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Alternative media (and a plea for alms)

alternative-media-alms — Image by John Inglar, pixabay.com Suspicious of the status quo media? There are alternatives to fake news, beat-ups and media bias.

Over the years I have found that readers value my occasional reviews of alternative media, as opposed to fake news or the mainstream media. Since the latter started finding it hard to make money (circa 2010), there have been many start-up newsletters and blogs that seek to go counter to the mainstream media. Some survive (and grow), others fade from view. It is a constant chore to keep up with who’s who in the alt-media zoo.

Alan Austin, writing for Michael West Media, said the alternative media attrition rate is high. West’s website (launched in 2016) had been the only new entrant since the Saturday Paper in 2014, Austin noted. Michael West is an investigative financial journalist who previously worked for the Australian Financial Review. On his ‘about’ page, West states: We are non-partisan, do not take advertising and are funded by readers. Our investigations focus on big business, particularly multinational tax-avoiders, financial markets and the banking and energy sectors. In a plea for monthly contributions to keep the machine rolling, West’s slogan is – Don’t pay so you can read it. Pay so everyone can.

That’s a mantra to keep in mind when perusing daily news online. Austin names four mainstream journalism outlets which are always ranked highly among the Top 50 Australian websites: news.com.au; abc.net.au; theguardian.com and smh.com.au. Of the four, only News Corp has a strict paywall. The ABC is and always has been ‘free’. The SMH and The Guardian prefer you to sign up for a daily email which contains a lot of news. The SMH asks readers to pay but provides a lot of free content on its website, as does The Guardian, which relies on contributions.

As time goes by, it becomes obvious that ‘free’ doesn’t really mean free. It means that if you value what you are reading, you are expected to chip in. When I first started this blog, it was relatively easy to source research material from a bewildering array of choices both local, state, national and international. More frequently I am coming up against messages like ‘you have read two free articles – why not subscribe?’

Today I’d like to point you to five alternative media outlets, chosen from readers’ recommendations and my own research. The list does not favour one publication over the other. The question to ask yourself before subscribing to a free daily email is, can you keep up?

The New Daily

I have in the past read occasional articles but am now trialling a (free) subscription. One of my regular readers recommended TND with the tongue-in-cheek caveat, ‘it might be too left wing for you’. I went browsing and found an article by Michael Pascoe which warned of forces marshalling in the US for the return of Donald Trump in 2024. If not Trump (T1), then a younger, more vigorous version (T2). As Pascoe says, it is a far scarier scenario than anything Covid can throw at us.

TND, a free online news publication, started in 2013 and now has 1.7 million subscribers. TND is backed by Industry Super Holdings, with senior executives including the former editor of The Age, Bruce Guthrie, and digital publishing pioneer Eric Beecher. Unlike some of its peers, it carries ads and tends to delve into celebrity news.

Pearls & Irritations

This weekly collection of essays focuses on Australian public policy and attracts contributions from well-credentialed writers. Formed by retired public service mandarin John Menadue, P&I has no sponsors, no ads and subscriptions are ‘free’ although there is a mechanism to attract sponsors with a structured schedule of monthly donations ($10 to $100) or one-off contributions. P&I recently went on a fund-raising quest to cover expenses including ‘legal challenges’.

Last week’s edition included an article by former diplomat Bruce Haigh, who took aim at former PM Tony Abbott’s “ham-fisted intervention” in Taiwan. In a widely reported speech, Abbott listed all of China’s “sins”, from Hong Kong, Uighurs and trade sanctions against Australia, as reasons to support Taiwan politically and militarily.

“This intervention by Abbott has about it the inept diplomacy which has seen relations with China, France and the EU collapse,” Haigh wrote.

In noting that the speech had not been coordinated with regional countries and major players like the US, France or Japan, Hague asked the question ‘who put Abbott up to this?’.

“Abbott’s speech contained a strong message and a line that has been pushed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

“The tone, intended or not, reflected the language we have become used to from ASPI.”

The Australian was less critical of Mr Abbott’s pro-Taiwan speech, mentioning that it followed a similar message last year from another former Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull.

When asked by reporters if he was representing the Morrison government, Abbott replied: “I am here as citizen. But, one thing about being a former Prime Minister is you do have a bit of a megaphone.

“I want the people of Taiwan to know that they are not nearly as isolated as Beijing would like them to feel,” he added.

I should note that this article is one of the few the conservative broadsheet makes available free of charge. You are more likely to be met with a paywall.

The Conversation

I have often referred readers to The Conversation, a digital platform where journalists present articles written by one or more academics. Not only is The Conversation ‘free’, it allows others to freely quote from and even reprint articles under a creative commons license. The project derives its content from a large, international network of academics and researchers. I make a monthly donation to The Conversation as it is often my go-to source for research and fact-checking. One interesting offering this week is a topic that has been turned over by others, including TND.

Crikey

This long-running alternative media publication has broadened its focus since the early days of focusing on media machinations. Crikey now has an investigative unit funded by former newspaper baron John B Fairfax. Crikey’s subscription model appears to be working – its mere existence says so. A visit to Crikey’s website allows the casual reader the chance to read two or three articles which are ‘unlocked’. An ad urges you to “Guard against stupid” and subscribe “from $1 a week” (the current annual subscription is a discounted $99).

