Raising Hell: Issue 11: She'll Be Right, Until She Won't

If you have been unfortunate enough to be paying attention to the news cycle over the last fortnight, you would have noticed that the political narrative of the moment is only now being written.

Generally speaking, all the various takes reach similar conclusions even as they emphasize some details over others. The first tend to begin by highlighting — to some degree — the shock at the intrusion of state power into the everyday lives of people who live in large cities. Another lot celebrates the kumbaya bipartisanship and political centrism that has blossomed in the midst of the crisis. A more recent variation focuses on themes of transparency and accountability, noting in the process that the federal Coalition government likes to demand accountability from everyone but themselves. The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy penned an excellent example of the genre:

“Morrison got a question on Monday about whether two federal officials should give evidence directly at that inquiry – something that would render the promised cooperation something more than nominal.

“I’ve said we would cooperate with the inquiry as we have,” the prime minister said. “That’s what we continue to do.” The follow up question – “but they haven’t answered direct questions” – hung in the air, unanswered. Morrison moved on.”

Whatever the detail, weld these individual narratives together and what you get is a first draft of history that reads: thank Christ we are not the US.

Though we all may well be forgiven for feeling a sense of collective relief that we are not living the nightmare unfolding across the Pacific, just as what’s happening in the US is revealing about that society, what’s happening here tells us much about who we are as a nation.

Being able to articulate that in a clear way is not easy. Part of this is because we have to zoom out to really see it. Placed in a global context, the recurring theme across the world is how the pandemic has collapsed social institutions that have long been neglected — if not outright plundered — in the process of driving a wedge through the global wealth divide over the last 30 years. The result has been a domino chain of failures that have struck a match on growing discontent. Scan the headlines of the world news media and it is clear citizens in country’s across the world are marching. People are marching in the streets in places as distant as Santiago, Portland, Beirut and Hong Kong. Whatever the specific reason for their protest, the fact these are happening in concert is significant and provide a backdrop to events in Australia.

Going into this moment, Australia as a nation has to date been governed as a monopole which hasn’t really done all that much for the last twenty years except accidentally strike it richer and stumble around after the US as it lied its way into the Forever War. Outlining regions of the country may have struggled through localised recessions, but in the face of any criticism, those at the centre have always repeated the trope about 20-something years of straight growth (if they were even listening at all). There may have been very real issues to address — climate change, wealth inequality, a collapsing aged care system, a banking system that has systematically ripped people off, a falling literacy rate, a corrupt and financialised water trading system, an inaccessible real estate market, a shredded social safety net — but then to even think about them was a downer and actually doing anything about it felt like work.

Faced with the choice, those in charge have preferred to live for the moment, which was only possible right up until crisis actually came, first as bushfire, then as disease. At the level of the individual, these events offered an instant Rorschach for the quality of this nation’s leadership. Be it in government, politics, the unions, the university sector or private industry, some have courageously risen to the occasion while others have crumbled, showing the extent to which they were simply in it for the paycheck.

If we can piece all this together into some kind of deeper narrative we can reckon with, it may read something like this: Australia is a rich nation led by a bunch who care less about ideas — the good or the bad — and how they actually affect the average person, and more about holding onto the ability to make decisions at any cost. These same people have been repeatedly warned about the risks — of pandemics, of climate change, of the growing class divide — but have done little. Their answer to date has consistently been “she’ll be right”, all the while continuing to profit from their assets, their growing salaries and their pension arrangements.

The financial world has a name for this: “shorting your clients interests”. Australians are not stupid. We know this is happening, even if we often don’t always have the words. It is why faith in public institutions — including the media — is at an all time low. Though we may have dodged the worst, the sense it could have been so much worse is bad enough — an understanding which perhaps explains the resigned nihilism of many. And can you blame them? After decades of pocketing the cash and shifting the risk onto us, we know more than ever we are being left with the bill.

