Raising Hell: Issue 23: How Good Is Australia?

The devil lay in the timing. Yesterday morning, before tens of thousands of people across Australia took part in marches that shut down every capital city, the story was already out: Christian Porter, the country’s embattled attorney general, was filing a claim against the ABC and journalist Louise Milligan for defamation. The man, as others have pointed out, who had been on sick leave to deal with the stress of having been accused of rape by a woman who has since taken her own life, somehow found the time during his respite to brief a crack team of lawyers at Minter Ellison with instructions to shoot the messenger.

The Prime Minister himself would advance that theme later in the day, when the marches were done. Scott Morrison rose to speak on the floor of parliament where he, as might be anticipated, tried to look on the brighter side. With characteristic cock-sure confidence, the spinner-in-chief explained how the women of Australia were lucky: in other country’s the cops replied to mass gatherings with the crackle of gunfire.

Though it is not clear whether Morrison understood what he was saying, everyone watching understood the implication: the Australia prime minister had just told the country his government may have wanted to crack down on the protests but found themselves restrained by the norms of Liberal democracy.

How good is Australia?

In an instant it brought back a litany of other revealing moments in time from the present government. When Brittany Higgins, the staffer who was allegedly raped in a ministerial office, made the situation known the immediate response had been to steam clean the couch. When the government refused to hold an inquiry into the allegations surrounding the chief law officer — perhaps his only shot to clear his name — it brought to might that time the government totally freaked out about the original ABC Four Corners investigation that kicked off this series of investigations. At least now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear why the government were so quick to grill the ABC’s managing director in the senate about a program that had not yet aired. When they asked whether the program was “in the public interest”, they were actually terrified about what might come out.

Image from the March4Justice rally in Adelaide on Monday, 3 March 2021 (Source: Royce Kurmelovs)

Now it has, the result has been a characteristic form of gaslighting from a government looking to side-step the issue by warping reality. We saw it when the Prime Minister insisted on going to the rugby during the opening stages of the pandemic. We saw it during the Black Summer Bushfire season which was blamed on the Greens and where Australians were told either that climate change had nothing to do with it, or the nation would discuss the issue after the fires were out. We saw it when the Prime Minister went on holiday to Hawaii as the country burned because, and I quote, he “doesn’t hold a hose, mate.” We have seen it with robodebt — a certified heist against the country’s poorest citizens which was designed, in part, by the Prime Minister during his time in the social services portfolio. We are seeing it now with the collapse in the aged care system, the finacialisation of the NDIS and the decision to plunge the social safety net back below the poverty line.

And yet, despite the reality, all we are offered in response is empty positive thinking backed by an exclamation mark: We’re all good, mate! How good is Australia! How good!

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 …

• ‘NSW to go it alone on vehicle emissions standards to avoid becoming 'dumping ground' (The Guardian, 11 March 2021).
• Critics rubbish ClubsNSW claim gaming card would cost $1.8bn and thousands of jobs (The Guardian, 9 March 2021).
• Australia lags the world on electric vehicle choice and it's hurting take-up, industry says (The Guardian, 6 March 2021).
• ‘Harry and Meghan interview stirs debate about Australia becoming a republic’ (The Guardian, 9 March 2021).
• ‘'Like champagne, mate': how a US kangaroo ban could kill off an Indigenous opportunity’ (The Guardian, 14 March 2021).
• ‘NSW to go it alone on vehicle emissions standards to avoid becoming 'dumping ground' (The Guardian, March 2021).

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.

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.

• ‘High levels of uranium in drinking water of NT community’ (NITV, 31 July 2020).
• ‘Company remains shtum on plans to filter Laramba's contaminated water supply’ (NITV, 21 October 2020).

Assorted Events

Now that Adelaide Writers Week is over (it was a riot), I’m looking ahead to what comes next. To whit, I’ll be talking to Stan Grant over Zoom about his latest book at Matilda’s bookshop Wednesday, 21 April. Click the button below for details about the event and to book in.

You Hate To See It

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

• It’s Only A Cage If You Call It A Cage

  In further evidence that as much as things change, they mostly stay the same, the Biden administration may have abolished the practice of keeping migrant children who had been separated from their parents in cages in the opening days of settling into the White House — or did they? The US government is currently housing 3,200 children at “facilities” along its southern border whereby half those detained have been so beyond the three-day legal limit. Of course, these kids are not being kept in “cages” per se, think of a word more along the lines of “containers” or “pods” or “overflow facilities” — anything but “cages”.

• Tighten That Belt Until You Starve

  With credit ratings agency Standards & Poors threatening to downgrade Australia’s credit rating if the government doesn’t cut spending, it is worth looking to new research out of Cambridge University showing what such calls for austerity actually mean on the ground. As it turns out, wherever conservative governments start talking about the need to “tighten the belt” and “balance the budget”, not all budgets get balanced evenly. When researchers looked at the effects of austerity — the name for the set of ideas that see services aggressively cut — in the UK since 2010 they concluded: “we are now seeing austerity policies turn into a downward spiral of disinvestment in certain people and places. Local councils in some communities are shrunk to the most basic of services. This could affect the life chances of entire generations born in the wrong part of the country.” 

