Raising Hell: Issue 20: Rickrolling Into Oblivion
"Landlords grow rich in their sleep," - motivational poster quoting John Stuart Mill, seen in the window of Chase Wealth Australia, 25 January 2021
It was something Jonathan Green said in the days leading up to January 26 that caught my eye for the way it articulated a long held sensibility:
Though it wasn’t clear what he was responding to — possibly an interview given by NITV’s Jack Latimore who pointed out the trolling in the lead up to Invasion Day always followed the same predictable routine — Green had managed to put words to a lingering sense Australian politics had degenerated to little more than one long-running shitpost.
The arc of how we got here will be loosely familiar to most Australians, even if few could name the specific comms strategies that have forged it. There’s the thirty-years culture war, the three-word slogans (that have now devolved into one word repeated three times) and the always reliable political wedge. On the centre-left, there’s the timeless strategy of triangulation, where Labor attempts to water-down its platform enough to avoid spooking centrist voters. Less familiar perhaps are the more sophisticated approaches like the “dead cat” manoeuvre, a political version of rickrolling. Developed by Australian conservative political strategist Lynton Crosby, no less than the UK prime minister Boris Johnson explained the strategy thus:
“There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
As method, a dead cat on the table is even more effective where it also functions as a dog whistle. This is why we invariably get statements around January 26 from the Prime Minister talking about how Australian history can’t be cancelled as medals are pinned to the chests of Margaret Court and Rupert Murdoch. So long as a blow may be struck against — in Murdoch’s words — “awful woke orthodoxy”, these people don’t really have to address other demands like the Uluru statement from the heart and the prospect of meaningful political inclusion of Indigenous Australians.
Dig around the collective memory and it is possible to find other examples on issues as diverse as financial regulation and the pandemic — even, possibly, the entire existence of Eric Abetz:
The trolling over climate change, meanwhile, really deserves its own highlight reel. There’s the moment that Scott Morrison accused Bill Shorten of wanting to “kill the weekend” for his embrace of electric cars. There were all those accusations during the 2019-2020 bushfires that the Greens were running a pro-bushfire conspiracy. Then there’s those times Matt Canavan has fired up a BBQ to promote natural gas extraction via “Australian values”. Never mind the broiling oceans, melting ice, billions in stranded assets, and collapsing biosphere — have a snag and savor the “functional reality”.
A decade or more of this nonsense has eaten away at the discourse to the point where a paradox has developed: as the public hunger for sincerity in politics grows, the very idea of sincerity in politics becomes more absurd. This is how we end up with the prime minister’s media team giving a makeover to the self-described “transactional politician” in order to cultivate his “daggy dad” shtick. So as we begin the first week of February by collectively clocking in at the troll factory, we can look to our political leadership with the stoic awareness that we are all, basically, being rickrolled into oblivion.
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 …
‘Tech giants push back on media bargaining code’ (The Saturday Paper, 30 January 2021).
‘Political donations and the resources sector’s influence’ (The Saturday Paper, 23 January 2021).
Most will have also caught the first QandA interview I ran last week, providing some background on Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. This was the first of what I hope will be an expanded offering, in which I’ll run a similar QandA every other Thursday — where I can find a willing participant. The idea will be to pose simple questions about complex issues to area experts or those with direct lived experience.
Cracking COVIDSafe
Over the course of November, Raising Hell ran its first serialised investigation, CrackingCOVIDSafe, in association with Electronic Frontiers Australia. The series looked at the creation of the government’s automated contact tracing app COVIDSafe and stepped out how I used Freedom of Information to learn more so that others may learn 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 story of Laramba so far is straight forward. High concentrations of uranium were first found in Laramba’s water 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. 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).
I’ll be marking my first ever appearance at Adelaide Writers Week this year in 2021 and I can tell already tell you it’s going to be a riot. You can catch me hosting a panel with poet Geoff Goodfellow and Chris Raja about their recent books, chatting with Rick Morton about our recent books, including Just Money, and talking to Marian Wilkinson, author of The Carbon Club. You can grab more details in the links below:
Suburban Dreaming (Sat 27 Feb, 1:15pm)
(Re)launch: Live and Local! (Sat 27 Feb, 6:15pm)
The Meaning of Money (Sun 28 Feb, 9:30am)
The Carbon Club (Thu 04 Mar, 12:00pm)
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Cost v Return
If you needed further proof those with the most care the least about the rest of us, study the case of Canadian casino tycoon Rodney Baker, a Canadian (who pulled $10.6 million last year) and his wife Ekaterina. In order to obtain a vaccine against the modern plague, The Bakers chartered a private plane to take them 450 kilometers to the remote, 100-person Indigenous community of Beaver Creek. There, they told health workers at the mobile vaccination clinic they were employees of the local motel in order to receive the jab meant for members of the White River First Nation. Their continued existence secured, the couple then immediately got into their plane and flew away. When tracked down by investigators, they were charged with offenses that may see them slapped $1,150 each or given up to six months in jail.
