Raising Hell: Issue 14: And This Is Why We Drink
"You have to fight that one more round," - Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli, speech to Cornell University students in 2013, six years before his extradition on massive corruption charges.
So, this last fortnight, huh? Between koala-killing puns and The Australian’s economics editor Adam Creighton seemingly endorsing Avi Yemini (“the world’s proudest Jewish Nazi”), life comes at you fast.
And over the coming weeks, it is only going to get better (worse). Of the two stories to watch, the biggest involves social security and the “economic cliff”. We have the pending robodebt class action that sets the scene for the next big moment in the pandemic: over a million people being plunged back into relative poverty as the government slashes the social security rate down to a pittance.
Over the weekend, legal documents in the class action lawsuit against the Robodebt scheme were updated, offering more clarity about the scope and scale of the program. All told, about $1.1 billion had been taken out of the pockets of the poorest Australians. On top of this, it later turned out the federal government had been told 76 times by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that the debts were illegal. If activists only knew of three or four of these cases, that was by design. The government largely ignored them and refused to appeal the decision in the hope of avoiding a precedent being set, even as senior members of the Coalition government went about insisting everything was kosher.
The take away from this? Department heads and government ministers knew, but did nothing. A social security program that function as one of the greatest heists in the country’s history was allowed to continue — a point worth bearing in mind as we move forward. On Friday the rate at which Jobseeker is paid will fall from $550 a fortnight to $250. By the end of the year, the Coronavirus supplement will be gone entirely, leaving everyone on it to subsist at the old rate.
As Peter Whiteford and Bruce Bradbury have pointed out (with graphs), for the 1.1 million people currently out of work, this is bad news. With only 130,000 vacancies between them, what we’re looking at is a situation where roughly one in 26 people are being deliberately being plunged below the poverty line during a recession. Though the Reserve Bank of Australia has been poo-pooing the idea of an “economic cliff” as not really a thing, it is no controversial statement to point out that a dose of fiscal austerity in a sensitive economic moment is going to have lasting social, economic and political consequences. As European researchers pointed out in August, when they ran the numbers they found those Germans hardest hit by austerity in the 1930’s voted in larger numbers for the Nazi Party. Throw in the increasingly visible effects of catastrophic climate change and the world is starting to feel a lot like this moment from 2017, caught on a golf course over in the US:
Image: Something or rather about eating cake while fiddling as the biosphere disintegrates? (Source: Elissa Washuta)
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 …
‘Wayne Fella Morrison: Damning report highlights failures’ (NITV, 2020).
While I’ve spent most of this fortnight doing media on the book and planning a series of standalone features to run exclusively on Raising Hell, I did manage to turn around this story the day the South Australian Ombudsman released its report into the administrative failings that lead to the death in custody of Wayne Fella Morrison. You can read the official report here.
The Adelaide Review: Last Ever Issue
On top of the NITV story, I also filed what will be my final column with The Adelaide Review. Last I heard, The Review’s parent company were literally packing up the office around the editors as they worked (I’m not joking), so how it will all turn out (and whether you will be able to read it online) remains to be seen…
Nystar Refinery Update
In the latest twist of the Port Pirie lead smelter saga that kicked off Raising Hell, the state government has shut down fishing in the area near the township due to massive heavy metal contamination. This is despite company and government officials insisting that various chemical leaks in the area were no biggie.
Image: Map of fishing closure area (Source: PIRSA)
Save The Date(s)!
And because I have a book to sell, come along and support me at:
28 September 2020 — Zoom — Better Read Than Dead — Sydney — 6.30PM (AEST)
Where Greg Jericho will grill me about the book. Register here.
7 October 2020 — Zoom — Imprints — Adelaide — 6.30PM (ACST)
Where playwright Ben Brooker will also grill me about how we think about debt and modern monetary theory. Save the date. Register here.
10 October 2020 — In Person — Dymocks Rundle Mall — Adelaide — 6PM (ACST)
A party! Hosted by Ben Stubbs, author of Ticket to Paradise (2020), we’ll chat for half an hour or so, then drink. Strictly RSVP due to the apocalypse. Register here.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Good News, Everybody!
Sooner or later we as a nation are going to have to confront an awkward question: at what point can we justifiably declare Australia a banana republic? Is it when the Minister for Home Affairs begins threatening foreign journalists if they don’t report the news in a favourable light? Perhaps it is that moment the government tries to funnel those on social security and in university into the fields? Or maybe it’s when the Prime Minister is talking about actively propping up an industry that is soon to be obsolete and actively killing the planet as a way to reboot the economy?
Is Nothing Sacred?
A couple of years back you may remember a bunch of people talking about a thing called Blockchain and how it was going to save the world. Well, a group of researchers looked into it and it really was just all bullshit and bluster.
