Raising Hell: Issue 7: If At First You Don't Secede...

Astute readers of Raising Hell will notice something amiss about this fortnight. First: the obvious. Today, as it happens, is a Wednesday when traditionally, this rag is published on a Tuesday morning. That is what you may like to call a clue.

The next point of interest is that you won’t exactly be finding a screed from me to kick off this issue. To be frank: I’m spent. While the rest of the world has been debating the symbolism of pulling Fawlty Towers from the airwaves or beheading statues of James Cook — subjects for which I have nothing useful to say — I have been busy. Extremely busy. In the constant pursuit of a story I found myself on Kangaroo Island over the weekend, braving the elements and a ferry crossing even long-time Islanders considered uniquely bad.

And then when it came time to string together a coherent sentence or two for Issue 7, all hell broke loose. On Monday night a 28-year-old Aboriginal man named Henry Noel was arrested by police. I heard about it at 6am Tuesday morning after a subscriber to this newsletter tipped me to the videos posted to social media that caught the behaviour of the arresting officers on camera. Naturally, I immediately began to investigate — for those interested in reading more I’ve listed these stories below with a few production notes to give a clear statement of where things are at when we left off.

This, for what it’s worth, is an extremely important story. The video that was recorded and the images that came out of it — along with the defensiveness of the authorities — reminds us why people marched in the first place. In many ways what happened was a direct answer to those who might shrug of the issue of police and custodial violence against people of colour as a wholly US problem. The events of Tuesday morning were significant as it reminded us that this stuff happens at home, too.

I have more to say on all this, but right now, given my physical state and my docket, I cannot find the words. Instead, and in the meantime, I’d like to pivot gracefully into some more hyper-local news. Those of you who know me or may have followed my work will be aware that for the last two years I have been working on a book. That book is about debt. The short version is that I was involved in a car accident — a moment that ranks among the worst experiences of my life. At the time I just so happened to have no insurance. This meant I was required to buy someone a new car and had a very large debt to pay. I then used this experience as a way to launch into an investigation of Australia’s love affair with debt. Given we are some of the most indebted people on the face of the planet and those who run the country are worried we may be heading for a solvency crisis in the wake of the pandemic, I’d say my book’s September publication date makes it extremely well-timed. This also means I now have permission from my publisher to show off the cover, and so I give you Just Money (2020):

For anyone wondering where you can pick up a copy, you can pre-order the book at Dymocks, Readings or Booktopia or your local bookstore. You might even hit up some of the little guys like Imprints (South Australia) or Boffins (Western Australia). And yes, you can theoretically get it at Amazon, but maybe give that one a miss, eh? If you’re a regular reader here at Raising Hell, I assume you have no love for profiteering gluttons like Jeff Bezos who treats his workers like serfs.

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 …

• ‘Arrest demonstrates racial profiling says ALRM advocates as SA Police launch investigation’ (2020, NITV, 16 June).

• ‘Violent arrest of a young Aboriginal man by South Australian police caught on camera’ (2020, NITV, 16 June).

  The earliest information from those on the ground was that Henry Noel, 28, was arrested within minutes of leaving a friends flat, according to witnesses. After a violent arrest — recorded and uploaded to social media — in which an officer struck him at least three times, Noel was taken into custody ostensibly for failure to wear a helmet and riding without a bike light. A field officer from the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM) called to check on his welfare, provide legal advice and get him medical treatment, their calls went ignored. Later, ALRM CEO Cheryl Axleby became personally involved only to be told Noel had been offered the chance to get bail but refused. At the time of the arrest, witnesses to the scene and activists who called the station were told he would be seen by a nurse. Later the police would say Noel had refused.

  I called Cheryl early on Tuesday morning and she sounded rattled by the treatment of her staff. Her words to me then were, blunt: “This is how Deaths in Custody happen.” What happened next was a rapid sequence of events where the police narrative seemed to shift by the hour. First, the nature of the charges changed. What began as an interaction over a lack of helmet and bike light, turned into charges for assaulting police and hindering arrest. A statement released by SAPOL later in the afternoon only confused matters further. To start with, it said police were responding to an incident of domestic violence. It then said Noel had been searched on suspicion of possessing illicit substances. It also added that Noel had been charged with assaulting police, hindering arrest and property damage — which was new information. These charges would later be dropped and Noel would be let out the backdoor of the police station by mid-morning. Much later, during a press conference at parliament house, SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens — looking very uncomfortable — sought to save face by insisting that charges may still yet be laid against “all persons involved” after the internal investigation is over. There was a considerable irony to this given the events of the last fortnight…

• ‘Record crowd rallies in Adelaide, shuts down city centre’ (2020, NITV, 7 June).

