Raising Hell: Issue 39: Something In The Water

It’s a general rule of thumb in the world of digital news that any online feature over 1400 words won’t hold a readers attention. On a scale from news reports of a few hundred words, up to 3000-word deep-dives into the issues, the sweet spot is somewhere in the region of 800 words as this captures a readers attention while also tickling that need to know more about an issue without overloading them.

What this means in application is at some point in the writing of any feature, a judicious call will get made about what makes it through, and what gets left out. Though you could say this for all news, the point of a feature is to draw a line through all known facts in order to contextualise an issue you’ve been hearing about so, ideally, the average reader goes on being able to cut through the spin. Sometimes this decision turns on whether a fact will get through legal. Other times it’s just that having to properly contextualise something is going to eat up time that could best be spent moving the story along.

Whatever the reason, sometimes this reality can be used as an exploit. A good case study on how this works is the situation faced by Laramba, a remote Indigenous community of roughly 300 people in the Northern Territory. If you’re not up on the situation at Laramba— a community that has been left drinking uranium-contaminated water for the better part of two decades — scroll down for my reporting on the situation to learn more. The oversimplified version of a long story is every attempt to get anyone to do something about the problem has so far failed, mostly because there are three government departments and a government-owned corporation involved but not one wants to shoulder the risk of a lawsuit.

Because there have been so many screw ups, explaining how this situation came to be is long and complicated. Even though I published a whole feature on the situation at Laramba with The Guardian — you should go read it, the photos are great — along the way we were forced to leave out a whole explanation for how drinking water quality gets regulated owing to the fact that this sort of minutiae was straight up boring for the average reader.

While I feel this was unfortunate — when bad people do bad things they fiddle with the minutiae knowing that over time it will build up to something significant without alarming anybody in the short term — this time around it meant I had to leave out some juicy detail I learned through Freedom of Information thanks to the generous support of my paying subscribers.

The good news is that if I couldn’t talk about it in the proper detail within the story, I can still do so here — I’ll be covering the highlights, but you can read the full docs here and here. In order to understand them, you first need to know two things. Number one is that within the Northern Territory, water quality standards are supposed to be governed by a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding between Power and Water Corporation (PWC) and NT Health. The second thing to know is that this MOU expired in 2015 and has never been renewed, which means that in an environment where there are no laws making sure that drinking water is clean outside 18 established towns across the territory — excluding Laramba and other Indigenous communities — there is very little holding it all together.

To learn more, I applied under Freedom of Information to get hold of the briefing notes given to former minister for essential services Dale Wakefield before she spoke to The ABC in July 2020 — among other documents. What they reveal is incredible if only because they show how no one really knows who is responsible — or at least is willing to say so. The email exchange obtained reveals how even when a ministerial staffer asks who, exactly, has responsibility, their question never gets answered. In another email, a question was asked about the MOU and whether it had been updated. The reply is incredible:

In other words, NT Health tried to update the MOU but the guy whose job it was to sign off on the document left before doing so. It seems Health finally grew fed up with the screwing around by PWC and gave notice it was withdrawing from the agreement — but then it claims the MOU they withdrew from was still in force.

Right.

Another interesting tidbit from these documents is where they reveal how the expert body for overseeing water quality issues did not meet for ten months:

Now, when I tried to ask Health about whether the body had met, they repeatedly refused to answer any questions and directed the inquiry to another department. What they do reveal is that there seems to be a vague plan to pass new laws about drinking water quality standards, but so far NT Labor has been pretty hot and cold on the subject.

The curious thing about all this is the extent to which total incompetence becomes its own strategy for avoiding accountability. When something is so broken, so confusing and so muddied, it becomes next to impossible to tell anyone about what is going on in a way that is concise, clean and engaging. And because not even those who run the system seem to know what is going on, answers are few and far between — but then refusing to answer a question is an answer in itself.

Whatever the case, my latest efforts have given me some new leads so when I get a moment to breathe, I’ll be circling back with new FOI applications. When I do, I’ll be sure to update you.

For the Fortnight: October 13 to October 26

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 …

Note: Due to some personal news, I’ll be a little tied up for much of this fortnight so next issue may be a little thin on the ground. If I owe you something or have promised you something, it may take a little longer. Sorry!

• ‘Approval given for $500m takeover of Tasmanian salmon farmer by Brazilian meat processing giant’ (The Guardian, 25 October 2021).
• ‘A 7m wall has gone up on a Sydney beach: are we destroying public space to save private property?’ (The Guardian, 24 October 2021).
• ‘Poor EV take-up to cost Australia’s health system $1tn by 2050, modelling shows’ (The Guardian, 24 October 2021).
• ‘Like snow’: freak hail storms batter Australia’s east coast’ (The Guardian, 18 October 2021).
• ‘‘I’m doing this out of my heart’: the fight for clean water in one remote WA Indigenous town’ (The Guardian, 20 October 2021).
• ‘It makes us sick’: remote NT community wants answers about uranium in its water supply’ (The Guardian, 18 October 2021).
• ‘More than a quarter of new Sydney apartment blocks have defects, report suggests’ (The Guardian, 14 October 2021).
• ‘Comedian’s ‘subversive’ billboards attacking Australia’s climate policy to feature in New York’s Times Square’ (The Guardian, 13 October 2021).
• ‘Should Australia build nuclear power plants to combat the climate crisis?’ (The Guardian, 13 October 2021).

