What the cat dragged in

2012-01-28T12:22:00.004+10:00

“It’s time to move on” – political speechwriters, riots and plagiarism

For some reason, Australian Indigenous rights campaigners have a certain linguistic affinity with Scottish newspaper sub-editors when it comes to being told to “move on”. That is, they don’t interpret it as its most common modern use – 1970s California therapy twaddle, in which the utterer of “move on” is by definition there to help the listener – and instead take the phrase more literally, and more in accordance with the centuries of its usage. That is “move on” as a brute command, a barely polite (no verbal answer is required, or even welcome) prelude to physical force, should the terms of the command not be immediately complied with.

You can read opposition leader Tony Abbott’s exact remarks in the same URL. Also the subject of wide reporting is Tony Abbott’s subsequent insistence that the media attention on his arguably inflammatory comments should itself move on, by carefully parsing his 70 or so words uttered on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, shortly before he flew down to Canberra for the ill-fated, bi-partisan Australia Day medal-pinning ceremony:

“I invite people to go back and consider my remarks,” he said. Mr Abbott said he never suggested it was time for the Aboriginal tent embassy itself to “move on”. (emphasis added)

Sticking to Abbott’s script here, former ALP national president Warren Mundine opined:

“The words were pretty timid,” he told ABC Radio, adding Mr Abbott did not say anything about shutting down the embassy. “He echoed words I would have echoed”. (same URL).

Presumably, Mr Mundine is suggesting that the Indigenous rights campaigners should have carefully read the transcript of Abbott’s remarks – which would have been available almost immediately from a media monitoring service for a hefty fee – before launching on their “riot”.

As it happened, of course, both the gist of Abbott’s remarks, and the fact of his location at the medal-pinning ceremony in a modernist glass-box restaurant 100m from the tent embassy, were relayed to the tent embassy crowd, via (and here media accounts differ) either a phone call and/or in-person attendance by PM media adviser Tony Hodges, then through an intermediary (an unnamed non-Indigenous woman), then finally via Indigenous activist Barbara Shaw, who duly informed the crowd what she had heard third-hand.

We may never know what Barbara Shaw was told precisely by the unnamed woman, nor in turn what Hodges told this woman. If either was indeed along the lines of Abbott had just said the tent embassy should be “torn down” or shut down”, and that now Mr Abbott was across the road, and so “maybe you can give them a bit of a liven up” then I suggest that the “riot” was carefully, fully orchestrated by non-Indigenous political insiders.

The fact that the Opposition’s response to the Tony Hodges revelations so far have heavily concentrated on the WHERE, i.e. the releasing of the Opposition Leader’s schedule/whereabouts as some sort of seditious betrayal (I would have thought that this was usually public information), rather than the meatier issue of WHAT was whispered/incited about Abbott’s remarks, suggests that Abbott himself may have been a possible knowing player in this game of set-up.

This post was originally going to be about another recent low-point of political chicanery: a speech to speech to the National Press Club (also in Canberra) on Australia Day eve, in which Transport Minister Anthony Albanese gave a speech, written by others, which plagiarised 30 or so words from an American film – a 1990's romantic comedy, called The American President.

Albanese’s speech was otherwise a call to arms to his floundering government/party, shortly before Parliament resumes for the year. His response to the plagiarism revelations shows that third-hand whispers is not just a choice government device for spreading malicious-yet-deniable disinformation, but also the way the party actually pep-talks itself up. That is, the unnamed speechwriter who made him and his government an international laughing-stock has not been sacked, because there wasn’t even any such identifiable individual:

Mr Albanese said a group of ministerial staff had compiled the speech. He insisted the matter was not a simple “cut and paste” and those responsible would be counselled, and not sacked.

“That was not a line I put into the speech,” Mr Albanese said. “But I gave the speech. I'm not about buckpassing.”

and

“It’s very much a third hand putting in (of information),” Mr Albanese told Melbourne's MTR radio. “Someone said something to someone, who thought ‘yes’, it was a good line, and used it; put it into the speech”.

“Pretty timid” words, indeed.

Update 29 January 2012

The unnamed woman was identified as Canberra local union bureaucrat Kim Sattler about the same time I uploaded my initial post yesterday.

The communications chain of Abbott's Delphic words about moving on still contains a missing link, however.

Yesterday, I had assumed that Tony Hodges was well on top of what Abbott had actually said – it is surely part of his job to bill taxpayers for media monitoring transcripts to check exact wording, etc. In today’s Age, however, it appears that Hodges’ only source re Abbott's “It’s time to move on” was a journalist, in person at The Lobby restaurant.

Here, the plot thickens. I wouldn’t be surprised that this unnamed journalist was the same journo who asked Tony Abbott the question about the ongoing relevance of the tent embassy in Sydney earlier that day. That is, a journo in the inner press pack, who presumably flies with the Opposition Leader through his many routine ribbon-cuttings and medal-pinnings – and occasionally gets to relieve the tedium of it all by playing Machiavelli? If my hypothesis here is correct, it is unclear whether or not Tony Abbott was a knowing participant. His answer to the journo’s tent-embassy embassy question seems to be a speechwritten-like masterstroke of polished ambiguity – but then again, it is surely part of a political leader’s job to be able to give such answers off-the-cuff, as well.

Otherwise, the Hodges/Sattler/Shaw Canberra-whispers slippage is easy to chart:

Hodges apparently said to Kim Sattler:

“Tony Abbott [has] made a statement about the embassy, that it shouldn't exist at all”.

Kim Sattler apparently said to Barbara Shaw:

“Tony Abbott is in the coffee shop talking to the press about closing down the Aboriginal Tent Embassy”.

2011-12-11T14:18:00.000+10:00

Sit-down meals – why nomads have the best table manners

Carrying is usually thought of as a hindrance or burden – however, one’s societal customs when it comes to carrying food are as varied as they are anthropologically revealing.

Primitive humans do not like to carry food – that is, they do not make an exception for food, in terms of the general rule of not being unnecessarily burdened. This means that they prefer to eat at the site of the kill/pick/harvest. In the West, the logistics of mass food production and retail make this hard to do literally, so a next-best-thing cultural substitute has arisen: the restaurant. Here, the adjoining kitchen is probably not the site of the kill/pick/harvest either, but the ceremonial, time-synchronised carrying (by strangers, not eaters) of the food from kitchen to table merely sanitises what is otherwise the closest thing Western humans will come to being seagulls squawking over a communal delicacy. That is, the restaurant-goer assuages their hunger at the food source, as immediately, greedily and individually as the restaurant custom of simultaneous plate presentation for each table allows.

Contrast the hunter-gatherer. While extremely light travellers in most respects, food is usually carried some distance from the site of the kill/pick/harvest. This may relate to “kitchen” hygiene (in the case of carnivorous meals), and more so, to supplies of water and firewood/fuel vis a vis the nomads’ “kitchen” and “table”. Most importantly though, the carrying of food is necessary to divorce the consumption of food from its production – that is, food will usually be shared even among those who had no hand in its killing/picking/harvesting.

All the restaurant “shared plates” in the world thus can’t disguise the intrinsic selfishness of the restaurant meal, and so perhaps also Western food consumption in general. Robust food-sharing customs are surely a pre-requisite to civilisation, but in the case of ethical eating, the West has either dropped, or refused to carry, its communal bundle.

2011-11-13T10:59:00.009+10:00

Terrorism by other means – the Herald Sun drops another improvised explosive device

The Murdoch press empire “mafia” has been in the Australian news lately for illegal conduct in a faraway land. While the UK phone-tapping was blatantly illegal and disturbingly widespread, on the reprehensiveness-meter this conduct still falls short of its campaigning – successfully – to have named individuals killed. Which is exactly what the Murdoch press “mafia” in my own – and Rupert Murdoch’s childhood – home-town has been doing.

Exhibit 1: Carl Williams
Exhibit 2: Nicola Gobbo

While Nicola Gobbo is not dead at the time of writing, today’s Herald Sun story on her is as malevolent in its timing, and as nonchalant about its revelation of very sensitive secret material, illegally-obtained, as it was in publishing Carl Williams’ status as a police informer on the day of his murder.

In both cases, the Herald Sun has relied on a fig-leaf of sorts. On 19 April last year, it didn’t actually state, but merely inescapably implied, that Carl Williams was a police informer. Today, its Invitation to Assassinate (or DIY) Ms Gobbo is pregnant with omission. The last event chronologically detailed is the fire-bombing of Ms Gobbo’s car in 2008 (16 April); after which it oh-so smarmily wraps up her life in the last three-and-a-half-years with this: “In recent years Ms Gobbo has left the bar, suffering from ill-health”.

Anyone who has followed the legal travails of Victorian ex-police officer Paul Dale over the last few years would have naturally wondered: Who is this key witness to Dale’s forthcoming Commonwealth perjury charges (over which a suppression order was partially lifted on 10 November).

“The revelations come as a key witness against Mr Dale was sensationally dropped from giving evidence against him amid ‘extreme’ fears for the witness’s safety. The witness was a shock withdrawal when the hearing began under a cloak of secrecy this week.”

ABC TV’s 7pm news on 11 November 2011 gave some further details on this witness; “they” had worn a recording device in a December 2008 meeting with Dale. “Their” identity is suppressed, unsurprisingly so in the circumstances.

If you Google "paul dale" "recording device" witness you’ll probably come up with the name I did. However, I’ll leave you to do the math.

On a related matter, is the surprisingly un-queried matter of why Paul Dale is currently a free man on bail, particularly given the perceived threat to the life of at least one witness.

“‘People who assist authorities in endeavouring to prosecute Paul Dale have got a pretty poor life expectancy. Two of them have been murdered [i.e. Terence Hodson and Carl Williams]’, Garry Livermore, counsel for the Australian Crime Commission, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court [on 10 November 2011]”.

“Do I hear three?” the Herald Sun chants to the mob, meanwhile.

Update 15 November 2011

At the Crikey “Pure Poison” blog, Jeremy Sear asks:

“Since the Herald Sun obviously won’t investigate this outrageous misuse of police records [re Gobbo’s 1993 charges], perhaps it’s something its rival at Spencer St might consider?”

Unfortunately, it is not possible to question the Herald Sun’s motives and timing in running the 13 November Nicola Gobbo story without suppression orders looming large – specifically those arising from Paul Dale’s current Commonwealth perjury charges. This is something the Herald Sun would have well realised before running the story; that more conscientious elements in the mainstream media would be hamstrung from making even a careful, considered follow-up/corrective to the Herald Sun hatchet-job.

Here, there has been a repeated, nasty pattern – of timid Age, bullying Herald Sun – in the comparative media coverage of the Paul Dale trials over the last two years, at least.

Thus, on 13 May this year, the Age gave-up its lunch-money (= journalistic pride), moments after Mum’s morning drop-off, with this craven, cowardly caveat:

"But also fuelling divisions among senior police is the death of Carl Williams in prison. Police had attempted to persuade him to turn informer on corrupt police. Although there is no allegation that this was a factor in Williams's death . . . ”

Admittedly, as per serious in-court discussion during Matthew Johnston’s murder trial (on 13 September 2011), there may be an argument that even after his death, Carl Williams may still be covered by witness protection program restrictions that, of course, forbid the naming of protected police informers. I am not sure of the end result of these courtroom discussions; as at that point I stopped listening – and started seething. Yes, we have a witness protection program that can’t actually protect a witness living in what should be the most secure place in the state. But never mind that – the powers that be can thwart media coverage of the full story behind a murder, under the bizarre pretext that this is somehow “protecting” the deceased witness.

Jeremy Sear (above URL) also notes something that I hadn’t previously picked up: that Nicola Gobbo’s being outed as a prosection witness against Paul Dale in his Hodson murder charges was courtesy of a successful application by the Herald Sun to have suppression orders protecting her identity lifted.

By that stage (the afternoon of 30 April 2010), it was already an open secret that the death of Carl Williams meant that the murder charges against Paul Dale would not proceed. But this would only become official on 3 June (although this time it was the ABC that ran the leaked scoop on the 7pm TV news on 27 May).

Outing Ms Gobbo as a prosection witness at this sensitive stage was an extraordinary step, then. If Carl Williams is possibly still a “protected” prosection witness in death, Nicola Gobbo’s “protection” by the state is at the other extreme. She was on that date rather prematurely declared “open season”, and the Herald Sun has relished having her in its gunsights ever since.

Further Update 20 November 2011

Now you won’t find the Crikey “Pure Poison” blog page linked to above; the page was taken down two days after posting, sometime between 9am and 9pm on 16 November 2011. There has been no explanation from Crikey of the reasons behind its suppression, AFAICT. However, I suspect that I can take some of the credit/blame here. For posterity, here’s a comment I posted on the blog:

“Debate over the nitty-gritty of Nicola Gobbo’s old legal run-in nicely underscores the providence of the documents that the Herald Sun relied on for its story. I would guess that its source here was police (= leaked), as opposed to court, documents. In general, of course, the former are confidential, while the latter are public (albeit usually not easily accessible).

The fact of the Herald Sun’s speculation – viz that Ms Gobbo’s subsequent legal admission showed that the charges did not lead to a conviction – also suggests that the paper either (i) has not bothered to check, or (ii) was denied access to, court documents as to what was the ultimate formal outcome of Ms Gobbo’s charges. (My guess is the former: after all, if the underworld are feeding you its choicest tidbits, you are not likely to want the effort of metaphorically picking your own grapes in the dusty vineyard of legal minutiae, in order to round off your “meal”)

As far as Gavin Putland’s suggestion that Ms Gobbo may have a good defamation case, I think that she may have more urgent priorities for the foreseeable future; such as avoiding the death threats arising from her (very reluctant) involvement in current underworld legal proceedings, viz page 1 of the Herald Sun on 10 November 2011”.

Note that there’s a typo in the date on the last line – but you get the picture, I’m sure. As to whether James Campbell relied on police documents only, or court documents as well, his update today on Nicola Gobbo’s 1993 student misdemeanours clarifies this. Duly chastened, I suspect, by my above comment, he has gone digging in the Magistrates Court archives last week, and come up with gold . . . crayon colouring.

Yes, the formal legal outcome of Ms Gobbo’s 1993 misdemeanours was, in sum total:

Drug trafficking – charges dropped (not that Campbell acknowledges this)
Possessing a drug of dependence – pleaded guilty to one charge
Using a drug of dependence – pleaded guilty to one charge

For the two charges to which Ms Gobbo pleaded guilty, no conviction was recorded and she was placed on a good behaviour bond.

Mocking the Herald Sun for making big news of the fact that Ms Gobbo, when a uni student, INHALED!, would be to let it off with a proverbial good behaviour bond, however. Here, the paper can hardly claim either youth or previous good character in its favour.

A depressing element of the comments thread on the now-suppressed blog page was a tit-for-tat debate/argument between two commenters over what last week’s Herald Sun story actually meant for Ms Gobbo’s criminal record. This debate was as pointless as, say, pronouncing on the funniness or meaning of a joke to which the punch-line has been forgotten. In Ms Gobbo’s case, of course, James Campbell’s original story involved either withholding, or not bothering to look for, the only definitive document as to Ms Gobbo’s criminal record from her 1993 charges.

The fact that two punters can nonetheless endlessly dissect what I would coin an Incomplete Joke is a nice metaphor for everyday Melburnians’ attitude to the underworld that runs their city and state. In general, they are prepared to politely laugh, or ignore, the absence of a punch-line as they go about their daily lives. In their deluded generosity, time after time, they assume that the punch-line is merely forgotten, rather than deliberately withheld.

Another further update 22 November 2011

The suppression order supposed to protect Nicola Gobbo’s identity as a (ex-) witness in Paul Dale’s current Commonwealth perjury charges was lifted this morning. No media coverage so far today has drawn attention to the Herald Sun’s recent intimidation of Ms Gobbo as a supposedly protected witness.

Contrary to what the Herald Sun – and most other media outlets – reported today, while Ms Gobbo was technically discharged as a witness on 10 November 2011, evidence provided as a result of her secretly wearing a recording device in December 2008 is still set to be a key plank of the case against Dale.

Ms Gobbo thus presumably remains a howling “dog” to the underworld, an assessment that seems to be confirmed by a fresh death threat last week (penultimate URL), received after she technically became an ex-witness (and after the Herald Sun’s apparent open-season-on-Ms-Gobbo declaration in its 12 November 2011 story).

2011-11-01T13:22:00.004+10:00

Who moved my star witness – how Penny Armytage gets to investigate herself

Prologue

It all started with one of those yawn’n’sigh headlines that seem to artificially link two otherwise discrete news threads: “Furore over Williams killing: Sir Ken ordered to leave” (Age 7 May 2011; henceforth “the Age 7 May article”). Any fresh angle on the April 2010 murder of Carl Williams would be newsworthy of course, but the four-days-on-twist on the 2 May 2011 resignation announcement of second-in-charge (to Simon Overland) cop Sir Ken Jones (intended to be effective from 5 August 2011, not 6 May) seemed to be a minor development indeed – office politics dressed up as daylight murder, you might say.

Subsequent developments have proved me wrong, but spot on, in other ways. The media/OPI lynching of the Godwin Grech-like Tristan Weston completes a vicious circle – this is office politics dressed up as a supposed corruption scandal, when the central figure is a naïve, apparently well-intentioned GenXer (as opposed to someone with real power, viz just about any boomer involved in the whole thing).

So what is the real story here? Certainly, you won’t find it in the OPI’s “Crossing the Line” Report (PDF), which mentions the Age 7 May article in its Chronology, but otherwise leaves the issues raised for another inquiry (the OPI’s inquiry into Sir Ken Jones is continuing, and although the identity of the government leaker behind the Age 7 May article is yet to be publicly established, Tristan Weston seems to be a definite non-candidate here). But I’m not holding my breath that the eventual outcome of the OPI’s ongoing inquiry into Sir Ken Jones is going to clarify much, either; as the fine-print in its Report wonderfully cautions: “. . . Victorian law permits me to report my findings to the Ombudsman but prohibits me from discussing or reporting them publicly. Accordingly, there will be some gaps in the narrative of this report and in my findings” (emphasis added).

Ah, we are back to playing that favourite game of the Melbourne establishment: “My secret is bigger than yours” – a game that, I suggest, Xers are generally temperamentally unsuited and/or too career-castrated to play. The Herald Sun, eternal fountain of leaks, happily and capriciously “umpires” this game, such as by using a “good” leak to out a leaker of “bad” ( = the other newspaper) leaks.

The Herald Sun’s dissemination of corruptly-obtained details of the OPI Report on the eve of the Report’s official publication is a notable recent example of a scoop with little public, but plenty of private interest. The scoop article’s first line: “The State Government today will come under pressure to sack adviser Tristan Weston over a finding by the police watchdog that he leaked secret information” (same URL) packs a punch much greater than that of a typical leak story; viz the kudos of getting a publication head-start over one’s media rivals. Just as with its infamous front-page Carl Williams story on the day of his murder, the Herald Sun was brazenly calling for a named head on a platter. Other than quickly expunging (as soon as the job is done, you might say) both stories from its digital archive (so far, not wholly successfully in the case of the Tristan Weston story), the Herald Sun’s partisan, and almost certainly criminal, collusion has been wholly unpunished, again.

For its part, the Age can take some credit for the scalp of police chief Simon Overland, who resigned (presumably under some duress) on 19 June. However, it took a veritable sieve-full of leaks – in the Age, Herald Sun, and Australian – to achieve this (whether or not Sir Ken Jones leaked to the Age, the paper clearly barracked for him).

Importantly, the Age’s leaks (in the April-June 2011 period canvassed by the OPI “Crossing the Line” Report) generally differ from the Herald Sun’s on the test of public interest. The Herald Sun ran a henpecking litany of one-off, minor complaints against Simon Overland’s management record (dodgy gun holsters, manky IT systems, fudged crime stats), while the Age coverage had the benefit of a common thread, of curious decision-making, and possible corruption, at the highest levels of the police force and its supervising agencies. I would argue that, as a last resort, media coverage of possible high-level corruption, even by illegal means (= leaks) is far more justifiable than the “My idiot boss has done it again - EXCLUSIVE” type of stories ran by the Herald Sun.

The secrets of Penny Armytage I

First, it may help to know who Penny Armytage is:

"Penny Armytage has been the Secretary of the Victorian Department of Justice since 2003. The justice portfolio is diverse and incorporates nine ministerial portfolios –Attorney-General; Police & Emergency Services; Bushfire Response; Corrections; Crime Prevention; Establishment of an anti-corruption commission; Consumer Affairs; Gaming, and Racing – concerned with the administration, reform and enforcement of the law, as well as with regulation in areas such as gambling and liquor. The Department has a budget of $4.4 billion, including Victoria Police, and employs more than 6000 staff. Before becoming Secretary, Ms Armytage worked as Executive Director, Operations at the Department of Human Services; and prior to that *[in 1999-2002] as the Commissioner for the Office of Correctional Services with responsibility for Victoria’s correctional system. Ms Armytage holds a Bachelor of Social Work from the Preston Institute of Technology and is a National Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia. She is also a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. She has been a senior executive in the Victorian Public Service for the past 20 years". (emphasis added).

The Age 7 May article notes that: “Five inquiries into the killing of Williams are underway. The Department of Justice inquiry reports to Ms Armytage, raising potential conflict of interest concerns given her role in approving his prison placement”. In fact, AFAICT, all inquiries into the killing of Carl Williams ultimately are under the supervision of Ms Armytage.

Conflict of interest aside, the Age 7 May article made two other claims adverse to Penny Armytage. One was that she personally made a prison placement decision that could be seen to have some connection with Carl Williams’ murder. This sounds vague, but follow-up reports have not thrown up any more light on it to date.

Apart from its vagueness, this alleged connection at first seemed to me on par with blaming, in hindsight, the monarch who issues a royal pardon to a rehabilitated criminal who subsequently runs amok; a mistake for sure, but one of a type in which the rubber-stamp (for that is all “decision-making” entails that high up) is necessarily applied more with pomp than with conscious intent, good or bad.

The further inference in the Age 7 May article – Sir Ken Jones was marched out the door the previous day, because of his perceived role in fostering the adverse Armytage-Carl Williams connection – could likewise be seen as a further stretch of an already flimsy premise. Coincidences happen, and a conspiracy is hard to conjure out of what looks like an over-reaction (if indeed there is any connection at all) to a non-event, relatively speaking. And there this whole saga could well have stopped, had not Simon Overland ordered (or if you prefer, requested of) his close friend Paul Jevtovic*, then the acting head of the OPI, that the OPI investigate Sir Ken Jones – this inquiry also was initiated on 6 May, the day Sir Ken Jones was marched out. The timing here is important: it appears to confirm Simon Overland knew at the time that the Age was going to run the adverse Penny Armytage story the next day. As the Age’s 7 May article recites, Ms Armytage, was approached for comment, but did not respond, before that night’s deadline (i.e. the evening of 6 May). It appears likely, therefore, that sometime on 6 May 2011, an incandescent Ms Armytage (as alerted by the Age) was in communication with a chastened Mr Overland, who then did what he had to do.

The Ken Jones OPI investigation is ongoing, so it is hard to comment on authoritatively. However, judging from the time-period and matters covered by its recent Tristan Weston Report, it appears that a substantial focus of it may be that Sir Ken Jones could have bad-mouthed his employer, in the weeks before or after he was marched-out**, including by leaking material personally damaging to Overland’s reputation, but otherwise not actually prejudicing the administration of justice in this state, AFAICT. Oh, and it necessitated using “emergency” phone tap powers – on par with those that law enforcement uses for other office-politics matters, like, you know, investigating murders.

When the over-reaction is this big, the conspiracy is back on, with a vengeance. And while it is tempting to speculate that Simon Overland’s colossal (bruised) ego is all the explanation that the OPI Ken Jones inquiry needs for its “why”, I would speculate that Overland’s departure early on proves the stakes are much higher than Overland’s ego, and indeed were so from the beginning.

A good witch-hunt ends, as we know, with a fire, and a fire begins with a point of ignition. The Sir Ken Jones OPI drama, which then also begat the (metaphorical) burning alive of Tristan Weston in the time-honoured way, has an emphatic, single ignition point: the Age 7 May article (the gist of which, as I’ve pointed out above, was presumably known about by Simon Overland on 6 May, at least). Two people were seen (= named) at the source of this metaphorical fire: Simon Overland (who we have already established to be an accessory able to be dumped when things got too hot, and so not the ringleader), and Penny Armytage. Ms Armytage thus appears to be, for some reason, a protected species of the highest order. With her protection from media scrutiny having worked so well, so far (the biggest “blip”, the Age 7 May article, has led to perhaps 0.1% of the media follow-up accorded to the hapless Tristan Weston), working out the “why” of Ms Armytage’s protected status is a difficult, necessarily speculative task.

The secrets of Penny Armytage II

Not a secret as such, but a matter of a curious lack of media interest, is the former role Penny Armytage held between 1999 and 2002: Commissioner, Office of Correctional Services (now job-titled “Corrections Commissioner” and held by Bob Hastings). It can be assumed then, that as well as being something of a public-service all-rounder, Ms Armytage has deep, if not exactly fresh, first-hand knowledge of the operations and culture of Corrections Victoria, the entity in charge of Barwon Prison.

What leaked material the Age had obtained to run its 7 May Armytage claims was, AFAICT, an email sent from Ms Armytage’s office approving Williams’ and Matthew Johnson’s co-location (achieved via separate intra-Barwon-Prison relocations) within the Acacia Unit 1 (one of four separate units within the Acacia Unit proper, which houses 14 prisoners in total).

As I said above, my first reaction to this story was that this was likely to be a personal decision by Ms Armytage only in a very technical sense. In other words, she wouldn’t have applied her rubber-stamp without first taking advice – and who would have thought otherwise? Again, subsequent events have suggested that this was no ordinary bureaucratic decision, of the sort easily defused, when under close query, by showing the paper trail leading upwards to the ultimate rubber-stamper’s desk.

A 25 May 2011 briefing note from Ms Armytage to three state ministers, apparently written in response to the 7 May Age report, “is believed to identify senior police and Corrections Victoria officials also involved in the decision-making process that led to Williams being placed with Johnson”. Nonetheless, an FOI request by the Age to obtain this briefing note was refused (same URL), so we are none the wiser as to whom the minions-to-take-the-blame might be, other than that they were “senior” minions (in which case, surely there is an overriding public interest in them being named?). Fortunately, Matthew Johnson’s September 2011 murder trial showed Ms Armytage being contradicted by at least one such senior minion, on the specific “Who moved?” question:

“Peter Hutchinson, a senior manager with Corrections Victoria, said in evidence that close consideration had been given whether Williams and Johnson should share a cell and that a senior policeman who was briefed on the situation had expressed no concerns. Yet that officer told the court that ‘we weren't involved in the decision to place them there’” (emphasis added).

So Penny Armytage’s answer to the “Who moved?” question – appears to be “Mr/Ms Nobody”.

The final claim adverse to Penny Armytage made by the Age in its 7 May story was expressed thus:

“Senior police are also believed to hold concerns about a request by Ms Armytage to be notified in advance of police searches of any departmental files. It is also believed a compromise was struck under which Ms Armytage was given notice of the police seizure of departmental files”.

No, I don’t get what the “compromise” was either; if we are talking about notice, after the event, of police seizure of departmental files, surely that’s a standard entitlement. If, OTOH, it is notice before the event, that is quite some favour – even to be asking.

We do know, through evidence given by Detective Sergeant Wayne Newman at Matthew Johnson’s murder trial on 15 September 2011, that there have been at least three police warrants executed against the Department of Justice in connection with Carl Williams’ murder, and accompanying seizures of material: on 12 November and 17 December 2010, and 3 February 2011. The fact and dates of these raids has received, AFAICT, no media coverage to date.

Will we ever know the “Who moved?” truth?

Judge at Matthew Johnson’s recent murder trial, Lex Lasry, recently used the platform provided by Johnson’s pre-sentence hearing to make a none-too-subtle (when moderated against the scale of judges entering the political fray straight from the bench) reference to the “Who moved?” question:

"Justice Lasry said that made the fact that Williams and Johnson had been housed in the same prison unit 'all the more amazing'. 'What the authorities did by placing Williams, or leaving him in that unit for the time they did, is a matter for somebody else to think about, I suppose,' he said. 'It just amazes me. It is just breathtaking.'” (emphasis added).

Justice Lasry’s “I suppose” has a clever, barely-hidden sarcasm about it. No wonder the Herald Sun’s report omitted these two words, then.

Meanwhile, Premier Ted Baillieu seems to be a lot further from losing patience with Ms Armytage than he was as Opposition Leader in the immediate aftermath of Williams’ murder:

“Ted Baillieu said a judicial inquiry may be required as Corrections Victoria could not be trusted to investigate the events surrounding Williams' brutal death, the Herald Sun reports . . . Mr Baillieu has raised questions about why the Office of Police Integrity was overseeing the homicide investigation as it has a track record of failure and is itself under government review". (emphasis added).

and

"[Opposition] Leader Ted Baillieu says many questions remain unanswered. 'There should be an anti-corruption commission in Victoria. Now when it comes to what's happened down at Barwon Prison, something terribly, terribly wrong has gone on there. Where a high security prisoner can be brutally murdered in the middle of the highest security jail we have something, terribly wrong has gone on'".

Premier Baillieu’s closest approach to snapping-point on this issue seems to have been, ironically, perhaps, on the very day he was widely quoted (via a spokesman) in the morning papers as having full confidence in Ms Armytage. The cause for the Premier’s abrupt change in mood appears to have been two emboldened official statements from Corrections Victoria; one made by a spokesman the evening prior:

“No prison staff have been disciplined [in connection with Carl Williams’ murder] and Corrections Victoria’s focus has been to improve the way we operate across all prisons . . . "Exercise bikes are still in some units, but Corrections Victoria has taken steps to secure loose parts”.

and the other on 30 September, by Corrections Commissioner Bob Hastings:

"He said no evidence had been found that Barwon Prison staff were corrupt and had been involved in the killing at Victoria's highest-security jail . . . 'After any major incident we take a critical view of how we manage a complex and changing environment. I can tell you that in the year and a half since Carl Williams’ death [NOTE: not “murder”, even though Matthew Johnson had been convicted the previous day] as the Corrections Commissioner I have overseen an enormous amount of work and our staff have invested countless hours in reviewing our prison operations to identify gaps in the system and make necessary improvements'".

While Commissioner Hastings no doubt would have made his predecessor, and now big boss, Penny Armytage, proud with his empty waffle, only a handful (as opposed to “countless”) hours later, Premier Baillieu nicely demonstrated that Barwon Prison is not the only “complex and changing environment” in the state, by his back-to-square-one use of the f-word in this media conference:

. . .

TED BAILLIEU:
I think Victorians are concerned about these issues. As I said at the time, we will await the inquiries that are taking place. There are a number on foot, clearly there was a failure at Barwon Prison; it had dramatic consequences. And as a result of that, we need to await those inquiries. (emphasis added)

. . .

REPORTER:
How soon do you expect those [inquiries] to report?

TED BAILLIEU:
That’s a matter for those bodies, but I think everybody in Victoria would hope that the sooner those inquiries are completed, the better.

. . .

REPORTER:
Is an investigation into David Prideaux’s disappearance continuing?

TED BAILLIEU:
Well, that’s a matter for Victoria Police, and again, not a matter for me, but clearly a matter of interest.

David Prideaux’ mysterious 6 June 2011 disappearance (and it seems safe now to assume, death, most likely from suicide or hypothermia) came one month after the Penny Armytage headlines (and Sir Ken Jones’ abrupt exit), and a score of days before Simon Overland’s own early exit – so allowing, in a nick of time, Overland to close the case pre-emptively, as it were. Albeit Simon Overland’s (acting) successor is not apparently pulling out all stops on this habeus corpus, either.

So we may never know whether the conspicuous lack of any sanction/discipline on any Barwon Prison staff arising from Carl Williams’ murder caused Prideaux to vicariously “discipline” himself. Alternatively, it is not that difficult to accidentally die of hypothermia in the Victorian high-country in winter – a “complex and changing environment”, you might say. As the Barwon Prison staff member/s responsible for monitoring the CCTV screens on the day of Carl Williams’ murder found out, a mere half-hour or so of sustained inattention can sometimes cost a life.

NOTES

* We know that Simon Overland laid his complaint with Paul Jevtovic in person on 6 May. Simon Overland and Paul Jevtovic’s friendship was dealt with as follows in the OPI “Crossing the Line” Report (PDF link above; Appendix 2 p 83):

“Mr Weston’s response also alleges that my deputy, Mr Paul Jevtovic, who, as Acting Director, commenced this investigation, is a ‘close friend’ of Mr Overland. I am satisfied that this allegation is without foundation. In a recent report the Ombudsman found no evidence of conflict of interest, improper motive, or any other impropriety affecting Mr Jevtovic’s decision to commence the investigation.” (Then footnotes 10 Oct 2011 Ombudsman Report, “Investigation into the Office of Police Integrity handling of a complaint”, without specifying page number etc)

From this, you might think that the Ombudsman’s 10 Oct 2011 Report (PDF) has therefore closely analysed the relationship between Simon Overland and Paul Jevtovic. In fact, these two paragraphs are the only discussion of it:

"45. During the course of my investigation, I examined whether OPI officers had a conflict of interest with regard to their involvement in the assessment and investigation of the complaint about Mr Jones. Two OPI officers in particular were brought to the attention of my investigators because of alleged conflicts of interest. However, I did not find any evidence that OPI officers wrongly influenced or directed the OPI’s assessment or investigation nor that the OPI acted detrimentally to a person believed to be a whistleblower. However, I am investigating the conduct of Victoria Police as a separate [i.e. ongoing, as at October 2011] investigation.

46. My investigation established that Mr Jevtovic’s decision to accept the complaint was not discretionary in nature. Rather, as the Acting Director, Police Integrity at the time, he was obliged to accept a complaint about the conduct of a Deputy Commissioner either pursuant to section 40(4) (a) of the Police Integrity Act or because the complaint was a deemed disclosure under the WPA by virtue of section 39(2)of the Police Integrity Act" (same URL).

The plain meaning of the above two paragraphs, I suggest, is far from the gloss put on it by the OPI Report. As far as Paul Jevtovic receiving Simon Overland’s complaint against Ken Jones, there was no possible conflict of interest because he simply had no decision to make. OTOH, as far as Simon Overland making a complaint against Ken Jones to Paul Jevtovic, whether there was a conflict of interest is a matter of continuing inquiry.

In its defence, perhaps the OPI missed the nuances here because it relied the Herald Sun’s 12 October summary – “Yesterday's Ombudsman's report cleared the OPI of any conflict of interest or acting inappropriately in ordering the investigations of Sir Ken and Mr Weston” – instead of reading the actual Ombudsman’s Report.

** Because Sir Ken Jones was marched-out, but then placed on “gardening leave” until his originally scheduled departure date, he was in an unusual legal position between 6 May and 5 August 2011. The more usual practice when marching-out employees is to make a clean break; i.e. to pay them in lieu of notice. This makes no financial difference to the employer (and may be tax-advantageous to the employee). By not making a clean break, i.e. by continuing to pay an employee who is not only unproductive but persona non grata, the employer risks liability during the interim period. But the particular circumstances of Sir Ken Jones vis a vis the OPI inquiry meant that there was also a significant upside of this arrangement for Simon Overland: the OPI could continue to monitor Sir Ken Jones long after he had “left the building”. The impropriety of so doing seems obvious, IMO, an impression confirmed by the inaccurate moniker “gardening leave”. “Gardening leave” is traditionally used by employers as an informal restraint of trade; i.e. to stop (those who would otherwise be) former employees immediately starting work for a competitor of the employer. Its explicit use to (legally) spy on someone who would otherwise be a former employee is a novel thing indeed.