  Having been around to mock the 5G protests and to cover the Black Lives Matter solidarity rallies in Adelaide, the conversation among the commentariat about the rallies makes me laugh. Over the last few months, certain voices in media and government have turned on a dime to variously defend the right to protest as sacred or totally lethal depending on who was involved. Whatever people may say about the appropriateness of protest during a pandemic (let’s be real, when is protest ever appropriate according to powerful people?) the telling moment for me came when the South Australian state government refused to allow a second Black Lives Matter march in Adelaide but did allow 2500 people to gather for the football. Given the events of Tuesday morning, that decision deserves a little scrutiny. On background, interested South Australians would do well to check out the story of Wayne Fella Morrison who died while in custody at Yatala Labour Prison and whose Coronial inquest will resume in September after every single prison guard involved refused to give evidence. Some might even dig a little deeper to learn about the Aboriginal woman who was refused mental health care and was instead shackled to a bed for 23 hours a day, for eight months in Yatala’s G-Division back in 2011.

  

  Image: One of my shots from the Black Lives Matter rally. There are others but in the interests of length, I stuck with this one (Source: Royce Kurmelovs)

• ‘Beer and Other Sins: Pour one out for the Kings Head’ (2020, The Adelaide Review, 11 June).

  At the height of the pandemic, the big question going was not so much the economic crisis we were facing but the solvency crisis which is still yet to play out. With this in mind, and given the inability to go out and drink with people, I spoke to Fidelma McCorry about the closure of The Kings Head for this Beer and Other Sins column in the Adelaide Review.

• SA Media Awards 2020: Best Freelance Contribution, Best Investigative Journalism nomination

  In a bracing ceremony last Friday, I won Best Freelance Contribution at the SA Media Awards and nominated for Best Investigative Journalism for a couple of stories I wrote for The Saturday Paper and The Guardian. Here’s what the judges said:

  This category attracts more entries every year, revealing a depth of talent and diversity of content. This year the winning entry demonstrated qualities that epitomise the ideals of journalism, showing a determined commitment to find the truth, through investigation and sheer hard work-breaking impactful national interest stories on the lives, and well-being of Australians including the environment.

  Here are the stories I entered:

• ‘Robo-debt restart affects thousands’ (2019, The Saturday Paper, 19 October).
• ‘Unpausing the robo-debt algorithm’ (2019, The Saturday Paper, 2 November).
• ‘Wrong turn: why Australia’s vehicle emissions are rising’ (2019, The Guardian 16 November).

You Hate To See It

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

• File Under: “Signs Of The End Times”.The world’s richest philanthropists, whose noted families have presumably spent the better part of last century tax dodging and stuffing mattresses with dollars, have now turned to deficit financing to fund their charitable pursuits. The American social security and healthcare system may be shot to hell, but rather than directing their largesse to help repair these systems, well-meaning donors looking to bask in the glow of good publicity are exploiting zero interest rates to give away other people’s money too.
• But Wait, There’s More!Rio Tinto may have blown up Juukan Gorge, a site of spiritual, cultural and archaeological importance that shows signs of human habitation going back 45,000 years — and the company is very sorry you feel that way about the destruction — but more digging has revealed most of the industry is in the same hole. Mining magnate Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Minerals Group — which recently suffered a crushing defeat in a decade-long legal battle against the Yindjibarndi people — was busted by the Sydney Morning Herald for planning to scrub two Aboriginal sites from the landscape, including one that shows evidence of human habitation going back 60,000 years. Next up was BHP. Just three days after Rio Tinto blew up Juukan Gorge, BHP was given permission by Western Australian Labor’s Ben Wyatt, minister for Aboriginal affairs, to destroy up to 86 Aboriginal sites in a mine exception. When asked to comment about his decision, Wyatt said his hands were tied by existing laws and instead asked BHP to “work with” the Banjima people. Thirteen hours later, BHP — perhaps worried about what bulldozing its way through humanity’s shared heritage in pursuit of ever higher returns to its shareholders might do to its public image — contacted The Guardian to say it was like, totally cool and they’d “work with” the Banjima people going forward.
• Corporate Undertakers WantedIf the commentariat has spent the last three weeks giving the Morrison government back-pats over its handling of the pandemic — seemingly forgetting the confused and befuddled scenes in the first weeks of the crisis — all that may be about to come to an end. With federal support for income and social security set to fall away in September (if not sooner), over a million people may be plunged into poverty and the economy may simply run off a cliff. The corporate cops at ASIC are already war gaming such a scenario, warning there are simply not enough liquidators in the country to handle the looming solvency crisis.
• Participation Trophies For The Ruling Classes!A long list of human rights abusers and screw ups have been rewarded in this year’s Queens Birthday Honours. Among the noted luminaries to be “recognised” were high profile Coalition figures like Bronwyn Bishop, who once spent $5000 of taxpayer funds to beat traffic by taking a chopper 80kms from Melbourne to dinner at a gulf course near Geelong and Philip Ruddock, the architect behind the country’s offshore detention system. Among the more humble persons to be rewarded was Alan Davidson, the guy in charge of automation at Centrelink — a somewhat curious choice given the fate of the robodebt scheme. Top of the list, however, was former Prime Minister Tony Abbot who was celebrated for his efforts on “border control”. Abbott went so far as to use his acceptance speech to declare the savage funding cuts his government inflicted on the Australian public to have ultimately helped the nation handle the pandemic — a point that is debatable, given the $111 million the Abbott government cut from the CSIRO’s budget in 2014 cost eight jobs in biosecurity — the very people responsible for developing vaccines and dealing with pandemics.
• But Let’s Not Be Partisan…In a stunning work of investigative reporting (or reality television production) Victorian Labor minister Adam Somyurek was recorded bragging about how he runs the Labor party in Victoria and was planning to branch stack his way to the top of the pyramid. If that weren’t enough, Somyurek was caught on tape uttering treasonous remarks as “fuck the premier [Daniel Andrews]” and asking, rhetorically: “Who’s going to protect Albo?" For many, however, the only truly shocking thing about the saga was that the incident occurred within the Victorian Labor Party and not across the border in New South Wales.
• Well, If Everyone’s Doing It…As the rest of the world was revolting against the legacy of white supremacy, in the wide expanse of regional Western Australia, a quieter rebellion was taking place. In a made-for-Youtube moment, three men and one woman broke into the historic courthouse in the Wheatbelt town of York to denounce the pope, throw off the decadent Australian state and proclaim the independence of “New Westralia” in the name of “freedom and the Kingdom of Heaven”. While it is not clear what the nascent theocracy stands for exactly, one article explained they “are against foreign incursion, domestic insurgency, mercenary, treachery, sedition and treasonous behaviour” and think the Australian flag “satanic”. Though the group — who were not locals — were immediately arrested, we here at Raising Hell await the inevitable uprising from the masses who will no doubt be drawn to the light that is the New Westralian nation and its dour religious creed.