Since I mentioned the investigative unit, this week David Hardaker concluded his four-part series, ‘God in the Lodge’. Hardaker’s quest was to examine Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s public position that his religious beliefs do not influence his policies.

Crikey has been generous with Hardaker’s series, unlocking all four episodes for casual readers. It also published daily commentary on the topic by key thinkers in religion and politics.

The Saturday Paper

This publication belongs to the same stable that publishes The Monthly and the Quarterly Essay (Schwartz Media). The Saturday Paper employs some of the country’s best writers and analysts. It is one of the few alternative media publications which has a print edition. The on-line edition provides quite a lot of ‘free’ content. But if you prefer a newspaper you can read in bed or at the dining room table, The Saturday’s long-form articles will keep you going all weekend.

Happy browsing, people. Do let me know if you uncover an independent media outlet with quality news and analysis I have not mentioned here.

Help keep FOMM going

This is also a good time to remind you of my annual plea for alms and many thanks to those who responded so promptly. It keeps me insured, maintains the website and covers other incidentals (coffee, dark chocolate, a nice lunch out for the Ed?SWPG (She who proofreads gratis.).

When Rome Counted its Citizens

Census-Romans — Census taker visits a family of Indigenous Dutch Travellers living in a caravan in 1925. Wikipedia CC

You may not immediately deduce from the headline that we are about to embark upon a discourse about the Census, which will happen in Australia on or about August 10, 2021.

I say on or about because the online version of the head count can be filled in electronically on or a few days after August 10. You just have to declare where you actually were on Census night.

As you will recall, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) held its first online census in 2016. There was a major glitch on Census night (August 9) when the ABS website crashed, leaving millions of citizens perplexed. In October 2019, a Census test was held across 100,000 households to assess ‘end-to-end operational readiness’ for the 2021 Census.

In 2016, about 37% of people opted to fill in the paperwork and wait for an official collector to come calling. This time the ABS says it expects a better than 63% online response, given research that shows Australians prefer to complete the census online.

Taking a once in five years snapshot of the country’s population is an expensive exercise, budgeted at $565 million. The ABS is in the process of recruiting 22,456 field staff and managers.

Named after the Latin word ‘censere‘, meaning estimate, the Roman census was the most developed of any in the ancient world. The Romans (Ed: what did they ever do for us?), conducted their census every five years. The Roman Empire used this information to extract duties from its citizens.

An ABS history page says the first known census was taken by the Babylonians in 3,800 BC, nearly 6,000 years ago.

“Records suggest that it was taken every six or seven years and counted the number of people, livestock, quantities of butter, honey, milk, wool and vegetables.”

So yes, there is an historical precedent for the (compulsory) collection of personal data from every household in the country.

You may remember Tony Abbott, who was Prime Minister for two and a half footie seasons (2013-2015), tried to axe the census to save money. It didn’t happen (such change requiring a new Act of Parliament). To be fair to Abbott, both the Fraser and Keating governments sought to abolish the census for the same reason.

Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Martin unearthed this little-known fact in 2013 while writing about other countries which had tinkered with changes.

As Martin noted, Britain had for a long time been trying to abolish its census (held once a decade since 1801). The government held an inquiry in 2013 to find ways to update the way the UK collects data. This year’s census will be the last. Thereafter, the UK will ‘harvest the data people generate in their everyday lives’.

Apolitical, a social network for civil servants, observed that other countries are moving in this direction or have already done so, including the US, Norway and Finland.

“Rather than survey citizens, statisticians would collect the data traces left behind by people’s everyday interactions with government. Data is collected from welfare and tax departments, housing and vehicle registrations or our health records.”

Apolitical says statisticians can glean more from the aggregating of all this information (and anonymising it to protect citizens’ privacy).

In 2010, Canada’s Harper government tried to replace its census with a voluntary survey, prompting the shock resignation of Canada’s chief statistician, Munir Sheikh.

Following his resignation, Dr Sheikh, once described by a colleague as ‘the best economist in Canada’, expressed his disapproval of the government’s decision, saying that a voluntary survey could not replace a census.

Following the reinstatement of the mandatory census in 2015, Canada is preparing to hire 32,000 census enumerators and crew leaders to survey its vast country in 2021. Canada, like Australia, uses data from the census to share resources fairly and accurately among its widely-scattered provinces..

New Zealand also considered replacing its census, using data from government departments to determine its population. The country’s last census was in 2018 but it is already gearing up for 2023.

Some governments have encountered deep social opposition to certain questions. Former President Trump wanted a Citizenship question in the 2020 Census. He backed off after a wave of hostilities that included a threatened boycott.

In July 2019, he realised there was no time left to have the question included in the 2020 Census papers. So he issued an executive order calling on agencies to turn over citizenship data to the Commerce Department.

In the first few days of his administration, President Biden rescinded this directive. Litigation about this issue argued that citizenship data could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.

The other controversial question on census forms is the one about religion. In 2001, the UK re-introduced the question (not asked since 1851), largely as an attempt to calculate the size of the Muslim population. Accordingly, some 390,000 people in England listed their ‘religion’ as Jedi, a response which occurred in Australia too, with 70,000 recorded in 2001. In 2016, 48,000 people entered Jedi as their religion. New Zealand had the highest per capita Jedi response (53,000) in 2001). Statistics New Zealand’s response was: ‘Answer understood but not recorded’.

