Raising Hell: Issue 17: F@!k Trump
"You are a bastard," - Alessandra Mussolini, fascist Italian politician responding to a political cartoon by comedian Jim Carrey depicting the death of her father Benito Mussolini, 31 March 2019
Okay, so yeah, the headline to this issue is clickbait. With the US election upon us and the subconscious fear that Donald Trump may win Four More Years driving the planet to doomscroll their social media feeds, I figured a man who exists as an attention seeking super-massive black hole is all the news is going to be talking about for the next month.
To be clear, I’m not going to be addressing the US Presidential election in a substantial way during this issue of Raising Hell. Some might call that an oversight, I call it not playing Trump’s game. Over the last four years, Trump has lived as a the rodeo clown who taunts the charging bull. Every announcement, every speech has been optimised to grab another headline. Meanwhile the little grey blurs who actually run the Republican Party have been busy leveraging the moment to do everything they’ve always wanted.
Here at home, this effect has expressed itself in a different way: the universal relief among Australians that “we’re not the US” and Trump is not our President. While this has been an understandable psychological brace against an increasingly irrational world, it has also doubled as something of a Get Out Of Jail Free card for our own crop of politicians who — so long as they do nothing overtly Trump-like — sense the public will tolerate them up to a point.
That sensibility has been present for a while now. First there was the bushfires, and then the pandemic that is currently destroying the Belgian healthcare system and wiping out the US economy has been stemmed in Australia. This is a good thing. Thing is, because we’re not as bad as the US, we have been willing to forget how our Prime Minister insisted on going to the rugby to look tough during the opening chapters and delivered his press conferences late at night, in confused riddles. Over time, and while we’ve been looking elsewhere in dismiss, we’ve had Premiers running documents on a multi-million land deal through the shredder, federal slush funds tipping money into Liberal-voting seats across the country and a crop of home-grown oligarchs busy counting the massive growth in their billions.
Though we may have our own problems, unlike the US political system, these are things we can actually do something about. Come what may when the US public go to the polls — a Biden win, Trump clinching victory or something muddier — I’m going to continue reporting the issues that matter here at home.
That being said, the outcome of the US Presidential may merit a special issue and I am also weighing whether to run a election-night drinking game using rules that, like any good innovator, I stole off the internet and rewrote as needed:
Sip when a state changes color on the electoral map.
Sip when there is a “breaking story”.
Drink when someone says in the ensuing coverage this “is the most important election in US history”.
Drink when the news interviews a person off the street.
Take a shot when the news cuts to how the candidates spent the day.
Take a shot for every Trump lie.
Take a double shot if there’s a coup.
Because whatever the outcome, it seems fitting we might end up obliterated.
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 …
'Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Inquiry’ (The Saturday Paper, 24 October 2020) ($)
It’s behind a paywall now but here is my story from over the weekend in The Saturday Paper about how the management thinking ushered in under the austerity-minded government of Jeff Kennett helped set up Victoria for a fall a long time ago.
Cracking COVIDSafe
This Thursday I’ll be running the first installment of my deep dive into the creation of the COVIDSafe app using Freedom of Information laws to learn more. Funded by my generous subscribers and run in association with Electronic Frontiers Australia, the series will appear each Tuesday and Thursday afterwards with a complete source list posted at the end. Over the course of it, I’ll be speaking to the experts, digging up dirt on multinational companies and posting the documents I obtain in order to investigate the machine that made the app while also showing you what I did and how I did it.
Laramba’s Water
High concentrations of uranium were first found in Laramba’s water 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 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 at Raising Hell I’ve been able to pick up the issue to find out more.
Here’s a running list of published stories:
‘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).
And because the time and application cost needed to work through the FOI process has been paid for (in both up-front cost and the time taken to file them) by Raising Hell’s subscribers, here is a list of documents and decision letters so far:
2020-08-11 - D2020/364025 - Decision (Application 1) - NT Power and Water.
2020-08-27 - D2020/354881 - Decision (Application 2) - NT Power and Water.
2020-08-31 - D2020/392344 - Decision (Application 3) - NT Power and Water.
2020-09-17 - D2020/412811 - Internal Review Decision - NT Power and Water.
2020-08-25 - Complaint in Relation To FOI Application (NT Power and Water - Office of the Information Commissioner. (ongoing)
2020-10-20 - FOI2020/316 - Application for Documents - Department of Health ($30). (ongoing)
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
It’s Really Hard To Make Jokes About War Crimes
An ABC investigation has revealed how Australian soldiers have been busy committing war crimes over the course of the nations involvement as a junior partner in the US Government’s Forever War in the Middle East. None of this has stopped other sections of the nation’s media corps running interference by calling into question the ABC investigation.
So Dan Andrews and Rio Tinto Walk Into A Bar…
Last Monday there was a genuine sense of joy as Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced Melbourne’s lockdown will finally lift. Yet as the city’s residents began to shoot each other congratulatory texts and planned to get drunk in company, another branch of the Victorian government — well away from the cameras — was busy taking a chainsaw to the Djab Wurrung trees held sacred by the Eastern Maar people in order to pave a highway. When asked about the incident, Andrews reportedly answered in the go-getting tone of a Rio Tinto executive saying: “ultimately we've got to get on and get this done.”
