Raising Hell: Issue 68: Introducing A "Concept of Fairness"
"Peterson, you idiot, stay out of this," Nassim Nicholas Taleb, statistician, responding to Jordan Peterson after he attempted to call Taleb out for refusing to go on Lex Fridman's podcast.
I don’t blame anyone out there who might have been blackpilled by the social security system. Try watching this clip of Russell de Burgh at the Robodebt Royal Commission last week and not be broken by the spectacle of a middle manager desperately trying to resist admitting, on record, that the system he was overseeing was built to shakedown poor people for change:
Last week the hearing’s shifted from those at the top to focusing on those somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy — the people who, in my experience, usually have a far better insight into how things actually work.
And boy, howdy, did they ever.
By this point we’re getting into the weeds of how a catastrophic failure of public administration took place and the desperate effort to cover it up to avoid repercussions. I’m not going to rehash events here — despite weird conspiracy theories, there’s actually been plenty of reporting over at The Guardian, The ABC and The Saturday Paper to get you across it. The key point, as Rick Motron wrote over at his own Substack, is the scale of the revelations being made to date:
The stuff being revealed at the robodebt royal commission is bigger and objectively more serious than anything that was revealed during the Australian Wheat Board scandal, more significant than anything that emerged from the Rudd-era Pink Batts Inquiry; more grotesque, even, than the children overboard con. The Whitlam dismissal, as large as that still looms over the life of domestic politics and governance, cannot hold a candle to what Robodebt means for systemic sabotage. To borrow the terminology of most newsrooms: this is the biggest story in town for decades.
I don’t think this is much of an exaggeration, and it’s a good reminder of how far this process has come. From Asher Wolf’s early tweets, to Christopher Knaus’ early investigations, to the early calls for a Royal Commission by legal academic Darren O’Donovan right here in Raising Hell — things have radically changed.
As it stands, Hearing Block Four began on Monday, with two days set aside to hear evidence from Annette Musolino, former chief Counsel at DHS and now Chief Operating Officer at Services Australia (DHS). Musolino is a figure who has been present across nearly the entire lifetime of the Robodebt program and who spent hours before Senate Estimates promising everything was on the up and up. Here she is in October 2019, confirming the basis of my story in The Saturday Paper where I busted the Department of Human Services for having accidently sending out 10,000 “zombie” robodebt notices. Later she hand-waved away any suggestion of a cover-up.
On Monday, Musolino doubled down on the broader position — shared across the Morrison government — that all the advice departmental officials received said there was nothing new about Robodebt and that it was only ever used as a “last resort”. It was a marathon session in which Musolino rejected the idea that the department knew the scheme was unlawful — which was true based on legal advice issued in 2014 — or that averaging incomes to determine a debt was unfair. At one point, Musolino suggested there was a certain “mathematical reality” to the whole process and that “administrative decisions are typically made on incomplete information”.
In other words: when the department went after someone for a debt, like the pensioner who had to appeal to “god” over an alleged $64k owed, they were simply doing the best they could — and we shouldn’t be so hard on them.
The Commissioner, for what it’s worth, had none of it.
It was a remarkable performance mostly for the way Musolino tortured the English language to avoid admitting fault or liability. Watching, I was also reminded about how a lack of literacy about Robodebt that limited media coverage in the early days. For the most part the story seemed to be heavily summarised as some silliness about automation and an algorithm that had gone, awry which was mostly sorted when the class action lawsuit succeeded in having it all overturned. I have memories of trying to explain how it all went far deeper than that, only to end up feeling very much like David Duchovny during that scene from Zoolander.
For many people out there, the Robodebt Royal Commission is a reckoning — a rare moment of catharsis for those who have been made to feel so powerless so consistently, and so absolutely. Now the growing test is how much that anger can be harnessed into the political will needed to ensure this never happens again. I have already had the privilege to speak to, document and write about those working to end Robodebt and reform the greater social security system. I use the word “work” here deliberately, as events to date haven’t happened by accident, or from the top-down. It has taken a sustained effort to seed the ground for change in the face of institutional contempt — and it has not been easy or romantic. Mostly it has been a labor-intensive, unrelenting and unprofitable grind. What matters now is that anger — and that work — is put to use. Others have said it better elsewhere, but the Royal Commission has let in the light on a corroded institution. I’m always hesitant to be too optimistic when it comes to the social security system, but it feels like a point of no return has been reached — and I look forward to seeing what changes.
For the Fortnight: January 18 to January 31
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 …
I mostly spent this fortnight getting started on book research, so I have no new publications to show.
Though I was asked to provide a research brief to a production company pitching a documentary on a similar subject. I’ll keep you posted if it works out.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Junior At The Gun Show
If there’s one thing Americans need is more guns. Perhaps a gun for every occasion, or at least a gun for children so that when they grow up learning how to duck and cover beneath their desks during a school shooting, they know how to handle themselves at the range with their parents. To whit, one gunmaker, Wee 1 Tactical, has already moved to corner the potentially lucrative children’s market for assault rifles. The company had a stall at the Las Vegas gun-show where it showed off its pint-sized assault rifles for children — the JR-15. Think of the rifle as an AR-15 for kids, complete with little gendered cartoon skulls. Of course, there was some backlash from the horrible wokes given that, weeks before, a six-year-old shot his teacher — but this is America, right? You can pry a tiny assault rifle from that nation’s cold dead hands.
