Monday, 22 October 2018

The fiasco of Australia’s telecommunications, Pearls and Irritations, 23 October, 2018.

JOHN STAPLETON. The fiasco of Australia’s telecommunications.

Posted on 23 October 2018

Complaints against the troubled broadband network have risen yet again with the latest Telecommunications Ombudsman’s Report, released this week, showing significant increases in complaints over the last year.

As the government prepares to sell the NBN, levels of dissatisfaction against what critics describe as the worst infrastructure project in Australian history are extremely high. The disastrous state of the nation’s telecommunications networks is generating not just anger and frustration but significant financial losses. In overall terms, residential complaints rose to a record 146,957, an increase of 8,141, or 5.9%. Business complaints rose 8.7% to 20,433, an increase of 1.644.

The worst performing telco by a considerable margin was Optus, with an increase of 35% in complaints. The next closest was Telstra, on a comparatively modest 7.7% increase.

Telecommunications Ombudswoman, Judi Jones, told The New Daily that Optus was well aware of the problem and her office was in constant communication with them. “They are working hard on their processes”, she said. “Hopefully next year will see a reduction.”

In terms of states, Queensland, for the second year in a row, showed the greatest increase in the number of complaints – 13.2%. There is no official explanation. “We can see nothing in the data to explain that,” Ombudswoman Jones said. The next worst performing state was WA, with an increase of 10.7%. In terms of volume, NSW remains the worst state, with 52,989 complaints, an increase of 4.9%. Twelve percent of residents complained they receive no service at all, while a further 19.1% complained of intermittent service, dropouts and slow speeds. In terms of customer service a whopping 33.8% of residents complained of either no action or delayed action. Businesses were even more dissatisfied, with 35.9% complaining of zero or delayed responses to their complaints.

The devastating impacts on business of the botched NBN roll out are clear: 16.2% complained of no service at all. A further 13.9% complained of intermittent service, dropouts and slow speeds. There were more than 12,200 compensation payouts last year for both residents and businesses. The maximum payout is $50,000.

While most of the statistics trended up across the year, Ombudswoman Jones points to a modest decrease in the final quarter as a hopeful sign the tide is turning. Internet activists see it differently. Former Executive Director of Internet Australia, Laurie Patton, told The New Daily any decrease in complaints was likely to be a result of heavy wholesale discounting by NBN, introduced in panic and under government pressure. The discounts allowed retailers to increase the bandwidth they purchased and saw congestion levels fall. “The dilemma is the discounts are about to end”, he said. “It was only a temporary measure. Our internet service is not going to get any better overall until we adopt 21st technologies.”

Patton said he sympathised with Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, who he says has been let down by NBN Co. “The people who advised the Government back in 2013 are the ones to blame, as are the current NBN Co. Board Members who refuse to concede that what they are now building is a dud.”

Research conducted with the assistance of economics graduate Christopher Collins.

John Stapleton worked as a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian for more than 20 years. A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.

This story was originally published in The New Daily, 17 October 2018.

Sunday, 21 October 2018

Publishing the Book: Children of the State, Medium, 22 October, 2018.

Publishing the Book: Children of the State

Stolen for Profit

Let’s face it: this is a tough sell.

In the beginning was the Word.

Well, there was a radio show called Dads On The Air.

We were a small group of that most unfashionable of all people. Separated, sad, angry, overwhelmed fathers.

But unlike most such creatures we had an outlet.

Australia is uniquely gifted with an often underutilised community radio network gifted to the present day from the 1970s.

We were a bunch of separated, extremely pissed off fathers who regard the country’s family law, child support and child protection systems as not just damaging and dysfunctional, but fundamentally corrupt.

You couldn’t shut us up.

Australia’s secretive and despised family law system is now, due to the repeated failure to reform its abysmal and discredited processes, the subject of growing demands for a Royal Commission. As controversial as we were in the day, operating on the very borders of what could be published and broadcast, history, the passing of time, has proven us correct.

Back then we were well out on a limb.

We would do a program talking about malfeasance and the rise of groups such as Fathers4Justice, and wait for the Australian Federal Police to come knocking.