2011-09-15T20:03:00.003+10:00

The Carl Williams and Paul Dale “explosive allegation”

The Herald-Sun’s banner headline (as at 7pm this evening) links to a story that was well and truly first off the blocks in the media race to publish, being first posted at 12:43pm today. The suppression order relating to the underlying facts was lifted only an hour or so earlier (11:35am is my estimate). The relatively tardy Age counterpart story (first posted around 2:30pm today) perhaps concedes its beta-dog status in today’s race by running the “explosive” adjective only in the sub-heading/“precede” between byline and story body. I missed most of this evening’s TV news coverage of this story, but the 7pm ABC TV news, for one, certainly chimed in with the “explosive” adjective.

Call me retentive, rather than “explosive”, but I would have thought that the money-shot of today’s revelations has been on the public record since at least 21 April this year, when Age journo John Silvester wrote:

“There is only one crime on the books in Victoria that could help [Tony] Mokbel cut a deal and that is the 2004 murders of the police informer Terence Hodson and his wife Christine. The key target in that investigation remains the former drug squad sergeant Paul Dale, a charge he denies. Police would have alleged Dale paid Carl Williams $150,000 for the hit. However the case collapsed when Williams was killed in prison last year”.

In case you missed it back in April (for there were no banner headlines, or mainstream media follow-ups), or otherwise need convincing that what John Silvester wrote then was merely the whiskers on a cat that was out of the bag well and truly by then, you can read my December 2010 post here (also links to previous posts). I’ll also re-iterate here that the bare bones of this information – viz Carl Williams was to have been a key witness in Dale’s trial for the Hodson murders – was on the public record, albeit in disseminated snippets and coded language, within one week of Williams’ murder in April 2010.

As to what this means for the future, current legal proceedings against Matthew Johnson make it unwise for me to comment further at the moment. If you are following these proceedings in the media, make sure you look out for AAP journo Mike Hedge’s byline. Hedge has at least twice included salient facts from the Matthew Johnson proceedings that no other journo – as opposed to media group – has covered. Thus, today he points out that the suppression order in question was actually only about 24 hours old (next URL). Again, further comment on this intriguing fact is a legal minefield, so I won't.

I make the journo vs media-group distinction because the SMH has run with Hedge’s coverage, and not the lesser-quality coverage of its Age sibling journo Andrea Petrie. Yes, as well as having the harbour and Opera House, Sydney also does Melbourne news stories better than Melbourne, apparently. Oh, and Hedge didn’t use the e-word in his 5:39pm today daily summary, either.

Talking of repetition, I’ll finish this post with the boilerplate legal prophylactic (I think, or maybe it’s just an old wives’ tale) that:

Matthew Johnson’s trial, before Justice Lex Lasry, is continuing.

2011-07-29T15:29:00.003+10:00

Marriage – a (gay) renovator’s delight

“Gentrification” is now an unfashionable word – the 1970s collective noun for “property renovation leading to capital gain” has long since been usurped by renovation-as-individual-triumph. But (for once) I’m not waxing nostalgic here: gentrification must always cause its own death, and has a maximum life-span of one generation. Thus, in inner-city 1970s Melbourne, for example, predominantly Anglo gay men, and a bit later predominantly Anglo baby boomers (of all remaining genders and sexualties), bought property cheaply from predominantly non-Anglo owners, whose notional capital losses in selling too cheaply, too early, never seem to be factored in to the usual account of gentrification – where everyone’s a winner.

And of course, there is one other big loser group from gentrification – those born too late to partake of it. Not surprisingly then, the current cohort of aspirational young gay men (aka GenY) have embarked on a collective-renovation mission quite different from the real-estate obsession of their boomer parents – to gentrify the currently dowdy, at an all-time-low, thing called marriage.

Angela Shanahan thus quite misses Tracy Bartram’s point: "Personally, I've had two husbands and three marriages, and marriage for me has lost its lustre. But I don't see why the GLBTI community should be excluded from marrying just because it's 'always been that way' ... And let's face it: nobody does 'wedding' better than a gay or lesbian couple!", says Bartram. “Gosh, what a great argument for gay marriage”, Shanahan concludes (same URL) thereby showing all the prescience of my paternal grandparents, who sold in inner-city Richmond c.1973, and then paid a lot more than their sale proceeds for a new house-and-land package on the suburban fringe. Hint to Angela (and Frank Furedi): don’t mistake the gay-marriage lobby’s visible contempt for marriage, such as you own it (“unrenovated since 1890!”) as illogical (or merely “elitist”, like a façade without the whole-box-and-dice accompanying capitalist interior). A decent capital gain can only be made, of course, when the old generation sells too cheaply – and the new generation’s purchasers have every interest in pointing out the flaws of the asset on the sale block.

Personally, I have no taste for either sort of gentrification. Alas, I simply feel too much for the losers, like Angela Shanahan. I couldn’t possibly ever sleep at night if I knew that my own fabulous gay marriage had gained from, or devalued her own plain heterosexual one. Albeit, I know that I’m in a conscientious minority here.

There is also a way out for Angela Shanahan: take up Tim Wilson’s rather daring idea of double gentrification of marriage. His idea: leave civil marriage to the gays, and the straights can circle the wagons around their notion of marriage by renovating religious marriage, presumably so that it is at least as European appliance-y as gay (civil) marriage. Oh what a race this would be! But are you really up for it, Angela Shanahan?

2011-07-11T13:45:00.002+10:00

Abattoir cinematography 101

Two disclosures first. I am a carnivore – vegetarians/vegans are likely predisposed to film (and view) abattoir footage as “horror”. Carnivores the opposite, perhaps. For me, this is complicated by my second disclosure: I am as squeamish over blood and gore as it is possible to be. I can’t watch a horror film, and even the 6pm TV news can send me reeling, such as a segment last week promoting Diabetes-awareness something, which depicted a needle drawing blood, with no prior warning.

Needless to say, I did not watch the economic/political-timebomb 30 May “4 Corners” episode apparently depicting animal cruelty inside Indonesian abattoirs – but not for the reason you may think. Any abattoir footage qualifies as “horror” for me, and so in the interests of balance, it would have been appropriate, surely, for “4 Corners” to depict animal slaughter inside Australian, as well as Indonesian abattoirs. The former would be presumably merit the voice-over labels of “humane” and “best practice”. However, the supposed black/white difference between Australian and Indonesian abattoirs would, of course, be lost on me. And I suspect many other also, and for reasons other than pathological squeamishness.

This is not to deny that animal cruelty may well be more prevalent in Indonesia. But Australians need to look in our own backyard first, rather than indulge in a strange-bedfellow alliance between carnivores and vegetarians/vegans (the Indonesian abattoir footage allows Australian carnivores complacency and vegetarian/vegan activists the hollow luxury of a cheap shot).

Do a Google Image search of “abattoir” and you will get, on the first page, mostly well-lit images of neatly-hanging carcasses – a larger, shinier version of the corner butcher’s shop of my childhood (where, needless to say, the killing was not done on site). Do the same search for “Indonesian abattoir”, and the first page is a medley of doe-eyed living cows, poorly-lit killing-room scenes, and only couple of images of well-lit, neatly-hanging carcasses.

This curious dichotomy, of Western abattoirs being archetypal white cubes, and Indonesian abattoirs black boxes, is also the title of an exhibition currently on at the Arts Centre in Melbourne. Appropriately enough, one of the pieces on display is what I would label “abattoir art”: Jill Orr’s “The sleep of reason produces monsters – Goya ” (2002-03).

Funnily enough, while I find abattoir art deeply confronting, as a carnivore, I think it that it is dishonest not to look when such art is brought before one’s eyes. It can’t be considered merely gratuitous – unlike, say, TV news footage of a needle drawing blood. Albeit, I only came round to this view recently, after watching the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film In A Year With 13 Moons (1978). The five-minute or so abattoir scene near the start of the film, which makes Jill Orr’s counterpart video look like Playschool, was apparently filmed in a functioning abattoir during working hours. The dialogue between the two main characters, as they walk through the brightly lit abattoir, killing-floor and all, is as confronting as the background imagery and yet searingly beautiful.

In short, abattoir art is a particularly powerful and poignant genre. If you are making it, please spare me “4 Corners” style voice-overs and malignant lighting effects. If the animal cruelty being filmed is that extreme, surely the camera crew, at least, have a duty to stop filming (= colluding in) such snuff, and to intervene on the animals’ behalf – that is, to set up a dialogue, instead of a stupid, and quite possibly racist dichotomy.

2011-05-03T16:42:00.004+10:00

Guess whose Osama’s got a whirlpool?

Osama bin Laden’s “burial” at sea – presumably the dumping of his corpse from a plane into the Indian Ocean (update: minutes after posting this, a TV news report had it that the body was instead thrown from a ship (aircraft carrier) into the Arabian Sea) – completes a strange cycle of parallel events from 1974, 1979 and 2011.

In late 1974, bin Laden was a newly married 17 year-old. Shortly before Christmas that year, a Gija woman was critically injured in a flood-related car accident near Warmun (then called Turkey Creek), Western Australia. This woman, a skin mother to celebrated artist Rover Thomas, died in a medivac plane above a whirlpool (Tawurrkurima/Jintiripul), off the Indian Ocean coast near Derby, in the West Kimberley.

In November 1979, bin Laden was a 22 year-old university drop-out getting increasingly radicalised by the fundamentalist revolutions that shook the Middle-East that year. He found his ideal cause soon afterwards, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the next month. Meanwhile, in Warmun, Rover Thomas’ Krill Krill ceremony reached its zenith, almost five years after its dual origins in the Gija woman’s death and the destruction of Darwin on Christmas Day 1974.

In March 2011, Warmun was destroyed by a flood that spared only the people. Now, that’s an intervention. As precisely choreographed, you might say, as the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May Day 2011. But that’s only one side of it – downstream of, and joining up, both events is the messy flotsam (Warmun flood debris) and jetsam (bin Laden’s jettisoned corpse) of the Indian Ocean. The whirlpool begins where it ends, across time and space.

Reference:

Rover Thomas et al, Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas (1994) National Gallery of Australia pp 22-25.

2011-03-21T20:54:00.005+10:00

Warmun washed away – everyone ok

In a time of multiple natural disasters globally, reminders of what really counts (in case it needs to be said: sentient life, and not property) have been intermittently wheeled out by the media. In this however, death is never front of stage, it is abstracted, “toll(ed)”. Most strangely of all, incessant replays of tsunami inundation in Japan, like the perma-seared footage of that plane hitting the twin towers ten years earlier, is never acknowledged as plain snuff – i.e. the sight of thousands of people being killed. A possible explanation here is that TV’s invention of the residential renovation-porn genre in the last decade has necessarily laid the groundwork for the opposite genre, property-damage porn. That is, we are sufficiently de-sensitised to view the tsunami inundation footage as the tragic demise of a million backyard water features, as it were.

The East Kimberley community of Warmun seems an odd place for property-damage porn to have reached its zenith, but “war zone” and “disaster zone” were terms bandied about by the ABC last week. As far as I can tell, despite the usual flood-disaster footage boxes all being ticked (“cars are upturned and piled together. Whitegoods are lodged in trees. The only access is by helicopter” (same URL)), no one was even injured in this particular flood.

Which fact, if true, surely merited some reportage (but of this there was none). How such a fine-tuned, property-damage only “disaster” happened, I don’t know. But the selectivity of the waters is hinted out in this photo, in which the top half of the hanging space at Warmun Art Centre is intact. A better photo of the Art Centre damage is slide 5 of the photo gallery in the penultimate URL. A pre-flood photo of Warmun Art Centre damage (slide 11 of the photo gallery in the penultimate URL), shows just how much art was hung very low down, and stacked on the floor. The art loss – and the displacement of Warmun’s entire population – are of course tragic in some ways, but at least a high-water mark has been set in this rather exceptional locale. And everyone is alive to tell the tale – of above and below the line.

Update 3 May 2011

Nicolas Rothwell writes:

“Consider the funeral described above. It was held in Turkey Creek, the dry community where the death took place. The young woman died in a house just up the road from a new police station. She and her friends had visited Wyndham, where a baby from a family they knew had died in a distressing accident. They were grieving.

They came back to Turkey Creek: they were in a house close by a large tree from which a young friend of theirs had hanged himself. In the shadow of that tree, the drinking, and mourning, began. The young woman was not a habitual drinker: she vomited, inhaled her vomit, and died. Technically, her death was not a suicide; in truth, it was part of a tangled chain of grief and loss. That chain stretches far: the mourners at her funeral last month came from as far afield as Wyndham, Kununurra and Wave Hill.

A few days after her death, a flood swept through Turkey Creek, devastating the community, wrecking its houses and forcing an evacuation of the entire population: they are being housed in a workers' camp 200km away while the place is rebuilt.

A disaster, says the state government. A cleansing flood, say the old Gija men and women who saw the waters rise: the action of the Ngarringarni, what we translate as the dreamtime, but should describe as the inscrutable, fate-dealing cosmic power of the Kimberley Aboriginal world”.

See also Nicolas Rothwell detail the flood's art toll (and incidentally rebut my imputation, above, that the Warmun Art Centre may not have been well-prepared for the flood) here and my Warmun-Osama link here.

2011-02-07T10:21:00.001+10:00

What the cat dragged out – eight lives in 30 seconds

Back around the birth of this blog in 2002, “cat blog” was the pejorative for the lamest niche in the fragmented universe of online self-expression. Nonetheless, or perhaps wanting a floor beneath which I could not possibly sink further, I chose a “cat” name for this blog around its first birthday. And then went entirely cat-contentless until this day.

C_, my 14 year-old cat, was euthanized by a vet on my lounge-room floor nearly two weeks ago. This experience certainly changed my perspective on euthanasia – aka organised, supposedly peaceful death (consensually, in humans; while in animals, a more nebulous criterion of relieving suffering, in our human opinion, applies).

C_ had been frequently ill for the past year, and continuously very sick for the preceding weeks, so I had few qualms about the overall medico-moral justification and timing. I just didn’t expect the end – the very end – to be so violent.

Prior to receiving her fatal injection, C_ was compliant in her sedation shot. I then held her now-floppy body for the last time, while we waited a couple of minutes for the sedation to take full effect. The vet cut off some fur, then the anaesthetic overdose shot went in. Again, C_ was compliant at first, “peaceful”. Then she struggled, with a ferocity I wouldn’t have thought possible in her condition. The struggle may have been 30 seconds or two minutes – I also seem to remember a second shot of anaesthetic overdose was required. Gruesomely, I had to hold her down throughout, and yet pretend to comfort her, as she screamed, wriggled and clawed against death.

Previously, I thought that death throes were either operatic exaggerations (heroines dying of consumption on stage) or the by-product of what we call a violent death. I don’t know whether such violence, at the tail-end of a supposedly non-violent death, is common or not. Perhaps it is a matter of semi- or unconscious instinct – as one’s vital organs shut down, the body slaps hard against the world that so long ago once slapped it at birth.

Unusually for a cat, C_ never once caught or killed a bird, nor had a close skirmish with her own mortality. Though unrehearsed with death, she died a diva in full flight.

2011-01-05T14:56:00.003+10:00

ABC News Report: Queensland floods demolish Great Dividing Range!

According to ABC News, bad as the Queensland floods have been, they have also had the startling effect of making the Balonne river valley – a major tributary of the Darling River, in Far South Queensland – “downstream”* of the Fitzroy River and Rockhampton in Central Queensland. Dr John Bradfield must be sitting up in his grave, if not also having his corpse spontaneously re-hydrate, at this nation-building pipe-dream development appearing out of thin air**. What’s next: Canberra “downstream” of the Parramatta River?

The ABC’s sloppy reportage matters because it is inadvertently so close to the truth. Central Queensland’s Upper Darling Basin (most notably here, the Balonne, Maranoa and Warrego rivers) shares a boundary “fence”, several hundred kilometres long, with the Fitzroy River’s southern tributaries (primarily the Dawson and Comet Rivers). The heavy rains, this time, appear to have missed the Upper Warrego catchment, which is on the west side of Carnarvon National Park, starting as close as 300 km WSW of Rockhampton.

Nowhere else along the Great Dividing Range is the irony of this borderline more exquisite. On the well-watered east/sea side of Carnarvon National Park, heavy rain will always causes major economic disruption – and to add insult to injury, the unwanted fresh water will take its own sweet time to disperse out to sea near Rockhampton. Conversely, on the inland side, it seems that there could never be too much fresh water. Had the flood instead been channelled – naturally or artificially – down the Warrego River (and thence the Darling, downstream of Bourke), it would have wound its way 2000km or so, to the still-thirsty Lower Murray, downstream of Mildura. This 2000km corridor is very lightly populated – Charleville, Cunnamulla (both QLD) and Wilcannia (NSW) are the only communities of note along it.

* “While [Rockhampton] remains the focus of the emergency, swollen rivers are causing concern further downstream . . . in the [Balonne valley] towns of St George and Surat”. Also ABC News Victoria, 7pm 4/01/2011: St George “further downstream” of Rockhampton and the Fitzroy River.

** Note, however, that Bradfield’s scheme – oddly, in my opinion – sought to arbitrage the Great Dividing Range in North Queensland; i.e. to divert water into the Lake Eyre Basin, not the Murray-Darling.

2010-12-22T13:16:00.002+10:00

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas (Riewoldt) – the nudest nude

“Lewd” and “explicit” have been the media’s most common adjectives to summarise the purloined photo of AFL player/team-captain Nick Riewoldt and teammate (/subordinate?) Zac Dawson. Riewoldt’s barely-contained anger at his press conference yesterday continued the theme of umbrage and offence. Unless you’ve seen the photo, you may well translate these scant descriptions of (/reactions to) the forbidden image as “homo-erotic”, but while it is indeed a powerful image, it is not of this kind.

There are, I think, two readings of the image. More obviously, it shows a rumpled Riewoldt and a fresh-faced Dawson, both hamming it up for the camera. Riewoldt, who of course is nude, faces the camera, and gives a comic, pursed-lips shrug. Dawson, who is shirtless (only) and almost side on, is either looking at Riewoldt’s eyes or something past the left of frame, sports a wide grin. His arms are locked down at groin height, and his clasped hands hold a sealed condom packet at a suggestive angle (the only aspect of the photo I find possibly “lewd” or “explicit”). Riewoldt’s hands frame his genitals, which are in close proximity to Dawson’s hands. A summary of this tableaux might go “Alpha dog indulges cheeky puppy”.

A deeper reading of the image starts by asking: Where did all the homo-eroticism go? And why is Riewoldt so furious, nonetheless? The short is answer to both questions is: into the visibly chiselled and yet mostly-clothed body of Zac Dawson.

Riewoldt’s bodily stance has some similarities (presumably unconsciously so) to a classical Saint Sebastian or Michelangelo’s dying slave – the naked (or almost so) vulnerability, at least. The latter’s homo-eroticism is notably missing in Riewoldt’s image – in part because his facial expression brooks no ambiguity or projection of fantasy by the viewer, but more so because the homo-eroticism Riewoldt’s body deflects is at the same time volcanically withheld in the body of Dawson.

The shirtless young man in jeans almost always entails a peculiarly heterosexual swagger. Think the tough youths lurking behind in Carol Jerrems’ Vale Street (1975), or the drug-affected, shirtless Ben Cousins filmed in Perth’s broad daylight a few years ago. The implicitly-swaggering Dawson’s unfortunate (if presumably unconscious) juxtaposition alongside the naked and vulnerable Riewoldt is made worse by their differences in physique: not even Riewoldt’s also wearing a pair of jeans in that photo could disguise the fact that Riewoldt looks much older than the three years and four months that separate him in age from Dawson.

For all these reasons, I hope that the currently-forbidden image may one day be appreciated as a classic in Australian photography. Snapper Sam Gilbert is at once an accidental Modigliani (painter of “the nudest nudes”), and the book-ender of the manipulated-subject, nude-tableaux Oz photographic era that began in the mid-70's with Carol Jerrem’s Vale Street and Bill Henson, and now has ended with Sam Gilbert, Bill Henson and Twitt-book.

2010-12-11T13:38:00.008+10:00

Wikileaking the murder of Carl Williams

One is a parallel, elite world in which the participants talk in a baroque code in public; while their private (honest/real) opinions are guaranteed the utmost secrecy. The other is transparently real – sometimes humiliatingly naked – but civil society is the better for it.

The former was, until very recently, the world of diplomacy and international relations. The Wikileaks revelations of the last few days have probably put paid to it forever. In any event, a more important development for Victorians is how, over the last few years, our legal system has morphed from an open (albeit imperfectly so) model to an insiders-only charades game of "diplomacy" - to put it kindly.

Not that I’m blaming the 39 year-old Australian Julian Assange for this unfortunate switcheroo. For one, the timing was not simultaneous, although this week has seen startling developments on both fronts. And in one strange coincidence, just past 39 year-old* Australians Paul Dale (ex-Victorian cop) and in an involuntary role, the now deceased, forever-39 Carl Williams (criminal and police-informer) have been at the centre of replacing the rule of law with a parlour game of suppression orders, augmented by occasional farcical open-court masques to appease the general public.

I can only assume that Paul Dale has the benefit of a perpetual suppression order (including suppressing the fact that there is such an order) over the fact that the late Carl Williams was to have been a key prosecution witness at Dale’s scheduled mid-2010 trial for double murder. I haven’t seen such an order; but nor have I any insider information – my supposition comes from decoding some baroque open-media statements (see these two posts for the backstory).

Not surprisingly, Paul Dale’s name was not mentioned (or if it was, was suppressed from reportage) during Matthew Charles Johnson’s three day committal before magistrate Rosemary Carlin in the Geelong Magistrates Court between 8-10 December.

Instead, going by the media reportage, we were led up sundry, oh-so-courtly byways, like whether Carl Williams had a conjugal visit in December 2008, and the feeling of prison officer Suzette Gajick (aka Suzette Gajic) that something was not “quite right” between Williams and his two cellmates on the day he died.

That’s right, “feeling”, because Gajic was not a witness questioned at the committal, despite her apparently being on duty at the time and place of Williams' murder. Call me a busybody M.Poirot if you like, but I would have though that what she was doing at the time of Williams' murder is an important matter for the committal. Instead, all we are informed, from her mostly-surpressed written statement (actually a 58-page police interview transcript) is that she felt some possible conflict between Williams and his two cellmates on the day. I would have thought that a more salient piece of evidence is that Gajic did nothing to follow-up her evidently fleeting feeling – as is obvious from the fact that no prison staff monitored the CCTV cameras (showing the murder in real time, a mere 10m away from the staff monitor screen, and then the corpse of Carl Williams being dragged back to his cell), for about half an hour on the day.

Another mystery left wholly untouched is the committal’s startling last-day revelation that “after the murder, a copy of Williams’ statement to police in the corruption matter [i.e. the Paul Dale murder trial] was found in Johnson's possession”. A lesser sub-puzzle is why the ABC names Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Harrington in this respect, but other media variously claim choice or suppression in not naming him (or possibly, another senior police officer involved in the Williams murder investigation). More importantly, how did this statement get into Johnson's possession?

But as you’d expect in any good parlour game, the mysteries don’t end with just a few juicy ones – the lesser loose ends can be just as tantalising. Like what happened on Williams’ one-day’s jail leave on 28 February 2010 (14 months after the main/“conjugal” 10-day bloc with the police corruption team and his father George), that suddenly turned Matthew Johnson against him, according to Williams’ father?

And about what, and to whom, was long-term Paul Dale associate, and convicted road-rage murderer/Williams-cellmate Tommy Ivanovic talking to in his phone call made (and recorded) as Williams was being bludgeoned by Johnson? It appears that this famously convenient (for Ivanovic) phone call may be the same as this one:

George Williams told the hearing . . . that Ivanovic had told a friend, Penny Lomas, of his fears for his life on the day Williams was killed. He said he had asked Ms Lomas why Ivanovic hadn't helped his son. “She said that Tommy said: 'I have just been threatened . . . 'Your f...ing next' type of thing ...'”

Ironic not, as a topic of phone conversation while one is witnessing another’s murder? And again, why wasn’t the recording played at the committal?

The other, less likely, possibility is that the phone call was not to Penny Lomas, but to another Ivanovic friend, Peter Hatzimanis, who was to be called as a witness at the committal. The only reportage of anything Hatziminas said at the committal is this: “Ivanovic told him Carl had ‘lost the plot’ about a week before he was killed”.

Finally, some sloppy – if not maliciously inaccurate – reportage today has Williams making threats against Johnson:

“[D]ocuments tendered yesterday allege Williams threatened Johnson before his death, including pretending to run a knife across his throat. Williams also allegedly said he would attack Johnson with a sock full of billiard balls while he was eating”.

Strange, not, that no other media outlet has ran with this lurid detail supporting a defensive-homicide plea? Actually no, because, as the ABC reports, these alleged threats come solely from the say-so of Tommy Ivanovic (as possibly furthered filtered by the say-so of Peter Hatzimanis, above), via the say-so of Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Harrington (same URL). Needless to say, a first-person Ivanovic written statement was as elusive at the committal as the recording of his phone call. “Whatever!” the Age’s Steve Butcher would presumably harrumph, given that he conflates the police-diary notes of Peter Harrington (“defensive homicide”) with Johnson's lawyer Christopher Traill’s defence for Johnson of “defensive homicide”.

* Paul Dale was 37 in March 2007, according to the Age’s “Deadly Secrets” feature article published on 24 March 2007 (apparently officially suppressed, but available here), which (correction added 7pm AEST 11/12/10) makes him 40 or 41 at the time of posting.

Update 19 February 2011

Wednesday’s Herald Sun (16 February) carried a supposedly scoop interview with Paul Dale. Despite the story running on the front page, it was so devoid of hard news value (though the sidebar was even more woeful), I wondered about its timing. Was something else going on?

Sure enough, the next day’s Age (17 February), relayed an ABC report from the previous evening that Dale had been charged, sometime between 14 and 16 February, “with Commonwealth offences in relation to an ongoing police investigation”, and that Dale’s first court date re these charges was to be sometime in March.

All further details are apparently subject to suppression orders. In fact, Google News doesn’t record any trace of the original (16 February, or thereafter) bare-bones ABC reports. A Google News search today of “paul dale” and “paul noel dale” yields only three relevant hits (all dated 17 February) – the Age (previous URL), a BigPond News story with a corroborating detail that the Age omitted (“The ABC says the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions had confirmed Dale has been served with federal charges and will face a Melbourne court in March”) , and a Herald Sun story titled “Former detective Paul Dale facing new charges - report‎”, with a Page Not Found message upon click-through.

Update 4 May 2011

The first anniversary of Carl Williams’ death on 19 April was unfortunately (coincidentally?) upstaged by Williams’ bridesmaid-in-crime Tony Mokbel. Mokbel’s guilty plea meant the suppression wraps were right off on that day, and Fairfax journo John Silvester wasted no time in submitting a 987 word in-depth article on Mokbel. Ah, to finally have all those long-suppressed details – like the amazing retentive powers of Mokbel’s bladder. Somehow nonetheless, after informing us that Mokbel does not frequently piss into the wind, the facts-incontinent Silvester manages to hitch his own pants up for long enough to stop doing so himself, and write this:

“There is only one crime on the books in Victoria that could help Mokbel cut a deal and that is the 2004 murders of the police informer Terence Hodson and his wife Christine. The key target in that investigation remains the former drug squad sergeant Paul Dale, a charge he denies. Police would have alleged Dale paid Carl Williams $150,000 for the hit. However the case collapsed when Williams was killed in prison last year”. (emphasis added)

Meanwhile, Paul Dale’s federal charges, which were supposed to have their first court date in March, remain either on ice, or the subject of a suppression order at least as retentive as Tony Mokbel’s bladder (allegedly, should I say?).

Speaking of allegedly, a Paul Dale sideshow did receive some media coverage last week and yesterday, with three associates of Tommy Ivanovic first being questioned by police over the attempted murder of a crime figure in Westmeadows in 1999 and 2001, and now Tommy Ivanovic himself being sought for questioning – all over a crime that, it seems to me at least, is both ancient and trivial in the scheme of things. No doubt the Herald Sun would disagree with this assessment – its URL went further than linking the questioned men with Ivanovic – they were associates of no less than Carl Williams (allegedly, of course), and so must be some serious bad-arses (if not also good bladders to John Silvester?). Paul Dale, you might have guessed, gets name-checked in the Fairfax, but not the Herald Sun reportage.

2010-11-10T13:50:00.000+10:00

Annexing the façade

Australian architecture has two faces. I speak particularly of inner-suburbia since March 1996 – when the Gay (and grunge) Nineties ended prematurely, replaced by no-off-button 24/7 real-estate porn. And who could resist something way better than a wank in front of a screen – the new porn is a Wank That You Can Actually Live Inside. And don’t be shy about inviting friends in on it – they’ll admire what you’ve done with your own wank; even to the point of admitting that they feel dark and cluttered in their own wanks, in comparison.

In case you’ve somehow escaped this 15-year porn deluge, I speak of the identikit renovations of a million-odd pre WWII inner-suburban houses. Like a mullet haircut, the façade will be all business (/conformity/“heritage”) out the front, and party out the back.

“Extension” is the usual name for these airy white cubes, but this seems too unduly modest a word (tacking another bedroom onto a fibro cottage in the 1950s was also called “extension”) for the indisputable money-shot, or crème de la crème of inner-city real-estate porn. I prefer “back façade”. Yes, I know that the usual extension is ten or so metres deep, but there is something about its skin that I, for one, can’t go past. You see, it’s press-button (or twirl a knob) nudey-rudey nude – the back wall actually opens up (and the bigger this on-demand hole in your house, the better, I’m pretty sure) to the outside, when the mood strikes you to do so. Thus, you let your live-in wank spilleth over into the streets, or your neighbours’ backyards, at a minimum.

If you think that my “porn” tag is just the bitterness of an Xer renting for life, let me remind you of some Aussie vernacular architecture from the not-too-distant past. Flyscreens. (!) And the lean-to. Actually, “lean-to” would be as good a de-tumescing describer for these identikit extensions as “back façade”, but for two things. First, there is nothing to lean against, as the new, steel-framed back-side is necessarily structurally superior to the old wobbly-bits out front. And then there’s the voluminous hole out back – there’s already a name for a lean-to that opens to the air: it’s called a verandah. And verandahs that are then re-enclosed are, I’m afraid, not the least bit wanky – any terrace house with an enclosed upstairs balcony positively screams “rooming house” to the street.

Which is why, I presume, almost every new house built in outer-suburbia in recent years is eave-less – to mimic the front façade of a rooming house (no inch of wasted verandah space here, thanks!). With their teasing blank-brothel-façades, we are reminded that outer-suburbia are not being prudish, or slouches in following the inner-suburban trend to being all party out the back. And with nothing in between.

2010-08-02T17:44:00.003+10:00

Not falling, landing. Three ways of touching down

One – down and out

An airplane intersects with the ground much the same as a human does. Lightly at first, then a heavier, simultaneous movement both downward and lengthways. A falling human’s split-second cascade of various body parts successively hitting the ground is not as elegant as an airplane’s precision-bump-then-roll, of course, but it is odd that there are no equivalent words for “touching down”, “runway” and “landing” (by which I mean the whole process of coming to a complete stop). Yes, we lack wheels, as well as designated falling/landing spaces. But the important thing is that falling – like landing an airplane – is at least as much a horizontal process as a vertical one.

The verb “fall” belies the imprint our bodies make along the ground as we decelerate; the dance-like attenuations of our collapse. You might also describe it as the “tracks” we leave, but this is a word with unfortunate, distinct static connotations (think plaster-casts of footprints) in its everyday meaning, while its Indigenous meaning is bundled with the mysterious (to non-Indigenous eyes) expertise of those who decipher feint tracks. I suspect, however, that by giving tracks momentum – i.e. doing away with the plaster-cast mindset – part of this inter-cultural mystery may be explicable.

This presumption to stasis is ingrained in Western culture. A car is “parked” – a curious word that means both the journey of deceleration (as with “landing” an aircraft) and the aftermath of this journey – the car as stationary object. Western humans “sit” in the same way that they park their cars, I suggest. The necessary journey to achieve stasis – a complex series of moves in both cases – is sidelined (if you’ll pardon the pun) by the word doing double-duty: the stationary aftermath is privileged because usually lasts much longer in time. In the case of sitting (down), the horizontal “runway” is also erased – as with a fall, it is impossible for a human to sit “down” in a purely vertical manner; the body must cantilever, i.e. (briefly) take up more horizontal space than the end-result “footprint” of the static sittee.

There are plenty of terms for going sideways while in contact with the ground: trip, slip, slide, scrape, sweep (away). All these are specific actions, in their usual meaning – but they also (if you look past the doing, to the done-to) describe surfaces: not-quite-flat planes with a vertical interest point, of imprint or overlay. Just please remember here that “texture” is a dirty word; weaving (from whence the word comes) is the antithesis of the runway moment. Texture/weaving conflates the horizontal and vertical planes; my interest is in their messier, genius intersections.

Two - space

“[Rover Thomas’ All that big rain coming from top side is] an imposing picture . . . Depicting a seasonal waterfall swollen by rain on Texas Downs station in the Kimberley, it is divided top and bottom by into narrow vertical planes in coloured ochres, outlined with little white dots. Up close, the surface of the picture offers all kinds of surprises – the ochre is lightly washed onto the canvas in some areas, and caked and gritty in others . . . [Rover] also managed to capture the sensation of light . . . with . . . purely the weight of his brush and the tones of his ochres”.

- Benjamin Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming 2008 p 201.

Unwieldy and random as it feels (and looks), any fall has its parameters, its “frame” on the ground. Being able to frame; i.e. set parameters to, 2D abstract art requires a mastery of scale/proportionality. I’m no painter, but I suspect that this mastery resides more in the done-to surface – the scraped, the swept-away, etc – than in the doing.

Three - time

“Maybe the parabola is the quickest way there.”

- Andrei Vosnesensky, as quoted by Leon van Schaik, “Behind the Door” Meanjin 2001 Vol 60 no 4 p 45.

Also verboten here is the idea of a slow-motion replay of your fall. The speed of a fall, for once, has body working ahead of brain. If you need to retrospectively analyse how you fell, then look to those two newly-imprinted surfaces - your body and the ground.

And take your time so doing – the early bird just misses the previous bus.

2010-05-28T09:17:00.005+10:00

Justice in Victoria buried in a shallow Collins-Street grave

Yesterday’s news – that ex-policeman Paul Dale is having murder allegations against him withdrawn – came as a surprise in just one way. Dale’s committal proceeding was already underway, but there has been no media mention of even this fact (let alone substantive coverage) of this whatsoever, bar today’s Herald Sun.

This suppression culture is farcical in the Google News age. I’ll let you join the dots here:

“Two key people had turned Crown witness against [Dale].” (ABC)

"The decision, which is believed to have been made by the Office of Public Prosecutions yesterday, follows the death of a key witness." (Herald Sun)

"A murder charge against Dale became possible only after key witnesses agreed to give evidence in the case. The witnesses included one of Melbourne's best-known criminal barristers, Nicola Gobbo, . . . George Williams, ''Little Tommy'' Ivanovic and the Hodsons' son Andrew." (Age. Note that the elision is merely back-story about Gobbo, i.e. does not express or imply any further witness names.)

Still unsure? Here’s a hint: the last three witnesses mentioned by the Age are all alive, and so can’t be the unnamed, deceased second key witness. Here’s another hint: this other key witness is presumably relatively recently deceased, as suggested by the Herald-Sun’s use of “follows”. The Age (and all others covering the story) couldn’t bring itself to even mention the fact of this second key witness being deceased, but the otherwise erring-on-the-safe-side Age couldn’t resist throwing in a couple of pantomime-subtle clues, in the names of two of the three living, non-key witnesses.

As for Nicola Gobbo, she has certainly been a useful fool for Paul Dale’s cause between 19 April and today. I sympathise with her mental illness, which would have considerably worsened her recent plight - as well as probably having caused her ill-judged decision in the first place, to wear a police wire in 2008. But of all people, as a lawyer she should know the Good Cop, Bad Cop game - her role, while fraught from the beginning, was patently unsustainable after the game was up with the death of her co-witness.

