Raising Hell: Issue 66: The Naked Pravda

The naked truth is I had much more ambitious plans for the final issue of Raising Hell in 2022.

One plan was to spend Issue 66 taking a deep dive into evidence given by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the Robodebt Royal Commission to fully appreciate the alternative he lives in — and the weird ride we all took during his reign as leader of the Federal Coalition. But then, when I sat down to write this, I couldn’t find the words. If you’re after a wash-up of what happened, friend of the newsletter, Luke Henriques-Gomes has you covered on that front in The Guardian, as does Rick Morton writing over in The Saturday Paper.

Another other idea was to unpack this last-minute power price cap that has the oil and gas industry so riled up, Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher attacked it as a “Soviet-style policy” that would kill investment in new fossil fuel developments — which honestly doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. It was perhaps a bit rich for an industry that literally began life in Australia begging for the government to subsidise half the cost of exploratory drilling, and which only embraced the “free market” in the early nineties when people began talking about this thing called the “greenhouse effect”. It was also a curious moment for Gallagher who has recently faced questions about possible insider trading during his time at Clough, a oil and gas service industry company that also went bust last month, and whose founder, the late Harold Clough, was a bigshot in the Australian climate denying movement of the 2000s.

For a minute there, I was even thinking about taking a few cheap shots at poor old Michael McCormack.

But who has the energy for this right now? In this economy?

If 2020 and 2021 were the year from hell, 2022 has been two sizes too small and if you’re anything like me, you’re just on autopilot until you can fall in a heap (though I’ll be pulling a few shifts over Christmas).

Instead I’m going to give a quick year-in-review style recap of the biggest or most interesting stories I published in 2022, starting with the one I wrote examining the activities of the OG Australian Nazi Party. Not only was this story fun, but I also tracked down Barbara Poniewierski, a historian who wrote the most comprehensive history about their activities in Australia. Among the notable facts about this period was how information about a German sailor shit-talking Adolf Hitler in Barossa pub was fed back to the Gestapo and the man was arrested upon his return to Germany, and how the local Nazi party kept tabs on the local Jewish community — for, you know, reasons. Most of these write ups in the media tend to focus on the clown-car nature of the local branch that had more infighting than a meeting of leftwing activists but something new we learned was that the German Nazi dispatch an SS Officer who was actively planning to run an insurgency at the time war broke out.

Moving away from the novel to stories with prescience, way back in April I wrote another feature for The Guardian laying out who Fireproof Australia were, what they wanted and how they were different to the various other groups operating. At the time, their activists had been stopping traffic over their no-brainer demands about climate change and there was a lot of confusion. As we talk about last time, I went back to this interview when Violet CoCo was initially sentenced to 15 months jail and denied bail — and then I wrote about in The Saturday Paper. As an update to this, CoCo is now out on bail.

By far, the story I am proudest of is this BBC Future Planet story on Australia’s lithium industry — an issue I had been meaning to look at for some time. The work that went into fact checking every detail of this story to make a reliable work of journalism that was later translated into Portuguese by BBC Brazil.

But probably the most significant story for me this year was the 3000 or so word feature I wrote for Rolling Stone Australia after attending the oil and gas industry’s national conference earlier in the year. It was a story I researched on spec and which was made possible by my generous subscribers at Raising Hell, whose support helped cover the initial cost of travel. Several outfits initially passed on the pitch as it was hard to understand what might have been “new” about a gathering of the most powerful figures in oil and gas in Australia which also happens to meet every year. Getting it over the line, however, has been important as it will form the start of an upcoming book which I will be researching next year.

There’s also some huge news to come on that front, but you’ll have to wait until next year to hear more as right now I’m trying to dial things back and take a breath before setting out again in 2023 to chronicle the latest horrors from our shared hellscape.

As the poet says: Be good. Or be good at it.

For the Fortnight: December 6 to December 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 …

• “‘People deserve to have certainty’: the growing push for ‘roster justice’” (Guardian AU, 18 December 2022).
• ‘Ukrainians angry at Hoyts over Russian film festival that claims to show ‘Russia isn’t so far away’” (Guardian AU, 9 December 2022).
• ‘The sentencing of climate activist Violet CoCo’ (The Saturday Paper, December 10).
• ‘15 months in jail after a climate protest’ (7am Podcast, December 12).