The Family Court, known as a “Superior Court” in the Australian judicial system, is protected by swathes of legislation which make it almost impossible to report on. At the time it was launching repeated attacks on its many critics, including hitting protesters with the arcane charge of “scandalising the court”.

We knew we were being watched.

The Australian Family Court, like similar courts throughout the Western world, is wrapped in the dogma of feminist jurisprudence. Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system.

Ordinary punters, with no knowledge or experience of the legal system, find themselves in a parallel universe. Commonsense is at the bottom of the barrel.

Radical progressives, as the jargon goes, are now radical regressives.

Truth is of no consequence.

Fathers, desperate to remain in contact with their children to protect them from harm, were simply dismissed as winging failed litigants by the courts and the well oiled child removal lobby. No democracy can survive that treats so much of its own population with such contempt.

The massively well funded feminist groups would all fume: where do they get the money from?

The truth: we had no money whatsoever.

Amazing what being incensed about an injustice can actually achieve.

We soldiered on, from the days when we couldn’t do interviews, through to our first website, to the current era of podcasts and social media.

Year followed year. We were desperately short of everything, money, goodwill, technical skills, and hands on deck.

Desperately short.

Dads On The Air has now been broadcasting since 2000, and is the world’s longest running radio program dedicated to fatherhood issues. It has been a phenomenal success.

Back in 2006 we got a call from someone calling himself Peter van de Voorde.

The Charades, a popular Australian band of the 1960s. Peter van de Voorde is on the far left. The band has just had its 55th Reunion.

He had just released an album Our Stolen Children.

His entertainment career included writing and recording a top-10 hit single, TV appearances and a seven month tour of Southeast Asia entertaining troops during the Vietnam War.

Could he come in and play it?

For sure.

Gum Scrub

Fast forward a decade and we all owed Peter a huge favour.

He had done vast amounts of volunteer work for Dads On The Air, including arranging interviews, writing editorials, managing the website, editing and uploading the shows each week.

“It was a full time job,” he recalls. “It was a five hour drive from my farm at Gum Scrub to the studio. I was dedicated. Bloody mad, mate. Obsessive.

“But I’m glad to have done it, it was part of the journey and life’s adventure. I learnt so much.

“People like Greg Andresen, another volunteer on the show, taught me all the technical stuff. John still sends me up because when I first met him, I didn’t know the difference between an email and a website. I’ve come a long way.”

Peter had been inviting me to visit his place outside a lost in time village called Telegraph Point and one day I decided to call in.

Family law and related issues are a bottomless pit of pain.

Facing government hostility and community indifference, most activists burn out sooner or later.

But Peter was still there. And he was determined that the issues went well beyond fathers or dads issues into child protection.

He always argued that we should call ourselves Families on the Air, not Dads on the Air. To be more inclusive. We saw it as appeasement. Back then, we saw it as appeasement.

Later, with some assistance, Peter set up a small lobby group, Family Briefing, which aimed to take the fight on child protection to the perpetrators of the country’s rotten-to-the-core systems.

“I had so much information running around in my head and had gathered so much evidence I didn’t know what to do with it all,” van de Voorde recalls.

“I produced a one hour audio documentary recording many of the voices of those affected as children and intertwined them with the voices of our political leadership apologising for the pain inflicted by their predecessors, for the babies stolen from their mothers at birth and for the children transported to the colonies as child migrants. And for the so-called Stolen Generation — the indigenous children routinely removed from their parents.

“It clearly illustrated the hypocrisy of those apologies, since they were in the process of inflicting the very same pain on their own constituents of which they were accusing their predecessors.”

The Process

An author for the first time in his life, Peter van de Voorde puts it thus:

I had never written a book and will never write another.

It was momentous.

It took two years of my life.

It was the hardest thing I've ever undertaken.

It was exhausting.

I was way out of my comfort zone. I never went to university. Making sense of such a sensitive subject, I could not have done it without the experience broadcasting in the field of child protection for so many years gave me.

I don’t mind admitting a certain obsessive trait helped get me across the line. My nature doesn’t allow me to walk away half way through a project; my character trapped me into it.

I was never going to say, I will give it away after awhile. I had to see it through.