The US does not ask the question (nor does Scotland), though the US asks about race and ethnicity. In Australia, the religion question has been ‘optional’ since the first Census in 1911. The box ‘no religion’ is a recent addition.

Curiously (well, we think it is curious), the ABS confirmed that 90% of people have answered the question in recent censuses. If your religion is not listed, the form provides space to enter the data. Because of this response, the ABS holds data on 150 religions in Australia.

The idea of trying to run a country without a census horrifies Peter McDonald, Emeritus Professor of Demography at The Australian National University. He thinks scrapping the census would be ‘a nightmare for planners and governments’.

“The problem in Australia is that we have no reasonable alternative to the census,” he told FOMM this week. “From an accuracy (and privacy) perspective, the census is better by a long way than trying to combine various administrative data bases. Without the census, the States would continually claim that their population was larger than it actually was. And every other group that received funding on a population basis would do likewise.”

Statistics is a dry subject, but one we encounter every day of our lives, so let’s leave you with this. Mathematician Joey Scaminaci’s clever rap ‘Statistics’ attempts to teach the basics in three and a half minutes. It impressed one fan who commented:

“From Australia I thank you, this is very helpful! Gonna ace my big exam”.

Volunteering and election fatigue

Image: Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity building a new home on Vancouver Island. Photo by Jon Toogood

It’s National Volunteer Week, as good a time as any to encourage people to offer their skills and labour to community organisations and causes they believe in.

For those who donated their time to support a political party or independent candidate, though, battle fatigue has set in.

More than four million Australians voted during the three weeks leading up to last Saturday’s Federal election. This was more than double the pre-poll vote in 2016. Instead of election volunteers concentrating their efforts on just one day, it meant putting in that sort of effort for 17 consecutive days.

University of Sydney senior lecturer Stephen Mills says the pre-polling trend is changing the traditional election campaign in unexpected ways.

“Candidates are spending less time campaigning in the community and more time at pre-polling stations. Parties are announcing their more attractive promises earlier. Party volunteers are being exhausted by long weekday shifts on the hustings. And many voters are casting their votes with incomplete knowledge.”

Mills and co-researcher Martin Drum of the University of Notre Dame Australia found that three weeks of pre-polling stretched the resources of the smaller parties.

“Early voting is not a level playing field, Recruiting and organising volunteers for three weeks is more of a challenge for smaller parties and independents than for the major parties.

“Incumbent MPs are more available to stand at pre-poll centres all day than, say, a minor party candidate with a job and other non-campaign commitments.”

While the long-term trend towards volunteering is down, 5.8 million Australians aged 18 and over carry out volunteer work every year. Volunteering can range from high-risk activities (bush fire brigades, surf lifesaving and State emergency services), to delivering for meals on wheels or selling raffle tickets outside the local Neighbourhood Centre.

My father (and maybe yours as well) would often use a barracks catch-phrase from time serving in WWII – “Never volunteer for anything.” So I can use that as an excuse for rarely volunteering, apart from local fairs, fetes and music festivals.

Big music festivals like Woodford and the National Folk Festival need thousands of volunteers to ensure that they run smoothly. This year in Canberra, the NFF engaged 1,300 volunteers on tasks ranging from MCs and stage managers to garbage detail. Even small festivals, like the re-born Maleny Music Festival, need about 180 volunteers. Music festival volunteers are given weekend tickets in exchange for an agreed number of volunteer hours ranging from 20 (NFF) to 25 (Woodford).

Volunteering for an election campaign is a bit like being one of the 45,000 Australians who held their hand up to help run the Sydney Olympics. It’s a massive job, but once it’s over you won’t have to think about it again for years.

In 2019, tens of thousands volunteered for political parties large and small. The Greens said in an email last week they needed 10,000 people for Election Day alone.

In any one of the 151 electorates, parties needed two to four people to hand out how-to-vote cards in each booth. An average sized electorate with 30 polling booths would need 120 volunteers over a 10-hour period for this one job. Each party also needed volunteers for door knocking and phoning campaigns and then to help staff pre-poll centres for two or three weeks.

It’s not just political parties that need volunteers. Lobby group GetUp said that more than 9,000 volunteers made 712,039 calls to voters and knocked on 36,315 doors. More than 1,800 volunteers put in 5,954 hours on the campaign to elect independent candidate Zali Steggall in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah.

Even small campaigns need the support of volunteers. Controversial Anglican priest Fr Rod Bower contested a Senate seat for Independents for Climate Action Now. He told me that 50 volunteers worked with him on the campaign. It was a first for Fr Rod, who is best-known for maintaining an ever-changing campaign of political slogans outside his Gosford Parish. It was also a first for ICAN, which gained 18,430 votes in New South Wales (all-up 32,525 votes in a three-state campaign).

Who knows how many of the election volunteers of 2019 will hold their tired heads up again in 2022. Some will probably be part of a trend that began in 2014 when an Australian Bureau of Statistics social survey showed that the rate of volunteering had slipped from 36% in 2010 to 31%. The next ABS social survey can be expected later in 2019.

It may come as a surprise to find that the largest proportion of volunteers is not, as you might think, drawn from the post-retirement age group. As Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, Chair of History at Flinders University, wrote in The Conversation, the highest rates of volunteering are among people aged between 35 and 54, working full-time, with young children.

