Raising Hell: Issue 19: 20/20 Vision
"I like my history in high-definition, widescreen, full, vibrant colour." - Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister, first speech to parliament, 14 February 2008.
So here it is: 2021. The good news is 2020 is safely buried six feet deep and most of us will have done our best to lose all memories of it via a montage of sleep-ins and moderate-to-heavy drinking. All the while, no one let rip with the nukes and the oceans haven’t yet risen. I call that a win.
And of course, now it’s over, we absolutely know every problem we have had has been resolved and left behind so that as we enter 2021, everything’s looking up — except, you know, for the attempted fascist coup in the world’s largest superpower, the massive concentrations of wealth, the global plague that continues to rage and may yet get worse, the melting permafrost and record high average temperatures. Oh, and phrenology is back. All in the last week or so.
Cool.
Cool. Cool. Cool.
But in all seriousness, despite the mundane horrors we are currently living through, I am genuinely curious to see what this year will bring. Vaccine, or no vaccine, world events — and even local ones — are continuing to shred any illusions we may have had about how things are going in our neck of the woods. Sure, we may have sidestepped a mass-death event that is currently consuming the rest of the planet, but the reality-check that has come with the attempt to hold an international tennis tournament is a reminder that thing things aren’t exactly going “back to normal” any time soon, no matter how much our fearless leaders promise. Meanwhile, the country’s political leadership is gearing up for a federal election that promises to be totally dispiriting even as it counts as a referendum on the quiet demagoguery of the Morrison government.
But you know that whatever happens, your faithful scribe will be here reflexively snarking on current events. I’ve been back pitching and writing from Monday, with a few fun commissions carrying over from last year — including a series looking at the environment bandits who have helped stall action on climate change, even as they’ve grown richer and more powerful. With growing interest in Raising Hell, my hope is this year I’ll be able to dedicate more time to working up new projects after the overwhelming response I had with CrackingCOVIDSafe. We’ll do be doing more FOI’s, making more mischief and doing our best to make powerful people moderately annoyed.
Whatever happens out there, we’ll get through it together.
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 …
For anyone interested, here are my two final stories published in the twilight of 2020:
‘Millennials aren't socialists they're just poorer than their parents’ (Australian Financial Review, 18 December 2020).
‘Young people drowning in debt: 'Don't borrow your way out of a recession’ (The Guardian, 18 November 2020).
Cracking COVIDSafe
In November 2020, Raising Hell ran its first series, CrackingCOVIDSafe, in association with Electronic Frontiers Australia that investigated the creation of the government’s automated contact tracing app COVIDSafe. With it, I stepped out how I used Freedom of Information to learn more so that others may learn the method in order 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 first time high concentrations of uranium were found in Laramba’s drinking water supply was back in 2008. The situation in the remote Indigenous community of about 263 people hit the headlines in 2018 when NT 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.
Thanks to the support of my generous subscribers I’ve been able to pick up the issue to find out more. I already have a series of FOI requests in two and 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 (UQP, 2020).
To be honest, I was as surprised as anyone when I woke up to a wonderful review of my book by Richard King in The Australian praising it with lines like:
One of the most impressive aspects of Just Money is the skill with which Kurmelovs weaves together the stories of ordinary, often desperate, people and broader socio-economic analysis.
I am deeply proud of Just Money (2020), and so to close out the year this way was very rewarding. It is also why I’m looking forward to Adelaide Writers Week where I’ll be on a couple of different events. Obviously, with state borders clamping shut, dates and times are still being firmed up, but so far it looks like I’ll be moderating a discussion between poet Geoff Goodfellow and author Chris Raja about their recent works, speaking to Rick Morton about money and chatting to Marian Wilkinson about her book The Carbon Club.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
A Pox On Your House, ATO
So much was going in 2020 that it was easy to miss the moment the federal court threw out an appeal by Adelaide tax accountant Nicholas Birdseye. Back in May 2020 the Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld a decision to strip Nicholas Birdseye of his tax accountant registration. His crimes were various, but included a failure to pay $250,000 in taxes owed on three entities he managed, general financial chicanery and that time he wished cancer on ATO investigators in a late night email. When later confronted about it, Birdseye refused to apologise and had no regrets. The full email direct from the decision is submitted here for your approval:
Disaster Apps
With the memory of the hellish 2019-2020 bushfires now fading, the Australian government has confirmed it certainly won’t be doing anything meaningful to address what happened, like actually dealing with the existential threat of climate change or investing in a sovereign fleet of airtankers to combat future blazes. Rather predictably, it will instead take the far cheaper route of developing a new national warning system that will, presumably, be delivered through some kind of mobile phone app — and we all know how that goes.