"A former Victoria Police anti-corruption investigator, who is familiar with the Dale case, described the lead-up to the current situation as a circus. ''In the murder of the Hodsons, Victorians should know that justice has gone missing in action.'" (same URL).

Actually, Victorians should know that the justice system takes them for fools - our justice system in 2010 is neither "missing" nor "in action", but an all-too visible, stinking corpse.

2010-04-19T20:46:00.005+10:00

Carl Williams, police informer

That’s a headline that was merely implied in this morning’s hardcopy Herald Sun (front page splash) – the official line was “that for legal reasons it is unable to detail why the payment [of daughter’s school fees and father’s tax-office debt] was made” (next URL). The school-fees/ police-informer story has since been expunged from the Herald Sun website. A case of blood on their hands, it would seem.

However, most other media outlets have been remarkably reluctant to point their finger at the tabloid attack dog. A Google News search at 7 pm AEST produced only two extant re-reports of the Herald Sun story. Neither of these was the Melbourne Age, supposedly the Herald Sun’s arch-rival. Neither of these commented/speculated further on the police-informer implication, but tonight’s 5 pm Channel 10 (national) news did.

Rather than go after one of their own, the media pack have instead generally gone for the opposite jugular – sanctimoniously pointing out that Williams, murdered in prison about 8 hours after the Herald Sun hit the streets, had it coming (“no surprise”), and duly re-hashing Williams’ lengthy criminal record. That Williams may have had at least one redeeming quality (a major one, IMO) – agreeing to be a police informer, in spite of the obvious risks – is the love (of daughter and father) that dare not speak its name, it would seem. All too human for a “serial killer”*?

Williams’ faith in the (presumed) strong assurances of Victoria Police that his police-informer status would be rock-solid confidential – despite all his instincts no doubt telling him the opposite – is touching. Or maybe, facing thirty years plus in prison, he was just resigned to the inevitable - that a corrupt police force and an amoral tabloid would sooner or later conspire to murder him, one slow-news Monday. At least, as a sort of pre-emptive legacy, he could provide for his daughter and father, come what may.

Either way – naïveté, or self-sacrifice (with possibly some self-interest** too) – in death, Williams looks mighty good in comparison to Victoria’s other underworld – our seamless, sordid media/government complex.

Update 23 April 2010

While looking for a reference for Simon Overland’s 2007 “serial killer” jibe, I came across a revealing comparison. Googling "Victoria's worst serial killer" comes up with a couple of 2007 references to Williams, and a whole lot more references to other killers clearly nastier than Williams. I could not find a direct Overland citation, however – for the record, my source was something I read online (probably the Age or Herald Sun) that afternoon (19 April). The context of Overland’s hysterical jibe (which if it were made, would have been immediately after Williams’ sentencing in May 2007) was apparently as a counter-balance to his public defensiveness two months earlier over Williams’ March 2007 plea deal with Victoria Police (a fact surprisingly little-reported in the last few days). In any event, Premier John Brumby has since taken on the “serial killer” hysterical jibe as his own. Presumably Brumby also has something unpleasant to expunge by so doing.

I wrote the post in a hurry, and should elaborate on what I meant by police corruption and Williams’ death. What I then meant by “corrupt police” was not mostly in a speculative sense. The leak of highly-protected information to the Herald Sun presumably came from deep within the Victoria Police. As early as Monday afternoon, it would surely not be difficult to, if not easily identify the leaker, narrow the field to a handful of police. The fact that several days later, AFAICT no progress (and quite possibly, no attempt at) has been made at prosecuting this serious crime – leaking strictly-confidential information, so as to perhaps (at least) incite a murder – speaks volumes.

The much-reduced life expectancy of high-profile criminals unmasked as police informers is well known. But in Victoria, you don’t need to rely on this as a general truism. Since the 2004 murder of Melbourne police-informer/criminal Terrence Hodson (and his wife), there has been an apparent strong link – still the subject of criminal proceedings – not just involving unmasking police-informers leading to murder, but also plain police corruption involving leaking highly-protected confidential information (straight to Hodson’s gangland rivals, not to the media as intermediary as in Carl Williams’ case), and far more else besides.

Former Victoria Police detective Paul Noel Dale (and his alleged hired gun Rodney Charles Collins) were charged with the Hodsons’ murders in March 2009. Progress on the prosecution since appears (see next para) to have been glacial, although Dale was granted bail on 11 September 2009. This was an extraordinary allowance made for a murder accused, who according to one of two separate pre-appellate judges denying Dale bail, “posed too great a risk to witnesses” (same URL).

Media reports on Tuesday (20/4) referred to a high-profile, unnamed criminal prosecution that, as a result of Williams’ death, would now almost certainly not proceed. It would be a striking coincidence – but also a very Melbourne, small-world thing – if this prosecution were that of Dale. I emphasise that this is pure speculation on my part; all factual information for this post comes from Google; i.e. the public record (which, from its scantness on the Dale prosecution, suggests sweeping suppression orders are in place over reportage of the case).

Speaking of the public record and suppression orders, Williams’ lawyer Rob Stary said this on ABC2 News on Tuesday (20/4):

“There have been 46 successful prosecutions of corrupt police in this state, but the public would have no idea about that". (video replay)

There is no transcript of this segment, and text reportage of what Stary said has wilfully omitted this surely important, succinct piece of fact.

You read it here first.

Further update 24 April 2010

From today’s Australian:

“It is already understood that one association that has appeared on the radar of the OPI and Task Force Driver is a decade-long link between one of Williams's fellow prisoners, Thomas Ivanovic - who was in the day room and reportedly on the telephone during Monday's attack - and a former detective on murder charges”.

and Age:

“It is fair to say that police have established Taskforce Driver to investigate the broader issues over the killing because they fear that corrupt police or former police may be involved. It is also fair to say that a high-profile case may have suffered a fatal blow at the same time as Carl was suffering his”.

You do the math.

And to Thomas Ivanovic, as the operator says – Hold the line (Friends aren’t always on time).

* In 2007, then Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland (previously, between 2003 and mid-2006, leader of the Purana Taskforce on organised crime) labelled Williams a serial killer (see also Update 23 April 2010, above), despite the fact that (AFAICT) Williams only killed within his own criminal fraternity. Ivan – now that’s a serial killer – Milat would no doubt be chuffed at Overland’s insult to Milat’s innocent victims, and the corollary beatification of Williams’ fellow-underworld victims. (Why didn’t they “have it coming”?)

** Assuming that Williams thought an early death preferable to serving his sentence.

2010-04-15T12:38:00.002+10:00

Booby prizes

The current Wynne Prize/Sam Leach controversy is remarkable for being a near-identical re-run of the 2004 Archibald Prize (both administered by the Art Gallery of NSW) legal challenge – big-mouthed boomer artist challenges talented, 37 y.o. Xer (Craig Ruddy, in the latter case).

“Eminent” Australian landscape artist Tim Storrier* – who likes a good Chesterfield armchair pose – is the most likely force behind the oh-so-boomer gesture of the email that “began landing in arts journalists’ inboxes” on Tuesday afternoon (13/4) – such precision timing and targeting, only matched by the level of its gutless anonymity (I’m presuming). Hint to Tim: if you’re so “eminent”, then maybe you don’t need to get your hands quite so dirty. Even if Storrier wasn’t behind the email, his on-the-record opinion that Leach’s prize-winning painting is “a flicker of that rather odious post-modernist practice of appropriation, which essentially is theft” is laughable. Apart from accusing Leach of a criminal act, he implies – rather “odiously”, surely – that the Wynne Prize judges are woefully ignorant of Dutch old masters and/or the Australian landscape. In contrast, Leach at least had the professionalism to be “quite confident that [the judges] would recognise the painting as being from that particular period” (penultimate URL), as well as (presumably) that the landscape was dubiously “Australian”.

I’m sure Leach now regrets entering the Wynne Prize – its modest $25,000 purse seems inverse to the Everest of vitriol heaped against him. Patrick White had the right idea about Australian prizes – not worth the bother of entering, or declining them if he was involuntarily entered. The National Gallery of Victoria, meanwhile, perhaps having read my 2006 blog post, has belatedly decided that it was “not in the business of promoting and awarding prizes”, which meant rejecting outright a $400,000 bequest to establish an award for a painting by an Australian artist “in sympathy with the work of E. Phillips Fox”.

* Storrier has never won the Wynne Prize

2010-04-05T13:11:00.002+10:00

Expert treatment of paedophile priests circa 1980

The latest Pope Benedict brou-ha-ha has featured a surfeit of moral outrage, from people who I am sure otherwise see public expressions of morality as on a par with corporal punishment in schools – something one is (of course) intrinsically unable to even imagine doing oneself, but is presumptively latent, and on hair-trigger setting, across a large swathe of the population otherwise. Personally, I am all for atheism in principle, if only it didn’t involve so-much goddamn tub-thumping, and so little doggedly clinging to empirical stalks of fact. For magnificently replacing the mainline opiate of the masses with a stealth-drip shovel-load of codeine tablets – take a bow, Christopher Hitchens.

Two particular stalks of probable fact have been given surprisingly little consideration: (i) the therapeutic and medico-legal treatment of paedophile priests between 1970 and 1989 (the high-water years of offending, other than in specialist (not boarding schools) institutions*), and (ii) the comparatively low rates (AFAICT) of paedophile offending by GenX men who were sexually abused as boys. The latter admittedly involves several assumptions and speculations, and really needs a lot more research before it can be rationally discussed. I am quite confident, however, that a strong correlation exists between male Xers (born between 1/7/62 and 31/12/76) and child victims of paedophile priests, and that adult male GenXers are not currently over-represented as paedophile offenders. I stress here that I am not, in any way, minimising the harm that was done to this child victim cohort. On the contrary, as I have frequently blogged before, Xers in general, particularly men, have some striking, sui generis indicators of poor mental health. This post is otherwise not much about Xers’ adulthoods, however – but by shining a much-needed spotlight on the expert treatment of adult paedophile priests c.1980, I hope some incidental glimmerings may emerge of how the same system, at the same time as it purported to “fix” adults, uniquely and comprehensively “broke” – or at the very least ignored – a 15-year cohort of children.

In hindsight, it hardly needs to be said, whatever the expert treatment comprised, (i) it generally did not work (i.e. prevent further offending by the patient), and (ii) would not be considered today, other than as an adjunct to a custodial (presumably) sentence following first-resort criminal proceedings (and such treatment, even today, is of doubtful efficacy anyway). But to be fair to the Catholic hierarchy, if they were following lay/“civilian” best practice at the time, a fair measure of blame and moral indignation can surely be shifted to the relevant experts.

Unfortunately, my “spotlight” here doesn’t illuminate much specific data. It certainly appears that some kind of “treatment” was very common in the interlude between a paedophile priest being moved out, and in to the next location, Father Peter Hullermann’s case being a seemingly shocking example of how indecently short (he resumed duties a few days after treatment began) this interlude could be. Not known by me, but all important, is the relative scientific value of the “treatment” at the time. At one extreme, “treatment” could be a euphemism for a cynical PR-exercise: burying the problem as quietly as possible, all done 100% in-house. At the other extreme, the Catholic hierarchy would be placing their utmost good faith in outside experts. However, because the latter has never been overtly pleaded (AFAICT), by those who it would surely most exculpate, it appears quite improbable. Much more likely, then, is that the “expert” treatment received by paedophile priests c.1980 was of doubtful or nil scientific value, even at the time. That said, this is a topic which could certainly use some detailed further investigation, and an open mind.

The case of Father Peter Hullermann provides a useful postscript here:

“Father Hullermann resumed parish work practically on arrival in Munich [where he was to undergo treatment], on Feb. 1, 1980. He was convicted in 1986 of molesting boys at another Bavarian parish” (same URL).

Umm, that’s actually quite a long gap, as far as the offending patterns of paedophile priests go, unless the 1986 charges cover conduct back to about March 1980. But no, it appears they relate to the Sep 1984 – June 1985 school year. Somewhat surprisingly, then, Peter Hullermann’s “treatment” actually may have worked, at least for a while. Other reasonable alternative possibilities, however, are that there are unknown/unreported offences from the intervening years, or that he was kept on a tight leash, such as working in girls’ schools only (penultimate URL), during this period.

More saliently, the 1986 charges also resulted, inter alia, in Peter Hullermann’s treatment – I have omitted the quotation marks this time because its medico-legal bona fides are clear: Hullermann’s sentencing package was an 18-month suspended sentence with five years of probation, a 4,000 marks fine, and an order to undergo therapy. Laughable today, of course, but hard to lay solely at the feet of the Catholic hierarchy.

And as to why all this came out only recently, it should come as no surprise that we have the undeservedly only slightly-famous Xer from central casting to thank, or blame:

“The case that has raised questions about the future pope’s handling of a pedophile priest in Germany came to light three decades after it occurred, and then almost by chance. It happened when Wilfried Fesselmann, an early victim, said he stumbled on Internet photographs of the priest who sexually abused him [at age 11], still working with children. Fesselmann, who had long remained silent about the abuse he suffered in 1979, said the pictures stunned him and spurred him to contact his abuser. Thus began the convoluted process, which included an extortion investigation against Fesselmann for the emotionally raw e-mail messages he sent the church in 2008 demanding compensation, that ultimately put Pope Benedict XVI in an uncomfortable spotlight. After the police investigated him for blackmail, Fesselmann did not discuss his charges [which were dropped in 2008, after several weeks of investigation] publicly until last month . . . [Meanwhile, charges against the priest for what he had done to Fesselmann were ruled out as ‘clearly past the statute of limitations, [so] no investigative proceedings against the priest were started.’]

Fesselmann, now 41, an unemployed father of three . . . [and] a large man with a gentle manner, . . . was no stranger to public attention. He has written two books on living well off the German welfare system, and he has appeared on television many times”.

Xers in adult life have never played by the book, for which we have often paid the price, as per the obscene – but sadly, also quite predictable – attempt by the German state to cast Wilfried Fesselmann as criminal perpetrator. The secular system – never mind the Catholic church – has failed Xers since birth with a comprehensive malice. Our reaction to this has only barely begun to be expressed.

* In these specialist, non-boarding school institutions, offending peaked in, or possibly before, the 1960s, in large part because such institutions closed soon thereafter.

2010-03-05T15:50:00.008+10:00

Tony Abbott – up Fossil Creek without a spare water-bottle?

Longitude 131 west of Alice Springs is perhaps a mysterious relation to the three great salt lakes that straddle (1) the NT/WA border further west, at 129°. While the unnavigable (thin salt crust atop deep blue mud) salt lakes have a serpentine north-south road around two of them, longitude 131 is simply a gap on the map. An invisible dividing line, it exerts a strong, and often hidden, attraction to cross it – to go west. But not far – after suitably messing with your head, you will be spat out slightly confused, and turned around to face – retreat – east; consciously, although no less painfully so this time.

Explorer Ernest Giles spent almost two months, in September-October 1872, unsuccessfully searching up and down longitude 131, around the Tropic of Capricorn, for a viable path west to the Indian Ocean:

“[Giles] also made his first acquaintance with another distressing fact in the geography of the Centre. Every westward-trending line of mountains eventually falls away . . . Past the end of the MacDonnells [a point about 50km east of 131°] . . . the ‘mountains’ and ‘ranges’ – Putardi, Udor, Kuta Kuta, Ehrenberg, Kintore – are worn hills of fractured rock . . . stand[ing] separate from each other in a ragged plain, rough and dismal.” (2)

A case of not being able to see the mountains – not to mention the Cleland Hills (3) – for the plain – or the irregularity of the former not compensating for the predictability of the plain, at least. Admittedly, objective geographical fact in this area often ends as abruptly and disappointingly as the Western MacDonnells – and moreover at the very same point, just east of longitude 131. Google “second highest mountain in the Northern Territory” and you may expect, after name-checking Mount Zeil (at 1531m, the generally-accepted highest mountain in the NT), mention of Mount Liebig (usually ascribed a height of 1524m). Instead, Mounts Sonder (at 1380m) and Edward (at 1397m) are the only named contenders by this phrase. Indeed, my pre-metric Reader’s Digest Complete Atlas of Australia gives Mount Liebig, at 5,000 feet, the thumbs-up over Mount Zeil, at 4,955 feet. Conversely, the official Australian government site records Mount Liebig at a lowly 1267m. Someone’s (Haasts) (4) bluffing here.

Anyway, as I was saying, the longitude 131 pattern is that you reach a western-most turning point. After which, when your return journey reaches, literally or metaphorically, the solid ground of the Western MacDonnells, the recriminations begin. Ernest Giles, after sacking his expedition assistant in consultation with his second-in-charge (and only after reaching comparative safety), found instead his second-in-charge taking off, in high dudgeon, with the said assistant (5). The path or road back east to Alice Springs, for all its solid ground, is where the loss or “lost” really sets in.

Midnight Oil’s 1986 strange journey from Yuendemu to Alice Springs has a prescient ring to it: Charlie McMahon, a jack-of-all-trades acting as Guide For a Day, who has lived and worked in the area (6), but was “unfamiliar with this part of the country” (7) got his erstwhile charges – in this case, the members of Midnight Oil – “well and truly lost” (ibid). How and why McMahon and the band went “too far west” (ibid) is left open in Andrew McMillan’s account, tantalisingly so when the Tanami Road from Yuendemu to Alice Springs appears (on a map at least) to be a well-worn, obvious path, and all the more so because the Oils’ Yuendemu gig was their last in a dusty, “dry” tour of the Western Desert, and the comparative civilisation of Alice Springs is (or should be) only a three-hour drive from Yuendemu. Unbelievably, you may think (that is, if I so far haven’t convinced you about the mysterious powers of longitude 131), the Oils’ road crew got separately lost – again heading west, of course – while trying to make a beeline for Alice Springs from Yuendemu (ibid). This time, though, the explanation is simpler: a wrong (right-hand) turn, just out of Yuendemu (presumably towards Nyirrpi). More haste, less beer, perhaps.

Tony Abbott’s journey getting “lost” west, or south-west, of King’s Canyon had a nominal purpose – seeing sacred sites – that seems to have fallen by the wayside, either on the day, or overshadowed by subsequent media coverage – remember, this is the zone where (cue spooky music), you struggle to see the mountains for the plain. The three journo’s who got “lost” with Abbott – Tom Dusevic from the Australian (an objective non-story only worth a passing, 136-word mention), Paul Toohey from the Herald-Sun (the full catastrophe), and Mark Davis from Fairfax (the Age and SMH) each published accounts of the experience quite different in their emphasis, with Mark Davis’ two accounts also curiously (or maybe not) dissimilar.

What does not appear to be in dispute (although neither Davis account makes this explicit) is that the participants’ chief concern was having run out of water, by about 6pm (Toohey). While Toohey’s account has it that the group were expected (and so presumably expected themselves to be) back by 5:30pm, even accepting this, it seems that the group set out for the day with insufficient water between them.

As to whose fault this was, probably we’ll never know. Primary responsibility to bring adequate water would surely be upon each individual participant. I suspect that, if supplies weren’t originally communal from the start, late(r) in the day, the water-provident shared with the improvident. As you do, of course. The “lost” drama – in which the guide and another member went off – announced – for a 20-minute (Toohey) foray that turned into two hours, while the main body of the group simply stayed put (8) – coincided with the time the water ran out. Without this fact, I strongly suspect, the l-word (and so the whole media story) would not have even arisen.

Once back at King’s Canyon Resort (remember “solid ground” and let-the-recriminations-begin, above) Tony Abbott did speak up, nailing the water-improvidence issue without naming, or even implying (AFAICT) the malfeasor/s:

“We were one jerry can of fuel, six bottles of water and about three hours of daylight short of what we needed.” (same URL)

Of the four published accounts, only Mark Davis’ SMH story runs this quote. Longitude 131 around Capricorn, I salute your ever-reliable caprice.

Footnotes

1. Lake Hopkins is entirely (just) in WA.

2. Ray Ericksen, Ernest Giles: explorer and traveller (1978) William Heinemann p 71. Giles' original intention was to stick south of the Western MacDonnells (and so the Tropic of Capricorn) (p 66), but he ended up going as far north-west as the Ehrenberg Ranges. To the south-west, his path was blocked by the near-continuous quagmire of (salt) lakes Amadeus and Neale. Had he back-tracked slightly east, Ericksen notes (p 83), Giles would have been able to skirt Lake Amadeus, and thence proceed west from Uluru. (Footnote amended 6 March 2010).

3. “At Cleland Hills, some three hundred and twenty-two kilometres to the west of Alice Springs [and 40km west of longitude 131], are low and stony ridges which Aboriginal people frequently visited. They camped in the area at Gill Creek and Uliila Waterhole and in both places there are paintings and rock engravings. There is much archaeological evidence of human presence. Some of the paintings and engravings are quite remarkable. Over three hundred in number, they include tracks, circles and human faces”. David Carment, “History and the landscape in Central Australia” (PDF), 1991, p 31.

4. “Yet errors were made [by Giles] and later travellers confused – as witness, for example, two widely separated features each named Haast’s Bluff on the maps.” Ray Ericksen, p 72. Haast’s (or Haasts) Bluff is also notable for being at the uncomfortable intersection – or near-miss, perhaps – of two great Indigenous art-traditions: the Western MacDonnells water-colour school (Albert Namatjira et al), and the Western Desert school (starting at Papunya in 1971). Haast’s Bluff (or one of them, at least) is about equidistant from the Western MacDonnells and Papunya; i.e. out on the plain, apparently belonging to neither.

6. Ray Ericksen, pp 84-89.

6. Andrew McMillan, Strict Rules (1992) Sceptre pp 42, 53-55, 295 (official role on tour is “camp coordinator”).

7. Andrew McMillan, pp 152-3.

8. Toohey’s account varies strikingly from the other three in this respect. While Dusevic and Davis (in the SMH) imply that the group simply stayed put during the two hours in question, Toohey maintains:

“As he set off, [our guide] said: ‘You blokes walk up that valley. You’ll find cool, sweet, crystal clear water and plenty of rock art’. We walked up. There was no water. There was no rock art”.

A slight variant to the stay-put theory is offered by Davis (in the Age)

“We were happy enough to be left to mosey around, looking for Aboriginal rock art in a couple of nearby caves.”

The weight of numbers, combined with the seriousness of Toohey’s implication, suggests that Toohey’s account is a gross exaggeration. (Footnote added 6 March 2010).

2010-02-17T15:44:00.006+10:00

Batty Country: We’re all looking for an easy way*

Environment Minister Peter Garrett doesn’t wanna be the one. His present Insulation-gate predicament is a nasty media beat-up, in my opinion (below), but then again, it is plain that Garrett’s best work, and federal Labor governments, do not mix. Midnight Oil’s discography goes into qualitative inexorable decline with the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983, barring 1987’s exceptional Diesel and Dust, clearly inspired by a tour the band made of the Western Desert in 1986 (the Oils also toured Arnhem Land at this time, (Andrew McMillan, Strict Rules (1988)), but any resultant inspiration is opaque).

So who should be blamed for the electrocution deaths of three young men (one actually a 16 y.o. boy), and the heat-stress death of a fourth? Well, given all four deaths happened in a Queensland (correction 23/02/10: the employee who died of heat-stress was working in Sydney, NSW) workplace, and that all four men were employees (AFAICT), how about laying primary blame on their employers, and secondary blame on the Queensland workplace-safety system?

The media have been remiss in ignoring the latter, especially given that Blind Freddy would know that retro-fitting ceiling insulation – think confined, unventilated spaces and bulky, toxic (fibreglass) and/or electricity-conducting (foil) work products – is that rare thing in the modern age, a classic Dickensian job for this generation’s young neo-chimney sweeps. Plainly, far too colourful an image to even be entertained. At the other end of this story is the hard-science (and –economics, and –OH&S), what-if angle: If instead the subsidy had gone to beefing up the energy-efficiency of new homes (only), such as by encouraging optimal orientation and eaves, such a scheme would have been inherently much safer and harder to rort. But it’s probably un-Australian to even think about such an alternative.

The media, and Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, have also been strangely reticent in naming the companies that employed the dead men, never mind the individuals behind these companies. Last Saturday’s Oz is typical:

“[Mitchell Sweeney’s] employer, a company set up by two 20-something men in September, who have refused to comment on the matter, has been kicked out of the government's rebate scheme.”

Evidently, Mitchell Sweeney’s employer was one of the 7,000 odd (from a pre-scheme 250 (ABC TV 7pm news, 15 February 2010, video excerpt) to 7,300, which is almost a 2,000% increase) companies hastily set up to profit from the generous federal government subsidy scheme that Garrett has supervised since its inception. Again, Blind Freddy could tell much just from these plague-proportion and contagion-speed numbers – but if you’re still not convinced, then I suggest that the thousands of two-bit, overseas-student visa-shops (sorry, private colleges) in Australia provides a concrete business model, if not an actual blueprint for the insulation shonks.

In both cases, there is a messy state-federal regulatory overlap, and customers inherently unlikely to complain about the usually sub-standard quality of their (nominal, in the case of overseas students) product/service. The reasons why overseas students usually won’t complain about their classroom content are obvious, but as to why, with apparently 1,000 house fires (same URL) likely to be forthcoming, Australian consumers aren’t (also) screaming blue murder, puzzles me. I suspect that there is something in the Australian character which, when a product/service is “free” (as insulation under the Garrett scheme is, although obviously it is ultimately paid for by taxpayers), simply shrugs at a slapdash result.

Not one of the 7,000 odd brand-new insulation companies is the 30-years-in-business Arrow Property Maintenance, the employer of 16 y.o. Rueben Barnes when he was killed on the job. Nonetheless, this death was all Peter Garrett’s fault, according to Arrow Property Maintenance director, Chris Jackson.

Named, but not quoted on Peter Garrett’s culpability was licensed electrician Ben McKay, of Big C Electrical (now called QHI Installations Pty Ltd), as sub-contractor to Countrywide Insulation, the employer of Matthew Fuller when he was killed on the job.

Garrett’s biggest omissions, in hindsight, are not to: (i) have banned foil insulation products from the scheme, and (ii) have made training for all insulation installers (not just supervisors) compulsory, until last week (Feb 9 and 12, respectively). These omissions hardly amount to industrial manslaughter, though. This story does have a pointy end, and it is about time that the media sharpened their weapons and focused their targets.

* Lyric from Midnight Oil, “Lucky Country”, Place Without a Postcard (1981)

2010-02-07T14:11:00.001+10:00

Watson’s law

I have oft pointed out the sharpness of the inter-generational divide between boomers and Xers, meaning that someone born in 1964 (like me) is comprehensively shafted compared to someone born in 1961 or earlier. Yet still more bricks seem to be freshly appearing on top of this inter-generational Berlin wall, which I’ll coin “Watson’s law”.

The latest Watson’s law, anti-Xer palisading is conjectural, I grant you. But because it fits into a well-established pattern, I think it is still worth a mention:

“Treasury now projects a return to surplus by 2015 and the burden of an ageing population not taking the budget into deficit again until 2032-33, provided future governments manage Labor's spending growth target of 2 per cent a year after inflation”.

Yep, there’s a projected budget black hole from 2032 – just after I become eligible for the old-age pension at 67 (the currently mandated age). This makes no sense demographically – the youngest boomers will have already been on the pension (rorting it, in many cases, of course, because they are stinking rich) a few years by then, meaning that the budget black hole should be during or before the late 2020s, not later, when new old-age pensioner numbers are actually dropping steeply, thanks to the mid-60s baby bust.

OTOH, 2032’s projected black hole dovetails perfectly with a case to raise the pension age for Xers up from 67, in due course. I have previously speculated on this, which would fix a notable anomaly – currently the pension age for both those born in 1961 and 1964 is 67; an injustice so heinous to those born in 1961 I’m surprised that ex Labor leader Mark Latham (b. 1961) hasn’t come out of his obscenely early, obscenely well-funded retirement to protest it.

Retiring just in a nick of time, however, is ex-Treasurer Peter Costello, who appears to be waiting at one of those nursing-home “bus stops” for a bus that will never come:

“All those babies born over the past few years will be in the prime of their working lives by 2050 and supporting the ageing baby boomers (same URL).”

So in 2050 boomers, aged between 89 and 104, will be merely “ageing”? Kerr-ist, GenY (b. 1977-1990) will be half past 67 in 2050.

2010-01-21T10:45:00.003+10:00

Pakula in charge of the cheque blank

How does $494m for a new public transport ticketing system (“myki”) blow out to $1,300m (or $1,400m) yet remain within the same “financial parameters” *? New Transport Minister Martin Pakula is the latest in a long line of short-tenure Transport ministers and Transport Ticketing Authority chairmen, CEOs and spokespersons, all of which have successfully dodged, so far, this billion-dollar question. Albeit some left skid marks in their haste: former (and inaugural) TTA CEO Vivian Miners abruptly quit one day before he was due to give evidence to a Victorian parliamentary committee on the state’s ticketing tender.

In his first day on the job, Minister Pakula conspicuously caught the train towards home, only to be met at his local station (not walking distance, but bus-serviced) by his taxpayer-funded, chauffeured 4WD (penultimate URL). Like flying your private 747 to guest-speak at a global warming conference, Pakula’s transport arrangements are a handy emblem of public-private partnerships in general.

The last mile, the fine print of the contract, more than undoes the whole point of the exercise - yet this sordid excess is either wholly exempt from scrutiny ("commercial in confidence"), or, like Pakula's 4WD expedition home through the manicured streets of Black Rock, quickly-forgotten tabloid fodder.

* [For the myki tender,] TTA was able to maintain its output-based requirement, achieve broad intellectual property rights and deliver a contract within the financial parameters set by Government. TTA is confident that the procurement result will provide the best opportunity to deliver a truly world class solution for Melbourne.
- Vivian Miners, CEO (page 5, emphasis added)

a world class fare payment solution for a world class city
(page 6, all lower case, in large letters with a page to itself, and all rendered, no doubt, in a world class font)

The RFT [i.e. myki tender] was strongly outcome-based, with a broad warranty regime, including a ‘Fit For Purpose’ requirement. These concepts represented a ground-breaking approach to the development of an integrated smartcard ticketing system. It was designed to ensure that the onus remains with the successful contractor to deliver a solution that meets, and continues to meet, the requirements set out in the tender, industry best practice and Victorians’ needs for a world-class fare payment system. (page 7)

Above 3 quotes from Transport Ticketing Authority 2004-2005 (signed off September 2005) Annual Report.

2010-01-19T14:19:00.003+10:00

From town hall to corner pub – a 1,300 km stumble

Supposed Laverton, WA loan shark Sam Tomarchio sure has a big territory for his business – all the way from Kalgoorlie to Alice Springs, according to the Oz’s Paige Taylor. This is despite Tomarchio expressly ruling out a Kalgoorlie customer base in the same story: “The ones here [in Laverton, 250 km* NNE of Kalgoorlie] are a different breed to the ones down in Kalgoorlie . . . they’re relatively half-honest” (same URL).

In fact, it appears that most of Tomarchio’s Laverton customers are visiting from the Ngaanyatjarra lands, which centre on Warburton, a dry community 500km NE of Laverton. It is possible, although I doubt it, that the one-pub town of Laverton also acts as a magnet for penurious visitors all the way east from Warburton to Alice Springs, a further 800km north-east. My strong suspicion is that Tomarchio would have even choicer words on the inadvisability of money lending to the Indigenous residents of Alice Springs than those of Kalgoorlie.

In a context quite removed from Tomarchio’s business, however, Paige Taylor’s Alice Springs reference is not without striking relevance to just about any Ngaanyatjarra story – the Ngaanyatjarra Council and Ngaanyatjarra Health Service are both based in Alice Springs, despite that town being almost 1,000km from Warburton by road, and in another jurisdiction. I should note here that while Ngaanyatjarra Council does many things, it is not a local government body – the Warburton-based Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku is this, and so strictly-speaking, Warburton’s “town hall” is indeed in Warburton.

Why Ngaanyatjarra Council and Ngaanyatjarra Health Service – which presumably ruled out Warburton as a base on the grounds of remoteness – did not settle instead for Laverton, Leonora, or Kalgoorlie (towns in ascending order of both urbanity and distance, but all closer to Warburton than is Alice Springs) is more than an administrative quirk. Laverton, vis a vis Ngaanyatjarra locals, is in a governmental blind-spot, despite its obvious importance as Warburton’s closest, by far, unrestricted (c.f. Yulara) alcohol outlet.

It is not surprising, therefore, that with so much Ngaanyatjarra alcohol-enabled dysfunction necessarily exported to Laverton – way, way removed from Alice Springs, a town with plenty of alcohol-enabled dysfunction of its own – Sam Tomarchio should emerge as the implied Fagin/boss of this alcoholic underworld (the details of which are politely – I would say cynically – left unspoken by Paige Taylor).

Also unsurprising is that Tomarchio’s two main apparent enemies are the Laverton police and the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku (the Warburton-based one). Both have evidently exceeded their respective mandates in their eagerness to “get” Tomarchio. Damian McLean, the Ngaanyatjarraku shire president “has succeeded in encouraging more than 100 Aborigines to cancel their bank cards and default on their loans” (same URL), while “Laverton Police believe Mr Tomarchio’s actions are immoral” (WTF?) and claim that “because of Mr Tomarchio, trouble occurs any night of the week and not just on the days when Centrelink money arrives” (both same URL). The latter appears to be an argument in favour of epic binge-drinking; if so, Paige Taylor has sorely disappointed us by not getting a Tomarchio-esque direct quote from the police-officer concerned on why Ngaanyatjarra locals are better drinkers on a once-a-fortnight basis only.

Meanwhile, the Alice Springs-based Ngaanyatjarra Health Service – which would see to be the logical chief advocate for shutting down a business accused of preying on its vulnerable patients – seems to just sit on the media sidelines, so muddying the real issue. Tomarchio’s lending business undoubtedly has a predatory side, but it is hard to imagine what shutting it down might actually do to improve Laverton’s alcohol-based health crisis. In other words, Tomarchio is just a bit-player, but a convenient scapegoat on the wrong side of Warburton from Alice Springs.

In any event, Tomarchio’s lending business now appears to be finished – with $100,000 in bad debt, and every indication from WA police brass that there will be no further inquiries on this front (same URL). Although Tomarchio’s modus operandi – of taking custody of his customer’s physical ATM cards and PINs – seems sordid, it is a much riskier way of ensuring payment that the more usual payday-lending method – a direct-debit authority. Tomarchio’s “security” can be quickly made worthless by a phone call to the bank’s lost-and-stolen card hotline (no change/closure of account required), while cancelling a direct-debit authority requires written notice to the bank, and even then, sometimes continuing liability regardless (I have heard of money being direct-debited from closed accounts, i.e. the former account-holder being billed the amount).

Also, belatedly trying to do some Tomarchio-scapegoating, or if not, Trojan-horsing, is Centrelink, which “is preparing to recommend to Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin that income management be introduced in the region [whatever that means] as a means of reducing Mr Tomarchio’s access to Aborigines’ welfare payments” (same URL). Meaning that, as with the current (since 2007) Commonwealth Northern Territory Intervention, up to 50 per cent of Centrelink payments would be quarantined for food and essentials. Shifting the Northern Territory Intervention over the border into WA (or parts thereof, presumably) of would be a big step in some ways. In other ways, though, it would merely ratify the status quo – that the current “Alice Springs-model”, of top-heavy, remote governance of a constituency in a downward spiral of dysfunction, is a dangerous and contagious disease, transmissible over 1,300km without even an Alice bureaucrat’s finger being lifted.

* Unless otherwise indicated, all distances are approximate and as-the-crow-flies.

See also : A long, long way from Patjarr – the death in custody of Mr Ward (18 June 2009)

2009-12-30T14:38:00.003+10:00

Gulp! Predicated on . . .