“Busy people are able to find the time to volunteer, possibly because it is important enough for them to be able to overcome their time limitations.

“The most regularly cited reasons given for not volunteering are ill health, lack of time, and lack of interest.

“With an ageing population, ill health is likely to grow as a barrier, while at the same time (there is) increasing demand for volunteer-provided services such as health or aged care.”

In a separate study, academics from Curtin University and the William Angliss Institute discovered a volunteer crisis unfolding in small rural communities across Western Australia. The researchers surveyed 10,000 people in rural WA, to find that volunteering in that part of the country is a way of life, with participation well above the national average. However, 35% of those actively involved in volunteering said they were planning to move away from rural areas, with more than half citing a lack of essential services or the cost of accessing these services in larger towns.

Australian volunteer participation is ranked second behind the US as a percentage of the adult population. The UN Volunteers global report found it accounts for the equivalent of 109 million full-time workers. The majority (57%) of this figure are women, while in Australia, the percentage is even higher, with 63% of volunteers being women. Another pattern observed in Australia found organisation-based volunteering rates were higher for the youngest group of people (aged 14 to 24) and people over 65.

ABS data shows that Australia’s volunteers each put in an average of 135 hours a year – 783 million hours of unpaid labour per year. According to Volunteering Australia, they are involved in areas including arts/heritage, business/professional/union, welfare/community, education and training, animal welfare, emergency services, environment, health, parenting, children and youth. As the global study found, 70% of volunteering is informal and community-based, including ‘spontaneous volunteering’, after floods, bushfires or cyclones have left communities devastated.

Flinders University researcher Lisel O’Dwyer has estimated the economic contribution of volunteering in Australia at $290 billion, surpassing revenue from major sectors including mining and agriculture. (The figures, revised in 2014, take into account the value of lives saved by volunteers such as firefighters, SES crews and life guards.)

Try telling the mining lobby that.

Six Prime Ministers and a potato class action

As the dry winter fades away, ushering in a hot and bushfire-prone spring and summer, here’s some sober reflections on ‘Single-use Prime Ministers’.

I borrowed the single-use mention from a clever meme doing the rounds on social media, where, I might say in defence of the humble Kipfler, Sebago and Desiree, potatoes continue to be openly defamed. It might not be long before we see headlines where Tryhard & Associates, no win-no fee, mount a class action on behalf of Mr and Mrs Sebago and 15 other tuber families.

As we now see from former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s attempted coup, while it worked in principle, the betrayal left Mr Dutton out on a limb, with a centre-right politician seizing the leadership.

At the outset, Australia’s new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, decided the people needed to know that “we’re on your side”.

“That’s what matters. We are on your side. And we are on your side because we share beliefs and values in common, as you go about everything you do each day.”

Keep playing that one, Scott. Stay away from the line that brings down Westminster democracies; when a leader (be it Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott or Turnbull), have all been caught referring to ‘my government’.

I had a couple of messages from FOMM stalwarts last week in aggregate saying “Get a grip, Bob. The nation’s imploding and you’re talking about stamp collecting?”

I defend last week’s meandering missive as making the case that Australian governments have been lurching hard-right for a very long time now, arguably since John Howard’s 1988 stance on multiculturalism and refusing to make a treaty with the Aborigines. Hence my writing about the stamp-collecting Philip Ruddock, a hard-line Immigration minister in control of our border policies from 1996-2003.

Now here’s the thing – party factions, backroom machinations and political knifings are not what does in a sitting PM – it is narcissism.

As economist and author George Megalogenis wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times: “The prime minister is not even mentioned in the Australian Constitution, yet the office has evolved into a paradoxical position of supreme authority and permanent vulnerability.”

Megalogenis also wrote: “They have borrowed the worst of United States presidential politics, with its obsessive focus on the leader, and grafted it onto a Westminster system of parliamentary government that was designed for collaboration and compromise.”

Australia has had six Prime Ministers since 2008, the number arguably including a bit of double counting when first Julia Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd, then Rudd came back and promptly lost the next election in a landslide. Then there was Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and now Scott Morrison. This era was characterised by frantic passing of new legislation in the incumbent’s first year. Fairfax Media research tallied new acts of Parliament passed in the first year for Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd (133), Julia Gillard (132), Tony Abbott (116) and Malcolm Turnbull (104). These are mediocre numbers compared to Paul Keating (212) and Gough Whitlam (161). Surprisingly (well, I was surprised), John Howard’s first year numbers (86), are only marginally better than Ben Chifley (74).

What appears to have brought undone Prime Ministers of the past 10 years is the polarisation caused by climate change policy. It seems nigh on impossible to achieve political consensus on this most serious of issues, even if over 97% of climate scientists active in that field of research say it is a reality, aggravated and accelerated by human activities. (There are, of course, nay-sayers. Just Google ‘what percentage of scientists believe in global warming, if you have a few hours to spare.)

All six of our Prime Ministers thus far have failed or been thwarted in terms of seriously countering climate change. Some even challenging the notion that fossil fuels have had their day. I refer of course to (a) Tony Abbott’s infamous ‘coal is good for humanity’ quote, and incumbent PM Scott Morrison’s stunt, brandishing a lump of coal in Parliament.

