Raising Hell: Issue 28: What's The Matter In Adelaide?

It was late last Friday afternoon and the figures still left in courtroom nine at the South Australian Supreme were running on empty. The latest round of hearings at the Inquest into the Death in Custody of Wayne Fella Morrison had been going for five weeks now and the entire day had been given over to the questioning of a single witness.

Claire O’Connor — appearing for the Morrison family — took the chance to ask Matthew Staples anything she could think of, as he was the only witness from Yatala Labour Prison to date willing to actually provide clear answers about anything that occurred in the lead up to Morrison’s death. By that point everyone was tired — the coroner, counsel assisting, the various lawyers and even Michael Abbott, who stood to speak somewhere around 4 o’clock. Appearing for the prison guards, Michael Penn and Shirley Bell, Abbott seemed to be feeling the attrition of previous weeks.

Abbott had been fairly bullish when any witness appeared who gave evidence that was critical of the guards, but in asking his further question the glove slipped more than he perhaps intended when he asked Staples: “Was any support provided by you to the prison officers after the violent and vicious assault by Mr Morrison?”

The question hinted once more at the narrative being constructed by the prison guards throughout the five-year-long inquest — that Wayne Fella Morrison was big, strong and out of control. Abbott first set up this version of events when, during the initial run of hearings, he had asked the prison officers to describe the man who died. Since then Abbott had largely steered away from anything saying anything in open court that reflected this outright but at the end of a long week — and with no other media in the room — there seemed no risk in going hard.

And it had been a long week. On Tuesday the coroner heard how the officers who were in the back of the van with Morrison would have had their hands physically on him in order to “hold him down”. On Thursday a surprise witness threw Abbott and the other lawyers appearing for the corrections officers a twist. A taxi driver who had dropped a prison guard back to the prison contacted the coroner’s office earlier this year offering to give evidence about conversations he overheard along the way. That development appeared to frustrate Abbott, who then sought to challenge the witnesses’ credibility by inserting fake facts into a recount of events in order to get him to agree — a trick the driver saw through as he took his time to answer questions.

When the driver had finished giving evidence and stepped down, a group of five corrections officers were waiting outside the court room. Once pointed out to court security, the driver was escorted to the street while he waited for a lift. As far as shenanigans go, it was the best sort: the prison guards had every legal right to attend the court, in full uniform and as part of a group. If it happened to be on the day a witness was giving evidence critical of their conduct, well, that was just a coincidence.

That said, it was not the first time something similar had happened. Another group of officers had, according to others present at court, attended while Derek Kay, the driver of a van that transported Morrison to Yatala’s High Security G-Division, gave his evidence. Until the weekend before, Kay had not lawyered up and was expected to answer any questions put to him. In court, however, Kay claimed privilege over pretty much everything and then claimed to be unable to remember anything else.

This, mind you, is not a full accounting of events — but a few notes of the goings-on around court from the last fortnight that never made it into print. The full list of my reporting over this period appears below. As the process rolls into its sixth week, and on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by US police no less, I’ll be sticking around to witness it.

For the Fortnight: May 11 to May 25

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 …

• ‘Centres for working women at risk’ (The Saturday Paper, 23 May 2021).
• ‘Wayne Fella Morrison inquest: taxi driver says he overheard guards allegedly discuss tampering with evidence’ (The Guardian, 20 May 2021).
• ‘Dozens of unanswered questions: inquest attempts to unravel the death in custody of Wayne Fella Morrison’ (The Guardian, 15 May 2021).
• ‘Wayne Fella Morrison inquest: prison guard’s head blocked CCTV footage during fatal trip, coroner told’ (The Guardian, 18 May 2021).
• ‘Tax relief has cheered Australia’s beer and spirit producers – but what will it mean in the bottle shop?’ (The Guardian, 18 May 2020).
• ‘Wayne Fella Morrison: guard went to football after death in custody, court hears’ (The Guardian, 13 May 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).

Nyrstar Up In Court

For those long time Raising Hell subscribers (for whom I am eternally grateful) you will know that this newsletter was conceived after I ran an investigation into a chemical spill at the Nyrstar Refinery in Port Pirie. As one subscriber and a friend of the newsletter informs me, Nyrstar were up in court yesterday where they were required explained what actually happened with the chemical spill. And — surprise — they appear to have taken responsibility without taking responsibility.

I’ve run out of time this fortnight to deal with this in any meaningful way, but now that this has occurred, I’m thinking I’ll put together a longer feature look at this event and the companies behaviour — but not today.

