Raising Hell: Issue 30: "Very Much A Normal Person"

Around the time Just Money was published I was informed — via sources — that an ad panel display in a non-descript building in an unspecified Australian capital city was running adverts with my headshot and the book’s cover on an infinite loop. These panels were installed in fixed terminals on every floor and inside the elevators, meaning that my face would travel up and down the building all day.

Ordinarily none of this would be worth repeating, except for the fact that this particular building housed a Centrelink office with one of those fancy executive conference rooms with clear glass walls — the kind that makes sure everyone on the floor knows when the head honchos are having a powwow. Naturally, this meeting room had been built within visual range of the elevators, a detail which brought me great joy since it meant my steely gaze would be staring at the bigwigs from across the hall whenever they sat down together.

Of course I immediately tweeted about this joyous twist of fate as soon as I got word, offering a rich bounty for anyone who could provide photographs confirming the rumour. Within 24 hours, however, a complaint had been made to the building manager and the ads were, sadly, removed.

Big government, right? Always trying to squash the little guy.

Ever since I have been wondering whether the department — or some other entity within the bureaucracy — has been responsible for running a media monitoring program for journalists and activists (hey, guys!). If so, it would hardly come as a surprise. Over in the US, the postal service was recently sprung as the administrators of a secret program that tracks and collects the social media posts of American citizens. Why not here?

There have, after all, been similar incidents within Australia. In early 2020, a crew member aboard the Antarctic-bound Aurora-Australis was made to take down a social media post critical of the Morrison government’s handling of climate change. Of course, no direct threat was made but the sailor’s private employer was “made aware” of the posts by the Australian Antarctic Division in what no doubt doubled as an implicit threat to flow of future government contracts.

At least with regards to social security, there had been other whispers that something weird was going on. Another journalist Hannah Ryan, had attempted to find out through Freedom of Information (FOI) whether Services Australia was monitoring the accounts of activists who had organised in response to the illegal robodebt program and other social security issues. Her application did not go smoothly. Naturally, I figured I’d take a turn way back in March when I put in my own application for the following documents:

The department’s carefully-worded letter came back in April just as I was getting super busy, which is why I’m only sharing it now. The short version is the department said they did not hold the records I was looking for — which does not mean they don’t exist somewhere. You can read the full document here but the following was, for me at least, the most interesting par:

As a fishing exercise based off a hunch, I have a few ideas about how to come at the issue another. That being said, this project isn’t a priority project for me at this stage, so I’ll follow up with anything if it develops — though I am always open to suggestions about where to look if someone happens to know more (looking your way, media monitors).

For the Fortnight: June 8 to June 22

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 …

• ‘Wayne Fella Morrison inquest hears spit hood could have left Indigenous man struggling to breathe’ (The Guardian, 8 June 2021).
• ‘Spithood potentially had role in Wayne Fella Morrison's death: pathologist’ (NITV, 8 June 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).

You Hate To See It

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

• So, Yeah. Mistakes Were Made.

  If there is any bit of evidence that may, on its own strength, be used to convict the human species, it is perhaps the entire existence of Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Tuesday, as an elected official to the US House of Representatives, Greene stood before reporters to explain she had made a huge mistake. “I always want to remind everyone, I am very much a normal person,” she told reporters before launching into an explanation about how she had only just learned about the industrial slaughter that was the Holocaust — in the year 2021. Along the way, Greene seemed to suggest her “my bad” moment meant she was entitled to a measure of leniency, a sentiment perhaps hard to accept given she is also a QAnon conspiracy theorist who has called for her political opponents and FBI agents to be executed — among other terrible things.

  Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I have made a mistake… this afternoon I visited the Holocaust Museum. The Holocaust is- there’s nothing comparable to it.”

  — Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) 10:09 PM ∙ Jun 14, 2021

• Whatever The Weather, You Can Always Blame A Millennial

  Think of Millennials as the Godzilla of the last two decades; a generational Big Bad who have been collectively stomping their way through the downtown areas of the world’s cities, killing diamonds and McDonalds along the way. They are so apathetic, apparently, people wonder whether they really care about anything at all. Now the invisible hand of the market — that is, a cabal of moneyed financiers and venture capitalists — have announced that Millennials are to be weaned off the teat of corporate subsidies. Sick to death of funneling money into tech startups for the better part of two decades, these invisible money-men have declared the end of a “golden age” where the “the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy” was underwritten by their wallets. Of course, the notion that they are somehow living the “good life” thanks to Corporate America may come as a surprise to any Millennial, anywhere on the globe. The generation who has come of age in a period book-ended by the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic, and who will be the first generation worse off than their parents have very little skin in the game vis-a-vis corporate profitability — and that’s not even counting Gen Z.