But let’s go back 117 years, to an era when coal really did rule – when steam trains, for example, burned through eighty pounds of coal for every mile travelled (a useful factoid from Michael Portillo’s fascinating series, Great British Railway Journeys).

Australia’s leadership changed seven times in the first ten years of Federation (and 11 times between 1901 and 1922). Again, leadership changes involved ambitious men having a second (and even a third) attempt. Andrew Fisher (1909-1909, 1910-1913 and 1914-1915) proved the most persistent, governing during the early years of WWI. Fisher, I’d like to point out, introduced Australia’s first postage stamp. On January 2, 1913, the Fisher-led government issued the Commonwealth penny stamp.

It featured a controversial design – a kangaroo on a white map of Australia. Although later stamps reintroduced the King’s head, the kangaroo design remained in use for some forty years. An example of this rare stamp sold at auction in 2012 for $142,563.

But we were talking about men (and women- Ed.) and their egos and how the Prime Ministership has evolved as the Office of Omniscience. Towards the last days of Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership, there were reports of policy on the run, along with statements made with no consultation, and there have been similar reports about other short-term Prime Ministers. To be fair, in the first year of the Whitlam administration, the late Gough Whitlam rammed through a colossal amount of social reform legislation in a fortnight with the help of a two-man Cabinet (the duumvirate) – just Gough and his deputy, Lance Barnard.

Megalogenis observed that post-Rudd, the Labor party has made it harder to remove future Prime Ministers. Changes to internal rules now require the party leader be elected by a combined vote of the parliamentary party and grass-roots members. From this side of the fence, it is hard to see the Liberals coming up with a similar safeguard.

In no time at all, it seems, Australians will be thrust into another Federal election, with a new Prime Minister who will not have had enough time to show his mettle. On the other side, we have Labor leader Bill Shorten, and deputy leader Tanya Plibersek. Mr Shorten’s tactics thus far, apart from keeping his head down and letting the Liberal Party stew in its own juices, has been to divide and conquer, emphasising the class gulf between the left and right.

Tucked away behind the cannot-be-seen hedge, Labor’s Anthony Albanese, passed over for the Opposition leadership in 2013, declared his colours in June, in the Whitlam Oration.

Mr Albanese called upon his party to emulate the Hawke and Keating approach and “collaborate with unions, the business sector and civil society to achieve positive outcomes in the national interest”.

The Labor frontbencher also delivered a warning about the need to find common ground with voters outside the union movement.

“This is not 1950, when most Australians were members of trade unions,” Mr Albanese said. “Indeed many people from working class backgrounds are not members of unions because they were beneficiaries of Gough Whitlam’s education reforms. We cannot afford to ignore this demographic.”

Sigh, it makes my brain burn, like the feeling I got when I saw that clever meme (above) with Scott Morrison feeding a lump of coal into a (red and orange) map of Australia.

Good for humanity my arse.

Renewable energy vs climate sceptics

Have you ever noticed, after giving your dog a bath, how it will head straight for the nearest patch of renewable energy? Ours has a favourite sunny spot next to the dining room table where he will happily bask, while our solar-powered camping lamp, calculator and torches are recharging on the window sill.

Free sunshine – what’s not to like? As it happens, we have been preparing our little caravan for a weekend music festival in the bush. The 160 watt portable solar panel slides snugly under the bed. At $159, this has proved to be a worthy investment for our outback and bush music weekend adventures. It means you can keep topping up the caravan’s battery (if the sun is shining) and go to bed early if it’s not.

We are not expecting rain. No-one is expecting rain.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed the winter just past was the hottest since records began in 1910. It was also the 9^th driest winter on record. The average maximum temperature was almost 2 degrees above the long-term average.

Meanwhile, Texas is suffering unprecedented flooding courtesy of Hurricane Harvey, the reporting of which has somewhat overshadowed devastating monsoon flooding in South East Asia. So far, in the latter disaster area, 1,200 people have been killed and almost two million children were unable to get to school.

As we ironically say in the privacy of our own home – “Just as well there’s no such thing as climate change, then!”

Now all, some of, or only a small part of these extreme weather events could be ascribed to global warming/climate change, which, 97% of scientists agree, is mostly caused by human activity.

Despite this consensus on behalf of an apparently overwhelming majority of scientists, sceptics disagree. I happened to read that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is set to deliver a speech, “Daring to Doubt,” at an annual climate sceptics group meeting in London on October 9.

You might remember Tony Abbott – his reign as PM at one year and 361 days (cumulative terms), was longer than that of Harold Holt and Billy McMahon, but not by much. Abbott the Climate Change Sceptic is infamous in some quarters as the man who canned the government-funded Climate Commission as part of a Budget cost-cutting exercise.

The Climate Commission bounced back as the privately-funded Climate Council. A new report by the Climate Council concludes that the individual States are going their own way, with mixed results.

South Australia is a clear leader in the renewable energy field, the stakes raised by the government’s decision to replace ageing coal-fired power stations with a 150 megawatt solar thermal power plant.

FOMM foreshadowed this in 2014, when the SA government was trying to negotiate the future of the coal mine which fed its Port Augusta power stations. Now, after five years of lobbying and debate, the SA government is aiming to invest $650 million in renewable energy.

