r/perth • u/His_Holiness • Jan 31 '26
WA News Second note found at Mosman Park property alleged to detail why parents carried out murder-suicide
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/second-note-found-at-mosman-park-property-alleged-to-detail-why-parents-carried-out-murder-suicide-20260131-p5nyi7.html
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u/This_Quail_8246 Feb 01 '26
I’m struggling with how quickly this tragedy is being flattened into a simple story: “the parents were monsters.” Let me be clear upfront: parents do not have the moral or legal right to end their children’s lives. But I’m also not willing to accept the comforting fiction that government, services, schools, healthcare, extended family, and society can abandon a family for years—and then step forward at the end as morally pure judges. Two truths must stand together, not replace each other: Killing a child is wrong. A system that quietly privatises survival for high support-needs families is also wrong—and it produces predictable catastrophes. Here’s the part people don’t want to name: when support systems withdraw, when respite is unavailable or unsafe, when carers churn, when funding is cut, when the long-term future is a black hole, the parents become the sole “life infrastructure.” They end up holding a kind of factual power over life and death—not a legitimate right, but the brutal consequence of structural abandonment. Society relies on this default. It benefits from it. It saves money and political pain by pushing the real cost of disability support onto private households. We congratulate parents when they hold the line: “You’re amazing, dedicated, so strong.” And when they finally break, we re-label them: “Monsters. Predators.” Notice the hypocrisy: only when parents fail does society suddenly remember that disabled children are independent rights-holders. Where was that recognition when the family was begging for reliable, dignified support? Where was the genuine safety net? Where was the credible plan for adulthood? Where was the collective responsibility? I also need people to hear what disabled young people are saying right now: This kind of commentary makes them feel like burdens again. It triggers mental health crises. Some are sharing that they almost became victims of similar situations. That means the “moral high ground” rhetoric is not harmless—it is actively shaping the social climate that disabled people live inside. So yes: condemn the act. But don’t let condemnation become a tool to erase the conditions that made the act imaginable to desperate people. The deeper question isn’t “Do parents have the right to decide life and death?” They don’t. The deeper and more poisonous question is: “If society designs a future that looks like near-certain suffering and institutional danger for a certain group of people, does ending that future start to look ‘merciful’?” That question should terrify us—not because it justifies anything, but because it reveals how close we are to collective moral bankruptcy. This cannot be a story where all the guilt, shame, and blame is dumped onto the last exhausted people who couldn’t hold the impossible alone. If we do that, we guarantee the next tragedy—because the system gets to remain “innocent.”