You Hate To See It

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

• Dial-A-Cop

  If the phrase “crypto-fascist corporate hellscape” was always a bit gosh, it may be be closer to reality than you thank to security-app Citizen and its latest innovation: an on-demand private security force. Once a crime-tracking app only, Citizen has been looking to expand is offering with a new service that allows paying customers to, within minutes of requesting assistance through their app, summon a member of the company’s private militia in a black SUV with the word “CITIZEN” printed on the side in all caps. For the record, the same people ushering in a Ayn Rand-esque nightmare are the same who, in recent weeks, put out a $30,000 bounty on a person wrongly accused of starting a wildfire in California. A former employee probably best summed up the situation best when they told VICE: "Honestly Citizen as an app simply doesn't need to exist and it's more and more apparent as the months go on that leadership is just a bunch of scum.”

  

  Image: The “Citizen” cars have been spotted driving around Los Angeles in recent weeks (Source: Joseph Cox, VICE)

• The “C” Word

  For two decades the International Energy Agency has consistently described coal as the fuel of the future and massively underestimated the installation of renewables like solar — but no longer! In its latest report the agency was abundantly clear: there can be no more fossil fuel projects if humanity has a hope in hell of stopping the worst effects of climate change. Australia’s response to this blatant example of woke-ism, has been to announced the construction of a $600 million gas plant in the Hunter Valley — one that will be too expensive to turn on by the time it is built but will massively line the pockets of LNP donors who have a dizzying history of funding climate denial groups. Never fear, though. The oceans may broil and the atmosphere may bake but the Federal Coalition’s plan is to literally do nothing until around 2045-2050 in the hope that technology will trigger a “massive transformation”. Cool and good.

• The Light On The Hill Has A Dimmer Switch

  On the other side of the aisle, federal Labor seem intent on taking a strategy of “Why Bother” to the next election with Shadow treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers — certified political genius — saying the party of the workers will not be raising the social security payment to livable levels any time soon. Instead, Chalmers has doubled down on his party’s plans to come at the federal Coalition from the right by telling the Australian Council of Social Services: “as important as income support is, it’s not the full story. It’s not the only lever”.

• Mouse Plague Marches On Canberra

  What started as something of a novelty for city slickers who gawked at the horrific videos coming from far west New South Wales showing thousands of mice flowing like water into every available surface has now become a potential new reality. With a rodent horde reportedly tracking east towards Sydney and Canberra, authorities have begun subsidising traps and baits in preparation for the inevitable onslaught. The CSIRO has urged calm, apparently forgetting how Australians brawled over toilet paper at the start of the pandemic.

• Because This Can Only End Well

  Modern science has been busy of late making vaccines to stop a influenza epidemic that has so far killed at least 3.46 million people and smashing particles into each at CERN. Among these profound and noble quests for insight comes one that has so far been overlooked: can you grow crops in the region around Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear disaster in 1986, and safely consume the end product? The quest reached its zenith recent when those enterprising scientists from The Chernobyl Spirit Company made “possibly irradiated” vodka from apples, rye grain and water sourced from the Exclusion Zone around the old power plant — which has continued to smoulder within its cement tomb. The shipment of 1500 bottles of “Atomik” vodka has been seized by Ukrainian officials in March citing “problems with the bottle’s customs documents”.

  

Failing Upward

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

• There are some days when the schadenfreude is just too finger-licking good to ignore for us here at the Raising Hell offices, that day came in the wake of the Upper Hunter by-election. Thanks to an increasingly concentrated national media environment, a craven political leadership and a reckless indifference to climate change, a small by-election in regional New South Wales was billed as a national event where the outcome offered a read of the tea leaves heading into a possible October election. Because of this, those of us who follow politics were forced to watch as federal Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon framed the entire contest as the last front in a battle against “woke-ism”.

  By way of background, Fitzgibbon is one of twenty Labor MPs who are reportedly members of the “Otis Group” — a pro-coal, anti-climate change cabal named for fine-dining restaurant OTIS where they regularly meet to enjoy the ever-changing $120 per person menu. In recent months, the golfing Fitzgibbon has cast himself as a sage of the working classes and strongarmed Labor into silence over climate change because coal is King.

  So in the wake of an electoral defeat in the Upper Hunter by-election (a safe Coalition seat) in which Labor lost votes to Independents who were actually talking about climate change, Fitzgibbon — who was more or less the architect of the campaign — took to the airwaves to say the result proved Labor hadn’t been right wing enough!

  .@fitzhunter says Labor needs to do more work to represent hard-working people.
  
  "We need to tackle discrimination, racism, and bigotry and all those terrible ills but not in a way which threatens the rights of those, the overwhelming majority who do the right thing every day."

  — News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) 9:25 PM ∙ May 23, 2021

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Sebastien Junger, writing in Time, delivers a history lesson on Spanish fascism through the story of his father, a Jew who fled the civil war into France.

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!