• You Can Have Everything, But Really You Can’t Take It With You

  We just across the channel now to the nightmarish fate of French billionaire Olivier Dassault who died last week shortly after leaving his holiday home in Deauville, a resort town in Normandy, via helicopter. Not long after takeoff, the helicopter crashed, killing both Dassault and his pilot in a terrifying final moment for any human with a pulse. The 69-year-old head of the Dassault family was estimated to be worth US$7.3 billion at the time of his death — a fortune built on the back of an aviation company that made everything from fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles to military transport helicopters. Like other billionaires, had converted his wealth into a political career as a centre-right member of parliament — something of a long-time family objective. By way of background, Dassault had inherited his wealth from his father Serge, a colourful figure in his own right. Dassault Senior survived the Holocaust and went on in life to build the massive contractor. Only a few years before his own passing, Serge was alleged to have engaged in “mafia-like” activity in a bid to obtain political control of a small French town. The aim? To push out the communists.

• Speaking Of Mafia…

  The never-ending saga of Robodebt just keeps on giving with yet another tribunal decision finding that the Department of Social Services attempt to collect money from society’s poorest denizens cannot be justified. This is perhaps significant given the way the Australian cabinet has managed to avoid any responsibility or consequences for their part in helping build the robo-debt system in the first place.

• Death Becomes Us

  Times may be bleak, but those in search of beer to pour over a numb brain may consider David Anderson’s latest venture. The recently opened Rickshaw bar, located in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, belongs to that sub-class of drinking establishments looking to ply its trade with story — this time with a “Vietnam War” theme. Promoting the bar for its launch, Anderson explained in a press release how the new venue boasts “exposed concrete floors, charred wood panelling and army-green booths” that “suggest was a post-apocalyptic future may have looked like in the 70’s”. Getting poetic, he describes how “the suggestive glow of red-neon light leads to the dark depths of the 65-seater venue, while stickers and tattered posters adorn the walls and empty bullet shells are littered throughout.” For those interested — and none too fussy about the prospect of lead poisoning — you may enjoy your next pint of beer with spent shell casings in the bottom of the glass.

  Imagine a war where over a million people died, & then imagine deciding to create an aesthetic out of it, to sell cocktails filled with bullet shells, with an Agent Orange theme.
  
  Welcome to ‘Rickshaw Bar’, now open in Melbourne. This is Australia.

  — L I M I N A L (@liminalmag) 11:26 PM ∙ Mar 9, 2021

Failing Upward

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

• There was no way we here at the Raising Hell offices could walk past the rise of former finance Minister Mathias Cormann this past week. Upon his successful election to head the OECD, Cormann — whose candidacy received bipartisan support from Labor — joined the ranks of other Coalition figures to be handed plumb diplomatic gigs as a reward for being a team player.

  We here at the Raising Hell are sure those high up in the Australian government are breathing a sigh of relief that the Swedish candidate, who was proposing climate tariffs to punish those who failed to live up to their international obligations, was narrowly defeated in the secret ballot. Cormann, a coalition power broker who secured the political rise of Scott Morrison, has since said he “can’t wait” to get stuck in — yes, on the issue of climate change, but mostly on the question of international free trade.

  Out of curiosity, we took a look at Cormann’s track record to see what he has actually done on climate change and collected some of the highlights below, with a hat tip to Greenpeace CEO David Ritter:

  1. In 2009, Cormann described the then Labor government’s attempt to put a price on carbon as “a very expensive hoax.”

  2. In 2011 Cormann described the Labor government’s emission’s trading scheme (a thing that would come in very handy right now) as “a massive deception” on the Australian people declaring: “[It is] a bad tax based on a lie. The lie it is based on—the proposition that is put to us—is that somehow this carbon tax will stop floods, it will stop droughts, it will stop sea levels from rising, it will stop the climate from changing—it will stop every ill under the sun. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  3. In 2014, Cormann worked with Joe Hockey in an attempt to dismantle the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and was described in Marian Wilkinson’s book The Carbon Club (2021) as having “no clue what the corporation did”.

  4. But it didn’t stop there. That same year Cormann attempted to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency for much the same reasons.

  5. As finance Minister, Cormann oversaw a multi-billion hand out to the fossil fuel sector.

  As those at the superfunds are wont to say, past performance is no indicator of future performance, yet we think it’s telling the Prime Minister’s most reliable man within the Coalition is now in a position to head off any real international effort to make Australia actually do something on climate change. Make of that what you will.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Writing over at InsideStory, Peter Brent takes a good, hard look at the legacy of John Howard, his race-baiting politics and his trickle down luck.
• Meanwhile Jon Skolnik in The Baffler writes about the corrosive influence of Robin Hood, and specifically, that tranche of FinTech companies whose sole mission has been to “democratise” wealth management but in doing so have only made the world marginally worse.
• Mike Seccombe, writing for The Saturday Paper, has a great instalment on the Christian Porter affair which sums it how our nation is run by a self-selecting elite who all seem to have taken part in debating club while attending elite private schools at the age of 17. The title says it all: The Children of the Gods: How power works in Australia.

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. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
• 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!