Raising Hell: Issue 25: How The Other Half Live

If you are anything like me, you have fantasies about what life might have been like had you lacked a sense of morality or basic principles. How might things have been different, you may ask yourself in a weaker moment, had I gotten into real estate? Or gun-running? Or even taken up one of the darkest professions of all: floristry.

The good news is that there is an easy, if a little unhealthy, means to indulge this illusion and that is by scrolling the “political jobs” page on Seek.com in order to get a sense for how the largest business interests are looking to warp liberal democracy in their image.

Take for example the forces of Big Oil who have been looking for a Perth-based government liaison. APPEA — the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association — is the peak body for the oil and gas sector in Australia and represents some 180 companies. The merchants of doubt at APPEA have been responsible for spreading misinformation about Climate Change for the better part of the last two decades, but then if you’re applying for this gig that’s not much of a worry.

The role, salary unspecified, requires a successful candidate to provide “briefing materials and advocacy advice on stakeholder engagements including but not limited to State elected officials, Federal elected officials based in WA and SA, State agencies, regulators community stakeholders”. In perhaps an example of the revolving door rotating in real time, the ad suggests the ideal candidate will have worked as an advisor to a minister or regulator:

The other position you might consider is the anonymous ad posted by specialist recruitment firm BlueFin Resources. The job offers a starting salary of $170,000-to-$180,000 plus super and is located in Sydney. The ad doesn’t specify which global conglomerate you will be working for, but it does describe it as a “well-known [Fast Moving Consumer Goods] Brand and the largest publicly traded company in its industry”.

If you take this position, however, be prepared to get your hands dirty:

What those “other environments” are is not specified but we can guess those “emerging issues” might include things like budding unionisation drives or any proposed regulation that may cut into the profit margins of the business.

If that’s a bit much and you really are just looking to elbow your way into the blood-and-guts world of politics, the good news is that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is currently looking for a Federal Campaign Director. The idea candidate will have three-to-four years experience and be “prepared to make and be part of Australian history”.

Again, the salary is unspecified but the advert promises it is “competitive” and the working conditions “flexible” — an odd flourish for the party that voted for the government’s latest Industrial Relations bill.

If any of this makes you feel uncomfortable, try to focus on the three-to-five years needed to cash a few paychecks. After that, you can dip and find yourself that hammock on a pristine beach somewhere. All you need to do then is sip cocktails and try not to think about catastrophic sea level rise caused by climate change that you, presumably, helped make a reality. Which, really, isn’t your problem, especially if you’re not planning on being around by 2061.

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 …

• ‘Fire and flood: 'Whole areas of Australia will be uninsurable' (The Guardian, 2 April 2021).A brief note on this feature: longtime followers of the newsletter will recognise this as a subject I have been following for some time. Though it is fairly long, there was a lot more information that had to be pruned from this feature, such as the recognition by insurance companies that government was going to be doing nothing meaningful about climate change.
• ‘Malcolm Turnbull accuses John Barilaro of ‘gaslighting’ with claim air quality data is manipulated’ (The Guardian, 8 April 2021).
• ‘The state of vaccinations’ (The Saturday Paper, 3 April 2021).
• ‘First Australian scorecard of vehicle CO2 emissions reveals best and worst brands’ (The Guardian, 12 April 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

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…

• Everybody Gets An Outsourcing!

  To those who insist the modern economy is fair, just and secures the most efficient distribution of resources, I submit the case of Christine Carrillo, founder and CEO at Butr Health and “Executive Coach” to other CEOs. In a series of Twitter posts, Carrillo gushed about how the Executive Assistant is the most “undervalued asset of a CEO”. Her own, she went on to explain, handles roughly 60 per cent of her workload. These were annoying, tedious things like emails, sales meetings, recruitment processes, organising payroll, due diligence — pretty much all the day-to-day work actually involved in being a CEO. In Carrillo’s own words, her EA “does all of the things I don’t need to be doing”. And where did she find this woman of super-human ability to actually run her company for two thirds of the time, leaving her to flit about the world reveling in the prestige of her position? Why, the Philippines of course.

• How To Make A Killin’

  Microsoft has landed a killer new contract with the US department of defence wherein the tech giant will be handed up to $22 billion to supply American soldiers with 120,000 augmented reality headsets. Alex Kipman, a “microsoft tech fellow” said on the company blog that “the program delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios.”