It’s the motherflipping holidays yall! Our shared hellscape is unrelenting but if I have any hope of chronicling the latest twists and turns, I need to take downtime sometime This is your notice that Raising Hell will be on hiatus until January 17th when we’ll pick up where we’re left off.

You Hate To See It

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

• Nothing To Lose But Your ChainsPlayers of political simulation Victoria 3 are pissed. Their problem? Marxism always wins. Apparently players frustrated that under communist models of production all wealth is returned to the producers rather than being horded by the bosses have complained that capitalism is just too dang inefficient. In the original complaint, a player complained how shared resources equally and ensuring everyone does better over the longhaul with any excess ploughed into better ensuring basic needs before concluding “it’s just so easy.” Never fear, though, there is already a community of modders at work responding to this crisis by help buff ethnostate playstyles and increase the production volumes for economies based on subsistence farming to achieve some measure of perceived “fairness” — because if there’s a universal truth it’s that white nationalists and Soylent Green-types could always use a helping hand.
• I SpyIf Elon Musk has spied opportunity churning up the sewer that is Twitter by basically opening the gates to white supremacists and laundering the tired climate change denying talking points of people who just want to watch the world burn, the world’s richest man has begun to probe the extent of his power. Embarrassed and annoyed at the swathe of accounts using open source intelligence to track his personal private jet, the Technoking has decreed that any account providing information on a person’s location — even if they are using open source, publicly available information — is now verboten.

• Scandaleux!
  The French. Those dastardly French. They are a culture shrouded in mystery, a cantankerous people who probably don’t exist with their boulangeries and charcuteries and menage a trois’s. Now it turns out that Naval Group, a state-owned French defence company that was previously contracted to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, was so alarmed that details of a conference call on the €56 billion project were leaked that they began an investigation. To learn whodunnit, they turned to cyber surveillance firm Altrnativ to spy on a politician, a journalist and others who they thought may be responsible. Their prime suspect? Former South Australian Senator Rex Patrick. Confronted with the allegations, former Patrick said:

I don’t think anyone from France would appreciate an Australian state-owned company investigating a French senator because he or she was asking hard questions in the French Parliament on the spending of French taxpayers’ money. They would rightly say such snooping was ‘choquant’, ‘outrageant’ and ‘scandaleux.’ Feel free to fix my bad French.

• It’s Christmas, so let’s not end on a down note about the French nor about the year. Here is video footage of 200 people attacking the Lafarge cement plant in the south of France. The plant is one of the biggest polluters and producers of CO2 in the country. The furnaces — fueled by industrial waste and tires — were specifically attacked as a symbol of greenwashing.

Failing Upward

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

• Our final failing upward nomination of 2022 is a disappointing one. The Robodebt Royal Commission has been trundling along, drawing in prime ministers, bureaucrats and purveys of “scientist phrenology” (as one Twitter user put it). But — and there is always a but — Kathryn Campbell, the woman responsible for overseeing this mess and fighting like hell sideline, marginalised and crush anyone that pushed back against the scheme has since been promoted. We here at Raising Hell’s elite satire unit were absolutely thrilled to hear the former departmental secretary for both Department of Social Services and Department of Human Services had been given a lovely Christmas present even as she was giving evidence about her department’s failure at the Royal Commission. Where has she gone, we hear you ask? Only to head up the office establishing establishing the new Aukus alliance inside the department of defence.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Something published earlier this year but stumbled upon in the last fortnight, here’s Alex N Press writing in Jacobin about ostensibly woke companies engaging in union busting.
• Samira Shackle has this great feature in the UK Guardian looking at the activity of Insulate Britain, a similar organisation to Fireproof and Floodproof Australia titled: “‘We’ll be hated, but it will stir things up’: Insulate Britain on what happened next – and being right all along”.
• Adam Tooze has this interesting look at the multinational who bought the world’s mountains to build a ski-resort monopoly.
• But hey, South Australia has spent a couple of days exporting renewable energy to the eastern states. You’re welcome, guys.

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 — contact me first for how. 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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