• The Only Limit Is Your Imagination

  If there’s one thing to be said about Nationals MP John Barilaro, it’s that he is an innovator. In a recent string of litigations that have seen Peter Dutton and Christian Porter resort to defamation law in an attempt to silence off their critics, the New South Wales Deputy MP enlisted the help of the New South Wales Police to charge Jordan Shanks (AKA FriendlyJordies) and his producer with stalking. The charges were brought by the good people at the “fixated persons unit”, a branch of the police originally set up to target lone-wolf extremists at risk of carrying out violent attacks way back when. The lesson in all this? If you want the police to respond to a complaint, get yourself elected to high office.

• You Can Say Anything You Like, So Long As You Agree With Us

  But then shutting down critics seems almost to be a pattern for the federal government. While Barilaro was busy punishing mouthy YouTubers, Resources Minister Keith Pitt cameo’d as a guest speaker at the Australian Petroleum Producers and Exporters Association’s (APPEA) latest conference. Seemingly frustrated by demands the nation wean itself off planet-killing fossil fuels, Pitt implored his audience of oil and gas tycoons to “never give in to the activists, slash anarchists” — which they were already doing anyway. As far as timing goes, the statements also coincide with the appointment of Justice Simon Steward — a conservative judge who has a long association with the Samuel Griffiths Society — to the High Court. Steward, it should be said, does not believe Australians even have the minimum right to political communication.

• Compare The Pair

  In the meantime, the Coalition has set up “dob seeker” as a tip-line for employers to report those on social security payments who they deem “work shy”, while it has simultaneously been busy prosecuting “Witness K” within an inch of his life for leaking information about how Australia illegally bugged Timor-Leste during oil negotiations and embarrassing former foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

• And Yet There’s More

  In an “exclusive” the Coalition announced a new trial program for women looking to fill scripts for birth control. Under the scheme, pharmacists would be allowed to give women trying to get hold of contraception a quiet talking to before they hand over the meds. With the government’s track record on running a seemingly permanent “trial” with the Cashless Debit Card, it will come as no surprise if this attempt to “wrap women’s bodies in red tape” gets expanded and extended forevermore.

  

  (Image: Originally posted by Amy Remeikis with the annotation “Fuck. All. The. Way. Off.”)

• Cool And Normal

  But then, why feel down? It’s not like something as simple as keeping a roof over your head is entirely out of reach. If you’re in Sydney, all it takes is a cool $35 million to buy a Point Piper penthouse — built where an iconic social housing development used to stand. If that’s out of your budget, you may instead consider picking up this two-bedroom ruin on Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst that is currently selling for $1.68m.

  

  (Image: Courtesy of Ben Law)

Failing Upward

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

• Look, we here at the Raising Hell office cannot stress enough that we are neither lawyers nor particularly competent satirists. We have, however, been keeping an eye to the defamation trial of Ben Roberts-Smith, alleged war criminal, media executive and Kerry Stokes’ toy soldier — and we have a few notes for the defence team. We could be wrong — again, not lawyers — but it does seem like a bad idea to run a defamation lawsuit in which your client is objecting to claims they engaged in domestic violence against their mistress and then allow said client to give evidence wherein they admit to hiring a private investigator to tail their girlfriend in order to make certain she was getting an abortion.

  On the plus side, the evidence is weapons-grade advertising for John McLeod, the Queensland-based private investigator hired by Roberts-Smith, whose professional bio — without a shred of irony — reads:

  “Security specialists with 20+ years of leadership experience in close personal protection, tour / venue security, risk & crisis management, investigations, mediation and workplace health & safety. The maturity, experience and credibility required to drive desired outcomes. Make the right decision because it is right, not because it is the easy option.”

  Sage advice, indeed.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Though Ezra Klein, writing in The New York Times, was talking specifically about the US economy, his op-ed could easily apply to Australia:

  The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.

• If you subscribe to this newsletter, but don’t also subscribe to James Hennessy’s substack, do yourself a favour and do so. The man, largely indifferent to publication schedules, has this great breakdown of the vampires in the buy-now, pay-later sector.

• Nadine von Cohen, writing in The Shot, has taken a pretty hefty swipe at the Morrison government — and those in the commentariat who keep trying to play to their humanity.

• Not quite a goodread, but please enjoy this photo of Jeff Bezos eating an iguana that I couldn’t fit in anywhere else but really captures the spirit of our perfectly normal and ordinary time:

  I think about this picture of Jeff Bezos eating an iguana a lot. A defining image of our time, a neo-gothic artefact, a 21st century vision of baroque. An utterly horrifying vibe.

  — Thomas Gorton (@AngstromHoot) 12:41 PM ∙ Jun 10, 2021

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!