• Bad Tidings

  Wealth might not trickle down, but rich people problems just might in the case of British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta. A few years back the industrialist swooped in to save Whyalla from deindustrialised nightmare by buying the local steelworkers for a bargain $700 million. Greeted as a hero, Gupta went on to float plans to manufacture EVs in Australia though his subsidies. Only, when his primariy lender — Greensill Capital — collapsed last month , it in chain a series of financial dominos that now see Gupta being chased by debtor collectors. It is Gupta owes roughly $4 billion to Credit Suisse, a Swiss investment firm, across the entirety of his empire. Faced with questions about what meant for the locals at Whyalla, Gupta wrote an open letter to South Australia over the weekend describing the town as his “spiritual home”. Yet, as a friend of the newsletter pointed out, heavy equipment is already being flogged off at auction. Those in the market for a 19-metre high Sampson Mobile Materials Shiploader, complete with control room and cascade chute delivery systems are invited to check the listing on the auctioneer’s website.

  

• Andrew Laming: Sex Pest and Soviet Sleeper Agent?

  Queensland MP Dr Andrew Laming, apparently regarded among even his own party as a certified weirdo, will be facing no consequences after he photographed a woman bent double, with her underwear exposed. The reason? The woman was wearing shorts and not a skirt, as would be required for prosecution under state laws criminalising “up-skirt” photos. Dr Laming has since doubled down on his defence of the "dignified” photo saying his "goal was to show a challenging work situation … an incredibly hardworking employee who was simply kneeling in normal work attire and stacking a fridge with an impossible amount of soft drink cans".

• Getting Off, Scott-Free

  Of course the school boy misogyny, apparent immunity to the criminal law enjoyed by the men of the country’s highest political offices and the culture of cover-up is not the “real issue” here. The Australian Financial Review went above and beyond to drive home this point last fortnight when it tried to pin blame for the government’s recent troubles squarely on the women who have been reporting the news. Senior Correspondent Aaron Patrick went to great lengths to run interference for the PM’s office when he name-checked several reporters and wrote off their work as “activism”. Because, you know, all the biggest stories in news history were broken by serious and impartial men who take their jobs as stenographers very serious. Did we mention how serious they are?

  

• A Wake Is A Kind Of Party, After All

  Over the weekend, political leaders in what is left of the British Empire stopped to make a public display of mourning at the death of Prince Phillip, husband to Queen Elizabeth and a man with a storied history of casual racism. Probably the most fun coverage came from Ghana where media treated the news with the gravity and respect it deserved — that is, by leaving it to the news ticker and getting on with their day.

  How Ghanaian tv broke the news

  — Tam Sellics son (@TamsellicsonIII) 12:46 AM ∙ Apr 10, 2021

Failing Upward

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

• News of Prince Philip’s death may have been greeted by wall-to-wall coverage over the weekend, with state-owned news outfits drumming up the pathos to keep the right wing from howling to the moon over any perceived lack of loyalty, but we here at Raising Hell — like the keen-eyed Sean Micallef — couldn’t miss how the Prime Minister used the event as an opportunity for yet another photo op:

  

  We here simply couldn’t fail to appreciate the elegant staging on display here. As viewers, we see Scott Morrison and his wife, Jenny, dressed in black, in the process of writing a letter to the Queen, expressing their deepest condolences. Upon the table where the Prime Minister writes is a framed photo of the Queen, alone. Notably, the photo is turned to face the camera, not Morrison, while Jenny stands a few feet behind, hands behind her back, watching her man complete the task.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• A week ago, I had no idea who Armie Hammer was. Then a friend of the newsletter sent through a link to an incredible profile in Vanity Fair describing the life and times of an actor who has sexual fantasies about rape and cannibalism. In doing so I learned several mysterious things about the Hammer dynasty. For one, they started out as loyal Russian communists and quickly became hyper-capitalist oil tycoons. Then there are the tidbits about Armie Hammer’s father who, apparently, sold fake art and owned a “sex throne” (not pictured). The more you know.

• Not really a standalone feature, but NPR had this interesting breakdown of buried details from the WHO report into the origins of Covid-19. It is significant mostly for the following factoid:

  But by the time the virus reached the market in mid-December, sporadic cases — with unknown origin — had already cropped up in a large portion of the city, according to maps in the report.

  In fact, most of the earliest cases in December 2019 had no link to the market. "The onset date of those with no exposure history to [the] Huanan market is earlier than those [who] had exposure history to the market," the WHO report says.

• Not new, but this longread by Douglas Preston published in The New Yorker back in 2019 was a great read. It’s got everything: a paleontologist with an Indiana Jones aesthetic, the KT extinction and a vivid re-telling of the day the dinosaurs died.

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!