More Feudalism Than Star Trek
Elon Musk, once namechecked in Star Trek, has bumped off Jeff Bezos to become the richest man alive. When asked in am interview what he would do with his wealth, Musk explained he would be setting aside his immense wealth to fund the human colonisation of Mars, presumably because he believes the earth is “fucked”. When it was then pointed out to him the average person couldn’t afford to make such a trip, and that it would take a lot of labour to build a glorious spacefaring civilisation, Musk responded that was all fine. He would simply extend able-bodied volunteers a line of credit and they could work it off through a form of galactic serfdom.
Good Times Ahead!
Speaking of serfdom, it seems the Coalition plan to run a credit-fed recovery by juicing the housing market is turning out to be great for banks who have celebrated as new home lending hit $24 billion in November. The announcement has been one of several of late to advance the idea there is nothing but economic good-times ahead, even if the record-high levels of Australian household debt may ultimately prove problematic — a point usually buried in the bottom of the story.
A Koan For Our Times
A decade ago, German-programmer Stefan Thomas was paid 7,002 bitcoins for making a video about how the cryptocurrency worked. What were then worth $2-$6 each are today valued at a total $240 million thanks to a recent price spike. The catch? Thomas can’t remember the password to his account and having made eight-out-of-ten attempts, he only has two more chances to get it right before his hard drive encrypts itself for good, leaving his fortune to vanish into the digital ether. This of course raises the philosophical question: if a bitcoin falls in the words and no one is around to collect it, does it even have value?
Of Feasts And Fasts
Nearly two million people have died from Covid-19 worldwide, but the absence of the plague in Australia is proving a boon to the nation’s retailers who just a year ago were fast approaching disaster. The latest numbers show how it has been boomtimes everywhere except South Australia (go figure), with Chief of the Australian Retailers Association, Paul Zahra describing the situation as simply: “outstanding”. Those who have spent the last year working a shopfront counter, however, cannot boast the same prosperity with the famed lefties at Deloitte Access Economics predicting wages will remain stagnant for the next half-decade.
Ten Plagues And Counting
And if it doesn’t already feel like we are beset by problems of biblical proportions, watch out because farmers in South Queensland and northern New South Wales have been waking up the first locust swarms in a decade, while in the US, snakes have learned to climb up circular metal poles. If that isn’t a harbinger of doom, I don’t know what is.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Having taken a long break from doomscrolling the endless abyss that is human civilisation at this point in history, we here at Raising Hell were curious about who would fumble their way into the first instalment of Failing Upward. We were pleasantly surprised when deputy PM Michael McCormack, fill-in guy for the Prime Minister, appeared to charge across the country last week doing his best to piss off anyone who wasn’t already rich, white and comfortable while pulling down a salary of $416,212 each year.
First, he came for the unemployed. Then McCormack upped the ante by failing to read the global room with his tepid defence of pub-fascism. It kicked off when the deputy PM equated the recent violent attempt to storm the US capitol with Black Lives Matter, a civil rights movement organised in response to racist police violence. In an apparent effort to appear statesman-like, McCormack condemned “any” act of violence committed against property and human life — in that exact order — while simultaneously appealing to the legacy of those diggers who used violence to shoot Nazi’s during WWII. Unpacking this wildly incoherent interpretation of events further, McCormack referred to Black Lives Matter as a “race riot” and seemed to consider the removal of Donald J Trump’s Twitter account to be the pressing issue of the moment — mostly on the basis it deprived the US President of his well-exercised right to free speech.
Deputy PM @M_McCormackMP has doubled down on his comparison of the assault on the US Capitol with the Black Lives Matter protests. "It involves violence, it involves destruction of property, it involves deaths of people. And any violence of that form is condemned."Of course, McCormack wasn’t done. When later asked about Coalition backbenchers lying about Covid-19, he responded with the wry observation that “facts are contentious”. On this issue at least, we here at the Raising Hell offices are in furious agreement with our eminent colleagues at The Shovel: how willing, we wonder, would McCormack be to die on this particular hill should rumours of his ferocious Ibogaine habit become public. With the way that Four Corners episode about sexual harassment in Canberra played out, we expect the answer is somewhere north of: not bloody likely.
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
As the holidays started, I came across this essay in Science magazine Aeon looking at family estrangement beyond abuse, asking why are people in western societies so quick to cut off their parents? I’m also a sucker for any brilliantly written archeology and evolutionary biology feature.
Of course there is this very good blow-by-blow account of what happened in the US Capitol during the siege.
It’s long, it’s technically-minded but for anyone with a cursory interest in why the public service sucks and how it got to be that way, The Mandarin published this long article interrogating the New Public Management.
Luke Henriquez-Gomez, a reporter at The Guardian and subscriber to this newsletter, published the forgotten story of how his grandfather was among 44 refugees from Portugese Timor who hijacked a military plane in 1975 and used it to seek asylum in Australia. If anyone tried that in Australia 2021, the headlines would be apoplectic.
And here’s a timely reminder how civility will get you nowhere.
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!