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 …

• ‘South Australian Police officers cleared of wrongdoing during violent arrest’ (NITV, 2020).This follows up my reporting back in July and the title says it all, really. To top it off, SAPOL made the announcement in a Friday afternoon garbage dump, hoping no one would be paying attention Monday morning. I tried to highlight this fact. Unfortunately SAPOL has succeeded in sweeping it under a rug. You can also read the police statement here.
• ‘High levels of uranium in drinking water of NT community’ (NITV, 2020).I followed up news that residents of Laramba lost a lawsuit against their landlords with this story asking NT Power and Water what they were doing about the uranium in the town’s water. They refused to answer. FOI’s now inbound. Will keep you posted.
• ‘Electric cars have few downsides except price. One company is looking to change that’ (The Guardian, 2020).This story appeared as part of The Guardian’s Green Recovery series. It has been weeks in the works — and it looks gorgeous with big, splashy photos. Put in context of the decarbonisation, the goal for me has been to highlight how going zero-carbon will actually be beneficial to working class people.
• ‘An ordinary night in extraordinary times at The Gov’ (The Adelaide Review, 2020).The latest installment of my column is now online. As some keen-eyed observers have said, even reading about the pub can be medicinal.
• Book Launch!With just weeks before my latest book hits the shelves, I’ve been quietly plotting a launch. Typically, these are organised months in advance but my tendency to overwork and the pandemic has delayed things. In the last fortnight South Australia has had a scare with possible new cases in the western suburbs — where I live — and while there are a few ideas, the idea of bringing 30-to-50 perfect strangers together seems the kind of reckless indifference I usually love to hate. While it is probably fine, I am seriously considering putting the whole thing off until next year when we will have a better sense for our circumstances. That sucks, but you can be sure that sooner or later there’ll be some kind of party where those who are SA-locked can gather to get trashed on cheap beer and shit-talk the titans of financial capitalism in good company.In the meantime, there’s always pre-order.

You Hate To See It

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

• I’m Talking Synergies. Vertical Integration. Negative Ions.An unnamed source within the federal Coalition leapt at the chance to tell The Financial Review how Victoria was on its own when it came to covering the cost of dealing with the pandemic. "They can't just send the bill to the feds,'' the anonymous messenger said while experiencing what we here at Raising Hell assume was a state of orgasmic bliss at the opportunity to tell a whole state full of lefties to get a job — and all on the basis it would constitute a “moral hazard”.
• Go Team Australia!If you were breathing easy that at least Australia was not like the US in the sense that workers weren’t being compelled by their bosses to clock in despite the ever-present risk of death-by-Covid-19, SPOTLESS has been a total killjoy. After workers at a laundry in Dandenong walked off the job when they were exposed to the virus, the company went to the Fair Work Commission to try and force them back to work. This is where it bears mentioning that SPOTLESS belongs to that clutch of private for-profit companies that charges governments a premium to perform basic public services. For example, it holds the contract to manage facilities at public schools and hospitals across the country.
• Sorry, Still Not Really SorryCompany reps from mining giant Rio Tinto have been before before a senate inquiry this past fortnight where they explained they totally didn’t have to blow up a 46,000-year-old cave system. When asked, the execs said the fate of the ancient cradle of humanity was sealed the moment they realised wiping it from the earth would open up a whole lot of high grade ore they could be turned into fat stacks of cash. Oh, and they’d already set the charges.
• Speaking Of Greed…A Lebanese woman filming her wedding video caught the moment when 2750 metric tonnes of fertiliser — that had been sitting in port since 2013 without any safety precautions being taken whatsoever — exploded, obliterating the firefighters who were first-responders and levelling half of Beiruit in a nation that functions like the Switzerland of the Middle East and is already mired a massive financial crisis.

• Irony Of Ironies

  News Corp have played an ignominious role in helping to bring about what is perhaps the first press release worth printing in full and without qualification after the Australian Pharmacy Guild called out a painful instance of gotcha journalism, concluding with a simple question: “What sort of unethical, tawdry show are they running at News Corp?”

  

• Your Yiayia Paid For This

  The Aged Care Royal Commission may have highlighted horrifying levels of neglect among the elderly living in aged care across the country, but rest assured the owners of the Epping Gardens Aged Care facility continue to live in palatial luxury. The Victorian aged care facility has been linked to 77 Covid-19 cases which have in turn exposed the foul living conditions many residents are forced to endure, but its owners Areti and Peter Arvanitis took time during a crisis for a photoshoot at their Melbourne mansion with Vogue Australia in March — proving yet again that money really doesn’t buy taste:

  

• Fate Of The World Getting You Down? We Got ThisThe Australia-New Zealand travel bubble may be dead in the water, but that doesn’t mean your dreams of overseas travel have to go down with the ship. If sealing yourself inside an air-tight metal tube with perfect strangers for 20+ hours makes you feel uncomfortable, Emirates Airlines has got you covered with a sweet new travel insurance policy. Should you contract Covid-19 in flight, the airline will not only cover your medical bills and quarantine costs, they will also bankroll your funeral costs up to $1765 in the event of your death. Book your tickets today!