Reading a book by Gerald Murnane recently (a writer only recently discovered, but serendipitously so, given he’s Melbourne’s Proust – forever frozen in mid-life), I came across a word I can’t remember encountering since primary school – predicate. In case you missed grammar for 10-years olds circa 1974, it consisted of just one set of four word-categories (noun, verb etc) and one binary pair – subject and predicate. (And in those days, grammar was like sex education – it came but once, ready or not, and one size fits all. I never again had a lesson on the g-word’s intricacies, up to and including Honours English at Melbourne Uni. But I digress.)

It struck me at about age 10 that predicate-spotting was rather lame; once you had identified the “subject” (a spotting usually so easy as to be itself veering on lame), the “predicate” was usually simply the rest of the sentence. You might as well have called “subject” words starting with “s”, and “predicate” words starting with in letter other than “s”, and then given 10-years olds a hundred sentences to sort out which was which.

Murnane is not the sort of writer to muse over empty grammatical vessels, however. It turns out (from consulting a dictionary) that “predicate” does have a rather precise, if now old-fashioned, meaning – to assert something. Which of course every sentence does, in a way (hence the simplified grammar lesson for 10-years olds), but “predicate” more particularly means a formal or serious assertion, or in more modern parlance, “stand up and be counted”.

No wonder, then, that the p-word has dropped into seeming redundancy over the last few decades. “Assertion” now more or less means asking for – and usually the getting of – what you want, whereas a few decades ago this was called making (and, if applicable, being granted) a request. I’m pretty sure than “predicate” and “request” (in their old-fashioned, particular meanings) would be considered mutually exclusive.

Predicate’s erasure has been made easier by its modern bastard child, “predicated on”. The former has 3,950,000 Google hits, while the latter is fast catching up at 2,140,000 hits.

“Predicated on”, at its modern, frequent worst, means contingent upon the happening of an event outside the speaker’s or subject’s control (eg: a Western politician saying “Climate change being stopped globally is predicated on China committing to immediate, binding emissions reductions”). In other words, the exact opposite of an old-fashioned assertion (“Climate change can/will be stopped”). Thus, “predicated on” is a mumbled piety, prefacing and airbrushing the real message: which is, in more modern parlance, “the ball’s in their court”. If you like, “predicated on” usually has a sting in its predicate.

Coincidentally, just before taking some medication the other day, I caught myself thinking something which also sent me to the dictionary. The exact moment was the deliberate swallow (of just saliva) I made shortly before I swallowed the medication (with water). It occurred to me (probably not coincidentally after reading Murnane), that this pre-medication swallow was a particular one – i.e. it wasn’t a simple swallowing of saliva, but a rehearsed, conscious and inevitable lead-up to the taking of medication in tablet form.

There seemed to be a conveniently apt word to describe the intense expectation, and yet empty pointlessness, of this pre-medication swallow: Gulp! Until I looked up “gulp” in the dictionary and saw it defined as guzzle, or to swallow/ingest a lot. Another case of modern linguistic slippage – “gulp!” is, like “predicated on”, a secular piety which so brashly prefaces that which follows it that the thing and its preface cancel each other out. And not to mention, pervert their respective dictionary meanings – even if you tried, how could you greedily swallow saliva?

And so in medication, as in life, after suitable dispensation, we unknowingly, casually, blissfully drink it down.

2009-11-16T13:17:00.005+10:00

Myer, Australian Taxation Office bumbling, and clueless journalism

The name “Myer” has long been familiar to anyone who has studied Australian tax law. Five years before Mabo in 1992, the High Court more or less “did a Mabo” – that is, made a decisive break with the past, so as to achieve a just result.

While Mabo involved combing through 210 years of documentation, none of which included a High Court direct precedent, Federal Commissioner of Taxation v Myer Emporium Ltd set up a dramatic break with the recent past – a big, pointed “f* you” to the golden days of tax avoidance under the Barwick High Court (Garfield Barwick retired as Chief Justice in 1981, the same year as the disputed transaction in Myer Emporium took place), and even more recently, a bit of a whack also to Barwick fellow-traveller, Harry Gibbs, who was in the process of being eased out as Chief Justice as the Myer Emporium case was heard in 1987.

Unfortunately for Australian taxpayers, history doesn’t seem likely to repeat this time around, with ATO bumbling meaning that Myer vendor TPG’s billion-plus capital gain – a fact, if not exact sum, well telegraphed in advance by every broadsheet in the land – was out of the country before it decided to act.

On the other hand, the ATO could be forgiven for some confusion if it relied on our broadsheets for guidance on capital gains tax. I’m not expecting journos necessarily to be experts on this specialist and intricate area of law (which I have lectured in), but knowing the broad-brush basics should be mandatory.

According to the Australian’s Andrew Main and Susannah Moran, relying largely on Professor Michael Dirkis (a former colleague of mine):

"The ATO action brings to a head a long-running battle it has had with overseas investors, exacerbated until December 2006 by a number of loopholes in Australian law, and by the ATO's constant problems in getting money from foreign jurisdictions.

From about 1997, said University of Sydney Michael Dirkis professor of taxation, 'it became very optional for foreign investors in Australia to pay capital gains tax on their profits' . . . Professor Dirkis, who said it was usual to use a Dutch entity because the Netherlands had one of the lowest withholding taxes on capital transfers, expressed no surprise at the structure, but predicted the case would test a December 2006 revamp of the CGT rules. Swanston bought the Myer assets six months before that date.

'Under the old rules, if you were not disposing of an Australian asset, you were not liable for CGT,' he said, noting that had been an ongoing gap in the CGT rules for years. The 2006 revamp, which to the best of his knowledge has not yet been tested, claims CGT even if companies are selling an indirect interest in an Australian company'".

Sounds plausible enough (because I haven’t studied or taught the 2006 CGT changes, I offer not personal expertise here) – a loophole that lasted a decade or so, a la the Barwick High Court’s licensed tax avoidance, followed by probably useless (I think this is safe to assume, if three years on, it hasn’t been tested even once) 2006 “closing” of the loophole.

A quite different angle on the 2006 CGT changes, however, was that of the Age’s Ian McIlwraith, writing on the same day as the Oz’s Andrew Main and Susannah Moran. McIlwraith opines:

"What confounds the tax experts is that under amendments in 2006 to the levying of capital gains tax, there is now an exemption if the first holding company is incorporated offshore, with Australia agreeing to allow that shareholder to be taxed in its country of incorporation, in this case the Netherlands".

That is, according to McIlwraith, the Howard government – rather astonishingly, in my opinion – “did a Barwick” in 2006, forgoing all CGT revenue that would otherwise arise from Australian-nexus transactions, providing that the vendor was incorporated elsewhere.

As Paul Hogan could well say – “You call THAT a loophole? THIS is a loophole!”. And Garfield Barwick would be proud, too – the good work of the Mason High Court 20 years ago now seems to amount to no more than some 18th C letters patent, destined for a 200-year+ obscurity, before perhaps the Mason legacy will also be dusted off and used as a prize exhibit by another tribunal circa 2200.

Update 6 December 2009

The plot thickens. Subsequent coverage in the Australian has veered from the those-ATO-hicks-are-scaring-off-foreign-investors angle to a (belated) forensic unpicking of TPG’s chain of ownership in yesterday’s Oz, showing some distinctly sloppy – perhaps even to the point of being legally smelly – paperwork on TPG’s part.

A question no commentator seems to have thought too much about is: Who ran Myer in the 3½ years TPG owned it? Maybe the chain of stores simply ran itself, and TPG, as no more than a passive investor, fortuitously – and quite accidentally, of course – made a huge profit. The difference between running an (Australian) business, vs being a passive investor in the same, matters hugely because profits made through the former are taxed in Australia irrespectively of the taxpayer’s domicile, while the latter type of profit – aka capital gain – is not taxed in Australia if the taxpayer is a non-resident (as of course TPG made sure it was).

Some confusion arises because there are two ways of pinning TPG to the running of an Australian business – statutory CGT law and case law. Re the former:

“Michael Dirkis, professor of taxation at Sydney University, said ‘there were three criteria devised in 2006 to catch higher levels of CGT . . . but it's the third that the ATO appears to be relying on. It says CGT is payable on any asset used to carry on a business through a permanent establishment in Australia. If you have a workshop, or a factory, or an office [or a chain of shops], that may apply.’”

Contrary to what I wrote in my original post, and now after having combed through the 2006 changes, I fail to see that these changes in any way enhanced CGT revenue – the opposite seems to be the result, and certainly the legislative intent. However, what happened in 2006 is important here for what didn’t change then – and the carrying on of a business through a permanent establishment in Australia remained a statutory trigger for non-resident CGT liability both before and after 2006.

Separately, as I alluded to in my original post, there is a body of case law, admittedly much of which predates the introduction of CGT in 1985, which takes an expansive view of how what may loosely be called “windfall profits” can be categorised as arising from running a business, and so taxable as ordinary income. It now seems clear (but wasn’t at the time of my original post), that it is this particular tack that the ATO is pinning its hopes on.

So was TPG running a shop? Such duties would be far too pedestrian for the financial-engineering whizzes, seems to the argument here:

“One industry adviser suggested that it seemed as though the ATO also didn't understand how the industry worked. ‘TPG is making millions of dollars for investors in their underlying funds. Those investors include pension funds, including Australian super funds, family offices, banks. It's not like (the late) Kerry Packer has gone and made a billion dollars. TPG was the management company, which was managing that process. It's not a corporate, it's a manager of money.’”

Admittedly, double-taxation – of both ultimate investors and TPG entities – seems to follow from the ATO’s approach. TPG’s alternative claim is more starkly ludicrous, however – it necessitates a belief that for those 3½ years nobody – nobody – was minding the shop.

Whether, over the same space of time, anyone was minding the ATO is a less absurd, and rather harder to answer question.

2009-10-26T15:52:00.005+10:00

Sunrise and shade-set at Uluru

Shade – meaning that which is to sunlight as black is to white (not tonal gradation) – is a mostly blank spot in the Australian consciousness. The jolly swagman made sensible use of it, but Dorothea Mackellar couldn’t see the shade for the sunlight-sucking trees, despite otherwise being fond of clichéd dichotomies#. In modern times, shade has been domesticated into the amorphous and everywhere – shade-cloth and shade-sails – and the nowhere/too-hard-basket, viz the 95% or so of new houses built since the 1970s (when the basics of passive solar orientation of houses became something a 12-year-old kid would know) apparently designed for maximum summer (and minimum winter) sunlight-sucking. My kingdom for an eave – to the north, of course, and casting a 30° shadow – may be the catch-cry of the small minority who care about such things: us urban, surly neo-swagpersons (“eaves-spotters”?).

In nature, shade is justly largely synonymous with trees – from the architectural splendour of the banyan (here I mean the shaded spaces, not the living skeleton) to the aloof, but nonetheless welcome, tessellation of the desert oak (surely the ultimate inspiration for tall, anorexic fashion models worldwide). But everything that is visible and above-ground, not just trees, casts a shadow, of course – arguably most dramatically of all, a large steep-sided rock/mountain.

It should be no surprise that Uluru’s shadows/shade barely rates mention as a prominent feature or attraction for visitors. Indeed, the moving of the rock’s tourist infrastructure from hard against the south (= maximum, partially-permanent shade) and east side (= all-afternoon shade, a la Gold Coast beaches) to well away to the north-west (aka Yulara) was in part a deliberate shunning of the Uluru shade experience, in favour of "our" Sunburnt Country's – only replete with 5-star shade-sailed things – cosy familiarity.

Viewing sunset and sunrise on the rock (from the west and east, respectively) are obvious, actively promoted Uluru attractions. I wonder how many such viewers stop to ponder, or even consciously experience, the several km-long shadow the rock casts at sunset and sunrise on the rock (more or less to the east and west, respectively). Admittedly, the shade experience is a moveable feast, in terms of both real-time (as the shadow lengthens while simultaneously tracking south) and seasonal considerations (June’s sunset shadow trajectories will be many km’s south of December’s, and vice versa).

In seemingly perverse contrast, sunset and sunrise viewing at Uluru have been corralled into officially designated Viewing Points since at least the 1970s, despite wide and deep theoretical viewing arcs, which would allow more or less the same thing to be viewed from an extensive area, providing that there is some elevation at that point. Also, as long as these potential sunset/sunrise Viewing General Areas (if you will) were due west/east (or up to about 20° north thereof) of the rock, they would also be usefully static; that is sunset/sunrise could be experienced from go to whoa at any one point in the area, in any season. Great if you want to do the folding-chair-with-drink-holder thing, of course, and conversely a bizarre, pointless ritual for the highly-mobile, shadow-chasing minority sect.

As it happens, the sunset and sunrise official Viewing Points at Uluru do (or did until very recently) fit neatly into the due west/east to 20° north thereof optimal viewing arc I have proposed. It is hard to be too precise about this, however, because of the rock’s irregular shape (and, to a lesser degree, because these “Points” themselves extend hundreds of metres sideways along an arc, not depth-ways along an axis). What can be stated with confidence is that the sunset Viewing Point is sigificantly further from the rock that the (pre-October 2009) sunrise one (about 2 km vs 1 km), and that, due largely to the rock’s acute angle at its eastern tip, the former allows (or allowed) for better “go to whoa” viewing in summer, but is (or was) equal to the latter in winter.

Enter (finally, you might be thinking) the new official sunrise Viewing Point at Uluru, as opened by federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on 7 October 2009. This time 3 km from, and (judging from pictures of the opening) about due south-east of the rock, it took a surprisingly long time (at least in the opinion of this hardened eaves-spotter) for the media to twig that the new sunrise location – which provides an excellent view of the southern face (which runs almost due east-west) of Uluru, but nothing at all past the eastern tip – would not be much chop in mid-winter, when the sun would not even glance upon the southern face. The shade-optimising consolations of the new location somehow escaped media notice (caustic sigh), but not so the new location’s dual-purpose view of Kata Tjuta, as well – at 30 km away, another triumph of shadow-less viewing experience engineering (harrumph).

More surprisingly, the second two-weeks-apart stories in the Oz, alluded vaguely to “cultural and sacred sites reasons” for the big move (IMO not “nearby”, as the first story puts it) in the sunrise Viewing Point from 1 km ENE of the rock to 3 km SE of it, while the first story was just-the-facts specific:

“Under traditional law, visitors are barred from taking photos of the rock from the north-east face because it reveals sensitive sites” (penultimate URL).

In case it is not clear, the pre-October 2009 sunrise Viewing Point looked at the north-east face of Uluru both exclusively and closely. This face is also immediately recognisable from any photo by the presence of a hemispherical (not elongated) outline and horizontal (not vertical) banding.

There is much more that could be said about indigenous sensitivities in these matters, but I’ll simply note that official park maps do show seven zones of “cultural significance” (aka “sacred sites”) on and adjacent to the rock, in/of which photography and filming is specifically prohibited. Three of these zones (which at 200m wide, or less, add up to perhaps about 5% of Uluru’s circumference) are on/adjacent-to the north-east face of Uluru, while another three are on the north-west face (which is directly in front of the sunset Viewing Point). The final zone is at the western end of the southern face. It should also be noted that at least one of the north-east face sensitive sites is particularly prominent; i.e. readily discernible even from a distant, whole-of-face omnibus image.

Finally, there seems to have been at least a third, quite different, sunrise Viewing Point at Uluru since the 1970s (I am not sure whether the sunset VP has been equally as mobile and/or controversial). Bruno Zimmerman’s Landscapes of Central Australia (Perth, 1973, unpaginated) has a photo captioned “Uluru-Ayers Rock from sunrise viewing point” apparently taken about 2 km ESE of the eastern tip*, and thereby showing (relatively unusually) both the southern and north-east faces. Another book from the 1970s, Derek Roff’s Ayers Rock and the Olgas (Ure Smith, 1979, p 48) shows two (uncaptioned) sunset shots from what appears to be a similar location as the brand new sunrise Viewing Point. One of these shots, which has cropped out both the sun itself and the distance specks of Kata Tjuta, actually shows Uluru (southern face) in formidable, just-shy-of-monochrome shade. I’m hoping, on behalf of eaves-spotters everywhere, that one day (if perhaps only when we rule the world) this particular image of Uluru will become de riguer – the new black.

# Although in "My Country" Mackellar waxes about the "green and shady lanes" of England (footnote added 27/10/09; body of post also slightly edited on this date).

* Possibly at or near the site of the former ranger station; see Bill Harney, To Ayers Rock and Beyond (1969) Seal Books pp 62, 66, 93-96.

See also related post: The view from Mt Ayers (21 July 2009)

2009-09-02T17:27:00.006+10:00

Tim Holding’s slide and Xer pride

It took a surprisingly long time for the media to run a plausible account of how Tim Holding came to be marooned at about 1100 metres (I am guessing this elevation from the vegetation and lack of snow shown in the rescue-winch video) on the north-west face of Mt Feathertop. This puts him about 800 vertical metres below the summit, and also well below the two huts (Federation and MUMC) on the west face – in forest far too thick to have slid down through/to, even if one tried – yet even after today’s press conference, the Age is running an updated story that gives no more particulars than Holding’s previously-reported slide near the summit, on icy terrain.

In fact, this icy-slide detail was known even before Holding was found, when bushwalker Ray Kennedy was quoted in media reports that went to press Monday night. Apparently Kennedy (and party) checked whether Holding was okay after his slide (same URL), and after being assured that he was, his party summitted. In an earlier report, apparently also quoting (but not naming) Kennedy, on their return from the summit, the party noticed that Holding’s footprints showed him heading downhill, but not on a track. For whatever reason, this account (which I have cohered from two separate reports) gained little media traction, however. A post-today’s press conference story on Ninemsn, quoting Holding, corroborates the going-way-downhill, off-track story, yet without commenting on its eyewitness/third-party media antecedents.

This (barely-reported) truth doesn’t make Holding look good, for at least two good reasons, neither of which concern the media’s current hobby-horses – whether Holding had good-enough gear, or shouldn’t have been hiking solo in the first place. I would have thought it was obvious that going off-track, below the treeline at least, is a bad, bad idea. The Ninemsn story gives this account:

“The minister said after sliding down the ridge he came into contact with a group of hikers with snow boots who asked him if he wanted to go with them. ‘I decided it was better to [go back down the hill] and return to the treeline.’ But Mr Holding said he became lost as he tried to follow a river to the bottom of the mountain.”

In mitigation, Holding:

(i) was probably in shock from his slide below the summit (having myself summitted Feathertop in winter, Holding is not exaggerating to say that he easily could have died from the fall alone – i.e. impact injury);
(ii) was probably wise not to go up (again), even in the company of others. Why another, compromise option – such as waiting for the group to return from the summit, and then walking down the mountain (presumably on the track!) with them – was (apparently) not considered by Holding may well relate to his pride as a fit and experienced walker, a pride compounded, in my view, by his being an Xer;
(iii) was not taking a ludicrous risk, as far as going off-track to the treeline (i.e. about 1400m) goes. But he obviously didn’t consider the “Then what?” (another common Xer foible, I can personally attest) – in particular the approximate 800 vertical metres (that’s 240 storeys) of bush-bashing between the treeline and the Harrietville valley (= civilisation/safety). If Holding really thought that “follow[ing] a river” (particularly in forest between 600 and 1200 metres elevation) was going to help here, he was either (a) concussed, or (b) not nearly as experienced a walker as the media have generally given him credit for.

Finally, what may have also helped undo Holding was another characteristic Xer behaviour tic – that of the Heroic Side-Trip. Holding pointedly did the Feathertop walk on his way back from opening a cross-country ski race at Falls Creek. Only an Xer, I think, would throw in a 22-hour* (including overnight sleep time) stroll up and down Mt Feathertop in winter as an incidental deviation to one’s main journey.

Update/Correction 3 September 2009

It now appears that my inference – that Ray Kennedy and party’s offer of assistance to Holding may have been conditional on Holding accompanying them to the summit – was incorrect, and that the offer was, should Holding accept it, to go straight down (and thus cancel their summit plans). My earlier confusion here was because I didn’t realise that Holding’s reference to his reluctance, after his slide, to go back “up” actually refers to his being below track level; i.e. the only conventional way down the mountain meant going temporarily up the dangerous, slippery ice. That Holding grudged this side-trip, or failed to assess that his chosen alternative was actually much riskier than going up the ice for a bit, seems to be the decisive factor in his subsequent predicament.

Perhaps Holding wasn’t comfortable with having an audience watch him get back up to the track. In any event, it should be noted out that Holding made his fateful decision to go down alone off-track on the back of two streaks of incredible, coincidental luck: his not having his mobility (at least) injured in his slide, and his having company (at minimum) for his descent, should he choose.

It is an axiom of mine that windfall-luck impairs one’s judgment, particularly when it comes to apparently small decisions. Had Holding been less “lucky” – or, for that matter, had he been less experienced/fit/adequately-equipped – then the climb back up to the trail would surely have been a foregone conclusion.

* On my calculation, Holding left his car in the Harrietville valley at about 2pm Sat, and expected to return to his car about noon Sun.

2009-08-05T14:58:00.002+10:00

Parallel parking is war

There’s a great photo in today’s hardcopy Australian (unfortunately not online, AFAICT). Run alongside this article on page 5, it is captioned: “Taking no chances: an officer stands guard as evidence arrives at AFP headquarters”. It shows a man wearing a flak-jacket, helmet and goggles standing in (about 4 m out from the kerb) Latrobe Street in Melbourne’s CBD, apparently giving parking indications to an out-of-frame vehicle (an important car or truck, admittedly, by being itself, or containing, “evidence”). The man is not wearing a simple – and sensible in the circumstances, I would have thought – fluoro-vest, despite or because of all his other safety accoutrements.

This picture would make a suitable end-of-decade bookend to the usual 11 September 2001 images. Indeed, in 500 years time, when the latter images will be as forgotten as their counterpart money-shots of bombs exploding, etc, in World Wars 1 to n, this picture may well be as good a visual summary as anything of this decade’s (at least) Western-world lives and minds – the banality of body-armour, a philosopher in 2500 might sniff. “Paranoid drag” is what I would call it.

To understand the power and symbolism of this drag, measure it against the dress and personage the context, of parking helper, might ordinarily suggest: a fluoro-vest, worn by a lackey. That is, there’s a pointed inversion here – deliberate drag, rather than just a man in women’s clothes, as it were.

As it happens, this inversion is also quite concrete – simply juxtapose it again this fluoro-vest, worn by a lackey, image, and add a bit of background. The photo, of the entrance guardhouse at Sydney’s Holsworthy army base – of course, the principal ostensible target of the latest round-up of alleged terrorists – lacks both visual and human interest, so it is helpful to know that the fluoro-vest guy is an unarmed, civilian security guard, presumably employed by a multinational company that has the contract to run the entrance guardhouse at the base, and pays its staff much less than the ADF pays its soldiers. A soft target, indeed:

“Opposition defence, science and personnel spokesman Bob Baldwin said yesterday that if the alleged plot had been carried out, it was likely civilian guards at Holsworthy would have been killed in cold blood. ‘Unarmed civilian guards would have been slaughtered, absolutely slaughtered,’ Mr Baldwin said. ‘Now is the time to be proactive. Events overnight have shown that now is the time to introduce armed defence personnel to guard our bases,’ he said.” (same URL)

Au contraire, the Australian Defence Association’s Neil James – showing all the mettle of a brewery shop-steward in the week before Christmas, circa 1976 – says that, while a case could be made for arming civilian guards at major bases such as Holsworthy, the ADA opposed the use of soldiers as sentries:

“I would think about arming some of the private security guards. But a soldier’s job is soldiering - training for war - and not acting as security guards on the base front gate”. (same URL)

What James is really saying, I think, is that his union members, if they answered Bob Baldwin’s call for entrance-guardhouse duties, would simply have nothing to wear. Fluoro-vests are obviously out of the question, while flak-jackets would be too comically theatrical.

2009-07-21T19:03:00.006+10:00

The view from Mt Ayers

It is a shame, I think, that “Ayers Rock” took the running from “Mount Ayers” early on (1). As a mountain, Uluru – another double-edged name, as we shall see – sits and fits comfortably between nearby Mounts Olga and Conner. As a rock, however, Uluru is singular in both environs and size. One medium-sized (for the area) mountain thus is remade into an outsize (marsupial-) molehill, with, by implication, an anti-climactic summit. Which image is probably the only neat convergence ever of Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of Uluru. Apart from the fact of this re-scaling, and so mythologising, the divergence is swift – a place cluttered (if that is not too strong a word) with Indigenous meanings, but just one big, empty myth for we non-Indigenes: a Big Rock, Geddit?

There is still a lot to explore, despite the uniform emptiness, when it comes to white Australia’s Uluru fascination/myth. Let’s start with the obvious – Uluru’s shape is like a round-to-oval cake, albeit with a curved edge between top and side/s and side/s not quite vertical, right? The usual Uluru postcard view, looking from a few km north-west of the mountain, no doubt helps fuel this misapprehension, but I’ve been to Uluru (in December 1994), and was still none the wiser, until recently. An aerial view, and some other reading, then opened my eyes – Uluru ain’t no monolith, it you accept that this connotes a regularity, if not symmetry, in shape. It’s got a heavily scalloped “coastline” at its base, for starters, and the top and side/s divide is even more complicated, as we shall also see.

Charles Mountford likened the aerial outline of Uluru to a kite (2), and one can indeed see this diamond pattern – the bottom of the kite being the two long lines meeting at the eastern tip, and the top of the kite being the two shorter lines meeting at the western tip, aka “the climb”. A kite-shaped outline necessarily requires four corners, however, and I see even less chance of the “northern corner” (or right-hand tip of the kite) et al, entering the vernacular than “Mount Ayers”. From the ground (never mind, for now, from the summit), Uluru simply doesn’t have corners. Moreover, when approaching and at the rock it is hard to get a handle on the N-S, E-W orientation basics – I’m guessing that few visitors arriving by road even notice that the (only) road to the rock comes in from the north-west, almost the opposite direction to the lengthy easterly course that all Uluru-bound cars and buses (bar those arriving through Docker River, aka Kaltukatjara and Kikingkura) have taken from the Stuart Highway.

Personally, I prefer to see the aerial outline of Uluru as a map of Australia, with the four tips/corners being (clockwise from the north) Capes York, Howe, Leeuwin and Londonderry. This admittedly entails a host of geographical liberties, including the severe squishing of WA and a phantom peninsula where the Gulf of Carpentaria should be, but it is highly appropriate, of course, to my idea of the rock having a heavily scalloped “coastline”. In addition, Uluru’s pronounced vertical lines/grooves complement such an imaginary map, by running obediently north-south through it (in contrast to their northwest-southeast actual compass axis).

In any event, we need to shift now from rarefied overview to side- or usual-view – meaning, certainly, Uluru from the ground up, and perhaps also from the summit down (from a standing, not aerial perspective). It is probably no surprise that the Indigenous perspective of Uluru is particularly dense at and near ground level, and that conversely, non-Indigenous eyes seem to only pick up interest with increasing height above ground, as though the rock only becomes The Rock after unambiguously soaring above the plain.

The “climb” is one obvious example of non-Indigenous ground-o-phobia at Uluru, less well-known is the frequent importance, in Indigenous tellings of Uluru, of nearby freestanding boulders – mere rocks, says my reflex White scoff, not the rock. Which is precisely the Indigenous point, I suspect – The Rock is actually a rock among many, heavily tethered to its particular place on and among earth. The irony is that this is the only “coastline” in Australia not coveted, and probably not even seen, by non-Indigenous Australians. The supra-liminal, unambiguously Rock-y Rock above is all we come for – a whole lot of nothing, local Indigenous minds could safely say.

Which nicely brings us to the “climb” itself. On a conventional mountain, there is a “start” (or bottom) and a “summit”, with the bit in between usually not rating its own noun – “climb” is a verb, plus it’s generally a statement of the painfully obvious. At Uluru, these conventions are mostly reversed – and necessarily so, as anyone who has been to the “summit” of Uluru could attest (but for some reason very rarely do). For the record, the top of Uluru is not what you expect. There is no view, unless you were to make your way to one of the steep sides, and negotiating this would make the “climb” itself the equivalent of a walk in Melbourne’s Bourke St Mall. Picture crossing, from the “summit” cairn any which way you choose, a slightly concave, and so apparently endless, wilderness of skate-park half-pipes cobbled together, with occasional trees and shrubs growing within – I couldn’t conceive of a more perfect landscape for getting seriously freaked-out and/or lost in.

Perhaps I should have clarified before this point that I have done the “climb” (and then, it hardly needs to be added, got the hell back down). Author Barry Hill, after also confessing to the “climb”, suggests that there is a sort of Doing-everything-once plenary defence to the doing of the “climb” at Uluru specifically (3). If so, it’s not the excuse I’d prefer to plead, while recognising that some words in mitigation or apology seem obligatory. So here goes: it was summer, stinking hot (I had hardly slept a wink in my tent at Yulara the previous night) and an early morning hour or so of exercise, aka the “climb”, was a sort of compensatory treat for last night’s prostrate sweat-bath, and a whole day of too-hot-to-do-anything to come. Pathetic, yes – but I can honestly say I learnt something that morning, at least looking back 15 years later. Or maybe this is just me crawling back to the Barry Hill defence, the sneaky long way round.

Uluru’s summit has not quite been disposed of – we will return to it soon, only not via the “climb”. Before leaving the “climb”, it is worth noting that the start/bottom of is perhaps as vague as its summit. Not in the sense that you could possibly miss it, but in that few tourists notice (certainly not me at the time) just how singular a feature of the rock it actually is. Of the dozen or so peninsulas on the rock, it is the only one that, from aerial outline, breaks the trend-line. It juts north-west, in direct alignment with the grooves, far enough to be the rock’s western tip, yet little enough to be a barely discernable bump, much less one of the four corners, in the standard postcard view of Uluru (it’s about two-thirds of the way to the right).

The local Indigenous understanding of the “climb” is as an end-ramp for the mala (a small, now endangered wallaby, aka "marsupial rat") men, concluding their long journey from the West, by staging a big ceremony at what is now the rock. The non-Indigenous understanding is of a conveniently less-steep gradient than the rest of the rock, whose only significant orientation is “up”. Needless to say, this is not a journey. The first (and quite possibly also the last) non-Indigenous Australian to do what might be considered the appropriate approach to the “climb” – i.e. walk to Uluru from the far West (around the Gibson Desert) – was Ernest Giles, in April to June of 1874. Fittingly perhaps, Giles (who had rejoined his surviving party in the Rawlinson Range on 1 May) appears to have left well alone the very last leg of the mala men’s long journey (4). Giles’ nemesis William Gosse, definitely did the climb (in July 1873), however – in bare feet (5), for some reason.

Uluru – whole rock or rock-hole?

So far, I have largely (ahem) circled around Indigenous understandings of Uluru – deliberately so. As far as the “climb” specifically goes, I have drawn a long bow, or tail, as it were, by emphasising the mala men’s overall journey, not just its last stage at Uluru. The opposite end of this macro-geographic approach is to now focus on the rock and to ask whether there is an Indigenous “whole”, if not essence, of Uluru – something that can contain or cohere all the many Indigenous micro-understandings of places/features on and around Uluru. But rest assured, I have no intention of being encyclopaedic here – even if this were possible, it would be culturally inappropriate for me to attempt such an exercise. Instead, I want to highlight a single feature of Uluru, and to do so from an explicit “armchair” basis – comparing the treatment of this feature by three non-Indigenous authors. The reason why there is (perhaps) a connection between this single detail and Uluru as a whole is simple: the feature I will discuss is rock-hole, also called “Uluru”.

I am hopeful, but not certain, that the following discussion would not be considered culturally inappropriate by Indigenous owners or managers of Uluru (the rock, that is; to avoid confusion, I will henceforth call Uluru rock-hole exactly that). My reservations largely stem from two of the three authors – Bill Harney and Charles Mountford – being excoriated in recent decades for, among other things, revealing Indigenous secrets about Uluru. The third author – Barry Hill – is in fact one such critic, as well as a writer from a more enlightened time: his Uluru book was written in the early 1990s, while Harney’s was written in the early 1960s, and Mountford’s in the 1940s. Countering these reservations is the fact that Barry Hill’s Uluru book at least mentions, albeit briefly, Uluru rock-hole by name:

“[The ancestral serpent] is called Wanampi, and it guards the Uluru waterhole in the upper reaches of Mutitjulu gorge” (6).

In fact, neither Harney nor Mountford have much to add to this, as far as their glosses of Indigenous understandings of Uluru rock-hole go. Instead, the Uluru rock-hole story that I want to tell, while containing ample mystery, is a geographical one, at bottom (and top, and sides). Put simply: Where on the rock is Uluru rock-hole?

Barry Hill’s above-quoted location of it “in the upper reaches of Mutitjulu gorge” is a useful starting point for my armchair quest. There is no mistaking what is Mutitjulu gorge – the big indentation on the south side of the rock, as singular an indentation among lesser others as the “climb” peninsula is – apart from the fact that this gorge forks, one branch going north-west (exactly following the vertical grooves), while the other goes more or less straight north. More worrying about Hill’s approach, however, than which gorge-branch (after all, it has got to be one or the other) is his interpretation of Harney, who “put the serpent at the base of the rock . . . ‘in the valley of Uluru’” (7). Harney does not place Uluru rock-hole/valley at the base of the rock, as the caption to the picture facing p 81 (8) makes clear – it is about halfway up/down, as well as being definitely the “north” (right-hand, as you look from the south) fork of the gorge. Page 91 of Harney, which refers to the Wanampi serpent looking down on tourists, reinforces this. Barry Hill has for some reason assumed that a “valley” can only mean something at ground level, as opposed to a “gorge”, which can also have “upper reaches”.

This probably would be just pedantry on my part, were it not for Mountford also entering the fray, as it were. Whatever Harney’s faults in his dealings with Indigenous sacred knowledge were (and FWIW, Harney never climbed the rock (9)), Mountford was much, much worse. A handy barometer of Mountford’s attitudes is this:

“I decided to make the complete ascent, and get the matter of Uluru [rock-hole] over with, once and for all” (10).

Ah, so Uluru rock-hole is at or near the top of Uluru, or at least accessed by the top, you might think (as well as secretly hoping that Mountford didn’t get what he so badly wanted “over with” that day – in which case you’d be pleased that his Indigenous guide couldn’t find Uluru rock-hole on that day). Mountford appears adamant that Uluru rock-hole “is on the summit of Ayers Rock” (11), albeit somewhat paradoxically also being a “deep catchment” (ibid). Rather more paradoxically, he locates it on the “northern” (12) side of the summit (the opposite side to Hill’s and Harney’s Mutitjulu-gorge general area), yet his map (13) clearly locates it on the southern side, about 500m due east of Harney’s north-fork-of-the-gorge, about-halfway-up/down location. Several days later, Mountford does finally make it up and over the summit to what he is presumably told is the Uluru rock-hole (14). I will confidently speculate that it was no such thing – more so than because of the various contradictions in the rock-hole’s location is the fact that (as I can personally attest) there is no well-trodden path on the summit from top of the “climb” to what would surely be “the” rock-hole, were it on, or accessible from the summit.

And with that, we’ve gone full circle, I think.

Sidebar: Should the “climb” be banned?

One easy answer to this (provided that you have read the above exegesis) is that the rock ramp/peninsula that is also known as the “climb” be generally accepted as an extension of the summit, in which case going one metre up it from the ground will surely be sufficient summit for most (pedestrians journeying from the Gibson Desert possibly excepted). Sadly, while this makes perfect sense to me, because (i) the actual/“summit-iest” summit is comprehensively underwhelming, and (ii) up vs down on the rock is not as clear as you would assume without knowing the strange story of the Uluru rock-hole, I can’t really see it happening.