The Right’s Stuff
What would you do for $50m? Well, if you’re far-right Youtuber and general crackpot Steven Crowder, you knock back the “slave contract” to prove to your audience — and the world — that you really are a $50m idiot. When The Daily Wire, a right-wing online entertainment company co-founded by Ben Shapiro came a knocking, Crowder rejected their offer in the name of freedom via the medium of Youtube. In response, The Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boreing released an hour-long response video going through the details of the contract where he revealed how Crowder had just passed up a small fortune. What followed was a minor civil war on the right but the key takeaway was just how much these right-ring revanchist culture warriors, like Jordan Peterson who is also hosted by the network, are getting paid to pollute the public square in the name of standing against wokeism — at least when propagandists on the left do the same, they have the integrity to do it for free.
Did You Ever Stop To Ask If We Should?
At least now software developers have built an AI system that even right-wing cranks can get on board with. Consider the Holocaust denial AI Chatbot which eliminates the need for nefarious leftwing teachers by scanning materials from history’s favourite villains and then roleplaying those figures in order to lie to high school about humanities worst crimes. Ghost Henry Ford will deny his very public hatred of Jewish people and fascist sympathies, by telling the curious student of history how he just “believed that certain individuals, regardless of their religious faith or background, were poisoning the minds of the public and had to be stopped”. Ask Confederate general Robert E. Lee how many runaway slaves he hunted, and he’ll tell you that you’re wrong, pal, and that he actually “did not believe in slavery”. Himmler? Well, he’s very sorry for the Holocaust thing. And, before you ask, yes, someone did check and it costs 500 coins to unlock AI Adolf Hitler.
Leopard, Spots. Etc.
International oil company, Shell, really wants you to know that it is trying its best on climate change. For one, it’s introducing a new brand of zero-carbon petroleum products to the market in Australia and investing $450m on carbon-offsetting projects despite how the market for those offsets is riddled with fraud. Shell may be undergoing a good-girl make-over, but all this fun, public messaging has perhaps been set back by revelations that the President of Shell Canada, Susannah Pierce, sat on the board of a leading Canadian climate denial organisation for years.
Did An Economy Write This?
Closer to home, the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe — on a base salary of $911,728 a year — wants Australians to take one for the team and take a pay cut to control inflation. Yeah, sure, inflation may have risen by more than 7.8% in Australia off the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supply chain issues and cynical opportunism from a pack of profiteering gluttons, but the cure, of course, is for the average person, who would not recognise real wages growth if it walked across the street, to bail out the economy by tightening the belt.
Princess And The Pea
Endless roads, starry skies, scrub to the horizon — and a radioactive capsule the size of a pea. Yes, the nuclear lobby loves to insist the industry is clean, green and nothing could possibly go wrong but employees at Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri mine in Western Australian were determined to prove them wrong. After packing and trucking the tiny capsule 1400k to a depot in the Perth suburb of Malaga, a week later it was unpacked only for everyone to recognise were in a bit of a pickle: it was gone. Social media users immediately got to shitposting as authorities began combing the desert along the truck’s route for the tiny package that emits both beta and gamma rays and, if held at a metre from a person’s chest, would deliver a dose of radiation equivalent to 17 chest x-rays. In other words, the capsule were tucked beneath the mattress of a princess to test her fitness for marriage by her sensitivity, her beauty would quickly be ravaged by radiation burns and, with prolonged exposure, she could be facing “immune and gastrointestinal” issues as her body began to cook from the inside out. So if you are burning north along the highway out of Perth and notice something glowing green in the twilight, heed the advice of Chief Health Officer Andy Robert and stay away. “Certainly don't put it in a pocket,” he said. “Don't put it in your car. Don't put it on your sideboard, because it will continue to radiate.’
The Market Works
If you’re in the market to build a subterranean lair, or just bury your head in the earth and forget about the world for a time, consider picking up your own boring machine — and for a call 74K, you’ll certainly be able to pay off the loan sooner than you’ll be able to buy a house.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Heard of Peter Collins? Neither had we here at Raising Hell’s elite satire unit, that is, until it was revealed the former head of international tax for PwC Australia had been deregistered by the Tax Practitioners Board for dishonesty. Peter’s crime? A kind of reverse-whistleblowing. It seems Peter shared confidential government briefings about future tax changes with PwC partners who in turn passed on this information to their clients in Australian and overseas. Doing so, in effect, gave a bunch of rich people a nice heads up about the changes so they could get their house in order well ahead of time. Now, it is true that the guy has been deregistered and has become a bit of an embarrassment to the firm, but in any other arena of life, he’d be sitting in a jail cell — providing yet further proof to the thesis cops and prisons are really just for poor people.
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton and Alex Heath writing in The Verge have this account from Inside Elon’s Extremely Hardcore Twitter which contains incredible details like how the old founder of Twitter had a portrait of himself dressed as a 19th century French general or that Musk had a small group of loyalists referred to by employees as “The Goons”.
Columbia Journalism Review published a good interview with Ajit Niranjan about his work reporting on climate change.
David Gilbert in VICE has done some great work with this expose of a neo-Nazi homeschool program in the US that teaches kids to love Hitler and hate just about everyone else.
We talk about how bad climate change is but Damian Carrington in the Guardian UK has a good story about how actually doing something about it could set up a virtuous cycle.
And if you enjoy other people’s suffering..
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!