Raising Hell: Issue 32: Thoughts And Prayers For Hopes And Dreams

I’ve said it before, but it’s a point worth repeating: the pandemic is a class issue. Whether it’s rich countries stopping poor countries getting vaccines or the Delta-variant escaping containment in Sydney’s east before quickly heading west, it should be clear by now that when we Covid-19 rip, it follows the wealth divide.

As far as insight goes, this is nothing new. Deakin University epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett was telling me as much back in November 2020 when the South Australian government tried to scapegoat a Spanish migrant after the state’s three day lockdown.

“We know this virus finds its tracks through the community to the less socially connected and most exposed,” Professor Bennett said. “They’re people who have complex lives complex stories.”

“Whether it’s class or its tunnel vision — you really need to understand your community and it’s a challenge for people to understand the community beyond the one they live and work in. The less life experience you have, the harder it is for you to anticipate the community you live in, in a pandemic setting. You’ve got to be prepared to go beyond the world that you come from and understand things beyond, for most us, our limited personal experience.”

With the nation’s two most populous cities lurching into lockdown last week — and Adelaide imposing stage four restrictions on Monday — if you wanted a quick visual in the context of the wealth divide, University of Western Australia Professor Marc Tennant was kind enough to map it across New South Wales, Adelaide and Perth for Raising Hell.

Here, for instance, is the situation in New South Wales:

Tennant’s map charts wealth inequality down to the neighbourhood level using the Index of Relative Socio-economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD). The scale is was based on data gathered at the 2016 census — the most recent data hasn’t yet been released. Dark red areas represent neighbourhoods whose residents are among the poorest ten percent of Australian citizens; dark green records the richest ten percent. The solid blue, meanwhile, are those neighbourhoods where there’s not enough data to make any informed observations, usually because no one actually lives there.

If architect Tao Gofers recently wondered aloud whether New South Wales was running a policy of “economic apartheid”, it is hard to overlook the solid red brick in Sydney’s west. It is especially interesting to read this data next to headlines about the spread of the Delta variant in a city with some of the most costly real estate on the planet.

Other cities to obviously have similar stories, but the situation changes depending on the local context. The map for Adelaide, for instance, shows a heavy concentration of poverty running right through the heart of the city:

And then there’s Perth, a city allegedly home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country and where decades of hostile planning decisions have ensured those further down the income distribution have been pushed out to satellite regions, leaving The Golden Triangle around Cottesloe, Peppermint Grove and Dalkeith largely no-go zones for the working classes:

As Professor Tenant himself said when he posted his original map to Twitter, if we actually want to make sure this pandemic stuff never happens again — if we want a “healthy, happy society” — the way to do so is to address poverty. All we have to do is chose it.

For the Fortnight: July 6 to July 20

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 …

• Bar one article that has yet to be published, I’ve had no public output this fortnight as I’ve been spending some time working on a follow up feature to a previous story I wrote on the origins “excited delirium”. With several FOI apps planned, that one is going to be slow going.
• In industrial relations news, I signed on in support of the Better Read Than Dead booksellers who have been trying to unionise in the face of outright hostility from management. Have a read, share it and sign it if you’re an author. If you’re not, but you know an author, stick the link under their nose and get them to sign it.

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…

• A Summer Of Labour

  In an example of life proving political science, it turns out the “Hamptons really is not a defensible position”. After well-to-do Manhattanites fled the Greatest City On Earth™ to their Hampton residences during the early stages of the pandemic, America’s well-to-do liberals have found themselves on the awkward end of a class conflict. Over the last 18 months, the wealthy part-time holiday makers have been increasingly met by locals frustrated at their demands to the point where people have marched in the streets carrying pitchforks to demand a billionaire tax. Sky-rocketing house prices and a total lack of cheap migrant labour which underpins the creature comforts of the leisure class has created a defacto general strike, forcing the upper crust to iron their own sheets, buy lawn mowers to cut their own grass and struggle to maintain their appearance. In the words of one local hairdresser, she has “never seen a summer like this”.

• The Plague Is For Thee And Not For Me

  Who is Jeromy Young? Well, according to his LinkedIn biography, as the CEO and founder of Atomos — an ASX-listed purveyor of high end video recording equipment — Young is a technology expert with “a vision to enhance, simply[sic] and improve video content creation workflows through the deployment of disruptive computer technologies”. The 44-year-old is also painfully predictable for a man of his social status when he greeted news that the highly infectious Delta variant was spreading across metropolitan Sydney by ducking the impending restrictions and taking three mates on a jaunt up north to the balmy climate of Queensland. Their chosen method of transport? An $18,000 a day, 34-metre superyacht, Dreamtime. Their purpose for potentially exposing a stadium full of people to the plague? The rugby test match between the Wallabies and France.

