Sign in Subscribe

Raising Hell: Issue 22: Love That For You

"Nothing would please me more, but who else would pump the oil that we need? God damn America." - Muammar Gaddafi, Response to a question on expelling Americans from Libya, March 1973

Raising Hell: Issue 22: Love That For You

In many ways I owe my career to the Australian car industry. What began with a story produced as part of an investigative journalism mentorship program in 2014 snowballed into a book that eventually lead to others. Today The Death of Holden has its own Wikipedia page, but I do not — something I consider among my greatest achievements in life.

So it was with some horror I found that all these years later — long after the closure, even after General Motors killed the Holden brand for good — many of the machines that built the cars are still there today, collecting dust in a factory complex that is slowly being transformed to serve a number of smaller operations. Since then, I’ve gone told a few people about the situation.

Even at the end of a busy fortnight, it is the waste that shocks me. Back when General Motors was pulling out of the country, it had several buyers come calling but word is the company drove a hard bargain for anyone looking to take over the operation. Ultimately GM didn’t sell to another manufacture. When it came down to it, the American firm simply passed on the keys to the site’s new owner — machines included — and walked away.

Of course, the backdrop to this is whatever happens at Elizabeth — the town whose people worked the factory. It wasn’t long ago that two-out-of-five people — 40 per cent — were unemployed, with lower, yet still significantly high figures recorded across the surrounding neighourhoods. Those numbers have fallen lately, back down around 38 per cent, but these things mean nothing to those people actually living among it. A few ticks up, a few ticks down, life still pretty much stays the same.

Knowing this made walking between the machines surreal. I saw many millions of dollars of plant and equipment as I walked through that factory — some of it in the same condition as at the time of the closure. The ex-Holden worker who showed me round pointed to each, explained how it worked or how it would only take the battery to be swapped out and a tune up to get each working again. Each new explanation only deepened that sinking feeling at what was actually being described. A town in need of work and a better life had nearly everything it needed right here, but everyone who mattered decided long ago those people were a lost cause.

At a macro level, yet another tragedy is where this leaves Australia relative to the world. As is the case for most Colonial society’s, right now Australia is rich thanks to its resources but it doesn’t really do much, especially vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Some wonks have even easily mapped this for your viewing pleasure, but then the thing about those statistics is that they represented the lives of real people — all of whom had been robbed of a better future.

If this is a heavy note, it is because these are also dark time. Right now the Australian government is embroiled in yet another round of scandals, this time involving historical allegations of rape against a senior Cabinet minister. Meanwhile, the aged cared system is in critical condition and neo-Nazi’s feel comfortable enough to film themselves assaulting black security guards. While these are all dark stories, I serve them up on the understanding that none of this has to be this way. We can demand better — and if the polls are anything to go by, it seems we already are.

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

Cracking COVIDSafe

Over the course of November, Raising Hell ran its first serialised investigation, CrackingCOVIDSafe, in association with Electronic Frontiers Australia. The series looked at the creation of the government’s automated contact tracing app COVIDSafe and stepped out how I used Freedom of Information to learn more so that others may learn to do their own. Along the way, we tracked how a constellation of government agencies and a clutch of for-profit companies made a hash of a new public service. So far we have managed to reveal how the government prioritised reputational risk over service quality and how security issues were not addressed by government for weeks after release, even though they put the app in breach of the government’s own privacy policy.

Read Part One

Laramba’s Water

The story of Laramba so far is straight forward. High concentrations of uranium were first found in Laramba’s water back in 2008. The situation in the remote Indigenous community of about 263 people hit the headlines in 2018 when NT Power and Water Corporation (PWC) published a report showing uranium concentrations there nearly three times higher than the national guidelines. That story made news again early this year when the community lost a legal fight to force the NT Government to do something to fix it.

Thanks to the support of my generous subscribers I’ve been able to pick up the issue to find out more. Here’s a running list of published stories that will be updated as I do more over time.

Just Money (UQP, 2020).

I just spent the weekend at Adelaide Writers Week and if you missed it, you missed out. On The Saturday, I chaired a session with Christopher Raja and Geoff Goodfellow about their respective works, then re-launched Just Money that evening. On the Sunday morning, Rick Morton and I rocked a panel about money and debt. I’ve still one more event to go, as I speak to Marianne Wilkinson about her book The Carbon Club on Thursday — and I intend to find out how she was capable of writing that thing without growing furious at the way of things.