It hardly seems worth mentioning that 1,900 kilometres away, the Queensland Government, in a contrarian move, remains committed to the country’s largest Greenfield export coal mine. The Carmichael mine, which includes a dedicated railway line to take coal north to Abbott Point, is deeply unpopular among environmental groups because of the potential damage it could cause to the Great Barrier Reef, both by the number of ships traversing the narrow channels, and through coral bleaching as a result of human-induced temperature increases.

On the other hand, Queenslanders’ love affair with domestic solar panels is demonstrated by the fact that 32% of households are covered in 2017. Lobby group Solar Citizens (almost 100,000 members), welcomed last week’s decision by the Queensland Government to increase the regional feed-in tariff (FiT) program. This will allow solar systems up to 30kW to receive 10.1c per kWh – six times more than what was previously agreed.

Solar Citizens has an ambitious target of one million solar roofs by 2020.

“Queenslanders know a sensible idea when they see it – with 520,000 solar homes, our State has the highest rooftop solar uptake in the country,” a spokeswoman said.

However, critics of domestic solar energy say the flaw is that those who can afford to become self-sufficient do so, and those who cannot end up paying disproportionately more for energy.)

This week, the Climate Council presented its annual ‘state of the States’ renewable energy report. CEO Amanda McKenzie said the State survey showed a major step up from last year. All States and Territories (apart from WA), have strong renewable energy or net zero emissions targets. South Australia is building the world’s largest lithium ion battery storage facility, and over 30 large scale wind and solar projects are under construction across Australia in 2017.

“The good news is that many States are surging ahead and doing the heavy lifting for the (Federal) government.”

Last week, the Victorian government flagged new legislation which would increase its renewable energy target to 40% by 2025. There is also an intermediate plan to lift Victoria’s clean energy target to 25% by 2020.

So yes, it does seem as if individual States (and Councils) are setting their own renewable energy policies, in the absence of clear leadership at a national level.

Noosa Mayor Tony Wellington did not miss an opportunity to talk up his region’s commitment to solar panels. Noosa Shire, which de-merged from the larger Sunshine Coast Regional Council (SCRC), claims 9,000 households in Noosa Shire have solar installations, which is better than the State average. Cr Wellington told the Sunshine Coast Daily Noosa’s goal was to be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2050.

Not to be overshadowed, the SCRC opened a 15 megawatt solar farm in July. The SCRC was the first local government in Australia to offset 100% of its electricity consumption with energy from a renewable source.

But what can humble citizens do, as pro-coal lobbyists clash swords with the solar and wind farm warriors? The go-it-alone mentality arises from a failure on the part of our Federal Government to stimulate investment in the renewable sector. Australia has already promised, under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% on 2005 levels by 2030. But Tony Abbott’s call as PM to reduce the renewable energy target (and now he advocates scrapping it altogether), was unhelpful.

Whatever way you judge it, a former PM addressing the Global Warming Policy Foundation is not a good look. The last Australian PM to do so was John Howard in 2013 (when he claimed global warming had stalled and was sceptical about the possibilities of an international agreement on climate change).

There have already been reports in the UK media which seized on old quotes by Mr Abbott referring to climate science as ‘bullshit’ and recycling his coal is ‘good for humanity’ comment.

As readers will know, we spent a week out at Carnarvon Gorge in July, a time of year when it is common for the temperature to dip below zero at night. We packed accordingly, then spent four nights kicking off the doona and keeping each other awake as the mercury stayed above 15.

It should be cool at night for the Neurum Creek Folk Festival, but I packed my shortie pyjamas, just in case there is such a thing as climate change.

Cucumbers and the silly season

cucumber-silly-season — Photo by Scott Elias https://flic.kr/p/iAVph

All through my journalism career I tried to take holidays at this time of year – the peak summer period known universally as the ‘silly season’ It’s called that, here and abroad, to describe the sudden drying up of real news stories (or even cleverly disguised fake stories). The media must continue on its 24/7 quest for yarns, but the fare becomes increasingly trivial, short on detail and (gasp) exaggerated.

In Australia, the ‘do not disturb’ sticker can safely be slapped across the calendar between December 23 and January 26. This is when all traditional news sources and their spin doctors head for the beach. Businesses close, parliaments and law courts go into recess. It’s down to emergency services to keep the media fed, and there’s a limit to the amount of mayhem holiday-makers can digest through the festive season.

Smoke but not much fire

Here’s a splendid example of a silly season story, introduced by a breathless headline: “Warwick church struck by lightning”. The fire brigade turned out in numbers to St Mary’s Catholic Church, a Warwick landmark, as did spectators. St Mary’s administrator Kathleen Cuskelly told FOMM the fire was not serious but could have been without the call to emergency services by a witness to the lightning strike. The blaze, which damaged two square metres of ceiling above the side aisle, was extinguished by a lone firefighter who found his way in through a back door.

The church-hit-by-lightning yarn certainly livened up the week for weather-watchers, braced as always for a natural disaster but more often left without a real story.

Mariah Carey’s Times Square technically-flawed performance on New Year’s Eve had the celebrity writers rolling in oily hyperbole. Carey described by maxim.com as the ‘golden-throated chart-topper’ was left on centre stage unable to cope with lip syncing which went awry. Someone played the wrong track, leaving the lesser-crested warbler nonplussed. The Daily Mail (UK) summed it up:

“Mariah Carey has stormed off stage after she lashed out during her botched New Year’s Eve performance, after the wrong lip-sync track played.”

