Raising Hell: Issue 57: "Adequate! Hooray!"
"What is an attack on the king, if not a work-related accident?" - Benito Mussolini during his socialist phase as quoted in "M. Son of The Century".
As the astute readers of Raising Hell will notice, Issue 57 is a little light compared to normal. There is a very good reason for this: turns out, time is actually zero sum.
Despite all evidence to the contrary it takes quite a bit to put together this newsletter each fortnight and usually it is written in piecemeal fashion as I juggle competing demands on my time. This go around, however, the time I would normally be spent piecing together Raising Hell was spent on the phone to my Internet Service Provider asking an familiar existential question which, like God, they had no good answer to: why?
After initially telling me to turn my router on and off again, asking me to check the cables were plugged in and making sure I was aware that there would be a steep fee if they had to send someone out to fault find at the property, it was discovered there was an outage across the neighbourhood which took two weeks to fix. Then, when that was fixed, my modem died.
Personally, I blame Tony Abbott and his ratfuckery when it came to the National Broad Network but then that’s neither here nor there. The point is that when you build a modern economy that relies on the internet as its backbone and your job basically requires you to be emailing constantly, it becomes a little difficult to do said job. There is perhaps a good lesson in class here when we consider how the Australian government pays poor people an allowance that barely allows them to eat and then expects people to have easy-access to the internet and a smart phone to jump through the proper hoops to keep it — but that’s for another time.
Right now, as we come down to the wire, I have nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
I had thought to write about the Australian National Audit Office report and it’s polite dissection of how the Coalition and the Nationals used the Building Better Regions Fund as their own personal piggy bank — it’s exciting what you learn when a government falls and their successor cleans house. But if you’re interested in the minutiae of government corruption, you can read it yourself.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for your fortnightly dose of gallows humour to get you through, please enjoy this old Futurama skit about global warming that is, unfortunately, still as relevant as ever:
For the Fortnight: July 20 to August 2
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 …
- ‘‘Federal government under pressure to increase EV uptake after ACT announces petrol car ban” (The Guardian Australia, 22 July 2022).
- ‘‘Woman who died sleeping rough in Adelaide parklands not found for three weeks” (The Guardian Australia, 23 July 2022).
- ‘‘Fifty-year extension for Australia’s biggest CO2 emitter attracts record number of appeals” (The Guardian Australia, 23 July 2022).
- “Federal government accused of ‘railroading’ traditional custodians over Burrup peninsula rock art site” (The Guardian Australia, 24 July 2022).
- ‘‘100,000 happy pictures: a new tool in the cyber ‘arms race’ against child sexual abusers” (The Guardian Australia, 25 July 2022).
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).
‘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).
‘‘It makes us sick’: remote NT community wants answers about uranium in its water supply’ (The Guardian, 18 October 2021).
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Death: The Ultimate Couple’s Challenge
Around 100 people with Covid-19 are dying a week in Australia and total worldwide deaths are somewhere over 6.39m. MonkeyPox is spreading and though technically non-lethal the potential climate-induced fire fire, flood, drought and famine is very real. The specter of death is everywhere, but in these trying economic times, with cost of living rising at least you can rest easy knowing DIY coffin kits are now a thing. As one couple told the Wall Street Journal about assembling their own chariot to the next world: “We just had so much fun.”
Eat, Pray… InvestHER?
Richelle DeVoe was 30-years-old, in a successful career as a marketing strategist and going through a break up when she bought a duplex in Missoula, Montana — the “crappiest house on the block” — as an investment property. “What I didn’t realize was how much confidence and pride and empowerment I’d feel,” DeVoe told The New York Times. Another woman said explained she had found the balance in her business “between making money and nourishing her soul.” At a time when real estate markets have been rigged to benefit investors, these women are among hundreds who are finding themselves by taking part in mentorship programs like Real Estate InvestHER and thinking about that sweet passive income as an act of self-care. Of course, stitching together girl boss feminism with the class dynamics of the tenant-landlord relationship in this way has other long-term benefits: if a tenant were to, for example, ask for a tap to fixed or black mold to be cleaned when their landlord was “at capacity”, well that would be problematic or downright misogynist — and a considerable saving on the maintenance budget.
The Process Works
Closer to home the consequences of ten years of dicking around on the environment have been documented in the state of the environment report which record drastic declines in nearly every major ecosystem. It might be easy to put this down to incompetence but an deep Freedom of Information dive into a last minute attempt by the Coalition to re-wire the carbon credit system shows the extent to which much of this was deliberate. Notably, the documents obtained show a civil service desperate trying to keep up with last minute switches in policy and, upon achieving the bear minimum, celebrating with the immortal words: “Adequate! Hooray!"
Crafty Devils
What do you do if you’re a major airline confronted by increasing pressure to look like you’re doing something on climate change at a time when you’re constantly in the news for treating your staff like rubbish and failing to run an airline? Well, you create a “Green Tier” class in its frequent flier program that transfer the cost onto the customer while also generating new demand for air travel.
Eat, Pray, Love Redux
But then don’t worry. When it comes to plague, all you need to do according to the host of wellness influencer and fitspo conspiracy nuts is to eat well, meditate and exercise. Here’s a good explainer for how to get ripped and make that happen:
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
- Imagine, for a moment, you were a federal conservative politician from, say, Victoria, who maybe fancied your chances at being the next Prime Minister but ultimately crashed out when you couldn’t hold onto your seat. Now you’re out of government, ask yourself: what do you do? Where do you go? Well, if you’re anything like Josh Frydenberg, you sign on for a lucrative gig in the private sector with the great Vampire Squid itself, Goldman Sachs — the very same global consultancy that helped tank the global economy in 2008 and once employed former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Kevin Sneader, President of Goldman Sachs in Asia Pacific Ex-Japan said of the firm’s new hire: “Josh’s deep public and private sector experience, connectivity, and insight. His significant understanding of geopolitical and economic issues will bring considerable value to our clients across the region and beyond.” The good news for Australians is that Frydenberg may have presided over a
“shocking” decline in Australia’s environmental conditions as Minister for Environment and Energy and he’ll no doubt get to keep doing so, just now with a sweet private sector paycheck.Those of us responsible for the Failing Upward section of this fine newsletter would like to thank the avid Raising Hell reader for pointing this out to us.
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!