More drastic, but eminently justifiable IMO, is removing the posts and chains from the “climb”. These were apparently first installed in 1964 and extended in 1976. Charles Mountford (among many others, of course) climbed Uluru at least twice before/without the chains’ assistance. If others want to follow in Mountford’s footsteps and “get [it] over with, once and for all” – and I’m sure there always will be some, chains or not – then so be it; they will hopefully get what they expect, which is to say deserve. Certainly I did.

After climbing the rock in 1994, I was much taken, and chastened, by these words, on a display at Uluru ranger station, quoting a female Anangu (local Indigenous) elder on why tourists should not climb Uluru:

“Even if you don’t climb the rock, the chains will still be there”.

Footnotes

1. In his magnum opus, explorer Ernest Giles (who was narrowly beaten to the summit by fellow explorer William Gosse) concedes “[Gosse] named this Ayers’ Rock”, but then a few lines later deliberately slips this in: “Mount Olga is the more wonderful and grotesque, Mount Ayers the more ancient and sublime”. Australia Twice Traversed Vol 2 (1889) pp 61-62.

2. Charles Mountford, Brown Men and Red Sand (1967) Sun Books p 66.

3. Barry Hill, The Rock: Travelling to Uluru (1994) Allen & Unwin pp 96, 105.

4. Strictly speaking, Giles rode on horseback for more than half of this eastward journey from near present-day Patjarr, although he gets significant “walking” brownie points for staggering alone through the first 120 miles, aka the Gibson Desert, with no food and scant water (albeit this epic feat involved Giles doubling-back on his own outward (westward) tracks). On 9 June 1874, Giles and party camped at a “roomy cave” at the rock for three nights. His Australia Twice Traversed then ambiguously records of this time:

“Ayers’ Rock . . . stands with a perpendicular and totally inaccessible face at all points, except for one slope near the north-west end, and that at least is but a precarious climbing ground to a height of more than 1100 feet.” (Vol 2, p 61. Four nights after leaving the rock, Giles and party returned to camp there for a further nine nights, a length of stay whose reason was the butchering, smoking and boiling of a horse, for the onward journey back east: ibid pp 63-66.)

Ray Ericksen, Giles’ biographer, does not mention whether or not Giles climbed the rock (Ernest Giles: explorer and traveller (1978) William Heinemann p 178). Presumably, Giles’ original journals (of which Australia Twice Traversed is an edited summary) would definitively answer this question. Barry Hill notes that William Tietkins – Giles’ second-in-charge in 1874 – when leading his own exploring party in 1889: “was drawn to ‘improve the rock’, [but] did not climb it.” The Rock: Travelling to Uluru p 74. Incidentally (or perhaps not), Tietkins was also the also the first photographer of Uluru (ibid pp 72-75) – not that his 1889 Uluru photographs are what you probably would expect. In this unfamiliarity they have an important similarity to Gosse’s 1872 barely-recognisable, because of or despite its ample detailing, drawing of the southern tip of Uluru (ibid p 64).

5. I recall reading the bare-foot detail; but can’t find the reference.

6. Hill, The Rock: Travelling to Uluru p 132

7. Ibid.

8. Bill Harney, To Ayers Rock and Beyond (1969) Seal Books.

9. Although Harney once attempted the “climb”, getting about two-thirds of the way up: To Ayers Rock and Beyond pp102-3, c.f. 82.

10. Charles Mountford, Brown Men and Red Sand (1967) Sun Books p 72.

11. Ibid p 68; presumably “the enormous bowl-shaped depression high up on the rock” (ibid p 70) is something else.

12. Ibid p 73.

13. Ibid p 67.

14. Ibid pp 87-9. In Ayers Rock - Its people, their beliefs and their art (Pacific Books, 1971), Mountford writes:

"Previously [i.e. in Brown Men and Red Sand], my informants, not being Ayers Rock men . . . made a mistake in the identification of Uluru rockhole" (p 152, footnote 29). Editing note: this footnote amended 27/10/09).

2009-07-07T11:14:00.001+10:00

You know you’re getting old when . . .

- You put the wheelie bin out two days in advance, and collect it five minutes after the truck has been. Instead of vice versa.

- You no longer have the chronic disease of intermittent raging thirst, which compels you to the potentially life-saving step of carrying a full water bottle whenever you are more than 100m from a reliable water source. That’s the good news; the bad news is that, despite newly being able to go for whole hours without even a sip of water, you will have the frequent, intermittent but raging need to do a wee whenever you are out and about.

- You no longer casually cast five-cent pieces from your pocket into your proverbial or literal too-hard basket, but plot to spend them soon, like they are radioactive ticking bombs. Invariably, you will come up with the Noah’s Ark strategy – two by two they can be usefully expended, before their accumulation becomes a biblical flood.

However, I’m still yet to experience my episode of the seemingly compulsory middle-aged-man, silly-hat phase. I’m hoping that a mild, albeit grossly premature case of this phase in my twenties will be enough inoculation against it for a long while yet.

Happy 45th birthday to all us Winter of ’64 Xers.

2009-06-18T20:22:00.002+10:00

A long, long way from Patjarr – the death in custody of Mr Ward

In custody or in transit?

You might think that the recent “4 Corners” story, ‘Who Killed Mr Ward?’ was impeccably researched, going by the rather special archival footage (shot by Ian Dunlop of the Commonwealth Film Unit) (1) of Mr Ward at three-ish, in 1965, alongside his large family, who were all at that stage nomads living in the Gibson Desert.

Alas, however, it was all downhill from there – certainly for the “4 Corners” story, and perhaps also for the life of Mr Ward. I’ll begin my castigation of “4 Corners” with the charge of geographic vagueness, if not plain error:

“His family members have travelled in [to Kalgoorlie] from the remote north-eastern communities of Warburton, Tjuntjuntjara, Patjarr and Warakurna, between 500 and 1000 kilometres away” (transcript slightly edited).

Patjarr, the most northerly of these communities, is a long way closer to the Southern Ocean (Great Australian Bight) than Kununurra, in far north-east WA, and closer still to the Indian Ocean (the Eighty Mile Beach near Sandfire Roadhouse) in north-west WA. While “central WA” would be probably the most accurate moniker, this sounds jarring, for some strange reason (most other states have a well-understood and in common usage “centre”). Failing this, the more usual geographic basket that Patjarr, et al, are put in is “the Western Desert” – admittedly this is shamelessly east-of-129° centric, but it’s also clear that it refers to a WA region that is neither Kalgoorlie nor Kununurra, etc.

The second piece of geographic vagueness is the transcript’s reference to “Baddya” (a phonetic transcription of the Ian Dunlop footage voice-over) rather than Patjarr. Here, I am assuming that these two similarly named, and if not identical, very close together places (2) are one and the same. I am not just being pedantic here: the modern-day community of Patjarr, which was established about 1990 (3) in an area in which Mr Ward obviously had some affinity with, is – if you draw the connection I have – a curious silence in the life of, Mr Ward. “4 Corners” only recounts:

“The same year this footage was shot [1965], the [Ward] family moved from the desert, to the more westernised life in the remote community of Warburton [about 200 km south of Patjarr]”.

Warburton was then a mission (4) community/“community” – another omission by “4 Corners”. Why Mr Ward as an adult then chose to stay in Warburton, a dry community which was mission de-commissioned about 1975 (5), is surely a salient point.

Next point: the friendly cop from Warburton and dodgy JP from Laverton. I don’t know why Neil Gordon was part of the “4 Corners” story. All the good-cop/bad-JP, Warburton/Laverton juxtaposition showed was that Mr Ward, sober in Warburton where he was a pillar of the community, was perceived very differently to Mr Ward, drunk in Laverton where he was an obvious out-of-towner. No kidding. It would have been much more worthwhile to have interviewed Neil Gordon’s Laverton-cop counterpart (I’d guess that s/he would have come across Mr Ward before, unlike the local JP, apparently).

Next, continuing the theme: the surprisingly scrupulous prison-contract company, AIMS. In 2001, after a WA Inspector of Custodial Services report had highlighted air-conditioning problems in prisoner-transport vans, AIMS commissioned its own report from an air-conditioning expert, which recommended that the type of van Mr Ward was to die in seven years later, near the end of a 400 km trip, was used only in the metropolitan area (i.e. on short trips). This report was subsequently ignored, “4 Corners” informs us, by the WA bureaucracy. I am puzzled by this: surely the more pertinent observation is that AIMS then proceeded to ignore its own report, by (it appears) continuing to use the vans on long, hot trips.

It is hard to be certain on this point, because of the (conveniently) tangled corporate veils over ownership and staffing of the prisoner-transport vans in question. The same vehicles are still being used today by GSL, who took over the contract from AIMS, “4 Corners” informs us. So, in the meantime, did AIMS have a crisis of conscience over the dangerous ongoing use of the vans, and renounce its contract? Err, not quite: AIMS sold the vans in question to the WA government (“cheap”) in 2005, and separately “bailed out” (whatever that means) of its prisoner-transport contract about two years later, in mid-2007, six months before Mr Ward died (not that “4 Corners” runs these two developments alongside). There is a distinct whiff in all of this, in which the WA bureaucracy/government’s sitting on the 2001 AIMS report, in isolation, appears to me a relatively anodyne odour in the mix.

Finally, there is the air of strange mystery, combined with shock-horror reaction when a morsel is revealed, regarding GSL’s prisoner-transport procedures at the time of Mr Ward’s death (and now?). I am surprised that these procedures, which would have to be contained in GSL’s contract with the WA government, are not on the public record. “4 Corners” doesn’t say either way, but it implies that it has only just gleaned all it can tell us:

“LIZ JACKSON: It was common for guards to stop on a long haul trip like this, for petrol, food and water, and to see if the prisoner needed the toilet, but there was nothing in GSL’s written procedures that said that this must be done. This time they just drove on and on.

… (about 20 minutes later in the show)

LIZ JACKSON: Over a year after Mr Ward's death GSL has still taken no disciplinary action against Nina Stokoe and Graham Powell, the guards who drove him on the day. At the Inquest Mr Hughes was asked why. His answer was extraordinary.

EXCERPT FROM INQUEST, JOHN HUGHES: I believe the view was formed that they hadn't formally breached any company policies or procedures”.

“Extraordinary” indeed, Liz, when you have plainly forgotten what you said 20 minutes earlier. GSL’s official procedures were/are indisputably barbaric, so it is a shame that “4 Corners” is so shocked just by this revelation that the show can’t even think to segue back to the WA government’s complicity at this point – an entity with presumably clear notice of GSL’s official procedures. But never mind – the whole point of privatisation, of course, is that no one – government or contractor – is left holding the baby, or in Mr Ward’s case, corpse. Like the ceaselessly changing permutations over ownership and staffing of the lethal prisoner-transport vans, Mr Ward and then his corpse, were never in anyone’s custody (which word implies a duty of care) – just in transit, permanently.

Patjarr Postscript

“‘Patjarr. I’ve barely heard the name.’
‘Is that right?’ Esme smiled. ‘I’d have to say that’s an extremely serious gap in your education.’” (6)

Patjarr, “the best permanent water supply in the whole desert” (ibid) is at or near (7) where explorer Ernest Giles gave up his westward trek in 1874, and in extremis, turned around, a decision that had fatal consequences for his assistant Gibson. Needless to say, Giles completely missed Patjarr’s water.

Regarding the Ward family’s perhaps wise move from Patjarr (and environs) to the Warburton mission in 1965, there was a curious plague of American anthropologists living at Patjarr (when of course it was just bush) in 1966-67 (8).

Endnotes

1. Nicolas Rothwell, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Picador 2003 p316
2. Ibid, Dunlop filmed “on the plains round Patjarr”.
3. Ibid p317
4. Nicolas Rothwell, Another Country, Black Inc 2007 pp 205-212
5. Ibid p209
6. Rothwell, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, p313
7. Ibid pp 312 and 323
8. Ibid p316

2009-06-04T19:18:00.001+10:00

The Chaser does Pissweak Make-a-Wish World

I haven’t laughed hard at anything new (i.e. “Kath + Kim” repeats excluded) on TV for ages until last night’s The Chaser “Make a Realistic Wish” segment. I found it particularly funny because, consciously or otherwise, it extended the concept behind Late Show’s classic Pissweak World mock-ads. The genius of the “Pissweak World” segments was their wise-child point of view, elevated into editorial/narrator omniscience – an impossibility in real life, of course, but also perhaps the paradigm of that elusive beast, Truth in Advertising.

Somehow, last night’s The Chaser segment has been perceived by some (most?) as an attack on terminally-ill children. Sheesh – the thought that it was actually the adults depicted who were being satirised (rather savagely, I admit) seems to be a step too far for middle Australia. Such critics have a gaping blind spot, incidentally proving that there is not nearly enough good Australian satire being made and consumed. Get a grip, people.

2009-05-27T13:38:00.007+10:00

The retirement age of consent

The 12 May federal Budget’s announcement that the age-pension eligibility age was going to be raised from 65 to 67 incrementally between 2017 and 2023 was a shock in one major respect – baby boomers, born between 1952 and 1957 slap-bang in the middle of their generation, are going to be first in line to experience the full force of the changes.

However, that’s only if you believe that the announced changes have put the pension-age issue to bed for another two decades at least, i.e. when Xers start to turn 67. February’s Harmer pension review (not to be confused with the concomitant Henry review), kept under wraps by the government until Budget day and little reported since, recommended a phased-in increase, between 2014 and either 2021 or 2029, of the age-pension eligibility age from 65 to either 67 or 69. Not to be outdone, the Henry review then endorsed this proposal, but added to it
a suggested further review in 2020, to consider whether it would be appropriate then to increase the pension-age further still; i.e. presumably beyond 69. So much for boomers, for once, being at the pointy end of a sharp stick.

One aspect of the Harmer review has already been ditched, though – the proposed 2014 start date. While there were logical reasons for this choice – it is the year when the arduous, one-year-in-four taper increase in the female age-pension eligibility age to 65 will finally be achieved – the government presumably decided that 2014 was simply too soon for the electorate to wear. A later start date of 2017 has consequently meant that the taper increase has been changed to one-year-in-three. Ominously for Xers, the tweaked 2017 start date and the shortened one-year-in-three taper increase dovetail perfectly with the Harmer review’s original 69-in-2029 worst-case scenario. If this does transpire, then consider yourself warned here first, Xers (and Gen Y) – it would surely then be a shame, c. 2025, to interrupt the neat pattern of increase set between 2017 and 2029, so you might want to pencil in that the pension-age is right now mathematically scheduled to hit 70 in 2032, 71 in 2035, etc.

Taper increases are funny beasts – a sharp taper, like one-year-in-one, takes a surprisingly long time to be put to bed. This can conveniently be seen with the virulently anti-Xer, and so impeccably bipartisan, changes to the superannuation preservation-age, first announced by Treasurer John Dawkins in his 30 June 1992 “Security in Retirement” statement (RTF), but only made law by the Howard government in 1998, effective from 1 July 1999. This one-year-in-one taper goes from 55 to 60 for those born between 30 June 1960 and 1 July 1964 (therefore seemingly exactly demarcating the Boomer/Xer divide at the mid-1962 born), but its implementation actually stretches from 2015 to 2024. Note that for every second year during this period, starting 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016, there will be no one at all hitting preservation age.

I have blogged before on the generational injustice of this taper increase. As well as the (announced to legislated) 23-to-17 year lead-time being ludicrously long – a point now reinforced by the mere 8-year lead-time for the pension-age increase – its direction, of taper increase not decrease, is illogical. Boomers have often loudly complained that the introduction of compulsory superannuation in 1992 came well into their working lives. Point taken, so why shouldn’t boomers’ preservation-age be higher than for Xers; i.e. that the legislated taper goes from 60 to 55 for those born between 30 June 1960 and 1 July 1964?

Predictably, ex-PM and Paul Keating and ex-ACTU leader Bill Kelty, presumed original architects of the anti-Xer superannuation preservation-age taper, and also of the anti-Xer HECS in 1989, have lately been concerned that their vision of comprehensive generational apartheid, now 20 years old, and long since bipartisan in practice, might be getting meddled with, in the wash-up to the age-pension changes. Certainly, both the Harmer and Henry reviews explicitly recommended an alignment between the age-pension eligibility age and the superannuation preservation-age. Keating said such a move would make superannuation “pointless”, while Kelty, not to be out-exaggerated, said it would be would be “an abrogation of the fundamentals” (same URL) of compulsory superannuation.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: the super preservation-age for Xers (born 1 July 1962 to 1976) is currently 58 to 60, and aligning it with our recently-increased pension age of 67, (and then possibly 69, and so on), is not in Xers’ interests, in principle. But the taper needed to achieve a massive 7-to-9 year increase in Xers’ super preservation-age from 2024-on works in our favour, for once. Unless such a taper broke entirely new ground for implementation speed (which can’t be ruled out, of course), Xers will, by 2030, either be scraping in on the favourable side of the taper (older Xers like me), or otherwise be a pig-in-the-python – an uncomfortable lump for the retirement system to digest painfully over two decades (the youngest Xers don’t turn 70 until 2046). So bring it on, and soon, I say – and to Keating, Kelty and Dawkins: sit on your “Security in Retirement”, and spin.

Sidebar: How and why can the government tie up Xers’ Money?

“Without preservation, superannuation savings would be in danger of degenerating into a form of deferred remuneration scheme, providing a concessionally taxed windfall payment whenever a person changes employment and becomes eligible to withdraw their accumulated superannuation. However, it is still the case [in 1997] that a very large proportion (around 65 per cent) of superannuation savings in Australia are not preserved [and so can be accessed at any age].” (RTF)

Compulsory superannuation, since it began in 1992, has always been “preserved”. Prior to this, preserved superannuation mainly attached to certain tax-concessional, voluntary super arrangements. For voluntary super, indeed, no general preservation requirement was enacted until 1999 (same URL). That is, prior to 1999, if you didn’t want to lock your (volunteered) money up until preservation-age (55 for everybody, also until 1999) you paid more tax. Which sounds fair enough – you not only got the choice to save, or not, for your retirement, you also got a between-now-and-55 further option, or insurance policy – as long as you paid the premium, of more tax, up front, your money wasn’t locked away until 55, but could be accessed at any time, for any reason.

Instead of this double choice (which of course boomers working in the 1980s and 90s, were prime placed to enjoy), Xers got double compulsion in our superannuation arrangements. Most iniquitously, low-income employed Xers pay a 15% superannuation (contributions) tax equal to, if not higher than, our ordinary-income marginal tax rate, but our garnished super pin-money* is nonetheless locked away tighter, and for longer, than that of any boomer under the most tax-advantageous possible scheme.

* My superannuation balance at the end of 2007 (last contribution) was about $6,000, my current balance is about $4,000. No voluntary or government co- contributions ever made/received, “balanced” option throughout, industry fund, total cumulative investment returns in “good” years (i.e. excluding loss years) of less than $1,000. Mmmn - and with only 15 years to go, under current arrangements, before I can access this incredible shrinking nest-egg of "security".

2009-05-20T16:17:00.004+10:00

Gang-bang etiquette 101

One participant (male) in a 2002 group sexual encounter gone wrong apologises to the victim (female) at the earliest opportunity* – pointedly, this apology is not for his own conduct, nor even for anything he witnessed personally. In 2009, he makes another apology on national TV. Nonetheless, this man is widely portrayed in the media as the chief villain, and his apologies, particularly the first, receive scant media attention. Somehow, the man has come to stand for the group, despite obvious (to me) differences in involvement, and so perhaps culpability, between the man and the bulk of the group. So to the facts.

There seem to have been two triggers for then-professional rugby player Matthew Johns leaving the hotel room at a certain point – that 8 to 10 of his teammates and other club employees gatecrashed (some or all through a bathroom window) the threesome (2M, 1F) Johns was having, and this exchange between the victim and one of the gatecrashers:

"[Luke Branighan] said he would [like to have sex with the victim, “Clare”] and she said “no, no, anyone but you” . . . She then pointed at [Matthew Johns, indicating that she wanted to have sex with him instead]".

Whether Johns left the room at least partially out of consideration for the feelings of Branighan is unknown. What Branighan did after this is also unknown, but “Clare” has not indicated that he then had sex with her, contrary to her express wishes. What can be reasonably inferred is that the sexual encounter started to go wrong at this point, that is, probably before a majority of the gatecrashers had sex with “Clare”.

The above reconstruction comes mainly from Matthew Johns’ account. The bathroom window detail appears to have come not from Johns but from the police account of the incident, with at least one player seemingly boasting to police about this (his) “commando” stealth in entering the room. Also, while describing the exchange in which the victim rejected Branighan, note that Johns was careful not to publicly name his teammate, which makes him a gentleman IMO, at least in this regard.

“Clare” has explicitly contradicted one aspect of Johns’ account, saying that Johns not only remained present throughout the incident, but was the ringleader:

“He laughed and he joked and he very loud and boisterous and thought it was hilarious and you know kept it going”.

“Clare’s” account of her two-hour long sexual encounter (not including the very end, which I will discuss separately) with the group of 10 to 12 men, as broadcast on “Four Corners” is as follows:

“SARAH FERGUSON: In 2002, 19-year-old Clare, as we'll call her, was working part time as a waitress at the Racecourse Hotel on the outskirts of Christchurch. After finishing work Clare went with two of the players back to their room, one of them started kissing her.

CLARE: I didn't want to you know, make a big deal out of a kiss and even though it was rough and disgusting and I was a piece of meat even at that stage, but it was you know it was you know, it was nothing it was just a kiss.

SARAH FERGUSON: Over the next two hours, at least 12 players and staff came in to the room, six of them had sex with Clare, the others watched. Five days after the event Clare made a complaint to police.

…
CLARE: They were massive, like ah big Rugby players, I felt that I just had no idea what to do. There was always hands on me and there was always um, if one person had stopped, someone was touching me and doing something else. There was never a point where I was not being handled. Every time I looked up, there would be more and more people in the room and um there's lot, lots of guys in the room watching, ah maybe two or three that were on the bed that were doing stuff to me.

SARAH FERGUSON: Can you try and tell me what some of those things were?

CLARE: They flipped me over quite a bit and got out their penises and would put like, put them on my face and stuff and like maybe two guys would rub them on my face and things like that and yeah.

SARAH FERGUSON: What were the others doing while that was happening?

CLARE: They were I don't like know how to say it, um but masturbating yeah themselves while watching.

…
CLARE: I only remember this whole time, I only remember one player definitely, it was Mattie Johns.

…
CLARE: They never spoke to me, they spoke just to themselves, amongst themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny. When you have sex with someone and it's nice and you talk and you touch and this was awful. This was nothing like, nothing like that.

SARAH FERGUSON: Some players even came into the room through the bathroom window.

CLARE: I had my eyes shut a lot of it and when I opened my eyes there was just a long line at the end of the bed.

SARAH FERGUSON: What was going through your mind when this was happening?

CLARE: I thought that I was, that I was nothing. I thought I was worthless and I thought I was nothing. And I think I was I was in shock. I didn't scream and they used a lot of like mental power over me and, and belittled me and made me feel really small like I was just a little old woman”.

In my opinion, the above description is of a quite unambiguous, brutal sexual assault. While “Four Corners” made a pointed disclaimer here (“Four Corners doesn't say that what took place in room 21 of the Racecourse hotel was sexual assault”), there are no outward indicators of “Clare’s” consent, and ample non-verbal signals that she was not freely consenting: “Every time I looked up, there would be more and more people in the room . . . They flipped me over quite a bit . . . I had my eyes shut a lot of it and when I opened my eyes there was just a long line at the end of the bed”.

Nothing Matthew Johns has said is inconsistent with “Clare’s” account, obviously bar (i) whether his presence there continued, and (ii) the Luke Branighan exchange. There is no point in speculating further on the former, but I will note that the Luke Branighan exchange, if it occurred, was a conspicuous, calculated cruelty by "Clare". I cannot imagine this exchange occurring at any time covered by “Clare’s” above account of her extreme passivity throughout. It apparently later became the subject of teammates’ jokes, which perhaps provides some corroboration that it occurred. Certainly, like the husband in the Borat-goes-to-USA movie’s “Not so much YOUR wife” joke, Branighan would have been KO’d at the time – there can be no socially acceptable response to the random, and so paradoxically personal, slur implicit in both “jokes”. Again, the media has not dwelt on any of this.

The most conspicuous media omission regarding the whole incident concerns the gatecrashers. Call me “Miss Marple”, but the fact that some or all of these entered through the bathroom window suggests that the hotel room’s door/s was locked. This is a very important detail in assessing consent to group-sex encounters – a door ajar may suggest an invitation (most likely revokeable and/or provisional) to others, while a door both closed and locked presumptively indicates the opposite. In other words, the gatecrashers must have realised that they required all three existing participants’ clear consent, if they wanted to join the then-threesome. There is scant indication, in any account bar the Branighan exchange, that such express consent was given by “Clare” to the group, wholly (bar Branighan) or individually. Plainly Johns, under his account, refused consent. Why the media spotlight is not instead currently glaring at (including by naming) the gatecrashers, given some plausible indicia that they (not including Johns or Branighan) raped “Clare”, escapes me.

Finally, two aspects of the “Four Corners” story made me wince, as a man – one for a lack of male-gender insight, and the other for excessive, to the point of unethical and/or dangerous female bonding between journalist/producer and subject.

“CLARE: I think maybe one of the guys said she's had enough, or something along those lines, like alright guys let's wrap it up she's had enough. And so I put my clothes on and walked out as, yeah.

SARAH FERGUSON: Did anybody talk to you while you were putting your clothes back on?

CLARE: No no one. I was nothing.”

In my personal experience, many gay men don’t like to talk before, during or after sex. I think this might well be just a guy, straight or gay, thing. To insinuate that a man’s failure to make small-talk at the messy end of sex either poisons a consensual encounter, or else makes a rape still worse is a gender-blind delusion. Worse, it unintentionally subscribes directly to what David Penberthy calls the “modern-day June Dally-Watkins” school of misogynist, or getting-away-with-rape, etiquette, aka “be polite afterwards and pay her cab fare home”.

Last night’s “Lateline” stated that “Clare” has gone into hiding. I am not surprised, given the unnecessary level of detail on her mental health that “Four Corners” chose to broadcast. Of course rape is a traumatic experience, and at least attempting suicide is probably a common-enough experience in the aftermath. But near-suicidal distress, however real, is rarely postively cathartic for the sufferer, especially when expressed in full public view. Whatever actually happened in 2002, “Four Corners” has managed to wring far too much emotion, and far too little truth (or reasoned speculation), out of it. So ladies, in case it needs to be said, I’m off - and sorry to have to end on a sour note.

* “SARAH FERGUSON: Afterwards in the car park, Matthew Johns told Four Corners, he went up to Clare and said he was sorry about the other guys coming into the room”.

2009-05-04T11:35:00.003+10:00

Counter-terrorism, Mills & Boon-style

For someone styling herself as a counter-terrorism expert, Australian journalist and author Sally Neighbour is oddly casual with her facts:

“[Rabiah] Hutchinson has spoken frankly for the first time about her 20 years on the frontlines of the global jihad movement, in a new book [by Sally Neighbour], The Mother of Mohammed. It began when she joined a student Islamic group [in Indonesia] involved in the resistance against then Indonesian president Suharto in the 1990s . . . In 1990, after divorcing her third husband, Indonesian-born Abdul Rahim Ayub, Ms Hutchinson travelled to northwest Pakistan with her six children to ‘join the jihad’”.

So joining the jihad in northwest Pakistan-Afghanistan wasn’t even a curtain-raiser to Rabiah Hutchinson’s later radical “beginning” in an Indonesian student group who – shock horror – were agitating against their corrupt (Muslim) dictator/president of the time? This curiosity is explained in the Australian magazine* of the same day –Hutchinson’s Indonesian student group days were circa 1984-85, not the 1990s.

In the same Australian magazine article, also by Sally Neighbour, the facts get stranger still when Osama bin Laden enters Hutchinson’s life. Earlier in her article, Neighbour sets the scene for Hutchinson’s spartan life in the Pakistan desert town of Pabbi for three years from 1990:

“The electric blankets [Hutchinson] had brought after being warned of the sever winter cold were never unpacked. Pabbi had no electricity, just a communal generator that provided electricity for about two hours in the morning and two hours at night”.

Pabbi’s material primitiveness doesn’t prevent Neighbour from being able recount, third-hand, a conversation between bin Laden and Adbul Sayyaf (a senior al-Qaida figure) in Pabbi sometime during those three years:

“‘[Hutchinson] came with her children, she works in the hospital, she doesn’t have anything, they don’t even have air-conditioning.

‘Well they do now’, bin Laden replied. A few days later, his emissary delivered a new air-conditioner to her home”.

It is surely remiss of Neighbour to not make more of bin Laden’s loaves-and-fishes scale miracle. Never mind that a rich man had freely donated a single new (!) electrical appliance (or a year’s worth of free bread (baked, not conjured) to the town as a whole), bin Laden has evidently solved a problem that bedevils many first-world power grids: providing enough electricity for energy-guzzling air-conditioners on hot days. And it’s not that Hutchinson’s air-conditioner would have been the only summer peak electricity-hog in the village – Sayyaf’s “even” implies that Hutchinson was one of a air-conditioner have-not minority at this time. More astonishingly still, bin Laden’s generating magic-pudding act has all been done using either using the previously-mentioned single generator (!), or by building a conventional power station in an impoverished town in an impoverished country, in record time. Praise be to Allah, indeed.

The improbable air-conditioner story is, however, Neighbour’s own highlight of Hutchinson’s interactions with bin Laden, unless you count a possible marriage proposal for Hutchinson to become bin Laden’s nth wife, which proposal lapsed anyway after bin Laden fled to Sudan. This is hardly probing investigative journalism. Sally Neighbour evidently has an excellent bedside manner in these matters, when she wants to – witness Jack Thomas’ “4 Corners” admission that was the subject of subsequent court proceedings. Why she covers Rabiah Hutchinson’s objectively similar, quite possibly traitorous journeyings as though they were a romp in a harem – an air-conditioned one, mind (but only after sufficient begging to the master) – is a mystery, of the strong and silent type.

* Sally Neighbour, "Journey to the Jihad", Australian magazine 2 May 2009 (no URL).

2009-02-27T12:01:00.001+10:00

Mental illness = crime and violence II

First NSW magistrate John Favretto says an order preventing swimmer – and all-round psychopath, it seems to me – Nick D'Arcy should feel free to drink alcohol, as a court order stopping him from drinking at all would be setting him up to fail.

But it gets better:

“Mr Favretto said D'Arcy was not an alcoholic with a criminal history or a record of violence or mental illness, but a young man displaying poor impulse control”. (same URL)

It is hard to decide who is more deserving of an immediate jail sentence – thuggish but impeccably sane D'Arcy or the stigma- and hate-mongering Favretto.

See also:

2009-02-03T13:54:00.003+10:00

Australia Day – a holiday designed by a committee

My apologies for this non-timely posting:

The Western Desert lives and breathes at 45 degrees*
But Melbourne doesn’t.

Mick Dodson’s call for Australia’s national day celebrations to be moved to a date other than 26 January was a brave move, for two reasons. Dodson was speaking as an individual on a matter in which obscure groups have seemingly always dominated the field, and he wasn’t championing a specific alternative date. Not only was a refusing to be a team player in this most team-ly of sports then, he was also pre-empting the possibility of individuals wanting to join, or at least barrack for, his X-date embryonic side.

The history of Australia Day, and its Indigenous counter-day, is a nice parable of going nowhere with provincial aplomb in the former instance, and just strangely petering out in the latter.

Predictably, a new nation whose first legislative move in 1901 was famously a bill to exclude Asian immigrants was not at all focused on a unifying national holiday. In any case it probably lacked constitutional power to do so. Getting the bickering states to agree to anything would naturally result in the lowest common denominator, and voila, in 1905 Empire Day, 24 May (the birthday of Queen Victoria, who had died four years previously), was instituted as a public holiday.

The then-reigning monarch would have been flattered by a bag-o-bones being honoured in lieu, I’m sure. But showing the durable adhesion of messy compromises, aka empty patriotism, Empire Day has survived to this day as a uniform national (except WA) holiday with only a slight shift in its title and observance date: Queen’s Birthday, on the second Monday in June.

In 1911, some Sydney Irish Catholic Church leaders dared to re-label Empire Day “Australia Day”. Perhaps this sectarian kite-flying was behind the push of the Australian Natives’ Association (ANA) from about 1930 to institute a supplemental national public holiday named Australia Day, to be celebrated on, or soon after, 26 January (same URL). It is unclear why the ANA were adamant that the uniform date had to be on the Monday following the 26th, unless of course the 26th was a Monday. Perhaps the long-weekend factor was a condition of obtaining state unanimity. In any event, this triumph of committee power and inscrutability, effective from 1935, was to sleep on unchallenged for almost another 60 years, before another committee couldn’t resist, or be stopped from, putting its own stamp on the issue.

In 1994, the National Australia Day Committee (NADC), after years of lobbying the states (and presumably also Australia’s least-jingoist ever PM, Paul Keating) managed to – drum roll, please – tweak the date so that the national holiday would henceforth always be on 26 January, exactly. This momentous change is something I’m sure ex-PM John Howard will go to his grave regretting he was not personally present to supervise, and then wheel out before the adoring masses like a proud parent. As it was, the self-congratulation at the time appears to have reached its zenith within the pages of the NADC’s annual report which crowed: “One nation - one day - Australia's Day!” (same URL). Never mind that Australia Day had been uniform already for 59 previous years.

The story of the Indigenous counter-day to Australia Day is contrasting in its transparency, even it this story is (judging by Wikipedia’s entry on the subject) little-known. On 26 January 1938, the sesqui-centenary, there was a national Aboriginal Day of Mourning. From 1940, “Aboriginal Sunday” was observed, as an arguable continuation of the Day of Mourning, on the day (Sunday) preceding the Australia Day public holiday**. For white Australians the focus of this observance on the day was in their churches.

Aboriginal Sunday continued on this basis until 1955. Then, acting upon a non-Indigenous committee’s concern that the day was muted by its being in the middle of a summer long-weekend, the Federal and state governments contrived to endorse a simple 180-degree move, to the first Sunday in July (ibid). That is, far removed from proximity to any public holiday, while also not being a public holiday itself. Otherwise, the new date/“date” seems arbitrary, if not meaningless, from an Indigenous perspective. Pastor Doug Nicholls was incisive about the 1955 committee switcheroo:

“Why was the date changed? Did they think that such painful memories took from the pride of Australia Day? Did they think that the reminder was too much? We didn’t argue about the change to the July date – but we should have. On Australia Day . . . [i]t’s still our Day of Mourning.” (ibid)

Aboriginal Sunday has now morphed into NAIDOC Week in early July. “NAIDOC” is usually glossed as National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee, but I much prefer the unofficial alternative without the c-word: National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Commemoration, even if this sits awkwardly with the Week suffix.

There are many more likely specific dates for a re-envisioned Indigenous counter-day to Australia Day. The 1940-54 original – which could now be fixed to 25 January – is actually not a bad one, in my opinion. Mabo Day in June, or 1967 referendum day in May, are some others.

If a legal Indigenous-rights milestone is to be chosen, however, two dates stand out above all others, in my opinion. The first is 31 October 1975, the date on which the national Racial Discrimination Act took effect. Without this Act, there could have been no Mabo as we know it. The 1967 referendum changes were also hollow until after this Act was passed, and subsequent High Court cases bound the then nakedly racist states of Qld and WA to its parameters.

The second likely-candidate date I am not even sure of. It is when Western Australia ceased the practise of using neck-chains on Indigenous prisoners and remandees. Neck-chains were still in use in the West in 1960 (ibid, p 90). It is likely that their use ceased sometime in the 1960s, perhaps with the passing of the Native Welfare Act 1963 (WA), which removed the power to whip Indigenous men for some criminal infractions#. I’m not sure why, but I find neck-chains even more shocking than licensed whipping – possibly because the former is widely known about through photographs (albeit usually sepia-tinged ones, i.e. from long before our lifetimes), yet no one, AFAICT, has highlighted the definite end of this inhuman practice. Maybe a committee did it; this time a self-effacing committee, who wanted to erase their change – and with it, all the prior torture and degradation of Indigenous men – from the record.