That’s a lot of storming and lashing over a relatively tiny tinkle in a teacup. Besides, Mariah sang the hell out of Auld Lang Syne at the start and that’s what counts, right? And she appeared to know all the words.

A few days prior to this earth-trembling news, like so many other heat-stressed people, I was hanging out in the local supermarket, hovering around the deli fridges, a packet of frozen peas clamped to the back of the neck. My mobile chirped and there was a text message: “jar of pickles pls.” Thus challenged, I quickly grabbed a jar, added it to the week’s supply of groceries and headed for the check-out.

The peak summer months, when Europeans and North Americans lock up and head for the beaches, coincides with the cucumber harvest. So their ‘silly season’ is known in many northern countries as ‘cucumber time’.

The ever-useful Wikipedia reveals that in many languages, the name for the silly season references cucumbers (more precisely: gherkins or pickled cucumbers). Examples given include komkommertijd (Dutch), agurketid (Danish) and agurktid (Norwegian, where a piece of news is called agurknytt i.e., “cucumber news”).

There are other examples: the Sommerloch (“summer (news) hole”) in German-speaking countries; la morte-saison (France) and nyhetstorka or news drought, in Sweden.

Media analysts have speculated that people employed as public relations consultants or media advisors in private enterprise and government now outnumber real journalists by five to one. The highly-paid spin doctors take January off and go to the beach. So their carefully crafted “news” releases, sanitised, scrutinised and signed off on by at least 10 people slow to a trickle then stop.

Meanwhile, the skeleton squads left holding the news forts have to forage for items to fill the ironically larger news holes (in the newspaper business advertising also takes a holiday). So the only thing a reporter or a news crew can do is follow the fire engine. On arrival, take emotive video of the cat stuck up a gum tree and hope (though only deep within their craven souls) that the rescuer in the cherry-picker might take a nasty tumble from a great height. The video editor can lip-sync it later and the presenter can do the nodding I-was-really-there-honest footage later. Back to you in the studio, Brian.

Bob Hawke lobbies for nuclear waste (again)

Perhaps the most egregious silly season story thus far was the reporting of comments made at a Woodford Festival talk by former PM Bob Hawke. Mr Hawke said Australia should embrace nuclear power and become a country where the world can store its nuclear waste. Mr Hawke has said this before, many times, but most news reports lacked this kind of background.

Warming up for Woodford, perhaps, Mr Hawke trotted out the nuclear waste trope at Sydney University late last year.

In 2013 he singled out South Australia, a vast and sparsely populated state, as best suited to (underground) storage of nuclear waste.

At Woodford 2016, the 87-year-old former politician employed much the same rhetoric he used when floating the idea in September 2005:

“Australia has the geologically safest places in the world for the storage of waste,” he then told the 7.30 Report’s Mark Bannerman.

“What Australia should do, in my judgement, as an act of economic sanity and environmental responsibility, is say we will take the world’s nuclear waste.”

Then Labor Opposition Leader Kim Beazley sharply responded to the comments by Hawke (who retired from politics in 1992):

“Bob is a respected father figure in the Labor Party, but that’s well outside the platform.”

In 1999, foreign company Pangea Resources tabled a specific proposal to build an underground radioactive nuclear waste storage facility in central Australia. South Australia and Western Australia swiftly responded by passing nuclear storage prohibition acts. Nick Minchin, Federal Resources minister at the time, said an emphatic ‘no’ and Pangea, a consortium of Swiss and British firms, folded up its tent.

Industry website www.nei.org estimates that the nuclear industry has generated about 76,430 tonnes of used fuel over the past 40 years. Most nuclear plants recycle used fuel, which will ‘eventually’ be permanently stored as high-level radioactive waste. US Congress made a pledge in 1982 to build such a facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the proposal has been ensnared in political wrangling since and was shelved by Barack Obama in 2010. Bloomberg reported in November, however, that a Trump White House would make the permanent dump site a priority.

Finland and Sweden are meanwhile working towards the first permanent radioactive waste sites in the world, the first of which could be operational by 2023.

But as then Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott told the 7.30 Report in 2005 (and little has changed):

“There are a lot of politics in this. Now, right at the moment, we can’t even get agreement on where to put a nuclear repository for Australia’s waste, let alone a repository for the world’s waste.”

Mark Bannerman closed his 2005 report with this apt quote from a Northern Territory woman:

“If it’s safe, take it down to the Lodge, put it under Kirribilli House. I think they’ve got a hide.”

Trump, Clinton and the third candidate

trump-this-small — Aussie tourist poses outside Trump World Tower, Manhattan. Photo by Laurel Wilson

Who, except Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, would want to be leader of a nation today? The manic, 24/7 pressure of life in the top job makes old men (and women) out of youthful candidates in no time. At home, we saw the pressure tell in quick succession on Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and now Malcolm Turnbull, who no longer resembles the debonair bon vivant who aspired to high political station. In the US, Barack Obama’s eight years in the job is etched into his face.

Yet the aspirant leaders keep coming. Hillary wants the top job, even though she saw what it did to her husband, not to mention Monica Lewinsky, these days engaged in anti-bullying campaigns.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again (though no-one has yet proven when the US was ever great). Former Australian PM Tony Abbott was cited (from afar), telling high-ranking people overseas he planned to make a leadership comeback. Whether he did or didn’t say this, on his return, Abbott and Turnbull clashed jousting sticks in the House, prompting gasps and gossip amongst Canberra lobbyists.