Failing Upward

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

• There was something pleasing about the blind fury of Mathias Cormann this last fortnight. If there was any doubt about where the Finance minister stood on the issue of police and custodial violence against Aboriginal people and people of colour, he quickly made his position known early on. During a spot with ABC News, the government’s money man declared Black Lives Matter protesters “selfish and indulgent” for daring to gather in public. It was, you might say, a somewhat curious criticism from a man who, at any other time, would likely celebrate rank self-interest and indulgence as the bedrock of a free market economy.

  Yet it was a follow-up appearance on Sky News Australia that would earn him a special mention in this fortnight’s Failing Upward. There Cormann told presenters anyone who turned up to protest and who was also on social security should be thrown off immediately — or at the very least, that was a “conversation worth having”.

  Now it was hard to tell, exactly, whether the public was witnessing a moment of weapons-grade irony or vintage hypocrisy from a man apparently arguing the poor needed to be starved into quiet submission. It is also too easy to respond to the moment by lingering on the obvious and the odious. For instance, Australia may well be past the peak of the pandemic (unlike the US which has broadly given up trying to control the spread of Covid-19). Pubs have re-opened, the kids are back to school and childcare subsidies have been cut. With all this, any freak-out about mass protests now seems rather strange. It is also hilarious. For anyone within the Coalition to talk with any seriousness about these matters, all you have to do is remember how it responded to those 5G conspiracy theorists who gathered when things were really bad:

  "It's a free country." @ScottMorrisonMP asked about the protests on the weekend. #auspol

  — David Marler (@Qldaah) 2:25 AM ∙ May 11, 2020

  If that wasn’t enough, recall for a moment those brave crusaders for small government and individual agency who, in the first month of the pandemic, were fiercely arguing grandparents should be allowed to hug their grandchildren, even if it meant certain death. Given this line of thinking appears to have had its supporters in government, it perhaps brings the petty moralising on the Black Lives Matter solidarity protests into sharp focus. Of course, the image of 20,000 people marched through Sydney demanding the government act to address Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in a meaningful way was suddenly a step too far for the government. These guys had, after all, staked their claim to legitimacy on a “quiet Australians” shtick little more than a re-branded version of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” (or perhaps those “quiet bat people”). Understood this way, all Cormann was doing in his media appearances was signalling to various constituencies on the right that the Coalition was still going to look after them.

  All of this can be refuted and mercilessly mocked for the dishonest stupidity that it is, but then that would entirely miss a higher truth succinctly explained by writer and journalist Ben Eltham:

  The belief that any protestor must be on welfare dies hard in the Coalition. They cannot imagine ordinary people who have jobs might want to protest something (except if it's 5G of course)

  — Ben Eltham (@beneltham) 11:33 PM ∙ Jun 11, 2020

  In the long, time-honoured tradition of people revealing more about themselves than they intend to, this was one of those moments. If there was a damning thing to be said about Cormann and the broader Coalition, it may well be that these guys have been blessed with a total lack of imagination.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• This by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic looking at collaborators throughout history is a must-read from the last fortnight. If Applebaum began by asking the question: what makes someone collaborate? She ended up asking the more pertinent question, what makes someone dissent?
• I’ve been tutoring a feature writing class at the University of South Australia as part of its journalism program. A student of mine had this profile of children’s musician Peter Combe published in The Adelaide Review.

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!