Many readers will have watched with interest Stuart Diver’s interview on Channel Seven’s Witness program last night. Some may have felt uncomfortable with the arrangement between the Thredbo survivor and the channel. Diver had announced that “it would be completely inappropriate for any payment to be made” for his story, but he did accept a job as a full-time “special commentator” with Seven. Here we can assume two things: that he will be being paid in his new job, and that, without his involvement in Thredbo, he would be still working as a ski instructor.

So why did Diver not simply sell his story to the highest bidder? In their eyes, he is a prize commodity because he promises huge riches in advertising dollars. In contrast to Diver’s perceptions, Channel Seven has never doubted that it should profit from the tragedy. Doubtless the channel will promote Diver’s forthcoming appearances. Doubtless, too, advertisers wanting to secure advertising spots in the breaks will pay top dollar. And needless to say, Seven will syndicate its scoop for handsome dividends all around the world.

But it is Diver, not Seven, whom the nation’s staffrooms and dinner tables have been discussing regarding the morality of taking the cash, however circuitously. There is nothing inappropriate at all, it seems, in the shareholders of Channel Seven and the advertisers attracted to the story’s audience potential “profiting from a tragedy”. Perhaps it’s just a question of how well such players disguise their interests.

Diver, via his agent, Harry M. Miller, has found himself at centre stage as winner of a lottery he would have given everything to avoid entering. He is at once a highly marketable commodity and the centrepiece of one of the great contemporary Australian morality plays, which intertwines themes of selfless voluntarism and the behaviour expected of those who benefit from it. It is becoming an increasingly popular play and has many different endings (vide Tony Bullimore), because the tension between these two themes can be mediated by the nature of different tragedies and the roles available to those cast into them.

Generally speaking, Australians believe that it is morally wrong to profit out of tragedy. But there are interesting exceptions to this. Those who have endured pain and suffering can accept with impunity whatever money others raise on their behalf. Funds set up to support victims such as those bereaved at Port Arthur institutionalise this. No one condemns a family compensated for suffering a shocking crime or natural disaster. If the community offers large amounts, this is seen as testimony to its generosity and sense of caring, and the victims are seen to be deserving.

But if such victims were to engage in any entrepreneurial activity designed to maximise the amount the community donated, the community would see this as tacky and the victims as somehow less deserving. It is OK to benefit if you do not proclaim your own needs and if you do not appear to go on the front foot looking for reward or compensation. This is a phenomenon known well to the lawyers and the insurance industry: victims, frequently through survivor guilt, often fail to pursue compensation legally available to them and need to be goaded by those acting for them.

Had Diver been perceived as seeking overtly to maximise the return on his bad fortune, his value as a commodity may well have been considerably diminished. Significantly, a Seven spokeswoman said recently that Diver “has a real affinity with the Australian public”. It better suits the story to have a young Australian wishing to reciprocate the spirit of voluntarism by speaking of his experiences and his gratitude than one shrouded in speculation about being paid stratospheric amounts for having the good fortune to survive.

After Thredbo, banners straddled highways and were unfurled at the football, proclaiming the rescue volunteers and paramedics as heroes. Unlike in the United States, we donate our blood rather than sell it. We have volunteer beach lifesavers, not paid ones. These reflect values that run deep and, at root, proclaim that helping others ennobles communities and should not be financially rewarded. These values venerate self-sacrifice and act as social glue, cementing communities.

The commodification of personal tragedies into stories to be auctioned off to the highest bidder places huge demands on those pushed involuntarily to centre stage. Faceless institutions are free to masquerade their venal interests as simply satisfying the community’s appetite for information and vicarious experience. Yet Diver and others like him risk being judged for maximising benefits they never asked for in the first place, and which the community might well choose to shower on them anyway. While precarious, Diver’s decision to minimise the perception that he is selling his story invites us to consider the important values behind why he and his agent are displaying such sensitivity.

Perhaps we should all be grateful that he turned away from the brazen take-the-cash alternative. To have done so would have inched us one step further towards the market-forces nirvana where the only measure of the value of anything is the money it commands.