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Raising Hell: Issue 27: Mum's The Word

"I know you're disappointed in me but what can I do? I'm busy and can't write often." - Joseph Stalin, writing to his mother.

Raising Hell: Issue 27: Mum's The Word

Two weeks ago the Inquest into the Death in Custody of Wayne Fella Morrison started back up five years after the Wiradjuri, Kookatha and Wirangu man’s death and two years since a Supreme Court challenge derailed the process. Through it all, I have been doing my best to catch events as they happened.

Since we have just celebrated Mothers Day, I think this is a subject worth discussing considering Caroline Andersen lost her 29-year-old son when he died in Royal Adelaide Hospital on 26 September 2016. Three days before, Morrison had been violently restrained outside his cell and transported to G-division, the high security wing of the Yatala Labour Prison, where nearly 50 guards watched him lay unconscious and non-responsive for almost three minutes before they began CPR. When he was admitted to hospital, he was booked under the false name “Ben Waters” so his family could not contact him.

Those facts, however, are known and anyone interested in learning more can check out my past reporting on this story — and my most recent, linked below.

What I want to talk about, briefly, is how the media is covering what I consider to be one of the biggest stories in South Australia right now and certainly one of the bigger civil rights stories in the country. The political, social and legal ramifications of this inquest are significant, and so it really says something that the only consistent presence at the Supreme Court this last fortnight beyond myself have been The Advertiser and The ABC. The commercial television stations are, of course, ever-present, mostly outside the courts where they wait to snap glimpses of the family at critical moments. Even the AAP — whose unofficial motto “first in, last out”, traditionally makes them the marines of the press corps — haven’t been around, owing to how the whole service collapsed a while back.

For years people have been hand-wringing about the withering of the media, but we are now living it. Ask an editor or a producer why they haven’t sent anyone, and the answer will no doubt be dollars and cents: sending a reporter to sit in a courtroom to hear five hours of legal argument on which they can deliver no copy is an expensive proposition. Yet that isn’t the whole story. With the nation’s media now being routed through Sydney, there is also a geographic component to this. Unless New South Wales will be interested, there’s no interest and without the AAP copy, it is harder to maintain the illusion of being everywhere. In practical terms, this means that unless you have someone in the room, you’re not going to get what happened — and it says much that there haven’t been all that many reporters in the room at any given time.

To be clear, none of this an slur on any individual reporter. If you want to keep your job, you need to follow orders and everyone who has moved through the courtroom in the last fortnight has immediately understood the scale and scope of what is playing out. The problem is an institutional one about distribution: who gets what, where, when and in what amounts. In that calculus, South Australia broadly doesn’t rate too highly. It has been hard to shake the idea at times that if Morrison had died on the east coast, the inquest would have been covered with blow-by-blow updates every hour. Instead, there has been a kind of institutional ADHD where the inquest has been covered in fits and spurts, by different reporters rotating in and out.

And that, as Caroline Andersen said when asked about how it took her son’s death to force changes to legislation, is a damn shame. Much of the coverage to date has been driven by Morrison’s family and broader public interest in the Black Lives Matter movement — a US-based civil rights campaign.

That people are more familiar with events in the US than at home, I think, says much but that is a conversation for another time. The point is, for the family, the last two weeks have been an exhausting and overwhelming attempt to once more force the nation to listen and watch. Other families in this position don’t always have the time, knowledge or resources to do the same — which is really the issue here. As media, when it comes to civil rights issues in our cities and our communities, it should be our job to record, amplify and transmit — and never to hit mute.

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

If you missed it, we have a late review of Just Money by Kurt Johnson this time in the Australian Book Review. The text of the review speaks for itself, but the follow par should give you some idea of its content:

Relating human scale to a broader economic arc has become the author’s trademark. This goes beyond trade-craft and runs to the core of Kurmelovs’s moral code: economic abstraction without considering the human implications is what produces a system that thrives on exploitation and hardship.

You Hate To See It

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

  • But Why Skulls, Though?

    We begin this week in France where the fetid call of fascism remains as 20 retired generals were among 1000 soldiers who signed onto an open letter claiming the country was headed for “civil war”. The reason? Why, religious extremism of course. The letter reportedly blamed the poor, anti-racists and the woke for weakening the French state and stirring up prospects of “racial war”. How, you ask? Well, the soldiers point to — among other things — attacks on statues and attempts to reframe history in a way that asks the question: Hans, are we the baddies?