Projects

• Cracking COVIDSafe - An examination of the machine that made the COVIDSafe app, a piece of software made by people who wanted to hack the pandemic (complete).

• Laramba’s Water - Laramba is a remote Indigenous Community in the Northern Territory which has been drinking uranium-contaminated water since 2008. We tried to find out what why (on-going).

  1. ‘High levels of uranium in drinking water of NT community’ (NITV, 31 July 2020).

  2. ‘Company remains shtum on plans to filter Laramba's contaminated water supply’ (NITV, 21 October 2020).

  3. ‘‘It makes us sick’: remote NT community wants answers about uranium in its water supply’ (The Guardian, 18 October 2021).

  4. 2021-03-15 FOI2020-316 NT Health Document Bundle 001

  5. 2021-03-15 FOI2020-316 NT Health Document Bundle 002

You Hate To See It

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

• A Giant Of The Form

  Colin Powell was many things: veteran, career public servant and guy with responsibility for the deaths of at least 150,000 Iraqi civilians. Last Tuesday the former US Secretary of State died, aged 84, from complications with Covid-19 following a long battle with cancer. Of course, the news was followed by a slew of obits trying to unpack his “complicated” legacy, when really it was quite simply. A brief overview of his CV will give you the gist: there was that time he helped cover up the Mei Lei massacre in Vietnam (where according to his own biography he helped torch houses and believed the South Vietnamese needed “four or five Hitlers” to help beat back communism). There was that other time he lobbied to arm the Contras, or that moment he instituted the idiotic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. His crowning achievement however was walking onto the floor of the UN with a vial of fake anthrax to sell the world on the invasion of Iraq instead of, you know, resigning.

• Speaking of Regime Change…

  Candance Owens — one among a legion of formerly self-identifying progressives to make a right-ward pivot in search of fame and fortune — has the All-American cure for the oppressive state of Australian political discourse: regime change. In a segment on her podcast, Owens asked the question: When are we going to invade Australia? The stated reason? The public health measures that have so far kept deaths to 2000 during a global mass-death event that racked up over 4.94 million deaths.

• But Hey, At Least There’s Robots…

  What do you do when you’re an American state with 1700 homeless people pouring into camps during a global pandemic? If you’re a cop in Honolulu, you jerry-rig a $150,000 Boston dynamics robot dog to screen patients homeless people for Covid-19, ensuring human nurses are deployed to tend to the rich.

  Hawaii has introduced a $150,000 “robot dog” to scan people for COVID in public spaces, especially homeless sites.
  

  — Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) 4:33 PM ∙ Oct 21, 2021

• It’s The End Of The World, And Matt Canavan Feels Fine

  But as ever, here is your timely reminder that the biosphere is in collapse and that the Australian government is doing sweet fuck all about it. In an explosive story that did not get nearly as much attention as it should, the BBC has received a trove of documents showing how Australia is among several fossil fuel producing nations trying to torpedo the world as it attempts to phase out the very materials cooking out the biosphere. Of course, the realisation that the leaders of this fair nation have spent ten years dicking around and wedging each other to ensure their flabby grip on power now means we are greeted to the spectacle of the ruling Coalition having to slap together something they can spin on the international stage as fire season approaches. But hey, at least we can trust these guys to be totally open, honest and transparent with us, the Australia people…

• More Tales From The Debt Trap

  Meanwhile, we turn now to New South Wales where a debt buy company tried to take 24 people to court in order to shake them down for sums as low as $400 — on loans with interest as high as 48%. The catch? Those people didn’t live in the great state of New South Wales, meaning it was all but guaranteed they would fail to appear in court, leading to a summary judgment being filed again them.

• Neoclassical Economists Finally Get What They Want

  But hey, when all is bleak at least we can find joy in others suffering, such as the players of Amazon’s new video game, New World. Thanks to poor design, the virtual world has created an economy which is stuck in an ever-deepening deflationary crisis, forcing players to horde gold and result to barter in order to transact. Eventually, some commentators warn, it will become so difficult for new players to be able to generate a return on the items they create in-game, they will simply stop-logging in as their chosen profession doesn’t generate a return — in a development that sounds eerily familiar….

Failing Upward

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

• There are times when we here at Raising Hell struggle to find someone truly worthy of a Failing Upward nomination, but this fortnight was not one of them. We present to you the figure of Pru Goward, former New South Wales Liberal minister who in post-political life has pivoted into academia. Goward — who was also responsible for selling off public housing to make way for ritzy developments during her time in office — attempted to show her sympathy with "the proles” by publishing a column with the Australian Financial Review which met with immediate backlash. We won’t go into the specifics — you can read for yourself below — but all we’ll say is that it’s entirely what you expect to see when a member of the upper crust says the quiet part out loud.

  

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Want a breakdown on just how much of a joke the Australian government is on climate change? Tim Baxter has you covered.

• Enjoy this tale by Molly Osberg writing in The New Republic about how small government libertarian billionaires would rather build a whole new doomed city than pay tax.

• If you got he time enjoy this five-part podcast series on Australia v The Climate from Adam Morton at The Guardian.

• And because everything is terrible, enjoy this gorgeous photo.

  Photo taken by NASA of a space shuttle leaving our atmosphere

  — Black Hole (@konstructivizm) 3:42 AM ∙ Oct 22, 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!