* “Beds are Burning” by Midnight Oil
** Mavis Thorpe Clark, Pastor Doug, Seal Books 1975, pp 110-111.
# John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without rights, CUP 1997, p 169.

2009-01-10T15:25:00.006+10:00

Hoaxes and HoaXrs

As soon as I heard that Keith Windschuttle, as editor of Quadrant, had been anonymously hoaxed, I knew that an Xer dunnit.

A hoax is never complete until its “reveal”, a la extreme-makeover reality TV. If the hoax (or makeover) has been a success – and Quadrant publishing Sharon Gould’s, aka Katherine Wilson’s, article was definitive here – then it is hard to imagine the protagonist shunning the spotlight at the exact moment of their triumph. Imagine a cosmetic surgery subject objecting to her/his made-over face being filmed or broadcast, because s/he “is just too happy about it”, or “doesn’t want to make the show all about me”. The audience simply wouldn’t buy this, but would presumably suspect that the outcome of the cosmetic surgery was in fact much less successful than was implied on-screen.

As with cosmetic surgery, reveals can be admittedly vulnerable moments for the hoaxer. There will usually have been an unhurried, biding-of-time lead-up to the reveal, but no amount of preparation or rehearsal for the big moment can extend its pressured, necessary brevity. The hoaxer has only one “take”*, in the media’s eyes, to simultaneously crow in triumph and explain their motivations – if they stuff-up this intense-spotlight, seat-of-the-pants moment, then the hoax, even if technically “complete”, will fall flat.

Kath Wilson (I’ve met her, once, as “Kath”) had at least one plausible reason for choosing anonymity at the time of her reveal, being 9 months pregnant. Yet her prior form strongly suggests that she would have chosen anonymity in any event. In June 2006 I blogged on her strange coyness about the backstory to a piece of undercover journalism by Wilson in Overland #183 (Winter 2006). One doesn’t simply go from off the street to ethically-borderline (at best) PR-training workshops – while I don’t imagine that the barriers are that high, one would need to have at least a plausible fake or real identity as a PR professional.

From Googling in mid-06, I found out that Wilson had worked in PR, but was apparently not doing so at the time of her Overland article field-research. She doesn’t even say as much in her article. Instead, she purports to be a mere fly, or tape-recorder, on the wall for the entire proceedings, apart from one sentence:

“I later learned that [Bernadette] Basell [senior partner of KKPR, a PR firm] then alerted [the PRIA’s David] Hawkins to the possible motivations behind my line of questioning”.

Ah, sprung during the workshop, or maybe even sprung bad? Alas, we do not get told any more, other than that Hawkins later emailed Wilson to either fudge or retract (you choose) oral statements he made at the workshop than seemed to condone unethical PR actions. We don’t even get a hint, despite what the above quote’s context suggest, what Wilson’s “line of questioning” was – i.e. was it premised on her assuming a particular identity? Nor are we informed on what basis Wilson registered for the workshop. I doubt that Wilson has much to hide, in this regard, but her silence is unsatisfactory (even for an Xer).

In the same June 2006 post, I revealed that Wilson was widely known about the Internet as “weathergirl”. Again, all this took was a bit of Googling. About the same time, Jason Soon of Catallaxy Files (from memory, with some outside help) triumphantly drew the same conclusion. I think that I was first, but in any event, I was loath to make much of this reveal, my own moment in the spotlight as it were, for reasons I will now explain.

Blogging, employment and anonymity maketh an unholy trinity, for reasons I pondered at some length five years ago. In Wilson’s case, however, it does not appear that there was ever a direct conflict – i.e. one requiring absolute anonymity when blogging – between her employment and her writing, at any time in her PR-workshop, “weathergirl” (c. 2006-07) or Quadrant-hoax (2008-09) days. Instead, Wilson’s desire for anonymity seems to flow from something more visceral. Here’s the final sentence the email she sent to principal hoax informant Margaret Simons, in lieu of any more direct reveal:

“I'd also like it understood that I have a silent number and am silenced on the electoral roll and don't wish to be contacted.”

The meaning is clear enough, but so is the subtext – of Wilson’s naively waving a red rag to the media’s bull. Predictably, an Age journalist – who must have known that Wilson was about to go into labour, and who more than likely had read Wilson’s explicit do-not-contact instruction on Crikey, “visited the freelance journalist and environmental activist at her home in Coburg” presumably soon after her real identity was confirmed on Thursday 8/1. Age journo Dewi Cooke then adds: “Wilson said she was having contractions and could not comment. She was packing for hospital” (same URL).

I find Dewi Cooke’s actions in this regard reprehensible, while regrettably explicable. As an affront to basic humanity, they far exceed any damage Wilson may have inflicted on Keith Windschuttle’s ego (a fact I’m sure that the man himself would even attest to, if he ever took the time to consider any human being born after 1961). From Wilson’s reveal-manque then, at least one useful, if unintended by Wilson, point has been made: Age journalists in general, or Dewi Cooke in particular, are gutter scum. Why aren’t Dewi Cooke’s ethics, like Wilson’s hoax, front-page news?

In a similar vein, although this time I’m not pointing the finger at the journalists directly, yesterday’s Oz finished its coverage of Wilson’s outing thus:

“Bloggers on Cattallaxy (sic) [Files] yesterday threatened to reveal Wilson’s contact details to Mr Windschuttle”.

I think, nonetheless, that Kath Wilson has been wilfully naïve, in the past at least, on the practical reality of anonymity in cyberspace. I can attest that all it takes to make identifying leaps and links through Google, and nothing but, is a good vocabulary; i.e. the ability to usefully predict which search strings or juxtapositions will come up with a short, useful results page.

Finally, the generational angle I started on.

Margaret Simons opined (Crikey link, above):

“Personally I wouldn’t have done this hoax, even if it had occurred to me. As a journalist it is no part of my job description to lie. But then again, I have other forums and I am not an activist . . . I have told Wilson that I think the media have so far treated the hoaxer very fairly.”

In case it is not obvious, Simons is a boomer-gatekeeper – i.e. a person both unused to a mirror ever being held up to their own ethics, and a person who, if bothered at home as if they were the story, would naturally have a suitable trump card up their sleeve to kill that story then and there. More specifically, Simons manages to parade about both her ethical purity in the whole affair, and her own cultural power in general (“I have other forums” and “I have told Wilson that . . . ”) and yet she never questions the obvious, glaring power imbalance between herself and Wilson. Both are apparently employed as freelance journalists, yet an invisible chasm somehow separates their status, and hence their end outcomes of writing and research. I can’t see any other explanation for this chasm other than that Simons was born in or before 1961, and Wilson after (in 1967, as the 9/1 Oz informs us).

Similarly, Age Op Ed writer, and boomer# (Xer, actually, see correction below) Leslie Cannold firstly backgrounded the Alan Sokal hoax-and-reveal: Sokal crowed that "the publication of his article proved that some disciplines would accept anything as legitimate scholarship as long as it 'sounded good' and 'flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions'". If Wilson, or “Sharon Gould” as she was then publicly known, had similarly crowed at her reveal, she could plausibly have uttered the same words as Sokal. Not that Cannold would admit any such equivalence though, of course: Wilson/Gould was, quite unlike physics professor Sokal, a “[non-]orthodox practitioner” and an “intellectual gatecrasher” (same URL).

I find Cannold’s distinction here bizarre, unless one accepts that anonymity per se makes the difference (which doesn’t appear to be her point). Certainly, Cannold can’t have known at the time that Wilson/Gould didn’t, say, have a PhD in the subject of the Quadrant article. (As it turns out, Wilson is not a scholarly expert on her subject, but even if she was, I don’t think that the hoax’s denouement would have been any different.)

Cannold’s subtext, of course, is that a boomer# in the field, aka “orthodox practitioner”, would never have to resort to going under-cover, like Wilson. Like Margaret Simons, Leslie Cannold evidently lives an unexamined, privileged life as gatekeeper, not gatecrasher.

Afterthoughts 12 January 2009

Due to not having Internet at home since Tuesday 6/1 (thanks Three mobile!) I didn’t get around to looking up Wilson/Gould’s “Diary of a hoax” blog prior to my post. No media coverage I’ve read has pondered the consequences of (assuming the post dates have not been manipulated) Wilson expressly telegraphing in advance every relevant detail of her hoax. I’d suggest that this itself proves that the gap between the traditional media (including Crikey) and blogdom is wider than at any time in the last five years – i.e. the former simply takes no notice of the latter. There's also the fact that the blog has one comment (9/1) to date.

Wilson’s blog also anticipates the Cannold’s Sokal vs Gould faux-distinction. Indeed, this very blog is more than likely Cannold’s source for the Sokal quote that she uses to oh-so-politely undermine Wilson. What livid irony.

#Correction 14 January 2009

Leslie Cannold has emailed me, pointing out that she was born in 1965. I accept that she is thus an Xer.

* Extreme-makeover reality TV shows may get more than one take of the “reveal”, although this would never be admitted, I imagine.

2008-12-24T11:19:00.003+10:00

Living in the 80s – Andrew McCann’s Subtopia and David Williamson’s Emerald City

Until I read these two books recently (both also recent op-shop, i.e. semi-random scores), I had long since given up on my experience of the 1980s having any cultural reference point. Stock-market booms and busts and extreme shoulder-pads? I was at school/uni (8 years), or working low-wage jobs (2 years) for the entire decade. Downtown Collins Street was a long way from Melbourne University and its adjacent pubs in all senses other than the geographical. Rather more naggingly close for me that decade was the likelihood of nuclear war, and a host of other concerns, most of which flowed from (as I slowly realised, but always just-too-late to sidestep whatever particular carnage) my Xer generation being the disposable pawns of the economic fundamentalist revolution then taking place throughout the West.

For these reasons, my generation did nihilism better in the 80s than it has ever been done before or since. No 70s-punk histrionics – by 1981, punk had evinced Thatcher as its only notable surviving# legacy. We had nothing solid to revolt against, in any case, until uni fees were (re) introduced in the late 1980s. Everything middle-class had always crumbled five minutes before we got there. Our nihilism was simply ordinary, when living in a disintegrating culture is all you know.

I started university in the same year as Andrew McCann (who writes as A.L. McCann), in 1984, and was once casually acquainted through sharing a first-year English tut. I haven’t been in contact with him since. Picking up Subtopia a few weeks ago was nonetheless like taking a strangely familiar ride.

I could, but I won’t go on in detail about how good this book is – I’m sure it’s mainly an Xer thing, anyway. I should caution that the book has the perhaps the worst (i.e. off-putting and more to the point, misleading) back-cover blurb in history:

"1977. The fibro-belt suburbs of Melbourne's south. The names of West German terrorists crackle through the white noise of television news, but barely penetrate the soundtrack of the seventies. Endless summers, mass-market pornography, sport, and a sexual freedom precariously close, yet always just out of reach. Only when Julian meets Martin Bernhard, a ratbag of a kid who smokes, drinks and shoots model soldiers with his air-rifle, does the world start to look a bit larger, and a bit more dangerous. And once you get a passport and a plane ticket, it seems, you can be anything you want to be."

The narrative is mainly set in the 80s, not the 70s, and the “dangerous” world it covers is not at the end of a gun or terrorist bomb, but at the end of a syringe, psych ward, or pub-crawl. Nor however is Subtopia (2005) “grunge” lit, a label that may well have been applied to the book had it been published ten years earlier. Mid-90s Xer grunge lit was, like late-70s punk, if not simply too much, too late, then the accomplice/harbinger of an ill wind which blew into Australia on 2 March 1996. There was no nihilism after Nirvana, you might say – just plain poverty, depression and an unconscious, niche nostalgia for our 80s youth. A possible exception here is Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) – but it is also unmistakably anchored in that lost decade, the 1980s*.

About a third of Subtopia is set in Berlin in 1988-89. Everyone knows what happened in Berlin in late 1989. Appropriately enough, the fall of the Wall, while acknowledged in passing (p 212), is a non-event in Subtopia, as it was for me (albeit in Melbourne) and probably most Xers in the West. Whatever the Eastern Bloc thought they were getting access to post-1989 was bound to be a mirage down the track – something my generation indelibly understood by 1989. Disintegration of the old order was something that happened to us every day, as economic fundamentalism steamrolled ahead without anybody ever pausing to wield crowbars in front of TV cameras. Moreover, the outcome of any given piece of disintegration was always replacement by something worse.

Similarly, when the narrative moves to New York City in 1990, Manhattan is merely a side-trip, an over-priced hole. The suburbs remain the same, not-quite-there (or then) place:

“Sally turned on the tape-deck as we drove . . . the long haul across Queens.
Tears for Fears.
‘Where did this crap come from?’ I asked.
‘I got it.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘I thought it would remind me of the eighties or something. I was nostalgic. I always used to like it.’
I listened in silence, momentarily defeated. ‘Didn’t they get the name from some new-fangled therapy about releasing pre-natal emotions? What a sell-out.’
A few minutes later we hit a dead stop on the city side of the Kosciusko Bridge. Miles of traffic stretched away in front of us, the red brake-lights like a giant lava flow in the darkness. Huge billboards and a McDonald’s logo loomed out of the chaos of Brooklyn. In the distance, over the water, the skyline twinkled.
‘The eighties?’ I said, finally, unable to contain myself. ‘This isn’t the eighties I remember.’” (p 230)

In contrast, David Williamson’s Emerald City (1987) closely adheres to the received, or boomer, vision of the 80s. I was initially irritated by its boomer-centricity (albeit Williamson and some of his characters are pre-boomer). Particularly jarring was this exchange:

“KATE: My [Melbourne] friends don’t care about money and fame. Terri works her guts out in the Western suburbs helping kids fight their way out of intellectual and physical poverty. Sonia tries to repair the psyches of wives whose husbands beat the crap out of them, and Steve uses his legal skills to try and stop the powerless being ripped off by the powerful.
. . .
COLIN: You know what I couldn’t stand about them? Their smug self-righteousness. They were all earning salaries five times the size of the poor bastards they were supposed to be helping.
KATE: All right. You didn’t like them. I did.”

Even allowing for some dramatic license/exaggeration, the five-time salary multiple between, say, a legal-aid wage and the minimum wage is absurd to any Xer. If we get one of these sort of idealistic jobs, which are always scarce, then earning average wage, at best, is the norm for us. But obviously not for boomers. How Williamson gets away with this gaping, generational blind-spot is resolved – perhaps even unintentionally on Williamson’s part – by this line near the end of the play:

“COLIN: I thought we should go back to Melbourne . . . Do you know what made me change my mind? . . . I was waiting for a taxi in the city and there were two derelicts asleep on benches. A City Mission van drover up and a young guy went across and talked to them without any hint of judgement, and took them somewhere safe and warm . . . That young guy doesn’t dream of waterfront mansions. He gets a couple of hundred dollars a week, a handful of people know he’s a good human being, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s enough.”

Ah, the 1980s. When Xers were all Mother Theresas (cum deus ex machina), able to conjure up housing for Sydney’s most intractable homeless (and neat play resolutions for Williamson). Obviously, there must then have been plenty of vacant real-estate for such needs, or if not, a near-unlimited flow of money available. In either case, the Xers on the street-beat apparently wouldn’t even dream of affording the new living arrangements of their older clientele.

As McCann’s narrator says with some understatement, “This isn’t the eighties I remember.”

# Unless you count the recorded music of Joy Division.

* Despite its oh-so-90s’ title, which incidentally has to be the worst book title in history – Wurtzel’s timeframe is almost entirely pre-Prozac, the book is much more about a (Western) generation than the US nation, and it has zip to do with the boomer-yuppie generation Prozac was so associated with circa 1990.

2008-11-19T18:10:00.004+10:00

Where the #?% is Baz Luhrmann’s and Tourism Australia’s East Kimberley?

Kununurra, the East Kimberley capital, was naturally was one of one of four co-hosts of last night’s premiere of Australia. Most media coverage blithely omitted the obvious (even if you haven’t seen the movie) point, however, that Kununurra and its environs (spectacular, if you don’t know the area) simply aren’t in the movie.

Darwin and Bowen stand in for pre-WWII Darwin, while Kununurra was merely the base for filming at “Faraway Downs”, the cattle station set. Finding out more precisely where “Faraway Downs” is didn’t take too much digging. It appears to be split between Carlton Hill Station (45 km NW of Kununurra) and Digger's Rest Station (60 km W of Kununurra).

The same URL notes that “Local indigenous people journeyed out to the set to conduct a 'welcome to country' ceremony” prior to the “Faraway Downs” filming. It must have been one mighty welcome to have trickled all the way down to Kununurra, so allowing the town to acquire the proxy mantle of being the “Faraway Downs”. Or more likely, near enough is good enough for the media – unless you care about Indigenous niceties, like specific place being something that matters.

Speaking of Indigenous niceties vs European geographical vagueness, there’s a great quote today from a Tourism Australia spokesman, point blank denying that Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri, an Indigenous elder from around the King George River in the NE Kimberley, could possibly have recognised, from some ad footage, King George Falls (in his own country), or at least that non-Indigenous tourists would be able to put a place name to the ad footage:

"The advertisements do not make any reference to a specific location. Rather, they are about the emotional impact of visiting Australia and the type of experiences people can have here."

2008-11-04T11:38:00.003+10:00

Warmun, November 1979

As fundamentalist revolutions raged around the Western and Islamic worlds, a quite different cultural revolution was taking place in the Indigenous community of Warmun (or Turkey Creek as it was then called), in the East Kimberley region of north-western Australia. Not for the first or last time, but perhaps the most spectacular performance (and certainly the best documented) on its home turf, a particular ceremony, the Gurirr Gurirr* (or Krill Krill) occurred. This non-secret Gurirr Gurirr was seminal to the art of the late Rover Thomas, and the Warmun “school” of which Thomas is the best-known artist.

The ceremony was photographed by Kim Akerman, and stills of this have been reproduced in various publications (including True Stories: Artists of the East Kimberley 2003 Dir. James Marshall & Hetti Perkins, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, DVD 32 min). Until researching the subject further today, however, I was not aware that there was any video footage of it in the public domain. The footage can be viewed online here (Chapter 2, between about 4.00 and 6.00).

The film the footage comes from, On Sacred Ground (1980, Film Australia, Robin Hughes – Producer, Oliver Howes – Director or vice versa), has its own story. It seems to have been deliberately suppressed** after it was finished, and (mostly) forgotten about in more recent decades.

What a gem.

* (9/11/08) "Gija people do no know the meaning [of 'Gurirr Gurirr']. Song words are often special words that do not have a meaning known today". Frances Kofod, "Gija glossary", in Paddy Bedford (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006) p 137.

** (9/11/08) "On Sacred Ground . . . was banned from being shown overseas. The ban was not lifted until 1983 when it was released for screening by the newly elected Labor government": Brian Syron with Briann Kearney, Kicking Down the Doors, Donobri International Communications, Sydney, 1996, chapter 4 (accessed through Google Books). The filming, editing and release of On Sacred Ground spanned the Noonkanbah and Argyle Diamond Mine native title confiscations of 1979-80. The former, but not the latter, was a cause celebre among white activists at the time. This was despite, or because, the oil-less Noonkanbah soon being proved a fiscal and political red-herring, just after the multi-billion dollar Argyle Diamond Mine was quietly steamrolled ahead. See R.A. Dixon and M.C. Dillon eds,
Aborigines and diamond mining : the politics of resource development in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands WA, 1990, pp 2, 43, 91, 158-60 and 173-78.

2008-10-06T14:47:00.002+10:00

Bill Henson’s “unimpeachable” school trawling

Has Australia’s boomer arts cabal lost the plot? Author and SMH journalist David Marr’s radio interview today was Pauline-Hanson shrill, defensive, and illogical. It reads like a parody of itself – or perhaps even an epitaph for an era. (Here’s hoping the latter.)

"I don't see what the problem is so long as the protocols are followed and so long as it is the parents who decide," Marr told ABC Radio. "This is a man who at the time was regarded as an unimpeachable, leading artist in this country, being taken by a school principal into a playground and suddenly it is this monstrous horror."

"There's nothing unusual about artists going into schools, there's nothing unusual about casting agents for film and television going in there." Marr . . . said there was a system of "talent spotting" in schools where people were allowed to look around for talent, without the prior consent of parents . . .

"The child was photographed with the full consent of his parents ... he was not photographed at the school. The boy was not photographed naked, he's got his shirt off." . . .

"I'll be having a couple of words to [fellow SMH journalist] Miranda [Devine] face to face when I get back to Sydney," he said. "Isn't she a charmer."

Perhaps Marr was emboldened by co-boomer Peter Craven’s amazing assertion in today’s Age that “[i]n 25 years no model has ever complained of Henson's conduct”. How would Craven know? While I accept that there is no media coverage of any such complaint, the media’s and Henson’s own silences in this regard speak volumes.

I blogged in May on Henson’s opacity when he was on-the-record re his child-model recruitment and consent processes. Presumably unwilling or unable to go down this path one more time, Marr’s book on Henson actually contains a quite direct admission:

Henson concedes some of his models may have looked back with regret about working with him but says there has never been any negative reactions at the end of a session. "There must have been a few errors of judgment in 35 years of work, where I photographed someone who in retrospect has gone, 'I wish I didn't do that'."

Taking out Henson’s “at the end of a session” lawyerly caveat, and transposing his ridiculous contingent tense (“may” and “must have”) to the real world, Henson has surely said that some former child models of his have complained about their modelling, long after the event, most likely in adulthood.

This admission is hardly surprising, I would have thought, given Henson’s oeuvre. But Peter Craven can’t see the writing on the wall, even when it comes from Henson’s own hand.

On the other hand, Henson’s other quote from Marr’s book on his child-model recruitment and consent processes is, like Marr’s interview today, unintentionally hilarious – a perfect parody of a chin-stroking boomer arts wanker:

"In the book, Henson says he takes photographs only with the 'willing participation and full control' of the family. The child then makes the final decision. He also points out that children have an ability to detect unsavoury people. 'Kids can smell a rat, you know, and we just don't give them credit for it. If there is a dodgy teacher in the school, kids will know about it ... It's all part of the way in which they are naturally equipped to be resilient. Babies are tough'." (same URL)

Henson obviously knows either nothing or too much about serial child sexual abuse in schools – which would always be stopped in its tracks after, at worst, the first adult-in-authority grope of the first child, according to his “smell a rat” theory.

His “babies are tough” line seems a non-sequitur, given the much older age range of Henson’s models (10+). Perhaps he’s defending the photographic art of Anne Geddes, while he’s at it. More likely, he’s unsubtly hinting that the fact that babies don’t care about their own nudity should somehow rub off on older children (such as those he photographs), most (or all) of whom do care about their own nudity.

The greatest silence of the whole Henson affair of 2008, however, relates to the thorough mauling of Henson’s motives by writer (and artist) Adam Geczy - an Xer, of course. Geczy’s article “Humbert or Humbug” was in the same (July 2008, #211) issue of Art Monthly whose cover received blanket media coverage – coverage that never looked past the journal’s cover, or the two photos on page 6, at most.

You won’t find the text of Geczy’s article online at Art Monthly, or anywhere else, it would seem. This is a real shame, as it is worth reading in full. With some misgivings, I’ve set out Geczy’s money-shots – only – below. The only comment I need to make, in case my editing of Geczy is not clear, is that, specifically referring to the controversial opening-invitation image of the naked 12 (or 13) year-old girl, Geczy declares Henson a pervert, in the nicest possible way.

“[Henson’s] naked girl, I think, is a kind of Rilkean angel of the deeper sense that most Australians eschew, an avatar of a forgotten soul. But she is Henson’s creation. We do not see the girl, we see him. Only artists with a strong personality can pull this off. She is also, just perhaps, the artist’s fetish . . . For the fact is that some men like young girls. The true scandal of some artists is the insufficient honesty in articulating their own dark secrets”.

2008-09-28T16:53:00.006+10:00

Using the ab in abuse

More than becoming interchangeable, “use” and “abuse” have even swapped roles, on occasion. My mission now is to reinstate them to their original, opposing places. This is not, I hope, a merely pedantic quest. Rather, my intent is quite concrete – new, useful usages.

How it has all gone so wrong in recent decades is obvious enough: “use” has flown excessively solo and so shouldered too much of a semantic burden, while conversely “abuse” has almost always been over-encumbered by weighty or jargon-y adverbs (or whatever the grammar-y word is).

Exhibit one: the common recriminatory retort at the end of a post-1968 relationship – “You used me!”. Err, no. “Use” in a consensual, adult relationship may not be an approved word in the Official Boomer 1968 Relationship Lexicon (which of course remains a paramount law to this day), but surely it is a reasonably healthy thing to get something out of such a relationship. Or in boomer-speak, to have one’s needs met. In any event, a cry of “You used me!” should always invite the coldly logical reply: “Thanks. At least I didn’t abuse you, because that would have been something BAD!”.

Exhibit two: “[illegal] drug abuse”. Generally, this means “use”, in any quantity. Paradoxically perhaps, “[illegal] drug use” also seems to mean use in any quantity, including to excess or death. In practice however, the speaker will be the message, and so ambiguity in this regard is actually as rare as a junky’s underdose.

Exhibit three: “child sexual abuse” – presumably meaning the bad sort of sex between adults and children. For me, “child sexual use” works just fine. The plainer verb (?) is not only more logical, it also sharpens the point of moral obloquy – of the doer’s simply having their needs met, with no shred of consent or reciprocity. The formulation “[bad] abuse” tends to put the doers and their acts in a category of the inexplicably and/or gratuitously evil, whereas “[bad] use” actually validates the perspective of the done-to, as incidentally seen in Exhibit one’s misuse (with its lazily implied “badness”).

Exhibit four: “elder abuse”. For Kerrist’s sake, “elder/s” is not a noun in common use among (non-Indigenous) Australians. Perhaps it should be, but I can’t see that pairing it up with the heavy-duty A-word is going to popularise its use more generally. “Abuse of the elderly” is not such a mouthful.

The “abuse of X” formulation has its own curiosities, though. “Abuse of power” is both a root catch-all and a specific accusation, although the latter only rarely. In either case, it seems oddly asymmetric with its necessary corollary: the “[good] use of power”. Ministerial/bureaucratic discretion, yes, but hardly ever power. Perhaps that’s because discretion, unlike power, can’t be easily coupled to the A-word.

My chief beef in all of this is to popularise one new coinage – “food abuse”. Note the “[neutral] abuse” formulation, in both its unambiguous, symmetrical opposition to “food use” and the non-gratuitousness of its two barrels. Further, food “use” is self-evidently good, while under- or over-eating are equally self-evidently bad.

My guess is that “food abuse” has so far never caught on because the food doesn’t have perceived feelings in any of this. True, but I reckon that food is somehow a friend, a peer to every one of us. “Friendship abuse” is another jarring formulation, not because it doesn’t happen, but because in a quality friendship, the give and take is ceaseless, and so in “power” terms, murky and unstable. So listen up, fatties and anorexics – stop leaning on your food intake – it’s time for more give and less take.

2008-08-13T14:52:00.000+10:00

Mental illness = crime and violence

Professor Frank Oberklaid (Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne):

“So many of the conditions we see in adult life like mental health problems, like violence, like participation in crime often have their roots in the early years”.

Tool.

2008-08-12T12:35:00.002+10:00

"Greatest hits" re-post from 2004

The post below was originally posted on 17 August 2004. It has been – quite oddly – removed from apparently any Google search. Hopefully this re-post will remedy that, for a while at least.

--

Cardinal George Pell – and the art of using paedophiles as a career springboard

With this news, it seems an inescapable conclusion that powers from high up within the Catholic Church are pulling strings at the Victorian OPP office. Gerald Ridsdale, sentenced in 1994 at age 60 to 18 years’ jail (with a minimum of 15 years) looks likely to become a free man in 2009, at age 75:

A spokesman for the OPP said that even if Ridsdale was found guilty of the new allegations, he would be unlikely to receive an increased sentence. The Court of Appeal in 1995 described Ridsdale's sentence as a "virtual life sentence . . . unusually long".

At such a late stage of his life it was "harsh punishment and a severe burden". The court said he would not be eligible for parole until he was 75.

The OPP spokesman said: "Our view is he would not get a substantial increase to his sentence, if any. We are prosecuting all of these cases in the context of limited resources in the criminal justice system.

The question becomes 'what's to be gained for the public?' "While we understand the concern of the individual victims, and we are concerned for the victims, it's a question of balancing all of the considerations."

By way of comparison, Robert "Dolly" Dunn – who shared Gerald Ridsdale’s especially heinous preference for pre-pubescent boys (typically, 10-12 yo’s), and the only man to share with Ridsdale the Google honours of "Australia's most notorious pedophile" – got a 30 year sentence (with no prospect of parole), at the age of 61*.

FWIW, the 35 yo “latest complainant” referred to could have been no older than 10 at the time (Ridsdale left Edenhope in Spring 1979).

The question 'What's to be gained for the public?' is anything but rhetorical. Even accepting that Ridsdale would be unlikely to re-offend at 75 (which personally I doubt), there is no logical reason why fresh charges would not result in an additional sentence, to bring Ridsdale’s overall jail term in line with Dunn’s. In other words – and let’s not beat around the bush – to make sure that Ridsdale dies in jail, as will Dunn. The severity of Dunn’s sentence presumably took into account that the prisoner had offended in multiple jurisdictions, although was being tried only for offences in one – similarly, it is to be noted that Ridsdale remains wanted in NSW, where he has not yet faced trial.

Further, at least one of the two Ridsdale co-offenders (both Christian Brothers) mentioned, upon whom the OPP is also sitting on its hands, is long-since a free man. Robert Best received a nine-month suspended sentence in 1996, while Edward Dowlan was sentenced in July 1996 to nine years and eight months' jail, with a minimum of six years. (The lightness of these sentences can be partially explained by the estimated $400,000 that the Christian Brothers order spent in Dowlan’s and Best’s defence.)

Still further, as for the OPP’s purported “understand[ing] the concern of the individual victims” – how does a trial resulting in an objectively meaningless “second” life sentence (like the first ,with no parole) for a convicted murderer meet this criterion, but a trial relating to the concerns of living victims of child rape doesn’t? In terms what Pell’s role might be, in explaining the OPP’s intransigence, in the face of manifest disparity between Ridsdale’s, Best’s and Dowlan’s sentences compared to Robert "Dolly" Dunn’s – I can only speculate, of course.

I will, however, take this opportunity to rebut something I wrote here more than two years ago:
What I'm saying, then, is let's not have a false witch-hunt. I'm reasonably sure that if George Pell had much of an inkling about what was going on at St Alipius school in 1971 (the year that he (and I) moved to Ballarat, but two years before he actually shared digs at St Alipius for a year, 1973), far more serious accusations would have since been made against him. Whatever he, or anyone else, has done wrong in handling the matter should be judged by what they did or didn't do at the time, and not by now going for the tallest target, who has - by coincidence - grown into a position of real power decades after the event. My guess is that George Pell does have a lot more to say about what happened at St Alipius in 1971 - but it's not at all his own skin that he's protecting in so far maintaining his silence.

What’s changed? Firstly, the unproductive “witch-hunt” I feared did come to pass, albeit in a minor way. Pell was himself "charged" – not by police, and heard by a closed-door "independent inquiry" – with child sex offences in 2002, and "cleared". Then and now, I’m convinced that Pell personally was/is not a paedophile, most especially not any time from 1971 on.

Where I was wrong was in underestimating – grievously so – the motivating effect of that other destructive aphrodisiac: lust for power. Two years ago, I thought that, given Pell personally not being a paedophile, there was little reason for him to cover anything up (i.e. to not become a belated whistle-blower) – unless he was still protecting persons more powerful than himself. Now having a much better understanding of Pell’s career trajectory and its key dates**, I can see that my earlier view was rather simplistic.

Even in the early 70s, Pell was by no means a quivering junior priest on the periphery of a child sex scandal only know about by a handful of top Ballarat clerics. Rather, Pell used the scandal as leverage to advance himself within the Ballarat diocese. From 1973, he strove to make himself a “cleanskin”, with an artificial, dual career path. One track kept him mostly well away from children (and so from working alongside, under or above known clerical paedophiles), while the other minimally kept his iron in the fire – in terms of saying mass etc, and also in terms of playing an all-important (if ill-defined) hand in diocesan politics.

In 2004 then, it is safe to say that Pell is a cold, practised and self-serving liar.

My primary argument in support of this assertion is that it is impossible to accept Pell’s claim that the first time he even heard rumours about Ridsdale’s paedophilia was when Ridsdale returned from four years’ treatment in the USA – in 1990, long after the two were both priests resident and working in the same diocese.

Even giving Pell the benefit of the doubt, in not having a clue about Ridsdale’s behaviour when it was occurring inches away from him – the two of them, along with other priests were living under one roof at St Alipius’ presbytery in 1973 – the latest possible date for Pell to have been generally aware of suspicions about Ridsdale would be 1975, the year in which then-Bishop Ronald Mulkearns has admitted that he first became aware of Ridsdale's “problem” (same URL).

Pell has said of his time living at St Alipius’ presbytery:

"I lived there with [Ridsdale] and there was not even a whisper. It was a different age, it was never mentioned."

“Different age” or not, the lack of even a whisper could only have been because there was a shout. Although Mulkearns – b. 1931 and still alive – has never been charged, a three-month police investigation (“Operation Arcadia”) concluded that Mulkearns had knowledge of crimes committed by Ridsdale much earlier than he has admitted to (same URL).

In fact, it is clear that Mulkearns inherited the Ridsdale problem when he took over as Bishop of Ballarat on 1 May 1971, a few days before Pell returned to Ballarat diocese from Oxford University, and a few months after Ridsdale had been shunted from Warrnambool to Ballarat (town hundreds of kilometres apart, but still within the same diocese). Mulkearns’s predecessor (and Pell mentor) Bishop James O'Collins recommended a psychological report on Ridsdale in 1966, and Mulkearns apparently did the same thing soon after becoming Bishop in 1971.

Reading between the lines of these known facts, it appears that Bishop O'Collins knowingly sent the paedophile Ridsdale to serve at St Alipius (including as primary school chaplain) from the start of 1971. This seems an almost-inexplicable act – O'Collins shunted a paedophile priest from a remote outpost of the diocese to its very centre, right under the Bishop’s own nose – except for the fact that O'Collins already had an exit strategy for himself in place. Moreover, O'Collins also had “insurance” – that he chose to step-down at exactly the moment the-then Oxford whizz-kid Pell returned to Ballarat speaks volumes. Pell’s initial job, then, was to cover O'Collins’s back.

Such a task necessitated Mulkearns getting thrown in at the deep end –which helps explain the curiously distant relationship between Pell and Mulkearns. O'Collins (and Pell, of course) kept up the pretext of knowing nothing, thus making Mulkearns’s supervisorial job that much harder – getting up to speed with a paedophile network headed by one’s same-age peer would genuinely take some time, and a lot of digging (in contrast, O'Collins had the luxury and power of having been Bishop of Ballarat since Ridsdale was a boy in the diocese).

While there is no single “smoking gun” to implicate Pell as a protector of paedophiles including Ridsdale, there is an observable pattern of denial on Pell’s part that sticks out like a polygraph thumb. After landing on his feet in 1973, at 32, as director of Aquinas College, Institute of Catholic Education (now Australian Catholic University), Pell was at least the Ballarat diocese’s second-most powerful figure for 11 years, until he moved to Melbourne in 1985 to head Corpus Christi College, the seminary in which he first studied.

The move/promotion, from what was essentially a secular role at a teacher-training institute, to being at the very crucible of the priesthood in charge of Victoria’s only seminary, came a year after James O'Collins’s death at 91.

