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Raising Hell: Issue 35: "We Figure That's Fine"

"Give war a chance," - Thomas L. Friedman, three-time Pulitzer prize winner on Afghanistan, The New York Times, 2 November 2001.

Raising Hell: Issue 35: "We Figure That's Fine"

First, the good news: early on this fortnight, I wrote and published my latest story looking at how Australian law enforcement have endorsed a made-up medical condition imported from the US that allows officers to evade responsibility for police violence. Thanks to my generous subscribers at Raising Hell I was able to partner with a young journalist, Helen Karakulak, on the project. While I won’t give the amount in this instance, your financial contribution paid for her time.

Together, we approached every police and corrections department in the country to ask what their policies are around excited delirium, and what they teach their officers to look for. Of them all, Victoria Police scored the best marks for transparency, with the organisation actually willing to engage with us on some level.

The worst of the bunch was over the border in South Australia. Though we are certainly not alone in having a bad experience just trying to get basic information out of the cops, the experience with with the South Australian Police (SAPOL) media department was unique. Not only did they outright refuse to any questions — we were instead directed to apply to Freedom of Information (FOI) — but at one point a member of the media team got cute when they threatened to report Helen to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for doing her job. As an act of intimidation, it was pretty egregious, even if the threat was toothless: ACMA has no reporting mechanism. When the media rep demanded the contact details for Helen’s manager, she forwarded them my details and said I would be waiting for their call.

I never did hear from them.

But what I want to talk for a moment about is the incredible work SAPOL does to frustrate attempts to ask good faith questions in the public interest. The tactic, for instance, of directing reporters to the FOI process when asking good faith question on a story is a quick way to chill a line of inquiry and delay a story into oblivion — or at least to a point where it is no longer newsworthy. FOI, as anyone familiar with the process knows, takes time, costs money and is weighted heavily in defence of the institution.

Just how weighted is somewhat surprising. Logging onto the website to find out more about SAPOL’s FOI process, a first glance makes the process seems simple enough; fill out the form, tell them what you want and pay the fee. The devil, however, is in the detail. The first red flag comes when the website directs you to take the completed form to your local police station for processing — where you are instructed to present proof of identity such as a drivers licence or passport:

Then there are, of course, the financial costs. SAPOL currently requires a $38.25 fee for both the initial application and an application for internal review, on top of a processing charge that will see them bill you at $14.40 in 15 minute increments:

What makes this outrageous is that it’s all largely unnecessary. Check Section 13 the Freedom of Information Act 1991 (SA) and you will find there is no requirement in law for anyone to provide 100 points of ID, file their application with their local police station, “verify” their postal address, or even provide one where an email address is available:

In short, the entire process outlined on SAPOL’s website is a set of unnecessary and cynical bureaucratic hurdles. By law, all that is required from someone looking to make an application is for an email to be sent to SAPOL’s FOI unit — their email, SAPOL.freedomofinformationunit@police.sa.gov.au, is buried at the bottom of the official form — outlining what documents are requested, stating it is an application under the Act and with a receipt for payment attached. No form is required, no visit to the police station and certainly no ID.

Theoretically, you can do it all from the comfort of your couch — though don’t bother asking to make an electronic transfer. SAPOL’s FOI unit is not “set up” for electronic transfers and only accepts cheque or a money order available from your local post office (which costs about $12).

Aside from this being problematic in the midst of a pandemic, add it all up and what you get is a process that relies on a subtle form of psychological intimidation to head off applications before they are made. Asking someone who, for whatever reason, might want to force documents held by law enforcement public to head into a police station and hand over ID is guaranteed to make them think twice. The financial cost then means it is an expensive prospect even where the FOI officer handling the application engages in good faith.

Needless to say, I have an application with SAPOL to follow up a lede on a new story. I again need to give a special thanks here to Raising Hell’s paying subscribers whose contribution has covered the application costs and the time to put this together (I’ve been working on it for weeks). This one, I have a feeling, will be big, so I will keep you in the loop as it unfolds — without giving away the game.

For the Fortnight: August 18 to August 31

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.

You Hate To See It

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

  • It’s In The name

    Of course the biggest headlines of the last fortnight involved the collapse of the deeply corrupt Afghan government and the withdrawal of US troops. Anyone who had actually paid attention to the war in Afghanistan on and off during this period would hardly be surprised, though much of the world was shocked at the spectacle. Naturally, many of the world leaders who helped begin the conflict had thoughts on the matter: Tony Blair - chief executive of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (yes, that is a real thing) - described the pull out as “imbecilic”. Meanwhile, Australian mining billionaire Twiggy Forrest sent word to the Taliban via the Financial Review telling them to play nice if they wanted to keep doing business with his charities. “We would meaningfully engage with anybody, including the Taliban, if they guaranteed equal education outcomes for girls and boys,” Forrest said.

