Raising Hell: Issue 18: "The Gang Solves The Pandemic"

If you lived anywhere else in this fair nation, the story in South Australia over the last month would appear to have unfolded in a confused and chaotic series of apparent screw ups: there was a lockdown, then there wasn’t. After that came some kind of embarrassing kerfuffle with a bloke and a pizza box. Unlike New South Wales’ attempt to power through its recent outbreak, and Victoria’ marathon lockdown, the whole South Australia was a non-story in a backwater that didn’t matter much in the scheme of things.

Whole essays have and will be written examining Melbourne’s collective struggle to control a virus that has killed a documented 1.54 million people worldwide, including 2190 people in the US just yesterday. Jack Latimore contributed an excellent piece to Meanjin a few months back. South Australia, you can be sure, won’t be getting the same treatment. If Melbourne had its love letter to Dan Andrews, Adelaide instead had Christopher Pyne pen a love letter to Rob Loucas($) praising the state treasurer’s “parsimony” and fawning over his miserly cheapness.

The only outlet that may have been able to connect the dots and provide a considered, longform treatment of events, The Adelaide Review became an early victim of the pandemic. This is a shame as the perception elsewhere appears to be that what happened in South Australia was a weird and wildly hysterical reaction to an non-existent threat seemingly ripped straight from Always Sunny.

This could not be farther from the truth. The precise sequence of events is too complicated to properly lay out in this format — though Tom Richardson at InDaily gave it a good go. The point is, the sensational events of “pizzagate” served as a successful political bait and switch that has largely been successful. Not only did it stop the public asking questions about how authorities allowed a highly contagious virus to escape hotel quarantine in the first place, but it meant at the time people casually dismissed the very real and very active 33-person cluster working its way through working class neighbourhoods in Adelaide’s northwest. That no one else appears to have become infected along the way can be put down to luck.

Pulling the camera back, the whole episode reveals much about the efficacy of core institutions that have been slowly hollowed out by a decade or two of grinding austerity, deindustrialisation and brain drain. Even now, after several days of zero new cases, it is still entirely clear what happened — and the South Australian parliamentary system won’t be providing answers any time soon. While some reporters have doggedly kept on the story, the call for a inquiry into what happened was voted down in parliament last week. Meanwhile, the business community has been lobbying hard to ensure that, should there be another outbreak, the words “lockdown” never pass the lips of another politician again.

And that is the current state-of-the-state as we go into the final weeks of December —in a year where the head of the UN has declared humanity on the brink of a “suicidal” climate catastrophe. Which is also my way of seamlessly transitioning into giving you, my generous subscribers, an update on my plans for Raising Hell over the holiday period. Now that CrackingCOVIDSafe is in a holding pattern — and given 2020 has been a breathless year that has left me in desperate need of some downtime — this will be the last newsletter of the year, barring some other world-shattering calamity that commands a response. We will picking up again on January 12, first with the newswrap and then — hopefully — with a other fun new projects I’ve been cooking up.

In the meantime, and in the words of a great poet: be good, or be good at it.

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 …

• ‘From zero to outbreak: how Adelaide's Covid calm was shattered’ (The Guardian, 18 November 2020).
• ‘The Woodville Pizza Bar incident’ (The Saturday Paper, 28 November 2020) ($).
• ‘Life After 4 Years of Detention Hell on Nauru’ (VICE, 5 November 2020).

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.

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 in the Northern Territory hit the headlines in 2018 when 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. When I asked for comment from PWC — the government-owned corporation that is responsible for providing drinking water — the answer was: no comment. Later when I tried to force documents public I found PWC and its subsidiary Indigenous Essential Services (IES) were protected under the NT’s FOI laws.

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.

• ‘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).

Just Money

My latest book has been doing the rounds. Recently it found good company with a mention alongside Thomas Frank’s new release in InDaily, I spoke to Barry Nichols at the ABC about how the debt business is booming and the Bloom podcast had me on to talk on a similar theme. Word on the street is two book reviews are on the way but I haven’t heard anything when they’ll be up.

And this is also perhaps the moment to mention that I’m on the lineup for Adelaide Writers Week in 2021. I don’t exactly know whether I have permission to talk about it yet, but I’ll be making my debut at the writers festival in my home town where I’ll be talking to the eminent Rick Morton.