During the intervening 11 year lacuna, Pell can be observed to have scrupulously avoided any formal role with the Ballarat diocesan hierarchy:

"I was never chaplain to St Alipius Boys School or worked there".

Disingenuously, Pell invariably omits to mention that he was officially assistant priest at Ballarat East (St Alipius) parish from 1973 to 1983. This was a role manqué for Pell – lowly enough to offer the immunity of plausible ignorance should questions ever arise, but sufficient for Pell to discharge his priestly duties while (i) he bided his time for a suitable place in the Church hierarchy, and (ii) he oversaw that nothing untoward happened to the in-it-up-to-his-neck, paedophile-protecting O'Collins before the retired Bishop's death.

Ridsdale, meanwhile, was finally decisively dealt with by Mulkearns – at least in the sense of his being removed from (i) the diocese and (ii) easy access to young children – in 1980, when he was sent to “study” at the National Pastoral Institute in Melbourne. Typically, Pell saw "nothing unusual" in this move.

If there is a stand-out piece in this pattern of denial, then this piece of retrospective justification is surely it:

"Before 1996, Ballarat had a committee to deal with this problem of accusations of sexual abuse. I was never a member of such a committee and no allegations or reports on any of the men mentioned were made to me." (same URL)

Yep, sure George – a committee did it. A faceless committee, comprised of unnamed persons, but presumably including your old sparring-mate Ronald Mulkearns, systemically covered up decades of child sexual abuse. Meanwhile, the one-person Committee for the Career and Advancement of George Pell was able to motor-on untouched and unimpeded – a career built on the suffering of hundreds of sexual abuse victims, that all started from the relatively innocent premise of covering one man’s back.

Update 18 August 2004

* Robert "Dolly" Dunn is appealing his 30 year sentence.
** After November 1983, the only person Pell could have been protecting was himself.

Update 19 August 2004

The Victorian OPP have been mysteriously swayed into keeping the Ridsdale files open, after all, "mysteriously" because the official explanation is that they thought that the "new victims" would have been heard at the original, 1994 trial. Go figure. Anyway, it's good news, I think. Keep an eye out for whether Mulkearns gets called as a witness, and if he does, whether he's finally going to decide to spill the beans (and therefore go down himself). If so, my guess is that Pell won't be able to stop taking the stand – and then the dock – himself.

The Pell Files – a selected bibliography:

Monday, June 03, 2002 Now for something completely different http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2002_06_02_paulwatson_archive.html#77280104

Thursday, August 22, 2002 Where to begin with the latest George Pell story? http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2002_08_18_paulwatson_archive.html#80548603

Monday, December 02, 2002 How many mentors should a person have? http://www.paulwatson.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_paulwatson_archive.html#85366782

Thursday, October 02, 2003 George Pell – one Cardinal Sin retires as another is inaugurated at 62 http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_paulwatson_archive.html#106507073873236795

Tuesday, May 04, 2004 Get Thee Down the Aisle, George Pell http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_paulwatson_archive.html#108365676328711565

Thursday, August 07, 2003
FOUND: the Vatican’s “smoking gun” on clerical paedophilia
[de-archived, reprinted post]

Clerical paedophilia, particularly in the Catholic Church, has been a significant public scandal, more or less continually, since the early 1980s. It is reasonable to suppose that the actual incidence of this crime has also significantly decreased since about the early 1980s (although I say this with a caveat – the long lead time, akin to mesothelioma’s incubation period, for many of the current batch of claims, may be a sui generis aspect to the reporting of the crime, rather than a year-of-crime-irrespective reportage “clustering” phenomenon).

The importance of charting a peak in the incidence of clerical paedophilia is double-sided. More obviously and understandably, it contains the crime (“contains” here in an innocent sense) – by the acts being mostly in the past, the present can be more effectively devoted to making reparations (aka “Towards Healing”), while not, of course, admitting that the passage of time has dulled the affect of the crime on its victims. A high level of present suspicion, in contrast, would be incredibly toxic – for the conduct of the “healing” process, and much more importantly, for the very survival of the Catholic Church in the English-speaking world.

An early 1980s peak can alternatively be invoked to deflect the crime of clerical paedophilia, by blaming it on the supposed exceptionalism of social mores between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Even accepting the existence as fact of social liberalism as an infectious, noxious agent in the post-Vatican II weakened Church, I (and I would assume, many others) cannot rationally comprehend how such a force could have undermined ordinary individual standards of moral autonomy. Still less could I (until I read this today) understand how the institutional Catholic Church could even broach such an ostensible link.

In case it is not clear what such a link means at the morality coalface, I'll spell it out now – paedophiles are as much victims of the liberal society as much as anyone else. A pretty sick argument, indeed – but a point nonetheless made by Archbishop George Pell, albeit in an oblique way, I should note. For a direct, bulls-eye invocation of the same argument by a senior political figure, see this.

With today’s revelations that a 1962 Vatican policy – apparently in force until quite recently – instructed total secrecy in cases of sex abuse by priests, the “out there” arguments of the Pells of this world now make considerably more sense. Clerical paedophilia was not long hidden/deflected because it was thought trivial, nor (probably) because it went to the Church’s highest levels, so giving blackmailers’ general immunity to its foot-soldier practitioners. Rather, Church paedophilia was caught in a loop of anachronistic secrecy.

The 1962 policy did not start out as a licence for paedophile clerics – although clearly, by the 1970s, it had become one. As a product of its time, the 1962 policy was mostly unexceptional – the prejudice that blanket secrecy would impose on victims of abuse is shocking by today’s standards, but not completely out of whack with mid-20th century haute paternalism. Presumably, the policy’s secrecy, even as to its existence, was also justified by the anticipated rarity of its invocation – like the rite of exorcism, some things clerical may well be best left as medieval-esque last resorts for the otherwise inexplicable (and unforgivable).

It was the 1962 policy’s secrecy, however, that was to quickly overwhelm its original intents. Never mind the admittedly changing social mores on the outside of the clerical ramparts; the licence had come from within. All that the sexual revolution et al did was to postpone the Church’s day of reckoning. Like a Bill passed in the last hours of a government about to lose office, the 1962 policy was soon to reek of Bad Law. Not that the Catholic Church had planned as much, at least in a precise, Machiavellian way. More likely, it was something simply overlooked, amid all the Vatican II optimism and momentum. It was thus left to the mealiest of senior Church mouths, like Archbishop George Pell, to take their revenge on Church modernisation by clinging on to a policy that had long since become evil (in any ordinary use of the word) – and then even to slyly half-confess their complicity, by the tried-and-true technique of blaming the Other.

- Paul Watson 4:37 PM

# posted by Paul Watson : 12:03 PM

2008-08-04T17:18:00.003+10:00

Twenty years of Punt Road gridlock – a parable

In the two years to mid-1988, car traffic on Melbourne’s Punt Road (an inner-city arterial and bete noir of every Melbourne driver) increased from 50,000 to 200,000 vehicles per day. This figure has stayed pretty much constant ever since. Nonetheless, Punt Road's traffic congestion is featured in two big (unrelated) news stories in today’s broadsheets. Contrary to what you might think, today’s stories are not shallow, ahistorical whinges; nor overt “20th anniversary of the gridlock” angles. Instead, we get the impression that the stories' quoted experts have driven on Punt Road precisely twice in the last 20 years (in 1988 and then just the other day), which has resulted in such exquisite deja vu that fixing Punt Road gridlock has become a personal crusade of some urgency.

As most Melburnians would recognise, the above Punt Road figures are a crock – everyone knows that Punt Road has been gridlocked forever. Moreover, any Melburnian who started espousing the golden, olden days of Punt Road, “when traffic was as light as silk”, would be committing high treason on Melburnians’ most sacred collective tenet – that the worst Punt Road traffic has ever been was one’s most recent (if not current) time, but equally the title to Punt Road’s true horror-of-horrors Worst Time Ever is so fiercely competed for among Melburnians that they should never lightly enter the ring, by sharing, especially with strangers, their own Punt Road traffic-horror anecdotes and metrics. But I digress.

If you replace “Punt Road” in the above with “post-modernism”, you get a nutshell of today’s “news”. Yes, post-modernism has been omnipresent in Australian universities humanities departments for about 20 years, but never mind revisiting the facts of its rather abrupt introduction. But that’s perhaps a niche story, anyway. More importantly for today’s "news" is that the intervening 20 years are of remarkably little consequence. While in the last 20 years, millions of journeys have been taken upon Punt Road, and at least hundreds of thousands have done three or more years study in humanities departments, today’s news focus is on the armchair expert, who somehow manages to own the Worst Pomo-Horror Ever (Anecdote) Official Title, in spite of twenty years of life and student/academic traffic going on and through humanities departments.

I have previously written on this phenomenon – which of course marginalises Xers' experience (to an offensive degree), and privileges boomers’ irrational/armchair perspectives – a la Keith Windschuttle. I thought then that maybe this was a right-wing nutbar peccadillo, but it now seems that it’s in the general water supply consumed by boomers.

For the record, there are actually living Australians who were students when post-modernism became pervasive in university humanities departments in the 1980s. As you can probably guess, I am one of them. I don’t think that anything more needs to be said about this, other than if pomo was going to cause the sky to fall, then it already must have happened, sometime in the last 20 years.

2008-07-19T10:02:00.002+10:00

Xers with nothing left to lose

When the Heinrich Kieber story – of the employee of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein who copied (/“stole”) documents on accounts held by foreigners in the tax haven, and later sold these to the German government – first broke in February, my first thought was: “This guy’s got to be an Xer”. Sure enough, he’s 43.

Personally, I would have happily given the documents away, rather than sold them. But other than that, I see where he’s coming from. The social contract that, more so than confidentiality contracts and laws, binds the bankers and their underlings of the ultra-rich to paramount discretion just doesn’t cut it with Xers. We may be paid (well) for our silence, although I suspect Kieber wasn’t while he worked for LGT, which may be a large reason for his later mercenary attitude. Even if we are well-paid, however, Xers are otherwise ill-suited to the cold-blooded life of a tax-haven private banker. Boomers reap and enjoy the status quo, and so are (or have been, since 1979, at least) generally unwilling to do anything to upset it. Xers, in contrast, have no vested interest in the quiet life, and can be therefore counted upon to rock the boat, or fly into the World Trade Centre, upon the least provocation (in boomers’ eyes) or ethical imperative (in Xers’ own eyes).

Today’s Oz gives more detail on Kieber’s motives at the time of the “theft”, under the misleading headline “Revenge of the IT guy in Lowy case” (Kieber was apparently primarily a document scanner and indexer, which surely makes him more “arts graduate” than “IT guy”):

Kieber's job was to scan thousands of paper documents. Seeing first-hand how wealthy individuals conducted their own affairs - tax scams hiding millions of dollars of assets - left Kieber, by his own admission yesterday, with a growing sense of outrage. He plotted his revenge . . . "To be able to index the documents, we had to read every single one on our screens," Kieber said. "It was then I began to realise the very questionable business the LGT was often involved in and the dubious clients they were serving, the kind of business that goes beyond just facilitating massive tax evasion." . . .

Kieber said he was also involved in IT training of the 85 staff members of the LGT Trust, including the chief executive and board members. "When I was teaching the CEO or a member of the board or a trust client adviser, I confronted them about the LGT's questionable practices that I have seen in many files," he said. "Sometimes I always raised this topic with foundations' bank account managers from the LGT Bank. All these discussions were about files with strong indication to corruption, links to dictators, or business deals to avoid a US embargo, for example. "The answer was always the same: none of your business. Just stick to your designated job."

Oddly, today’s Oz doesn’t report the fact, which was widely reported in February, that Kieber is now living under a fresh identity in Australia. Also odd is the last line in a story in yesterday’s Oz, that:

“The report notes that on June 25, 2001, [Lowy Liechtenstein entity] Luperla was wound up, but the committee said there were no documents explaining why this decision was taken.”

A useful additional fact here may be that on 25 July 2001, a month after Luperla was wound up, Westfield America Inc (a public company in which the Lowy family are major shareholders) contracted to lease New York World Trade Centre’s retail section for 99 years.

Finally, speaking of 43 year-old IT guys, today’s Oz has another, completely unrelated, one also running amok on the job.

Terry Childs, this time a real (and reasonably well-paid) IT pointy-head, after being disciplined by his employer, the San Francisco Department of Technology, has configured the city’s computer network to administrator access by just one, secret password.

I don’t think that the aptly-named Childs is in the same ethical ball-park as Heinrich Kieber, but nonetheless this was definitely another of those “This guy’s got to be an Xer” stories. Enjoying the deckchair view from your supposedly unsinkable status quo, boomers?

2008-06-17T14:29:00.004+10:00

Bridging Melbourne’s transport missing links

Everyone agrees that something, and something big, needs to be done.

Before launching into specifics, I’ll propose five common-sense (I think) general guidelines for planning expensive transport infrastructure.

But my very first observation is that Melbourne apparently has a peculiar allergy to building bridges across the Yarra River, particularly outside the CBD. Along the 30-odd km of river between Princes Bridge (CBD) and before Fitzsimons Lane (Eltham), there have been just one new foot/bike bridge (just downstream of Burke Road; contra to Guideline 4, below) and two new road bridges (the Eastern and South-Eastern (Monash) Freeways) built since 1938 (when a bridge replaced the punt in Punt Road). (NOTE: this excludes the privately-built Lower Plenty footbridge (1955) and the ridiculously-narrow Fairfield pipeline footbridge, built c.1990 on top of a pre-existing pipeline).

GUIDELINE NO. 1

Road tunnels should not, in general, parallel existing surface arterial routes. Ditto for new rail lines/tunnels vis a vis existing rail and tram lines.

GUIDELINE NO. 2

Existing under-used arterial roads should form the planning foundation for future road tunnels.

GUIDELINE NO. 3

The cost of tunnelling can be amortised by making it dual purpose; i.e. both road and rail.

GUIDELINE NO. 4

A river bridge should usually not be built in close proximity to an existing bridge, especially where there is a substantial unbridged gap further up- or down-stream.

GUIDELINE NO. 5

Commuter bicycle routes should generally follow road and rail infrastructure principles; i.e. be primarily “spokes” converging on the CBD. If a “natural” bike route/path (i.e. a river, creek or abandoned train reservation) happens to generally align with a “spoke”, that’s great, but if it doesn’t, then the commuter bike route needs to become “unnatural” – i.e. direct – for that section.

SUB-GUIDELINE NO. 5A

Recreational, as distinct from commuter, bicycle routes, can loop-the-loop, or whatever. They are not worth spending a cent on expanding now, however, until other things are fixed first. In other words, Melbourne already has a supreme abundance of dedicated bike paths going from Somewhere-near-you to Nowhere-much, and dreaming of filling-in the “missing links” between any or all these is idle.

--

NEW ROAD TUNNELS

Two years ago, I proposed a two-tunnel solution, one diagonal (see Guideline 1) tunnel from the existing end of the Eastern Freeway at Clifton Hill to west of North Melbourne station, and one under Footscray. These two tunnels would capitalise on the currently under-used (see Guideline 2) east-west Docklands arterials (Footscray and/or Dynon Roads) and Geelong Road.

I am pleased to say that the recent Eddington report seems to have been thinking along the same lines, although it seems vague in the details. (Most media reports have been of either a single Clifton Hill-Footscray tunnel or an even more ludicrous mega-tunnel from Clifton Hill to Deer Park (i.e. the Western Ring Road). Both such tunnels, of course, are gross and wasteful breaches of Guideline 2).

NEW RAIL TUNNELS

The Eddington report’s recommendation of a multi-billion rail tunnel from Caulfield to Footscray, via St Kilda Road and Melbourne Uni, is an utter crock. Almost all of its route is parallel to, if not actually directly underneath, existing rail (mainly) and tram (especially heavily between Melbourne Uni and the CBD) infrastructure. There are only two sections where it is not: between Melbourne Uni and North Melbourne station, and more nebulously, between the inner south-east and St Kilda Road. The former gap is already solved by my proposed inclusion (same URL) of a rail, as well as road, tunnel (see Guideline 3) between Clifton Hill and North Melbourne station, via Melbourne Uni.

The latter gap has a host of existing tram lines. However, I recognise that (i) time-wise, these are not a satisfactory current solution for commuting from the middle or outer south-east to St Kilda Road, and (ii) there is currently a serious tram bottle-neck outside Flinders Street station for southbound St Kilda Road commuters. I believe that these problems could be solved by a much shorter new, stand-alone (albeit contra Guideline 3) rail tunnel from South Yarra station, via St Kilda Road at the Domain interchange, to Southern Cross/Spencer Street station.

NEW BICYCLE INFRASTRUCTURE

What is needed here above all, in case it is not already obvious, is bike bridges, bridges, bridges – and a couple of short bike tunnels, to boot.

Melbourne’s only currently decent and viable off-road bicycle commuter (i.e. to the CBD) routes are the Yarra north-bank/Gardiners Creek route and the Port Melbourne train reservation route. The path alongside Footscray Road is also viable, although it barely qualifies as off-road. The Yarra north-bank route is severely handicapped, however, by limited (non-step) access to it, particularly from Prahran/South Yarra.

The Yarra south-bank route not only ends nowhere (Toorak, to be precise) abruptly, and is a km or so longer than the north-bank path, it is narrow and often badly surfaced, largely because of tree root damage (neither of which problems can be easily or cheaply fixed).

The Merri and Moonee Creeks bike paths, while broadly well-enough aligned to qualify as potential spokes, are too bitsy (and again, unfixably so) for anything but recreational riding, except for the lower reaches of the latter, under CityLink.

Which brings us to Melbourne’s only other substantial off-road bicycle routes in the inner and middle-suburbs: the north-east Yarra and the Darebin Creek paths. The former is hopelessly meandering, in both elevation and direction, not to mention bitsy and step-riddled. The latter is uncannily, and unfortunately, similar to the Merri and Moonee Creeks paths: while it runs in a generally useful direction (north-south), it is simply too bitsy for viable commuter use. One good thing about the Darebin Creek path, however, it that it actually currently ends somewhere - i.e. near both a city-bound train station and a city-bound arterial road that has a reserved bike lane, at least in the morning peak.

Notwithstanding any of this, there is supposedly a missing link between the north-east Yarra and the Darebin Creek paths, a problem which apparently can only be solved by four million dollars, the bisecting of a golf-club, and going hard by the fragile Kew Billabong.

This “missing link” theory, and purported solution, is a handy nutshell of everything that is currently wrong with Melbourne’s off-road bicycle infrastructure. That is, the power-that-be seem determined to repeat the mistakes of the past, by spending maximum bucks for minimum bike-commuter benefit. For a start, the 2 km or so route would go at a noticeable angle to the rest of the Darebin Creek path’s general alignment; in fact at the most useless possible angle: north-west to south-east. Then it’s expensive (because of the substantial land acquisition it requires), and environmentally dubious. Above all, though, is that better and cheaper alternative routes lie just east (along the Belford Road alignment, where a narrow reservation runs all the way to the Yarra's south bank) and/or west (from Alphington Park) of this nutter obsession route, that the bike-path-must-follow-the-creek-to-its-end-confluence, no matter what.

So here’s my grand (I’m estimating $10m or so) plan to fix at least the inner north-east’s current bike-path mess, and at the same time throwing in a useful north-south, direct city bypass through Richmond and South Yarra, as well as providing a much-needed additional entry point to the Yarra north-bank route from the inner south-east.

Bike bridge one: north end of Rockley Road, South Yarra to Yarra north-bank path (with no steps!). Route then joins existing Coppin Street, Richmond, on-road path.

Bike bridge two: north end of Duke Street, Abbotsford alignment (along CUB Brewery boundary) straight across the Yarra. (Duke Street is continuation of existing Coppin/Gardner/Bennett streets on-road paths in Richmond).

Bike tunnel one: north-south, about 100m long, below existing golf course and escarpment, to continue the alignment of the new Duke Street bike bridge. The tunnel's elevation should be (like all new Yarra bike bridges) just above the river's flood peak.

Bike bridge three: simple mirror image of the new Duke Street bike bridge, continuing the north-south alignment. Note that this bridge, together with a short, new low-level path along the Kew bank will also solve the current Gipps Street bridge steps problem (simply building a ramp here, without building a new bridge or anything else, has been quoted at a ridiculous $1.5m plus).

Bike bridge four: from the Collingwood Children’s Farm in a north-east direction, about 200m south-east of the existing Johnston Street bridge. The path leading to this bridge will involve a small amount of land acquisition from the Children’s Farm. This impact can be minimised, however, by elevating the new path – which would be a prudent course in this flood-prone area, anyway. Note that this bridge may also appear to breach Guideline 4, but Johnston Street bridge is most definitely not a viable substitute in this case).

Bike tunnel two: north-east/south-west, also about 100m long, under Studley Park Road and the escarpment, to come out about 50m west of existing Studley Park boathouse.

Bike bridge five: it’s the obvious one: north-east to Yarra Bend Park. While the south end of this bridge would be on a relatively pristine bank of the Yarra, there are strong grounds for placing it here, rather than east of the boathouse, as it would materially separate most bike traffic from the heavily pedestrianised (on both banks) Kane’s Bridge area.

Bike bridge six: from somewhere between Eastern Freeway and Yarra Bend Gold Course, east-west to join Yarra Boulevard (and from there, all points north-east, including via my proposed Belford Road alignment and/or Alphington Park “missing link” bike bridges).

Yep, it’s admittedly, compared to recent decades, a veritable bridge binge, and all in a relatively small area, to boot (not to mention the novel idea of bike tunnels). But it sure as hell ain’t bitsy in the end result – it starts and ends in useful places, it goes in a useful direction, it admirably leverages a lot of existing under-used parkland, and it involves minimal property acquisition.

2008-05-25T13:18:00.001+10:00

Bill Henson, art and child porn

Distinguishing photo/video art from child porn, is – or at least should be – much simpler than in the case of adult-actor porn.

With naked and/or sexualised adults, the production process for consensual porn and art is essentially the same – the models/actors do what is asked of them by the man (as it almost always is) behind the camera. It is only the context of the finished product – and not the finished product itself – that is best able to place an ambiguous enterprise in an “art” or “porn” pigeonhole. In the end, though, even this context – e.g. is it displayed in an art gallery, or is it on a pay-per-view Internet site? – can sometimes be hopelessly subjective or of circular logic.

With children, such context scarcely matters, a fact which seems to escape a lot of commentators in the present debate. The production process for child porn is the litmus test – there simply are no consensual actors within the finished product, whatever its context. A child’s exploitation will often be objectively clear from the face of the finished product, but if this is ambiguous (as are Henson’s images, in my opinion), further inquiries can be made to get at the objective truth of the production process.

Thus, the unnamed, apparently pre-pubescent girl depicted in the offending images (and unpixellated in today’s Age) surely has an important voice in all this, as do her parents.

I do not know how Bill Henson recruits his child models, nor the details of the contractual arrangements he makes in connection with them (presumably contracts between parent/s and Henson). Something that Henson has twice said, in media interviews canvassing this very topic, does strike me as flippantly rote, however. The comments, which were made almost two years apart, are:

“Though Henson says his golden rule is ‘never apologise, never explain’, he does tackle the accusations of exploitation, pointing out that he remains in contact with many of the people he has photographed over the years, an unlikely outcome if the subjects had felt violated in any way. ‘I have dinner with people who are going bald who I photographed when they were 12,’ he says.”

- “Twilight zone” by Miriam Cosic, Weekend Australian Magazine 22 March 2003 (no URL)

“[M]any of those young models remain his friends and supporters today.”
(presumably paraphrasing something that Henson said).

- “Emerging from the shadows” by Rosalie Higson, Australian 7 January 2005 (no URL)

2008-05-22T11:50:00.005+10:00

The Medicare levy black hole

Been slack about this blog lately. My excuse is that the Australian broadsheets, viz my usual source of inspiration, have been so lame that it is hard to know where to begin.

Making my daily overdose of dyspepsia worse has been the “news” that several hundred Fairfax journalists on salaries above $100,000 “could be forced into one-on-one [as opposed to collective] negotiations with no guaranteed [as opposed to automatic] pay rises”. Diddums – given that I live on less than one-tenth of their average salaries, and that I would be ashamed , paid or unpaid, to contribute to the content-lite fluff that is the Age’s house style.

The Medicare levy changes at least provide some interesting shades of grey in terms of their relative media coverage. But first, to the titular black hole.

Widely reported yesterday was an Access Economics study which estimated up to 900,000 people could cancel private-hospital policies as a result of the changes, almost double the government’s own forecast of 485,000. Maybe – and we’ll see it very soon, in any event – but what no one seems to have picked up on, more than week after the budget, is the numerical absurdity of the government’s claim that it will save $300m by the 485,000 people cancelling their current private-hospital policies. This figure was calculated as the cost of their current 30% rebate ($960m), less the $660m foregone by the large increase in the Medicare levy surcharge's income threshold*.

The Access study found that Treasury estimates on the revenue implications of the policy change were “highly implausible”. That is, it’s a battle of pure estimates, a battle on which very little objectively depends, because if the government finds out soon enough that its estimates were wildly wrong, it can steer things in the other direction to compensate. It’s not rocket science.

Calculating the out-of-pocket cost of 485,000 people’s private-hospital policies that attract a 30% rebate of $960m apparently is rocket science, however. I’m no maths whiz, but in round figures, it seems to translate to 500,000 people having out-of-pocket costs of a total $2bn, or an average of $4,000 a year each. Surely that’s an absurd figure, given that the cheapest Medicare levy surcharge-compliant (i.e. excess of no more than $500) private-hospital cover starts at just above the minimum possible (pre-changes) level of the surcharge, of $500, or $10 per week. While it may be possible that some people are paying $80 or more a week for private-hospital cover, these are unlikely to be among the 485,000 (or 900,000) mainly young and healthy people who are now poised to drop their cover. The mainstream media’s (and Access Economics’) omission to see this, while focusing on something else said to be “highly implausible”, is bizarre.

To better prove its woeful standards, though, the Age couldn’t let things rest there. It had to take Access Economics’ forecast result of the fiscal consequences of the 900,000 drop-outs (viz a 5% increase), and combine them with the invariable annual, anyway premium increase, to come up with a “Health cover 'to soar [sic] by 10%'” headline shocker (same URL). Look at the byline: it took two way-overpaid journo’s, and presumably also an overpaid sub-editor, to come up with this complete non-story. Newsflash to the Age – if something essential and/or big-ticket is going up in price by only 10% annually at the moment, then it’s either an absolute or relative non-event.

Adding to the media’s slackness here is its widespread laziness in bandying-about the 30% rebate. AFAICT, only Mike Steketee, in today’s Oz, has made the salient reminder that the applicable rebate is 35 per cent for people aged 65-69 and 40 per cent for those over 70 (a change that was introduced in 2005). Admittedly, the over-65s are not likely upcoming insurance drop-outs, but the detail is important as a reminder of just how badly the “community rating” principle has been tampered with. The young and healthy cross-subsidise the old and sick with their premiums – this is a good and necessary thing. But these cross-subsidies needs to be both transparent and reasonable, and the higher-rebate, a secondary cross-subsidy, is neither. Nor is the lifetime rating system, which also both gives a free kick to over-65s, and effectively grandfathered baby boomers (and older) over younger generations.

Intriguingly, Emeritus fellow at the Australian National University and one of the architects of Medicare, John Deeble alluded to the generational unfairness and general mess in an ABC radio interview yesterday:

SABRA LANE: Mr Deeble backs the Government's decision to double the Medicare levy surcharge thresholds for singles and couples. He says it’s fair.

JOHN DEEBLE: Well, I think it is very fairly obvious and equitable move. I mean those targets were introduced in 1996 and they were designed to frighten people by the threat of tax to take up private health insurance. They didn't work then actually and it took a number of years before they were backed up by other things, but clearly they are now catching a large number of people who are not in the income range that was first contemplated.

No other media outlet, including the ABC’s online news section, picked up this quote, despite (or because of?) its controversial nature.

So endeth my eight cents (of labour) worth.

*“An odd pill for a sick industry” by Siobhain Ryan, Weekend Australian “Health” 17 May 2008

Update

I just remembered that there was some media coverage, soon after the budget, that the government's 30%-rebate-savings figures were over-optimistic because they included "extras" cover as well. Of course, both "extras" and private-hospital cover attract the rebate, but only the latter is relevant for the surcharge. Even estimating the "extras" component at a generous $25 per week (out of the improbably high total of $80 per week), however, the government's implied out-of-pocket hospital-cover-only cost figures still seem seriously skew-whiff, at $55 per week.

Further update 25 May 2008

Here’s my recommendation for a generationally-fair lifetime rating and government rebate system. Abolish both the present age-related rebates and the punitive current rating system and replace them with a single rebate incentive. E.g. for cover maintained for 10-19 years, a 10% rebate, etc, up to a 40% rebate for cover maintained for 40+ years. Importantly, eligibility for this rebate would be retrospective, as it were. While documenting such health cover back to the late 1960s may be difficult, it shouldn’t be an insuperable obstacle. Certainly, the most recent decade will be easily documented.

The advantage of my proposal is that current oldies who have done the right thing – i.e. also had private-hospital cover while they were young and healthy – will be no worse off, keeping their current 40% rebate. Johnny-come-lately’s to private-hospital cover, in contrast, will not be able to doubly sponge off the present generation of the young and healthy (as they do at present), with age-discriminatory rebate levels and lifetime-rating grandfathering.

2008-04-25T11:58:00.001+10:00

Un-Australian Chinese

Amnesty International is not one of the many One China-Issue causes, a la Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong, and bears in cages. While most of the latter have a point*, AI is more big picture than barrow-pusher. Its rap sheet on China goes like this:

While some reforms have been made on the death penalty, China remains the world's top executioner. Human rights activists continue to be detained and harassed. Internet users are censored. Individuals are subjected to detention without trial. While new regulations may give foreign journalists more freedom to conduct interviews in China until October, control over the domestic media has tightened. [And then there’s Tibet . . . ]

- Claire Mallinson, national director, Amnesty International Australia

For all its carefully nuanced concerns about China, this is what happened to a small group of Amnesty International supporters/demonstrators at yesterday’s Canberra torch relay:

Away from the front line, smaller skirmishes had broken out all day. Tibetan independence supporter Marie Gunderson-Briggs found herself in the middle of one.

"We'd just joined up with a group of about 30 Amnesty demonstrators when we were surrounded," she said. "They were pushing in on us. They were 10 deep, squeezing us, yelling 'go home' and 'liars' and grabbing at our banners. It was incredibly intimidating."

Mrs Gunderson-Briggs recounted how her 13-year-old daughter Manon had broken down crying.

"When the riot police did arrive, they had to force their way through," she said. "If they hadn't come, I don't know what would have happened."

A story in today’s Oz corroborates the role of the police in extricating the Amnesty International group from the threatening situation.

The similarities with the Cronulla riot of late 2005 are inescapable – the police barely able to cope with a thuggish army of thousands, all as one high on an ethno-exclusivist patriotism. Needless to say, both occasions were deeply un-Australian.

It is now incumbent on Australian Chinese leaders to condemn what took place yesterday, and for Australian authorities to act decisively to prevent a re-occurrence.

*Falun Gong excepted – no government could ever stop a person meditating in private, and if one’s right to group/public meditation in China is really your main or only China issue, then you’re a moronic stooge.

2008-04-14T16:56:00.003+10:00

Lonely Planet guidebook fiction

I’ve long been suss about Lonely Planet guides anyway. An Aussie export powerhouse, centered on – and so co-opted by – the American market. Which puts it in an exclusive club of three – the other two of which are crocs (Dundee and Steve Irwin).

Worse though, is Lonely Planet’s odiferous boomer taint. Beginning from humble and youthful beginnings in the early 1970s, Lonely Planet began, or if not greatly popularised, the supposed distinction between “tourists” (bad) and “travellers” (good). I would have thought that any such distinction has just one acid test – tourists carry mass-market guidebooks. QED.

The boomer taint insidiously extends to Lonely Planet’s editorial, in the oddest places. Here’s a background small fact about the Tanami Track (from Lonely Planet Outback Australia 2002 by Rob Van Driesum and Denis O'Byrne p 179 (accessed through Google Books)):

“Up until the early 1970s there was a stock route that went from Refrigerator Bore [183 km NW of Yuendemu] . . . to Balgo and Halls Creek. This route was pioneered in the early 1960s and a series of wells dug along its length to supply the cattle. Once trucks took over from droving, the route was no longer used”.

Unless someone here is taking the piss, Lonely Planet actually wants us to know that a track that was “pioneered” (no less) in the early 1960s was obsolete within ten years. Apart from factual dubiousness of this quote (the last droving use of the Canning Stock Route, for example, was in 1958, about when road-trains for cattle took off), there is its barely hidden meta-narrative of all boomers (and of all Lonely Planet guides). That all time froze circa 1973, but in so freezing, a more innocent time of a decade earlier was somehow captured in the final result. “We want (back) our childhood (/got-there before-it-was ruined traveller-hood), and we want it now” – the boomers’ evergreen, pathetic anthem.

Roll up, roll up, welcome to the perma-nostalgic, pioneering 1960s. For boomers, it's the decade without a past, or end.

2008-03-26T15:27:00.004+10:00

“Border Security”, spectacle and compulsion

The Channel 7 reality show “Border Security” is an oddity compared to scripted soaps and reality soaps (like Big Brother) on TV. The last two or three minutes of the show – the usual spot for the climax/cliffhanger – is mostly an unsatisfying denouement.

There are four staple segments in “Border Security”, which together account for at least 90% of the show’s content (excluding the boys-with-their-big-toys (and guns) on the high seas segments, which seem to me to belong in a quite different show).

The non-Anglo/Celts who have brought with them contraband food/plant material will usually get a small fine, plus a compulsory lecture (which is also repeated, for emphasis, to the viewers by voice-over) about the $X-billion risks to Australia’s environment/economy. In any event, the fine doesn’t seem proportionate to the lecture’s message, so I can only assume that the latter is full of crap. If not, al-Qaida only needs successfully to import some dubious dolmades to bring Australia to its knees.

Then there’s the posted drugs, cleverly, but not cleverly enough, hidden in some object. The package is delivered, sans actual drugs, to its nominated address, after which, more often than not, “AFP enquiries are continuing” – i.e. the baddies haven’t been, and probably won’t be, caught. Another oddly predictable anti-climax.

Next, there’s the drugs-on-the-person. This time, the soap climax conventions are followed, albeit by surtext – “X was convicted and sentenced to 8-10 years’ imprisonment”. In a minority of cases, however, the drugs turn out to have been a false alarm/suspicion.

Finally, there’s the visa-issues segment (i.e. no customs involved). These vary too much to generalise, although instant deportation from Australia is the most common outcome. In such cases, instant deportation is invariably favourably contrasted, by voice-over, to the other stated option – a stint in a detention centre.

If the “Border Security” format has settled into rigidity over the years, one thing has noticeably changed over this time – pixellation of faces, seen fairly frequently in previous years, now seems never to occur.

Pixellation can occur for two reasons – pending court proceedings, or the depicted individual/s not signing a release. The former can be usually worked around, by holding the footage until the verdict is in. Of course, such shelving also makes dramatic sense for the single segment (drugs-on-the-person, confirmed) where court proceedings play any narrative role (the food/plant fines are generally on-the-spot).

Which brings us to the depicted individual/s not signing a release. With the top-rating show having been broadcast in Australia for several years now, it seems safe to assume that almost any Australian resident, however tired and jet-lagged upon their return, would know that signing a release to being filmed at the airport would more than likely mean “Border Security”. (I am assuming that the releases, to better their chances of being signed, might simply allude to something like “Acme Productions”). It is odd, then, that the pixellation-rate has not only not increased, but has shrunk to zero, even as Australian residents (at least) became ever more knowing of exactly what they were in for, should they sign.

The explanation for this, according to this fellow Melbourne writer-blogger Peter Chambers, is that consenting to being filmed on “Border Security” is a condition of re-entry for Australian residents (and presumably also a condition of entry for non-Australians).