  • Some Men Only Want To Watch The World Burn

    Fresh off of scoring brownie points by admitting in the press that Donald Trump’s presidency may have gotten a little out of hand and that maybe the Koch brothers screwed up by bankrolling his way into the White House, the brothers have been working hard in recent months to stop kids learning about racism in schools. If you have paid any amount of attention to the news over the lasts couple of months — even here in Australia — you would have caught the moral panic about “critical race theory”. A favourite subject of pearl-clutching right wing media personalities, even Pauline Hanson’s One Nation got in on the fun when her party convinced the government to block any mention of the term in the school curriculum. Turns out, the campaign was driven by the Brothers Koch and their network of 79 thinktanks that exist mostly to convert the profits made through their oil and gas empire into favourable public policy changes.

  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

    Meanwhile, those who participated in the January 6 riots - an event US Republicans are doing their best to make sure goes away - are apparently being housed together in prison where they are passing notes, processing what happened and realising that, they actually totally could have overthrown the government that day.

  • Now That’s A Flex

    Closer to home now, Amazon’s hellish operations have landed and begun preying on an increasingly desperate workforce with a new service called Flex. As noted by the ABC, Flex was launched in 2020 with “little fanfare” and allows people to make extra money with their car delivering packages in “four hour blocks”. The company billed the service was a side-hustle for people with jobs, but naturally people forced to stitch together one job by juggling three or four different apps are finding out it’s basically hell on wheels with one worker describing it as “no way to live”.

  • Raise A Glass For Peter Bond

    But then as we have noticed many times before, consequences are generally for poor people. Linc Energy founder and accomplished grifter Peter Bond won’t be getting prosecuted for a failed industrial operation that rendered a swathe of pristine farmland uninhabitable after charges against him were dropped. Bond, famously, was rolled into Adelaide, South Australia and promised to cure the state’s economic ills after claiming to have found an “ocean of oil” beneath Coober Pedy. That promise, like so many others from Bond, was a total lie.

  • Comrade Capybara, Hero Of The Masses

    If the world is a grim place right now, at least one group of Argentinian capybara’s have had enough. Nordelta is a gated community for Argentina’s rich built in the middle of the sprawling Paraná wetland. In recent weeks, a pack of the giant rodents — which grow to either a metre in length and stand at 60cm tall — have responded to this incursion into their habit by invading backyards to tear up well-manicured lawns, bite dogs, disrupt traffic and shit absolutely everywhere. Some in the divided South American nation have looked to the animals as heroes of the class struggle, lionising the gang for striking a blow against the ultra-rich.

Failing Upward

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

  • Like a moth to a flame, we here in the Raising Hell basement were drawn to a story out of South Australia last week about how the head of the state’s Department of Human Services attempted to shut down a mobile soup kitchen run by the Australian Communist party. In a story full of delicious irony, the principle antagonist was Lois Boswell, DHS chief executive and a part-owner of Spark, a trendy bar on Whitmore Square that caters to the progressive set. Upon seeing the hammer and sickle fly over Whitmore Square for the umpteenth time, Boswell - who lives nearby - confronted the organisers and asked them to move on, in part because they were allegedly, “fostering dependence among a section of the Aboriginal community.”If true, this attitude — framed in language reminiscent of the way people talk about animals at the zoo — is particularly problematic given Boswell’s recent appointment as chair of a new task force to “reduce anti-social and sometimes violent behaviour associated with visitors to Adelaide from remote Aboriginal communities”. Boswell, of course, has no previously had problem with others taking over public space when the people doing it are in her own social circle an income bracket. In an interview given to CityMag in 2017, Boswell showed off her Adelaide home, explaining that the limited floor plan means her dinner parties regularly spill over into the street, saying: “We just take over the street, we figure that’s fine.”

Good Reads, Good Times

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

  • We’ve all heard people talk about what’s happening in Afghanistan, but if you wanted something that neatly summed up the bitter horror of the situation have a listen to What A Hell Of A Way To Die podcast’s episode “This is the end”. Author and podcaster Joe Kassabian joined two other US veterans who served in Afghanistan and opposed the war to discuss the takeover by the Taliban, the reaction of the world and the bastardry of the US government. Their conversation is something of an antidote to all the bad takes that have filled pages this last fortnight.
  • Andy Fleming, or Slackbastard has been monitoring activity on the far right for years. But like everything, it takes cash and the cat that manages their finances says they have debts to pay. If you want to support their work, head over to their new Patreon.

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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