Hush Money
Confronted with a string of stories about corruption within Coalition ranks, there is a certain elegance to the logic behind the Morrison government’s reaction: no investigations, no corruption. Scott Morrison, the guy who famously opposed the Financial Services Royal Commission and has a somewhat coy relationship with The Truth at the best of times, has otherwise been busy starving any institution capable of offering external oversight of funding while putting the finishing touches on a toothless federal ICAC. Who knew the “Quiet Australian” election slogan would turn out to be more of a verb than a noun?
Real Estate Blues
In a speech, Michelle Bullock from the Reserve Bank of Australia spoke about the stability of the Australian economy in the wake of the pandemic. Bullock explained there wasn’t much risk to an economy built on a pyramid of credit, as if worst-came-to-worst, people could just sell their homes to cover the money owed — unless of course everyone tried to sell at once.
Hearts Of Gold
Adani, that Indian mega-company that is determined to push humanity to the brink of extinction in its endless pursuit to maximise shareholder value in a failing industry, has been busy of late weaponising the court system to crush its critics. In an effort to prove they weren’t bad guys, the company admitted it had its agents spy on the home of one activist to document the moments of his wife and child. The mining company’s rationale for doing this? Well… let’s just say their motives were pure.
So Bad It’s Good
You gotta feel bad for Angus Taylor. The guy isn’t even good at being bad. His office has been sprung in text messages obtained under FOI by The Guardian as having fed a lie to the Daily Telegraph in an effort to slander the Lord Mayor of Sydney. Now if Taylor had any nous, he would have taken a leaf out of Gladys Berejeklian’s book and kept his office’s shenanigans on paper so they could be run through a shredder at a moment’s notice. Now that’s chutzpah.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Liberal Senator Eric Abetz caught the attention of the Raising Hell office over the last fortnight for his grandstanding during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee. Those appearing before the committee included Wesa Chau, Labor's deputy lord mayoral candidate for Melbourne, Osmond Chiu, a researcher with progressive think tank Per Capita and Yun Jiang, an academic with ANU — a list of credentials hinting at a certain political persuasion. This fact was not lost on Abetz. Seeing an opportunity to troll the libs, Abetz took the opportunity to use the inquiry into issues facing diaspora communities in Australia to interrogate the three about their loyalties to the Australian state.
"Can I ask each of the three witnesses to very briefly tell me whether they are willing to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship? It’s not a difficult question," Abetz asked.
This was rich from the German immigrant whose great uncle, Otto Abetz was a Nazi who had served as a member of the SS and a perpetrator of the Holocaust — but then Abetz didn’t actually care about the answers. Nothing less than a robotic, jingoistic denouncement of the Communist Party of China would have satisfied the man. In giving her answers, Chau saw the obvious stitch up and, like us here at Raising Hell, seemed to recall the Abetz family history. In answering the question, she asked the good Senator whether he had ever been quizzed over his loyalty to the Australian state in an effort to show how this line of questioning was unfair. Abetz — immediately triggered — began to rant:
“And, sadly, if you’re of Italian origin you will be asked if you’re part of the Mafioso — If you’re Vietnamese you’ll be asked if you’re part of a triad. If you’re German, like myself, you must be a Fascist by birth, irrespective of what your public utterances might be. And so the list goes on. That is why, might I add, that in nearly every single interview that I do unequivocally condemning the Chinese Communist Party I stress that this is not a condemnation of the Chinese people — because I believe that they are just as freedom-loving as every other human being on the planet — but that I am condemning the regime under which they suffer, just as much as not all Germans were Nazis, or all Russians communists, or all Italians part of the Mafioso or Vietnamese part of the triads. But, as German-born, can I say that I have no difficulty in saying unequivocally that the Nazi regime deserved to be condemned. I’m just concerned that some of our witnesses have great difficulty in condemning a regime that has been responsible for millions of deaths; incarceration of millions; forced organ harvesting; illegal land grabs; ripping up of an international — UN-sanctioned, even — agreement between the UK and China in relation to Hong Kong; and the list goes on. I’m just concerned that in this great freedom-loving country of Australia, that has adopted all of us as part of its citizenry, we are unable to fully celebrate the great freedoms we have and to condemn some of the backgrounds from which we come — not courtesy of the people but courtesy of the ugly regimes that were inflicted over them.”
After some sparring between Abets and Chau, Fierravanti-Wells stepped in to back up her boy Abetz, advising Chau that she “go and read the Constitution”.
To this, we here at Raising Hell say: god bless the big brains at the helm of our great nation.
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
Rolling Stone have this excellent feature looking at how the US has devolved into an oligarchy that offers a certain clarity given everything going on in the world at present.
Liam Grealy has this for RightNow magazine on the situation at Laramba and how it might breach the Racial Discrimination Act.
Martin McKenzie Murray writing in The Monthly has this great piece on the public frustration with the media and the cynicism of political leaders, especially for lines such as this:
“As a former, repentant media officer in various political and government offices, allow me to confirm that a politician’s desire for favourable publicity is comparable with Fleetwood Mac’s desire for cocaine in the ’70s. It is an endless quest, fiercely myopic, and has little mind for public benefit – only for how many references they score in that week’s media.”
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!