  • Fresh Hell

    Now to Galway, Ireland where local councilor Clodagh Higgins has been busy spruiking the latest innovation in “inclusive” park benches. The design includes a gap in the centre to ostensibly allow a person with a wheelchair to sit in the middle while also conveniently stopping homeless people from being able to sleep on the bench. Predictably, when called out over the endorsement hostile architecture masquerading as “inclusivity”, Higgins bit back saying the benches had been “requested” by parents in the area: “To imply that my motivation was to target homeless people is a despicable slur and personally very hurtful,” Higgins said.

  • CIA Or AOC?

    Speaking of cynical woke-ism, sound the hip hop siren because the Central Intelligence Agency — the organisation responsible for springing Nazi’s from jail, suppressing people’s movements, assassinating heads of state, running drugs and overthrowing democratically elected governments over the course of the last fifty years — has found a creative new way to make the world just that much worse with a clumsy recruitment campaign. Titled “Humans of CIA”, the agency’s HR department has ham-fistedly deployed the language of inclusion and in doing so sent the right wing apoplectic. First among the agency’s critics has been Republican senator Ted Cruz who lamented, “we’ve come a long way from Jason Bourne”. As a name-drop, it perhaps said more about Cruz than anything else given Jason Bourne was a fictional figure who never existed. Here, for your amusement, is the video — which scans exactly like the kind of script the HR department for an amoral organisation would write in a cynical attempt to appeal to da yuf:

  • Bull In The China Shop

    While we’re on the international stage, Australia has yet again proven that it’s entire foreign policy is pretty much just trolling with two separate gaffes. In one instance Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke to reporters during a press conference on the travel ban with India, held — wait for it — out the front of the Australian Beef festival. With cows audibly moo-ing in the background, the insult to the Hindu nation where many consider the animal nation was not lost on Australia’s Indian community. Just days later, in another press conference, the Prime Minister appeared to become confused and accidentally ended up endorsing the Chinese government’s policy on Taiwan.

  • Seems Legit

    To Western Australian now where oil and gas exploration company Buru Energy has been quietly carving a grid pattern into the Kimberley landscape in their quest for potential new sources of hydrocarbon. Thanks to environmental laws that give free reign to fracking operations, the company has cleared 14,000 kilometres of scrub — roughly the distance from Perth to London — for no apparent reason. When asked what the hell was going on, a spokesperson from the state’s Environment Minister insisted the state has “a robust environmental assessment process across multiple agencies with environmental expertise embedded within each of these agencies.”

  • What Is This? Spain In The 20’s?

    As much as things change, some things remain the same — to whit, students at the University of Sydney have obtained documents under freedom of information laws showing how the university administration has known about and allowed police to monitor student groups on campus. One subject of particular interest? Why, a panel on abolishing police held by a bunch of socialists of course. And if this level of surveillance in our democracy makes you uneasy enough to consider using encrypted communications apps like Wickr or Signal, just know that the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission considers use of these platforms as an indicator that you are probably a criminal.

  • Burn One Down For The ManRemember that time a future Australian prime minister once held up a lump of coal in parliament to defend the interests of the fossil fuel lobby? Well, enjoy this image of a French lawmaker brandishing a joint in parliament to call for the legalisation of cannabis.

Failing Upward

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

  • We here at the Raising Hell offices have spent the last fortnight half cut and drowning in paperwork, so we were caught between two candidates for failing upward. First there was Shari Markson, investigations editor at The Australian and host of “Sharri” on Sky News. In promoting her new book What Really Happened in Wuhan, Markson cited a document she claims proves the Chinese government discussed the weaponisation of the SARS virus five years before the pandemic — except it didn’t. When you actually ask people who know about these things (such as people who speak the language) the document turns out to be a tract written by a conspiracy theorist widely ridiculed within China. Ordinarily such bullshit wouldn’t be worth much attention, but given how Australian government officials have been openly fantasising about war with China, a basic failure to validate sources such as this is dangerous and deeply misleading.

    Catch “Sharri” at 6pm every Sunday on Sky News.

    In the alternative, we also thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Keith Pitt, the Minister for Resources, Water and Northern Australia who killed a windfarm and battery project in Queensland that was set to deliver jobs and renewable energy. Why? No one knows! Especially, it seems, Pitt himself.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

  • Olúfémi O. Táíwò, writing in The Nation, talks about when Americans invoke the noble ideal of freedom, what they really mean is freedom for white people.
  • Politico have published this oral history of the assassination of Osama bin Laden which is worth a read for the revelation that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a better intelligence network than the CIA.
  • Turns out, according to this withering account in The New Yorker, that the head of the NRA can’t shoot and had to execute an old elephant at point-blank range.
  • Long-time friend of Raising Hell, Walter Marsh, has a debut feature in The Monthly puncturing the myth of the RM Williams boot and, god bless, wouldn’t you know it involved ripping off the labour of Aboriginal people (locked to subscribers).

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!
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Jamie Larson
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