You Hate To See It

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

• Covid-19 v Adam CreightonBarring a critical failure in a public service hobbled by a decade or more of mindless austerity and outsourcing, Australia may just buck the global trend and become one of few nations to eliminate Covid-19 from its shores all together. If achieved, we here at Raising Hell presume the moment be followed by an flood of contrite apology letters from figures like Adam Creighton, economics editor at The Australian and former fellow at a Koch Brothers brothers funded thinktank, who once insisted Australia follow the failed path of Sweden.
• Livin’ For The SchadenfreudeQueensland Senator Malcolm Roberts appears to have taken news of Trump’s demise hard. In the days and weeks after the US Presidential election, the One Nation senator — who seemed confused about his national loyalties — took to social media to bravely prosecute Trump’s charge that the Biden campaign stole the election. Though things may be getting worse for the good senator. One can only wonder how the man — who famously vomited the first time he watched Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth — with such an iron-fisted grip on reality will now react to the lefties at The Economist declaring it was “time to make coal history”.
• Speaking of Climate Change…If you have ever wondered why the Bureau of Meteorology is largely silent on the existential threat that is climate change, those over at Michael West media have you covered. Their FOI requests reveal how the trusted agency’s CEO, Andrew Johnson has taken the view that the “Bureau should not be proactively discussing climate context”.
• It Pays To Have Friends In High PlacesHaving just poured hundred of millions into a financialised economy in the hope all that stimulus will trickle down, the Coalition is embarking on plans to bail out the nation’s employers yet again — this time to the tune of $39 billion. While not being paid out in direct stimulus, proposed changes to Australian industrial relations laws will retroactively wipe away billions casual workers may be able to claim from bosses who relied on legal chicanery to underpay them. It’s almost as if employers would prefer people work for free if they could get away with it…
• Free Labour, You Say?Over the recent holiday period, school uniform and supplies company, The School Locker found themselves in something of a pickle. Confronted with massive demand and not enough staff, the company quickly set about solving its labour shortage. Posting to social media, the company said it was looking for “volunteers” to perform a self-less act of national service by helping disgruntled parents and their demanding brood scour the shelves. The School Locker, for what it’s worth, is owned by the billionaire founder of Harvey Norman, Gerry Harvey. At a time when the global economy was lurching into crisis and recession, the company made a $341.1 million profit in Q1 of 2020-2021.
• Party Like Its The Dying Days Of The Roman EmpireIf the travails of the world got you down, maybe consider taking some inspiration from the decadence of disgraced former WA Liberal MP’s Nigel Hallett and Brian Ellis, two men entirely free of burdens like self-awareness. An investigation by the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission found the pair spent thousands of dollars in electoral allowances on strippers, fine dining, their girlfriends and a trip to an Adelaide winery. On one occasion, Ellis justified a $1995 expense incurred at a Northbridge strip club claiming he had met with “some farmers and insurance company representatives”… for you know… “business”.

Failing Upward

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

• With Raising Hell’s home state of South Australian moving in and out of lockdown on a dime, it has been hard here to separate out one screw up from the pack of well-paid and powerful screw ups. Here, for your viewing pleasure, we provide you with the full video of the SAPOL presser where it was announced the police would not, in point of fact, be “throwing the book” at the 36-year-old Spaniard who allegedly lied to the state’s contact tracers. Held late in the day, note the absence of state premier Steven Marshall or Police Commissioner Grant Stevens. The bad news was instead left to Assistant Commissioner Peter Harvey to deliver where he, perhaps tellingly, wrapped up the session with a line straight out of The Godfather: “this is just business.”

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• Trump’s defeat has been a prompt for much great writing. First there was Rebecca Solnit’s essay on how we cannot meet Nazi’s halfway. Then there was Benjamin Moffitt’s reminder that no, Trump does not mean no right wing populism has been defeated. This warning against complacency was echoed by Edward Burmila in The Nation who wrote how Biden will be facing gridlock over the next four years, and also by Adam Tooze who grappled with the reality that Trump has not been repudiated. As another story in The Nation points out, unless the underlying fragility and precarity of life in the US is addressed, the situation can only get worse.
• Writing in The Conversation, Saul Eslake — the former ANZ chief economist who I once greatly annoyed as a younger, stupider freelance reporter by hustling his personal phone number — retells how former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello used his influence to stop criticism of the then-Howard government. It is an excellent case study on how influence within Australia works by making implicit threats to a persons job security.
• The eminent Peter Whiteford, a subscriber to this newsletter, has this excellent forensic history of the robodebt scandal that was recently settled out of court, letting down the thousands who wanted their day in court. It is well worth a read on background, especially given the perception out in the world that robodebt was funny computer-stuff, and not an intentional effort to wrest a billion bucks from the pockets of the nation’s poorest.

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.

• 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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