  

  Above: The Dreamtime in question (Source: Ocean Alliance)

• Heroes Of The Professional Classes

  Of course, preachy tech entrepreneurs are not the only ones who seem to consider the pandemic a personal affront to their ambitions. When New South Wales was busy trying to work out who was and was not essential during the latest lockdown, Real Estate Institute of NSW chief executive Tim McKibbin had some thoughts. Amid surging houses prices, punishing rent hikes and a flurry of activity as landlords look to offload their properties, McKibbin appeared to earnestly suggest real estate agents be given priority access to vaccines saying, “what it boils down to is there are three things we must have — food, water and shelter” — and, of course, a 7 percent return on investment.

• The Left Can’t Have Anything Nice

  Turns out Bob Hawke — the man, the myth, the legend of the Labor movement who ushered in neoliberalism to Australia — was regularly providing information to US diplomatic officials for the span of his career. According to archival research, the former PM’s contacts praised Hawke as “an experienced chameleon” for the way he would tell his supporters one thing while also looking after US interests. Neither was he alone. Between the CIA providing the seed-funding for right-wing literary journal Quadrant and the close relationships US embassy officials maintained with other, frankly, batshit anticommunist figures like B.A. Santamaria, other high profile members of the left were potentially — in the words of Jeff Sparrow — “snitching” on their mates, including revered former South Australian premier, Don Dunstan who was reported by the Labor attaché slagging of Gough Whitlam in 1973. Search the cables yourself.

• You Pay More Tax Than Exxon In Australia

  End of financial year getting you down? Take heart: you will be paying more than ExxonMobil — the oil company that has spent millions over the last few decades to deny climate change and delay any action to address. Michael West Media has provided a handy list for you to appraise and appreciate just how much you’re getting screwed.

• A Passive Takeover

  But then if it were possible to draw a Venn Diagram of the relationship between fossil fuel companies like Exxon and the Australian government, chances are it would be very close to a perfect circle. In a fortnight where Finance Minister Simon Birmingham seemed to admit that pork barreling was now government policy, it was also revealed that the federal Coalition handed $21 million to a fracking company that just happened to be run by a party donor. Of course, this is small change compared to the money that has been sunk into GISERA — a weird public-private partnership with the CSIRO that means the industry can now shape the very scientific standards against which their operations are measured. To top it off, Angas Taylor appointed Katherine Vidgen, a former oil and gas executive to head up the Clean Energy Regulator — raising the possibility that it may be easier to make a list of government operations that do not include an oil and gas executive.

• Dick’s In Space, Fuckers

  Richard Branson has beaten fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space — or at the very least, the upper limits of the atmosphere — by a matter of days. Branson, whose fortune stands at $5.4 billion despite various arms of his business empire going bankrupt during the pandemic, touched down safely after a few minutes of weightlessness, whereupon he gave a short address to reporters. In his speech, Branson promised to open up access to space so “people of all ages, all backgrounds, from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity have equal access to space.” Of course when critics pointed out that the world was still wracked by a global plague that has killed 4.04 million people to date and hasn’t seriously dealt with climate change, a fellow billionaire and the world’s richest man leapt to Branson’s defence explaining in a tech-bro koan how “space represents hope” for so many people.

  those who attack space
  maybe don’t realize that
  space represents hope
  for so many people

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 3:05 AM ∙ Jul 13, 2021

Failing Upward

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

• Like many of our fellow citizens last fortnight, we here at the Raising Hell enjoyed the spectacle that unfolded when a certain former Labor prime minister announced it was they had actually intervened in vaccine negotiations where the federal Australian government failed. While the public was treated to the argy-bargy about who, exactly, deserved credit for securing the critical extra doses of Pfizer, we noted with great interest how officials within the present Coalition government seemed reluctant to even utter the name of said certain former Labor prime minister, as if they were afraid doing so may cause the man to appear out of a puff of black smoke.

  That sage also gave us our candidates for Failing Upward this week. We here at Raising Hell wish to recognise the fine work of those "rude, dismissive and penny pinching" yet anonymous “relatively junior bureaucrats” dispatched to negotiate with Pzifer over the purchase of vaccines for the Australian people. If it wasn’t enough that they negotiated for ten million doses to vaccinate a nation of 25 million that needed at least 50 million shots in order to be fully vaccinated, they ended up pitching for 10 million. After this debacle, we expect their careers to flourish.

  

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Long time friend of Raising Hell and Flinders University Criminology Lecturer, R.V. Gundur has a new podcast The Open Circuit. Originally produced for students in his cybercrime class, it’s a good read for those looking to hear from some of the world’s best experts in the field.
• Speaking of crime, Rolling Stone have run an excerpt from a new book by Noah Hurowitz retelling the time Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán — the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel — met with agents from the DEA and Mexican law enforcement to inform on his competitors.

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!