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

  • Why Are People So Unkind?

    We begin today’s broadcast in the wintry landscape of Albany, New York where a landlord — frustrated they could not evict a tenant thanks to the protections put in place to ensure no one would be turfed out of their home in the midst of a global plague — entered the unit he was renting while his tenants — a 21-year-old woman and a 32-year-old man — were sleeping. Holding them at gunpoint, Shawn Douglas and two other men bound, gagged and carried the tenants from their bed to the back of his truck. From there, Douglas drove the couple to a snow-covered cemetery in the rural town of Ghent where he left them tied up before driving away.

  • The Standard You Technically Advise Is… The Standard You Accept?

    Skipping across the Pacific to Philippines, it has been revealed that Australian security services have leant “technical assistance” to a new anti-terrorism law that critics charge will Rodrigo Duterte — who is certainly a murderer — crackdown harder on opposition voices. With a police force that has already killed thousands in a totally irrational war on alleged drugs and drug users, pretty much anyone who has ever pointed to an atrocity committed by the Philippine President is now worried that under the new laws — that don’t differentiate between “terrorism” and “dissent” — they’ll be next.

  • Nice Work If You Can Get It

    To the sunny, ochre expanse of the Pilbara now where Rio Tinto — a mining company likened to the Taliban for dynamiting an ancient site of our collective humanity in pursuit of a profit — has reported handing a fat new bonus to executives who steered the company through a review into its handling of the incident. Michael L’Estrange, who lead the internal review into the event, was paid a 46 per cent bonus last year, for a total salary of AUD$288,386.

  • Speaking Of Bastards…

    During that brief period where Facebook banned the sharing of news in response to the government’s proposed media bargaining code, the satirists at The Chaser took advantage of the fact they were the only ones who could share news content on the platform to distribute a convenient list of the various acts of bastardry committed by the Australian government in recent memory.

  • Glimmers Of Hope

    With our tech overlords devoting their energies to find new and creative ways to make everything that much worse, it is inevitable that humanity will have to learn to defend itself from the robot army of the future — and some are already doing just that. The Boston Dynamics Robot dog — a horrifying metal canine named “Spot” that has already been used by the NYP to terrify apartment dwellers — had VICE reporter Samantha Cole so worried, she has done humanity a service by researching the most effective way to kill the beast. The best method currently known (at least until the next model) is simple enough: flip the machine on its back like a turtle then pull out its battery.

  • No Accounting For Taste

    In yet another hopeful sign of the times, Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie has made a splash with the announcement she is expanding her art collection to include this rare item — a depiction of her slaying billionaire nickel mining magnate Clive Palmer like Jabba the Hutt.

Failing Upward

Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

  • Another fortnight, another cavalcade of characters in the lineup for Raising Hell’s prestigious Failing Up nomination. This time around we have landed on the erudite figure of Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw who last week advised the nation that rape and sexual assault allegations should be reported to the police, not the media. As with many things — Stalinist communism, Joss Wedon, the hedgehog slice — Kershaw’s idealism perhaps reads better on paper than in application. In recent days it has been revealed that not only is the AFP required to brief Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on “politically sensitive matters” but the former cop has described rape and sexual allegations made against a senior Liberal staffer as “she said, he said”.While researching* this section, we here at the Raising Hell offices attempted to count the number of times a politician or senior staffer had been actually prosecuted by a police body but we all we came up with was that time the AFP raided a journalists home to poke through her underwear draw.*Admittedly, we did not try very hard.

Good Reads, Good Times

To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…

  • As I have often told many people, I have a long-term pro-occupation with climate change, our evaporating fresh water sources and the potential for human conflict. That is now starting to break through into conversation elsewhere, with this story about water justice and how the lack of fresh drinking water is going to particularly screw over Aboriginal people, yet again.

  • Things have been hectic this last fortnight but along the way I clocked this interview with Kimberle Crenshaw, the woman who invented the term “intersectional feminism” that is well worth a read for discussions on race and class, particularly for things like this:

    “She points to a documentary about a white Klansman who said that, although he did not have much, he thanked God every day for being white. “Why is that more important than the fact that he can’t put food on the table?” Crenshaw asks. “When people tell me that intersectionality marginalises class, I say no, intersectionality is what we need to understand why it’s been so difficult to mount a fully class-centric movement.””

Before You Go (Go)…

  • Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990.

  • And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!

    Subscribe now

Subscribe to Raising Hell

Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
Jamie Larson
Subscribe