Papers, Please
The US just can’t help themselves. Australia has massive catastrophic fires, our cousins across the Pacific immediately try to one-up us by adding into the mix roving bands of heavily armed militias setting up random checkpoints to interrogate people about their connections to “antifa”. While covering the Oregon wildfires, reporter Alissa Azar began tweeting about how she and her crew had been stopped at a make-shift checkpoint by a group of white men armed with assault rifles. They were, reportedly, utterly convinced that “antifa had lit the fires”.
Read The Room
The university sector may be in crisis, but Sydney University has greeted the moment by printing a Sydney University Themed edition of Monopoly so you can now enjoy destroying your friendships while chasing a buck with a sandstone backdrop.
The Last Laugh
In a routine scan of declared interests, South Australian MP Connie Bonaros was discovered by reporters at the ABC to be the owner of the incorporated entity “Prostitute’s Delight”. When asked to explain, it turned out it was all part of a cunning scheme to keep the state’s treasurer, Rob Lucas, from working up moral outrage against attempts to legalise and regulate the sex industry — because apparently the only thing people like Lucas respect is a legal letter from a faceless corporate entity telling them to cease and desist.
The Long Air-Highway To Nowhere
Qantas — in between laying off great swathes of its workforce — are now offering literal flights to nowhere. The seven-hour round trip allowed passengers to catch a glimpse of natural wonders like the Great Barrier Reef and Kata Tjuta from as low as 4000 feet. Tickets went as high as $3787 for business class seats and sold out in ten minutes proving, once more, that capitalism is as malleable as people are gullible. Good thing the oil industry is in collapse and jet fuel is so cheap it is being blended into fuel for use in shipping.
Truly, The Darkest Timeline
As one Twitter user so eloquently put it: what in Tory hell?
Failing Upward
Where I recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
It could be a sign of the times, but we here at Raising Hell were once more overwhelmed by events of the last fortnight. There was that moment Tony Abbott spat on the bloated corpse of the meritocratic ideal by landing himself a plumb gig advising the Brits on trade. Then there was that whole bit when New South Wales nationals leader John Barilaro tried to hold the NSW state government to ransom over the right to murder koalas or a property deal or whatever — at least until he withdrew from public life after a searing takedown by a goddam Youtuber. Then there was that video of Sarina Russo dancing.
If you are not familiar with Sarina Russo, be thankful. It likely means you haven’t experienced a bout of long-term unemployment or poverty in the last two decades and so found yourself funneled into the clutches of those companies that make up the Jobactive network — an industry purpose-built to monetise the unemployed. Each year these providers suck in billions of dollars in public money on the ostensible assumption they will help find people jobs. In reality they do little more than police those out of work as they are pushed into an endless series of meaningless resume-writing workshops and training programs. Some have gone so far as to call them contemporary digital workhouses for the poor.
The Sarina Russo Group is one of the biggest players in this industry, named for its founder, the Brisbane-based entrepreneur, Sarina Russo. And so it was, jaw agape, we watched “The Jobs Queen” record a moment of pure nihilism that is symbolic of our present nightmare in ways that only the Germans or Japanese might have words to express. The video captures a snippet from what looks like the world’s worst party, celebrating Russo’s 41 years in the business world. Her office is littered with helium-filled party balloons, her staff seem to have been made to attend. As the camera pans to capture the expressions of human dread, her staff half-heartedly, clap out a beat. Russo, meanwhile, dances her terrible jig, back turned to the room, performing for what looks like 20-something person Zoom call. At one point, there is even a leprechaun man.
We have included this vision of our absurd, dystopian reality here for your viewing pleasure:
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
Greg Jericho in The Guardian makes this good point that needs to be remade every time someone from the Institute of Public Affairs that gets on their soap box about lockdown: you can’t have an economy without people.
Kristin Tanner, writing in The Guardian, has this excellent response to the bushfires raging over in the US that look more or less like the fires that burned here in Australia. If you’re one of those who don’t think this is the “new normal” also consider that the arctic region of Siberia is currently on fire — as is the Pantanal wetland in Brazil.
Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic has this great feature on conspiracy capitalism and the bunker business — that is, those people making a killing selling people bunkers so they and their loved ones may ride out the coming apocalypse.
Over at The Intercept Alyssa Katz has this investigation into the US FinTech business that has been lending to people at an ever-increasing rate, thus accelerating whatever economic cataclysm is presently befalling our closest ally.
When we look back at the carnage of this moment, there is little doubt we will conclude that those who could have done the right thing, let it happen — as highlighted in a new book by Owen Jones on Jeremy Corbyn’s run for Prime Minister.
Ever wondered what a robot might say to convince you that robots mean no harm? Now we know.
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! [NOTE: In the past I’ve used Wickr but I’m now in the process of switching to another platform, so check back in a few weeks.]
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.
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