Failing Upward

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

• When it came time to nominate a candidate for Failing Upward this fortnight, we here at Raising Hell were confronted with a depressingly full field. Among the front-runners were economic commentators like Adam Creighton (who have, for weeks, been calling for a “rapid” re-opening of society) and his pearl-clutching tweets about the lockdown in Victoria. Then was Lauren Southern, the white nationalist who quit the limelight but has recently washed up with a spot discussing current affairs on Sky News.

  It was tough but in the end we simply could not move past the fine form of Kathryn Campbell. As Department of Social Services secretary, Campbell appeared before a Friday afternoon hearing of a senate inquiry into robodebt. There Campbell — reportedly appointed to the position for her “killer instinct” — circled the wagons in the face of heated questioning about what the hell the department was doing at the time the program was set up. It was then that, in search of some way to defend herself and her department, she defaulted to a classic strategy: obscurantism through legal formalism.

  The way it works is to use language like a filing system by making it overly technical and precise. That way, any question that deployed the wrong words in the wrong order would deliver a null result. This, it should be said, has long been Standard Operation Procedure for the department in most of its external dealings. The tortured dialect of English that blossomed as a result has been used against everyone: from those forced to navigate the byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth all the way up to pesky senators asking probing questions that could hint at legal responsibility. All were tut-tutted, dismissed and patronised as if they were ignorant children who didn’t understand what it was they were talking about, simply because they didn’t have the right combination of words.

  Campbell offered a working demonstration when she deflected basic questions about robodebt by responding to the specific language used to ask the question instead of its content. After a particularly aggressive exchange, she finally threw up her hands and declared: “I do not know what robodebt is".

  Department of Social Services secretary Kathryn Campbell: "I do not know what robodebt is."

  — Luke Henriques-Gomes (@lukehgomes) 7:26 AM ∙ Jul 31, 2020

  The irony, as was pointed out on Twitter, was that Campbell was familiar with the word “robodebt” and its plain English meaning, given she had used it during a speech back in 2018:

  “So, it’s fair to say, when DHS rolled out the online compliance initiative which went on to be known as ‘robodebt’ … we didn’t do quite as much co-design as we should have.”

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• If there is anything you read this fortnight, make it Richard Cooke’s analysis of the Morrison government in The Monthly. It is the first clear articulation of something I have felt — but didn’t have the words to describe — about how the federal Coalition has relied on patronage to curb dissent and, in doing so, remake the country in keeping with a politics recycled from the Nixon era in the US. My only criticism is the final line, as it does not identify the circumstances Morrison has been exploiting: the very real awareness among the working classes that their children are increasingly being cut off from any occupation that allows upward social momentum and a chance to pursue any goal other than money. This was neatly summed up by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, a work I have been reading for research on another project:

  If you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in. The “liberal elite,” then, are those who have placed an effective lock on any position where it’s possible to get paid to do anything that one might do for any reason other than money.

  Morrison is just the first to make an effective politics out of a very real frustration. Little will change unless that is addressed.

• Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based investigative journalism magazine, may have leaned a little too heavily into the “Trump is a Putin agent” thing but they can still publish a good feature. This time, they’ve told the story of how the famed Texas Rangers were little more than muscle for white supremacists looking to enforce ethnic segregation.

• Turns out I’m not the only one thinking the US seems to be going down like the Soviet Union. If this is true for academia, Rolling Stone have also published this scorching obituary for the US as a player on the world stage.

• Speaking of Rolling Stone, they also have this great feature asking the question: Who Won The Battle of Portland?

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 turns out to be burying toxic waste beneath children’s 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! Download the encrypted message app Wickr Me onto your phone or laptop and contact us securely at my handle: rorok1990.

• If you’re lurking and like what you see, throw me a subscription to get my screeds straight to your inbox every second Tuesday — it’s free. If you like what I do and want to see me do more of it, throw me a paid subscription — it’s $5 a month or $50 a year. Are you skint? Or flush? Well, you can also pay what you feel I’m worth by setting your own yearly rate.

• And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, or leaving a review or just tell a friend about Raising Hell!

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