Who’d be a world leader? US presidents get asked to make awful decisions, to wit Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1945, killing between 130,000 and 226,000 people. Harry didn’t drop the bombs, but it was his head that nodded when the generals asked him if they should.

Even Australian Prime Ministers are asked to make unpalatable decisions which may come back to haunt future generations. Bob Menzies bowed to pressure from Great Britain, who wanted to test atomic bombs in Australia’s western desert. After all, they could hardly do it in Manchester or Liverpool. People would have complained.

Some impressions of this seldom-scrutinised period in our history are captured in Collisions, an 18-minute multimedia film by Lynette Wallworth. The Monthly’s Quentin Sprague reviewed the ‘immersive’ film which premiered in Adelaide and is playing as a ‘virtual reality experience’ at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image until mid-January. Nyarra Nyarri Morgan, a young man in the 1950s when he witnessed the mushroom cloud above the desert, recalls its impact: “the surrounding waterholes boiled and kangaroos fell to the ground under a drifting blanket of ash.” Later, when people became sick after eating the fallen kangaroos, they mused: “What god would do such a thing.”

Harry Truman recalls approving the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a biography written by his daughter, Margaret Truman, Harry’s decision to over-rule the general who believed the Japanese would surrender under the onslaught of conventional bombs, was aimed at saving Japanese and American lives. Almost 80,000 died after the firebombing of Tokyo, part of a planned programme of incendiary bombing.

“It was not an easy decision to make,” Truman said. “I did not like the weapon. But I had no qualms if in the long run millions of lives could be saved.”

After a successful testing in New Mexico, Truman approved the bombing of four targets – Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki

Given the history, you do wonder about people like Donald Trump, a self-described multi-billionaire who has no material need, apparently, to live in the White House. There are bigger and better mansions and easier jobs than making America great again, or even for the first time.

Why would he want to be the one with the power to pick up the red telephone? There is no guarantee either that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t pick up the red phone.

The media is making much of the Clinton-v-Trump clash, mostly ignoring a third candidate, Libertarian Gary Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld. Johnson and Weld say they have a master plan to sneak the presidency from under the noses of Trump and Clinton.

The Washington Times reported on Monday the pair say they can change history and win the election through a combination of quirky political circumstances, voting variables and polling inaccuracies. Polling data shows Johnson and Weld have greater support in 20 states than the margin between the Republican and the Democrat, neither of whom will find it easy to snare the necessary 270 votes. One or two states could determine the outcome.

Former Republican adviser Bill Whalen agrees there is a scenario where neither Hilary Clinton nor Donald Trump wins the presidency. He told ABC Radio’s Eleanor Hall on Wednesday much hinged on the outcome in Utah, where candidate Evan McMullen has snared enough votes to win that state. It could be that the House of Representatives will decide who is best suited to the Oval Office: Trump could be deemed ‘unsuitable’ and Clinton’s election risky, as it could spark a constitutional crisis if a Federal investigation finds against her. Enter stage left, Evan McMullen, an inscrutable former CIA operative who has a theoretical chance at the White House.

Here is yet another reason to cite The Simpsons. “Citizen Kang” (season 8), still rules as the best piss-take of the two-party political system. Homer is abducted by aliens Kang and Kodos who demand he takes them to his leader. When Homer explains about the (1996) election, the aliens kidnap presidential candidates Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, placing them in suspended animation and assuming their forms through “bio-duplication.” The one-eyed aliens plan to ensure one of them will become the next leader succeeds, despite their alienating habits of walking hand in hand, drooling green slime and talking in robotic voices (“Klin-ton”). Kang is subsequently elected, enslaving humanity into building a giant ray gun, to be aimed at an un-specified planet:

Meanwhile, the global media obsession with Trump vs Clinton, which promises to continue until January, provides perfect cover for our conniving government, which seems intent on homogenising the arts and making sure people who tried to get to Australia by boat go (somewhere else), and never return. Comedian Lucy Valentine suggested they should make this law retrospective to 1788.

Of lesser significance, maybe, but mean-spirited nevertheless, Education Minister Simon Birmingham announced cuts to student loan funding for 57 creative arts diploma courses including circus, screen acting, stained glass, art therapy and jewellery. Additionally, the government capped loans for creative diplomas to $10,000 compared to $15,000 for agriculture and engineering.

Birmingham said the changes were made to focus on courses which would ‘benefit Australia economically in the 21^st century’.

“Currently there are far too many courses that are being subsidised that are used simply to boost enrolments, or provide “lifestyle” choices, but don’t lead to work.”

Predictably, this decision brought forth a torrent of commentary on social media, ranging from reasoned debate to outright vitriol.

This issue, however, has slipped behind the international smokescreen which is the US presidential election campaign; a litany of (alleged) lies and counter-lies, insults and counter insults, accusations of defamation and one lawyer’s letter, published in the New York Times, which is very much worth reading.

If Donald Trump does not win the election, he has promised to sue everyone who has accused him of behaviour unbecoming of a US presidential candidate. It will be a long list.

He should probably just go back to building high-rise towers, hotels and golf courses and making money. He claims to be pretty good at that.