I am staggered that this requirement, which seems to have been brought in within the last year, is not more widely known, and excoriated. It is repulsive and Orwellian.

Peter Chambers otherwise dismisses “Border Security” as xenophobic. I disagree, at least that such is the show’s main problem.

Being filmed is well-understood as being a way of heightening conflict. Put another way, the actors in reality TV tend to become “actors”. Inter-cultural conflict/misunderstanding - where it exists - is generally itself ample for the show’s narrative requirements.

Conversely, for most Australians being filmed at the airport for possible inclusion on the show, “rateable” conflict needs to be artificially stimulated. This may not be even consciously realised by the customs/immigration staff who obviously hold the power to turn up the conflict-o-meter as required. Nonetheless, such an abuse of power is a natural and inevitable result of Australians mandatorily being filmed for “Border Security”.

Finally, it would be naïve to think that any malicious or “accidental” conflict escalation by a government officer (c.f. the hapless Australian’s response) would itself make it to broadcast – it is clear that Australian customs/immigration have ultimate editorial control of “Border Security”.

What a disgrace.

2008-02-12T09:25:00.000+10:00

Roots weeping down to the blue sky – Vincent Serico and saying “sorry”

Oh boy, tomorrow morning’s “sorry” is going to be simultaneously ratified and drowned in an archipelago of weeping. Or that’s how I feel about it now. Shedding tears is a part-visual thing, but weeping is all sound. The sound of sadness being distilled. The sound of shuddering drawn and undrawn breaths.

An article in yesterday’s Australian on terminally-ill Indigenous artist Vincent Serico, vis a vis the forthcoming apology, sets a poignant enough tone. As it happens, I was gobsmacked by a particular painting of Mr Serico’s 12 years ago.

The painting “Yesterday” was hung at Tandanya Gallery, Adelaide in March 1996. Here’s my diary entry of its viewing:

“At the bottom of the painting is a scene of what first looks like an ordered working-class white town, but at second glance is a clearly all-black MissionVille, complete with church. On top of the town’s blue sky is a black line of tree roots, through which tribal Aboriginal figures reach down, precariously and strenuously. The figures dangle branches to pick up people from the white world and take them into the beautiful and dense Aboriginal world above”.

It was and is the saddest thing I have ever seen or heard.

At that time I knew nothing of Mr Serico’s background. Now the painting “Yesterday” seems to me a perfect representation of the stolen generations.

There is an obvious spatial cleft, and incongruity, in the painting between the “Indigenous” top and the mission below. There is also the suggestion of a temporal cleft, in the tribal Aboriginal figures juxtaposed against the mission’s assimilees.

The painting’s gut-wrenchingness is in knowing – as every Australian does, even if unconsciously – how small these clefts really were, which it turn required the persistent and violent policing of the boundaries. At Darwin’s Kahlin Compound, parental and elder hands literally reached through the chain-link fence to their children. But these became the hands of ghosts, as the fence and cleft eventually prevailed. Few of those on the outside of the fence - those who dangled their hands down in Mr Serico’s painting - would now be alive. Their sound can no longer be silenced, however.

2008-01-29T12:41:00.000+10:00

Rogue employees and Wayne Carey’s CCTV copyright

“Privacy” is an amorphous supposed “right”. I’d prefer to have the simpler right not to be (i) stolen from, or (ii) to have my image used without consent, express or implied. The latter, civil (c.f. criminal) right is admittedly vague in its parameters and enforceability. In any case, some recent precedents suggest that even out-and-out thieves can act with relative impunity, at least providing they have Channel 7 as an accomplice in the crime.

The security guard who sold Wayne Carey’s CCTV footage to Channel 7 for $20,000 may yet be charged, it is true. However, last year’s court sequel of the Centrelink employee who detailed Schapelle Corby’s (supposed) medical file on national TV – for which former Centrelink employee Natalie Pearson received a good behaviour bond* ("Media Watch" misleadingly said Pearson was “fined” and “punished”), and Channel 7 got off scot free – suggests that even if charges follow, the outcome for the security guard will be a slap on the wrist, at worst.

Whistleblowers – i.e. employees who leak information to the media for a genuine public benefit – have never faced a more daunting array of potential criminal and civil punishments. Greedy and/or amoral (Pearson wasn’t paid for her story) opportunist insiders, however, seem to slip through the legal net.

This is itself part of a larger problem – that the concept of a “position of trust” has more or less evaporated, a casualty of economic fundamentalism. Wayne Carey, as owner or renter of his apartment, paid for (presumably through the building’s body corporate) a CCTV service on private property, but this seems to be of little consequence, when push/prurience comes to shove/broadcast. If a Centrelink client’s (supposed) medical file can be broadcast without sanction on the broadcaster (and not in connection with any allegation of welfare fraud, aka whistleblowing), then anything goes, evidently.

Without employees being held to be in positions of trust, legal distortions arise. Last year, revelations about Melbourne bus drivers pocketing customers’ cash, so giving them a discounted ride but not a valid ticket, were summed up by public transport Minister Lynne Kosky as a fare evasion problem. Kosky’s department, meanwhile was “examining whether it can charge some drivers with criminal offences” (same URL). Public servants stonewalling the police, in other words. Yup, it turns out that it’s bus passengers – or nobody, otherwise – who are primarily charged with the responsibility of stopping thieving scum. Admittedly, fare part-evasion (by discount) by passengers is also a form of theft, but as an individual criminal act it is objectively trifling compared to the systemic theft of tens of thousands of dollars annually by bus-driver employees from their employers and Victorian taxpayers. A legal and political system that cannot recognise this is useless.

One anomalous employee role apparently yet remains as a position of trust – that of equities and derivatives trader. With a clear mandate to make a lot of money for other people, while never losing too much in the course of so doing, such traders are part sober trustee and part Santa Claus, to their adult charges/beneficiaries. Call me old-fashioned, but I see an intrinsic conflict between these two roles. Appropriately perversely, the criminal law seems ever eager to throw the book at rogue traders, despite the usual minimal or zero financial, or other ulterior, gain they personally accrue.

A security guard exploiting a person who pays their wages? Just one of life’s modern miscellaneous bug-bears. Ditto, it appears, for Centrelink employees turning on their clients and for thieving bus drivers. But Santa Claus stuffing up his gift orders – now that’s a crime deserving of the law’s full majesty.

* “Ex-Centrelink worker slammed over Corby leak” by Greg Stolz news.com.au 10 October 2007 and “The Diary” by Amanda Meade, Australian 11 October 2007.

2008-01-03T11:21:00.000+10:00

Closing Pakistan’s madrassas

A day or two before Christmas, a TV news snippet of Benazir Bhutto speech-making caught my eye. Visibly yelling to the microphone and audience, the gist of Ms Bhutto’s speech was, to me, surprisingly blunt. She railed against Pakistan’s madrassas, as follows:

“Bhutto said President Pervez Musharraf had spoken of the need to reform religious schools, or madrassas, but had done nothing. She said she respected genuine religious schools.

‘Then there are the political madrassas, the political madrassas that teach their pupils how to make bombs, how to use rifles and how to kill women, children and the elderly. Who they are who tell children to carry out bombing on Eid al-Adha,’ she said, referring to the attack on Friday in the northwestern town of Charsadda”.

How brave of her, I thought at the time. Now I’m not nearly so sure. If you Google Bhutto and “political madrassas”, you’ll see it was a well-worn, albeit sparsely reported, theme of Ms Bhutto’s for at least the past year. But the real problem for Ms Bhutto’s clarion call was not its diluting repetition, but its hypocrisy.

Clearly, closing Pakistan’s “political” madrassas would be a good thing for everybody, bar a few adult males with vested interests in Islamic terrorism. Oh, and to Pakistan’s corrupt ruling classes – men, women (including the late Ms Bhutto, of course), and children – with vested interests in the status quo.

Residential institutions where early-teen boys are brainwashed into becoming foot-soldiers for a shadow, el cheapo army require a large and entrenched (hereditary) underclass for the supply of their raw material. It does not appear that Ms Bhutto had any intent of addressing this supply and demand aspect of the madrassa problem, however.

Then again, Ms Bhutto did not have a penis, and according to op-ed columnist Pamela “Assassinated because she was a woman” Bone, this is the key to her political legacy.

As far as Ms Bhutto’s membership of Pakistan’s overclass goes, all Bone admits is that “she was at least a beneficiary of the billions stolen by her husband from the people of Pakistan”. Is Bone seriously advocating the anecdotal theory that it is invariably the spouse of the President/PM who really wears the pants? So ex-PM John Howard was a passive “beneficiary” of Janette’s cynical scheming, etc?

Pamela Bone’s gender agenda reaches maximum stretch when she invokes the will of Mohammad Atta, the September 11 lead hijacker. This mass-murdering psychopath – drum roll, please – apparently left a written will that cast at least one arguably misogynist aspersion, against pregnant women. And here was I thinking the guy’s actions on September 11 spoke somewhat louder than whatever words he may have earlier scribbled. Thank you, Pamela Bone, for introducing a new gold-standard of the “if you mention Hitler, you’re losing the argument” aphorism – the triumph of Mohammad Atta’s will.

2007-11-30T13:14:00.000+10:00

From parent-teacher night to parent (teacher) rule

The Sudanese are barbarians. Not because of their émigré youth gangs (much in the news in Melbourne recently), but because in down home Sudan, one or more parents of young (6 y.o.) primary-school aged children has taken up a weapon only recently developed in the West, and found that – perhaps to their own great surprise – this weapon works just as well in their war and famine-ravaged land. The weapon? Parental rage against their children’s teachers.

Not too long ago in the West (i.e. when I was at school), this weapon was rare, if it existed at all. If a parent was dissatisfied with something a teacher had done or not done, there were appropriate channels of complaint, starting with the teacher’s boss, the school headmaster. These appropriate channels don’t seem to have actually changed over the last two or three decades, with one exception. A recalcitrant teacher’s boss is now apparently the parent with the loudest complaint.

I would speculate that, two or three decades ago, a parent would have been reluctant to go outside the usual channels of complaint. This may have been because the teacher concerned was (and still is) a qualified, educated professional. Alternatively, the parent may have paused to consider that, by making a direct complaint, they would probably come across as a screaming redneck, an impression which would not ordinarily attest to their fitness to (i) be a parent, and (ii) be taking the moral high ground. Last but not least, the parent may have stopped to think of the effect of their rage on the child caught in the middle of it.

All this, including their own child’s long and short-term welfare, is of no concern to the Sudanese parent/s in teddy-bear gate, of course. They know best, and won’t be denied. It turns out that globalisation’s seeming remotest, problem pupils have easily mastered the West’s post-1979 cardinal lesson in educational and institutional undermining.

2007-09-28T11:06:00.000+10:00

Show eve, the longest night

There’s a crater-hole most adults in Melbourne would have felt earlier this week, even if unconsciously. Since the Kennett government abolished the Show Day public holiday (the Wednesday before the last Saturday in September) circa 1993, on the explicit ground that this public holiday cost employers X-million dollars and so its cancellation was a no-brainer, Show Day has been surprisingly quickly forgotten by the mainstream media.

Wednesday’s (i.e. the day formerly known as Show Day) IR rally in Melbourne was a case in point. I didn’t see a media skerrick about the day’s significance in the quite recent past.

I miss Show Day, needless to say. But not half as much as I miss Show Eve.

Tuesday nights in the 80s and early 90s (and maybe much longer before?) were Melbourne’s best night for going out (for me, that meant bands at POW and clubbing at Chevron, stuff cheap movies). Show Eve was naturally an annual Tuesday night among Tuesday nights. No wonder it had to die, under the sword of economic fundamentalism.

On the ghost of Show Day, you can help yourself to some extent. Take the day off – just don’t call it a strike. And probably best not to mention out loud the day’s significance, either.

On the ghost of Show Eve, however, you’ll be battling with every daemon and every memory. This Show Eve, a friend took the night off, forever.

In memory of Jen McComb, 1964-2007.

Update 30 September 2007

A ghost upon a ghost . . . As Anthony correctly points out in the comments, the day formerly known as Show Day was a Thursday. I acknowledge my mis-rememberance, but for obvious reasons, I'm sticking to it.

2007-09-21T19:21:00.000+10:00

Mr G goes too far?

I’m a long-time fan of Chris Lilley’s “Mr G” character, currently being seen on ABC TV’s “Summer Heights High”. From his troubled birth, during which Lilley, as Mr G, visibly “died” on stage during the 2000 “Raw Comedy” national final, Mr G has blossomed into what I’d call the quintessential gay (male) Xer. He has talents (actual or otherwise) way in excess of his narrow job requirements, but lacks an after-hours outlet for these. He therefore throws everything into his job.

In my view, this is a defensible decision, given the demographics of real-world public schools, as accurately reproduced in the “Summer Heights High” staff-room. A boomer-dominated teaching force would by instinct do the very opposite of Mr G when it came to school drama departments; i.e. throw nothing into their jobs, and instead devote as much as possible of their remaining working lives to poisoning the lives of younger generations, by staying in tenured jobs way after they had lost their “spark” (a very effective double-poison, working on both their students and their Xer (= largely untenured) “colleagues”).

In the last three eps of “Summer Heights High”, however, Mr G has got power, of boomer proportions. I’m not saying this never happens to Xers in the real-world; just that such a plot development requires a major re-think of the Mr G character. It’s one thing to be a bitter and frustrated second banana, another to be a simple megalomaniac. The latter lacks boundaries, not to mention real-world credibility.

Watching Wednesday’s (19/9) ep, I thought that Mr G was improbably cruel, per the “Annabel Dickson” character, aka the “slut” Year 11 schoolgirl who had died of an ecstasy overdose. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of bad-taste, and Mr G’s seeing the death as a chance for some me-me-me publicity was just the right stretch. “Slut” was off, though. Having Mr G instead choreograph his students in some dubious and overblown interpretation of the teen party lifestyle as a B-A-D thing would have been much more appropriate, in two senses. There’s funny “wrong” and there’s just wrong wrong. Ditto for believable characters.

What I thought was most off about the “Annabel Dickson” character was not the s-word, but her similarities to Anna Wood, a Sydney schoolgirl who famously died of an ecstasy overdose in 1995. Picking up today’s MX (a free Melbourne newspaper) with a headline saying “Cruel School – ABC comedy mirrors drug death”, I thought, here we go.

But the controversy is much more bizarre than I had assumed. It’s not Anna Wood’s family who’s taken (primary) offence, but that of Annabel Catt, a Sydney schoolgirl who died of an ecstasy overdose on 18 February 2007, and who looked very much like “Annabel Dickson”.

“Summer Heights High” finished filming on 7 February 2007, so there’s no doubt that it is, as the ABC have described it, a “[very] unfortunate coincidence”. But there’s a lesson to be learned here, I think. Too-nasty characters generally make a M-E-S-S. Mr G would himself see any mess as simply a severe choreography deficit that only he can fix. So let’s all let Mr G fix himself now, please.

2007-09-03T19:26:00.001+10:00

Xers and climate change

It’s hard to get too excited about today’s media coverage of a Climate Institute report that apparently proves actuarially that Xers, due to retire in the 2020s, will have their superannuation savings hit when the climate change crunch comes in that decade. That’s even despite my sitting in the actuarial bulls-eye itself – among Xers (who according to the Climate Institute are now aged between 36 and 46 (I say 30-ish to 45-and-a-quarter), present-day 42 and 43-year-olds (i.e. born 1964) will be particularly hard hit.

Any Xer has known since the early 90s that superannuation has been deliberately skewed against them. That’s when preservation ages were set at 55 for those born before 1 July 1960 and 60 for those born after 30 June 1964, with a taper for those in between. Last year, the median date of this taper – 30 June/1 July1962 – became enshrined as the definitive Xer vs boomer landmark, and litmus test. As long as you’re born before this Rubicon, you can plow $100k of after-tax money into superannuation for at least one year. If you’re born after it, it’s $50k, tops

In addition, climate change evangelism bores me stupid. My own carbon footprint is tiny, I imagine. Car? Can’t afford one. International plane trips? Ditto. Air-conditioning? Ditto. Boomer moron, and climate change evangelist, Clive Hamilton would presumably trumpet me as a “down-shifter”, but I am no such thing. I’m simply skint and an Xer – if that’s not a tautology.

Plus, climate change could be brought into check simply, just by rational and fair pricing. Road pigs – aka people who drive needlessly obese cars, especially 4WDs – should be taxed out of existence. As things stand, 4WDs are actually subsidised by small car owners. Ditto for air-conditioning pigs. As a light user of electricity, particularly during summer peaks, I pay year-round for their infrastructure. If you live in Melbourne and are an owner-occupier (and are basically healthy), you should not need air-conditioning, ever. A fan, plus a properly insulated and oriented dwelling will do the trick for 360 days of the year and it doesn’t kill you (unless you’ve got a medical condition) to sweat out the other five, when its 40-plus by day and doesn't get below 25 by night.

2007-08-25T14:39:00.000+10:00

The joy of maps

I am a map-nerd. But please don’t get carried away with my admission. The male nerd gamut – sport, cars, computers, trains, sci-fi, DIY etc – otherwise leaves me cold. So the torque of a passing locomotive exactly matches that of your home-made coffee-table, crossed with a Holden alternator, and multiplied by Bradman’s batting average? Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

Map-nerdery is a better sort of nerdery than any of the others, IMO. It is definitely useful when travelling – who needs Lonely Planet’s track-beaten and overweight guidebooks (yet another 70s’ boomer relic overstaying its welcome), when a single thin map contains most of what you need to know? I love a good contour and gradient – otherwise known as a view. Urban high ground is, surprisingly enough, generally more expensive. Where you have a tantalising choice of routes, the most indirect one will usually be the most scenic – but if in doubt, always follow a ridge.

The map-nerd’s holy grail is not, however, some distant and exotic place. One only ever goes, physically or in an armchair sense, somewhere that’s been mapped, remember – and that’s pretty much everywhere. Rather, the joy of maps is in discovering something one had previously overlooked in one’s own backyard.

I have made two such discoveries in recent months, although neither through actual map-gleaning. Both came from the writings of Nicolas Rothwell, who seems to be a specialist in finding improbable and numinous corners of Australia, and in telling the compelling human stories of these corners. As a map-nerd, I am naturally primarily interested in the geographic angle, so I should stress that Rothwell is not himself also an apparent map-nerd, but rather a people-nerd – if not a nerd’s nerd (which is a high compliment).

Here’s Rothwell in yesterday’s Oz, writing an extended obituary (aka prose elegy?) for rock-art ratbag Grahame Walsh:

“His last wish was to visit tiny, distant Browse Island, in the Indian Ocean, about 200km from the Kimberley coast: the island of mortality in the Wandjina tradition, the place to which the soul flees on death, only to be shocked by the cold water and cast back to land as a rock painting. A helicopter conveyed him there and he duly found it rich in ancient stone arrangements”.

Sure enough, my Reader’s Digest Complete Atlas of Australia (1968) records Browse Island, due north of Derby, and about half-way between Derby (and Broome) and the Indonesian island of Roti.

Browse Island’s geographic significance is probably something only a map-nerd would get, so bear with me. Other than Ashmore Reef and neighbouring Cartier Island, which are part of Indonesia in all senses but legal sovereignty, Browse Island is the only stepping zone, or interim land, between the closely-settled parts of Indonesia (which come nearest to Australia at Roti) and the Australian (Kimberley) mainland, including for present purposes, the large number of islands just off the Kimberley coast. Browse Island is appropriately enough a transit-stop for the dead – it uniquely has a geographic foot in both Asia and Australia, and despite or because of this, it is little-visited, or even known (if a middle-aged map-nerd has never heard of it, that’s obscure).

The other striking place Rothwell has recently written up is what my Complete Atlas of Australia records as Ryan Buttes, in the east Gibson Desert, 700 km due west of Alice Springs:

“Deep in* the Hickey Hills, a plateau of dune and mesa north-east of the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve, a pair of ridges twist round to create an enclosed valley system, bisected by a deep trap-rock channel”.

- Another Country (2007) Black Inc p 272

Wow – a painted desert, a la the US-southwest, combined with some improbable kind of gorge. Map-nerds can gorge on gorges – but that’s nothing compared to finding out that Australia has it own mesa and buttes landscape.

Rothwell goes on to describe a location apparently in the vicinity of Ryan Buttes and Hickey Hills as a “kind of terminus for the Western Desert’s most potent ancestral tracks” and a “Grand Central of the sand-dunes”. (Another Country p 280)

All aboard the night-train! (Some things transcend maps, even for a map-nerd, once you're in the general area.)

* "Deep in" is a poetic, but most un-map-nerdy, phrase (unless you're literally referring to going underground). The expression one would use after perusing the Reader’s Digest Complete Atlas of Australia (1968) is that Ryan Buttes are "just north of" the Hickey Hills.

2007-08-21T20:58:00.000+10:00

Take a bow, Dr Wafa Sultan

Prominent on page 3 of today’s hardcopy Oz, but strangely not appearing on the Oz website is this magnificent story about a person who manages to be both “an influential Muslim thinker” and a former Muslim, who has explicitly “renounced her religion”. Go figure.

But I’ve taken a shine to her, nonetheless, because of the year of her conversion on the road to, ahem, Damascus. The Oz recounts that Dr Sultan began to question Islam after she witnessed her university teacher get gunned down by Muslim hardliners in Syria in 1979. While I don’t blame her for drawing a line in the sand at such an act, as a former Catholic it has to be said that I have seen worse (than murder), and not in my case by some nutbar fringe element (as I’m assuming her lecturer’s assassins were).

In fairness to Dr Sultan, though, her lecturer’s murder was hardly an isolated act at the time. The Islamic parts of the mid-East were in turmoil in 1979-80 – ironically, or maybe not, as the biggest oil shock of the last five decades was shovelling hard currency into (some of) their pockets faster than they could count it. There was Iran, of course, with the Ayatollah and the US embassy hostages (the latter featuring a cameo by the current Iranian President). But there was also the mosque takeover in Mecca, and the countdown to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

But the real reason I quite like the doctor is, as I’ve said, simply the fact that she has nominated the year 1979 as her turning point. I do believe that, by so doing, she is the First Baby Boomer in History to Admit That Their Generation Screwed Up the World, Starting in 1979.

I admit that Dr Sultan, by the Oz’s account, doesn’t seem to be grinding the axe I think she is grinding all that loudly. But it’s a start.

Next step, maybe the weaselly Iranian President – another boomer, of course – could ‘fess up to his student activism in 1979-80. If he’s not proud of it, and his evasion of the matter since becoming President suggests he’s not, then why not a mea culpa? Hell, he was young at the time, and I believe, or at least hope, that youthful indiscretions are relatively forgivable.

But once the ball starts rolling, there’s no reason why Muslim (or ex-) boomers should occupy the main spotlight. In the West, Reagan, Thatcher and Hawke/Keating should be denounced with the same venom as Dr Sultan reserves for her lecturer’s assassins – although none of the economic fundamentalist trio were boomers personally, they had boomer self-interest, and nothing more, behind them from their beginnings in 1979-80.

And in the music field, we will be able to settle once and for all the great Joy Division vs New Order controversy. New Order was born out of Joy Division’s death in 1980 - the year really says it all, and nothing more need be added. In fairness (again) however, I admit that New Order gave great dance music for a while in the mid-80s - if you were a yuppie robot, that is. But in the mid-80s, who wasn’t? (ahem, talking of youthful indiscretions)

Like New Order, the Reagan, Thatcher and Hawke/Keating fundamentalist revolutions may have seemed, at least for a period in the 1980s, just a logical next step, or the iron-law temper of the times. But more than two decades later, history has recorded its objective verdict.

New Order has recently imploded – I am surprised it took so long for the trio to realise that the 1980s have ended. But I am also surprised the economic fundamentalist counter-revolution of 1979-80, begat in (inevitable and predictable) response to the boomers’ cultural revolution of a decade earlier, has had such traction. But it too will pass – and when it does, I like to think that Dr Sultan will be mighty proud of herself, as the very first baby boomer to desert their generation’s sinking ship.

2007-08-01T10:33:00.000+10:00

Kevin Andrews and the secret police

See also: http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2007/07/doctors-and-extra-curricular-jihad-what.html

What advice did Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews receive from the Australian Federal Police on 16 July, when he decided to revoke Mohamed Haneef’s visa on character grounds? And what are the protocols for such advice; i.e. can just any cop, state or federal, with a hunch about terrorism (or even a hunch about any crime?) have a whisper in the Minister’s ear, and have the Minister act accordingly, providing that the suspect has a visa (or citizenship?) that can be revoked?

These question are thrown into sharp relief by two side-by-side articles in today’s Oz. Dennis Shanahan does his usual pro-government grovel, arguing that Minister Andrews was only acting as the AFP’s glove-puppet in his visa decision. Certainly this is consistent with Minister Andrews’ 7:30 Report interview on the day, which deserves to go down in history as a truly Orwellian performance.

Then there’s Cameron Stewart, who writes:

No one involved in the Haneef case, from the prosecutors to the Australian Federal Police, asked Mr Andrews to intervene on July 16, when he arbitrarily revoked Dr Haneef's visa -- thereby extending his detention -- after the Indian doctor had been granted bail.

That action transformed a police investigation into a political trial, triggering a firestorm of public criticism and instantly turning Dr Haneef from terror suspect to political victim.

Mr Andrews' decision, taken after discussions with John Howard and the national security committee of cabinet, caught the AFP by surprise. Investigators had already planned how they would tail a bailed Dr Haneef on the Gold Coast.

It also angered the AFP because it complicated and inflamed the Haneef investigation, putting greater pressure on a case that was already crumbling.

I’d suggest that these two stories can be partially reconciled by throwing into the “discussions” Minister Andrews had “with John Howard and the national security committee of cabinet” the personage of AFP chief Mick Keelty.

In other words, Commissioner Keelty was (I’m guessing) brought in to launder away the smell of pure politicking. That he allowed himself to be used for this role means that Minister Andrews’ job shouldn’t be the only one that is currently on the line. That Commissioner Keelty’s rubber-stamping of the PM Howard (that much is obvious) decision also necessarily tore up the plans of front-line AFP cops makes his intervention doubly odious.

2007-07-08T13:41:00.000+10:00

The insolvency-illiterate financial journalist

“Rank” may be thought an old-fashioned word. Other than something used in the military and at vice-regal dinners, and a thing more colloquially “pulled”, aren’t we all egalitarian, or a meritocracy at least?

Not in insolvency law – nor hence in investment decisions, or well-informed ones, at least.

Rank is fundamental to insolvency law, but unlike vice-regal dinners or the military (is colonel higher than corporal or vice versa, and who cares, anyway?), it is not a system of esoteric taxonomies and/or shoulder-pads. All one needs to know is that secured creditors rank above unsecured ones, and that secured creditors also have a ranking system within their own group. Generally one’s latter ranking, i.e. compared to other secured creditors, is based on being first in time. When different creditors/lenders have the same class of security over the same property, e.g. a mortgage, ranking is unambiguous and acute between them. Should the borrower go belly-up, the holder of the original, or “first” mortgage, first gets paid in full, or as much as possible. Should there be anything then left over, the second mortgagee then gets a bite, and so on, down to unsecured creditors. But even for the second-ranked, these are usually slim pickings – the essence of rank is that one’s situation is never affected by either weight of numbers below, or by the second-ranked becoming a bit too familiar and so attempting to elide the ranks near the top. Thus, a first mortgagee does not have to even consider the existence of a second mortgagee when it comes to the timing of a mortgagee sale. In practice, and in the case of a severe downturn, a second mortgagee is often no better off than an unsecured creditor.

AFR “Investor” editor Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon looks from her byline photo to be in her mid-20s. Whether because of an indulgent boomer-parented GenY upbringing (“every child gets a prize”), or because she is too young to remember recession, she has a seeming cognitive blind-spot when it comes to understanding rank in insolvency law. Hence her bizarre description, in a column in today’s Age, of what a second mortgage is:

“What all four companies [Westpoint, Fincorp et al] have in common is that they all invested in second mortgages – mortgages over other mortgages. In other words, mortgages than were not secured by property but by, well, pieces of paper”.

Oh dear. I’m sentencing you to 80s’ boot-camp, Nicole. A few years of feel-the-width shoulder-padded decadence, followed by an abrupt stop-the-music moment in which 20 people try to sit on the one chair left in the room. Only that it’s really no contest: the first-ranked of course gets the chair, and everyone one else has to pretend that they didn’t know the game was always going to end exactly as it did .

2007-07-04T17:58:00.000+10:00

Doctors and extra-curricular jihad

“[W]hat greater mockery of the Hippocratic oath is there than the [immigrant] doctor who wants to blow the arms and legs off the people who live there?” asks a Glenwood NSW letter to the editor in today’s Australian. Presumably even doctors who deliberately kill their patients with syringes or scalpels while on the job (as Dr Jayant Patel is alleged to have done to dozens, and the UK’s Dr Harold Shipman did to hundreds), are less evil than immigrant* doctors who unsuccessfully attempt (or even idly wish for) wholesale amputations while off the job in their adopted home. The moral high ground of Sydney’s white-trash is a beautiful thing.

Such white-trash moralising is also exquisitely captured in a story in today’s Oz by
Tony Koch and Hedley Thomas: “Medic was nothing out of the ordinary”. The detained doctor apparently lives (or lived) in a rented bedsit, for which he pays $250 a week. The story nonetheless gushes: “Although [the doctor] was paid more than $70,000 a year by Queensland Health, he lived frugally in the unit”. Gee, a young doctor, who I assume was putting in killer hours of unpaid overtime on the job like most doctors, apparently didn’t use his limited spare (i) time and (ii) income to make his rip-off rented bedsit a luxury haven, or a swingin’ party pad. And on “more than $70,000 a year”! (Never mind that his modest new, or almost new, $30,000 car would have eaten, with his rent, at least two-thirds of his net income). What was wrong with him?

It should not surprise anyone that a visibly downwardly-mobile and likely overworked doctor seems to have developed unhealthy extra-curricular interests. When you live in a bedsit, lonely and dog-tired, the internet is your natural best friend. It was a choice of MySpace or JihadNetworking.com for the GenY doctor. And only one of these would jarringly remind him, the next morning at work, just what a pawn he was in a global and transient labour pool, a speck in a drowning mass clutching at straws by night in sad bedsits.

Update 15 July 2007

I’m embarrassed about what I wrote in the above post, in the light of subsequently revealed facts. Dr Haneef’s online activities turn out to have been beyond reproach. I wrote the above post based on reading between the lines of three facts of the police case as it then stood: the doctor was leaving Australia in a suspicious hurry, he had not taken leave from his job to do so, and that his leaving his laptop with a friend before he wnet to the airport was his sole measured act in taking leave.

Each of these “facts” has since emerged, of course, to be palpably false. The next day (5 July), Age reports (somewhat surprisingly, I admit, given that the Age is generally a decrepit rag) managed to show that an ordinary journo or two is better than hundreds of federal police in finding out very basic information. Such as: (i) Dr Haneef had a wife and newborn child in India, which rather explains his leaving Australia, and (ii) He had taken leave from his job to do so. The third 180-degree correction emerged later: Dr Haneef had not only left his laptop with a friend before he left Australia, he also entrusted his car and some jewellery for safe-keeping with the same friend.

I probably should have run this update/correction much earlier. Or at the very least, emphasised that even if Dr Haneef had patronised jihad websites, or somesuch, this should not of itself be a crime. But qualifying this, if he was such a patron, and he had a personal connection with in-real-life terrorists, then he should be thoroughly questioned and investigated as to his real-life links. There was hence nothing inappropriate about bringing Dr Haneef in for questioning over his real-life links to real-life (alleged) terrorists. Twelve hours of questioning over a 24 hour period should have been ample for this. In case the point needs to be made, it is not appropriate for police to detain a person for the duration it takes to inventorise, and then check as "innocent", the suspect's entire cyber-history, as oppposed to real-life links. Unless, that is, that person is reasonably suspected of planned involvement in an imminent terrorist attack. Dr Haneef's flight to India seems to rule out the latter.

The reason I didn’t run this update/correction earlier is my gratuitous lingering at the scene of an almightly train-wreck, not wanting to leave until it was officially returned to “normal”; i.e. most likely that Dr Haneef was released without charge. Some hope.

The AFP’s early incompetence, if not malevolence, should have been enough for me to know that this was going to end badly – if you’ll allow yesterday’s charging of Dr Haneef as an “end” of sorts – but I wanted to believe that the feds couldn’t be quite that bad, that maybe they knew from the beginning what the Age had found out, but were playing some kind of strategic game with the media. Plus there was, until very recently, still that apparently incriminating, handballed laptop.

To charge Dr Haneef with supporting terrorism on the basis of a mobile-phone SIM card (left with his housemate/second-cousin when Dr Haneef left England in March 2006, to start work in Australia a few months later) is a travesty. The SIM card in question was apparently under a contract until August 2006 (penultimate URL), which is important for two reasons.

But first, there are two types of people in the world: “prepaid” and “contract” types. I am definitely the latter. I simply can’t comprehend why anyone would object to getting much cheaper mobile phone costs, in return for a bit of future commitment. Another way of putting it is that we contract-types are tight with money. We don’t need a physical credit meter on our phones, as we were given a hard-wired mental “meter” at birth, thank you very much. The only downside is that contracts do sometimes turn out to be painfully long, especially when circumstances change. But don’t think that this means the “prepaids” were right all along. We “contracts” will do almost anything to avoid simply paying-out a contract we can’t use, such as because of an overseas move. Even giving a SIM-card to a friend ensures that the phone company doesn’t ever get the satisfaction of getting our money in return for precisely nothing. Simply donating one’s hard-earned cash to phone companies is for schmucks, aka “prepaids”.

Why the obviously “prepaid” AFP has trouble understanding the other half of the human race is baffling. Contracted SIM-cards, more so than prepaid ones, are highly traceable. Contracted SIM-cards are akin to pens, writing-paper and postage stamps – if put into the hands of terrorists, then yes, they may be used for terrorist communications, but it is absurd to categorise them as inherently suspicious items. As with blank writing-paper, terrorist use of a mobile phone SIM-card left with another is to do with the message only, and not the medium. But unlike blank writing-paper, which is actually globally useful, there are, as I have said, perfectly natural and understandable reasons for giving a contracted SIM-card to a friend, when leaving a country.

After two weeks of intense media reportage, I’ll finish by awarding to the media one bouquet, and one brickbat, plus another brickbat to a truly contemptible human being. To Hedley Thomas at the Oz (who I dissed in the initial post) kudos for running in Friday’s paper (13 July), seizing on an apparent AFP leak, that the police case was basically a crock.

How pathetic of yesterday’s Age (14 July) then, to run this brown-nosing pseudo-leak, in an apparent attempt at one-upmanship:

Federal police are sceptical. In an affidavit presented to a magistrate, an officer is quoted as saying he suspected Dr Haneef "has not been entirely truthful" about his departure.

Two sources have confirmed that much of that suspicion rests on an email Dr Haneef sent just before his thwarted departure, and after news of the initial British arrests had been aired.

"He said he had to leave in a hurry. He made no mention of his sick wife or child," said one official.

By running this wafer-thin innuendo on its front page, the Age managed to more than undo its credible, nay even investigative, journalism of the previous week.

The other brickbat goes to Callum Spence, Dr Haneef’s landlord/slumlord, for making moves to evict his tenant while the doctor was locked up without charge. “[I’m only doing it] because I need the rent money” Spence, evidently one of humanity's "prepaids", was quoted as saying. You evidently need a soul more than you need money, Callum.

* The letter-writer actually writes “asylum-seeker”, no doubt choosing that odd descriptor (for a doctor recruited from the UK to Australia via completely conventional channels) because she didn’t want to sound like an uneducated racist by using the “immigrant” word. As we all know, “asylum-seekers” are the sort of immigrants who throw their children overboard.