Good News, Everyone!
We may have spent 2020 enduring fire, flood, plague and a demagogue with his greasy finger on the big red button, but don’t worry, you can sleep soundly knowing all the money poured into economic stimulus has found its way to the pockets of the world’s 20 best-performing hedge fund managers, who made $63.5 billion while 2.14 million people died from Covid-19 worldwide.
Ghosts In Your Machine
Do not fret, however! For the rest of us, our tech industry overlords are busy working on a way to solve for death. Microsoft have announced they have patented a new program that will harvest a deceased loved-one’s data from the expanse of the internet and reconstitute the poor soul into a chatbot you can interact with.
Nice Work If You Can Get it
At a time when the federal government has been talking about rolling back responsible lending laws and has generally doing all it can to pretend like the Banking Royal Commission did not happen, it has now emerged Australian banks laundered $500 million in South American cartel money by sifting it through the country’s financial sector.
Gamers, God Bless ‘Em
Few people outside the ranks of cocaine addled psychopaths can truly claim to look upon the workings of the sharemarket and understand its esoteric functions. Some might even suggest it was designed that way to further enrich a small group of wealthy people whose whole existence is spent gambling on behalf of other rich people. Now some bored gamers appear to have proven this hunch correct while also utterly demolishing the “efficient market hypothesis” — the quasi-religious belief that share prices reflect all known information about a particular company at the point in time. What started a year ago with one user on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, eventually grew into a frenzy as others joined in, buying up shares in bricks and mortar video game retailer, Gamestop. Having found a way to fuck with over-exposed short sellers mostly for the luls, the Redditors virtually bankrupted a hedge fund, forcing it to be bailed out by two other hedge funds with a $2 billion quickie loan.
Things We Do In The Shadows
In a remarkable dispatch from the far-off Chilean city of Santo Domingo, a group of 15 people have caught Covid-19 after gathering for a “clandestine meeting” to celebrate the birthday of a cat. While only a small group of people were present for the gathering, unbeknownst to them all, one man in attendance also had a mistress. His subsequent nighttime activities resulted in several other households becoming infected with Covid-19, earning him a special mention by Chilean health officials so that everyone, everywhere now knows everything. The age of the cat, however, remains unknown.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
We here at the Raising Hell offices don’t claim to be social media experts. Hell, we don’t even claim to be experts on anything except, perhaps, the study of bad ideas. This is why were were a little taken aback by some curious design decisions at Labor headquarters in the last fortnight that appeared, prominently, on Anthony Albanese’s twitter feed. As certified non-experts, we couldn’t be sure what the opposition leader was trying to tell us, but in reviewing the new advertising blitz, we were pretty certain it had something to do with “jobs”:
We get it. Politics is hard when you have frenemies like Joel Fitzgibbon fueling speculation of a leadership challenge. But if you find yourself running with something akin to Quiet Bat People, you really need to rethink a few things. If in doubt, we suggest hitting up Doug Cameron for advice.
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
For the curious, some genius who knows things about tech stuff has managed to pull the geocodes of every video uploaded to Parler — the right wing social media website — exposed in a recent data leak and map them accordingly, meaning you locate clusters of far-right activity.
It couldn’t make it fit anywhere else, but sex work Twitter reports that neo-Nazi, Blair Cottrell once turned up to a brothel in Melbourne but faced a boycott where “not one girl” would see him.
US public interest journalist outfit ProPublica ran this incredible profile of a climate scientist and how he has coped (or hasn’t coped) with the knowledge that the world’s biosphere is slowly being cooked away. The story is one of a zealot who, in trying to get people to take an impending catastrophe seriously, fails to value anything else that makes life worth living. Along the way, he alienates his wife and turns their son into a nihilist. Unlike, the most annoying (and occasionally lethal) religious zealots, the story’s protagonist is right about one thing: it doesn’t look good.
The Guardian’s Melissa Davey had an incredible science feature last weekend about the discovery of a 50-year-old man and father of three from New South Wales, whose natural biology kills Covid-19 without killing him — and what that means for future treatments.
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!