The Blurb

Eventually it was all done.

The writing. The editing — farmed out to a newspaper sub-editor of long experience. The cover design, by one of the world’s best cover designers. The interior design, by another expert in her field.

Uploaded and ready to go, came the time to write the blurb and start promoting.

And so we wrote:

Today, every minor child is at risk of being deprived of the protection of their biological family, because we have collectively failed to recognize the supreme guardianship powers of the State.

Perceived legal rights to the protection of their own family, something everybody assumes parents and children are entitled to, are in fact non-existent.

This has resulted in the creation of a multi-billion dollar child-removal industry, engaged in the redistribution of stolen children for profit, across the Western world.

Twelve years in the making, Children of the State: Stolen for Profit, presents a devastating compilation of statistics and analyses of failed family and child protection systems.

It provides a detailed account of morally indefensible international family and child protection laws and practices, which combine to provide legitimacy to the involuntary removal of millions of children from their biological families.

Cumulatively impacting more than 25% of the Western world’s population, with most countries pouring more of their taxpayer funded budgets into waging war against their own constituents then they spend on national defence against external threats, that this issue is not at the top of national agendas places a huge question mark over the quality of our collective conscience and vigilance.

Without rights or anyone to turn to, the overwhelming socioeconomic consequences of misguided family and child protection policies reach deep into every community. It’s where our families, friends and neighbours, struggle in silence each day with the effects of their imposed loss of family protection.

Children of the State: Stolen for Profit, leaves no stones unturned as it prudently explores urgently needed viable alternatives for those left disempowered without a voice.

For our political leadership, claiming ignorance is no-longer a viable option.

Minister for Children Runs for Cover

The flyer and advertisement prepared by the Mid-Coast’s News Of The Area.

By a curious coincidence Peter van de Voorde’s local Federal representative was Dr David Gillespie, who at the time, in Australia’s tediously unstable political realm, was the Assistant Minister for Families and Children.

He was the obvious choice to launch the book and nothing ventured nothing gained, we decided to ask him.

The helpful staff at the Tea Gardens Library were great. Carol pictured here, helped us organise the event and understandably was not too happy when we cancelled. We apologised for the inconvenience and unnecessary work we caused her. Dr David Gillespie the local Member of Parliament should also apologise for the inconvenience he caused.

As per standard protocol we went through his media adviser. We sent him a copy of the book and some days later one of his staff confirmed that the Minister would be more than pleased to launch the book at the Tea Gardens Library, near where the author lives.

We booked the venue and the library staff, pleased to be involved with a local author, prepared advertising to promote the event.

Then the bad news struck.

One of the Minister’s flunkies, Tony Jiwan, emailed to say:

“Unfortunately due to other commitments Dr David Gillespie will not be able to attend the book launch.”

To which I responded: “I would be curious to know what was more pressing than a Minister for Families and Children launching a book on the subject of child protection by one of his constituents.”

In a subsequent phone conversation the truth came out: The Minister could not be seen to be launching a book which might criticise the department or government practices.

Australia is, more than any other Western country, a failing democracy.

People elect politicians in the mistaken belief they are electing someone who will represent their views. They do nothing of the kind.

Politicians protect the corruption and dysfunction of the courts and the country’s inept bureaucracies.

Normally politeness itself, Peter van de Voorde says:

What does this say about the character of the man? That he would put the interests of his department ahead of the protection and well-being of the nation’s children.

How does such behavior compare with that of all those recently charged with widespread cover-up of child sex abuse in order to protect the reputation of their relevant institutions?

Although it threw us into chaos, the withdrawal of the Minister made me glad I had included in the book the quote from Martin Luther King:

I have almost reached the lamentable conclusion that the Negro’s great
stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White
Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate,
who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative
peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the
presence of justice.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words are a judicious reminder. For those of us who no longer wish to remain silent, the task of dismantling decadent 400-year-old child-removal policies will be painful.

It will involve the earning of self-respect and becoming ‘comfortable with discomfort’. It will require conflict, disorder and division from some of those we hold dear and the challenging of cherished myths.

Whenever I am asked what my qualifications to write this book I just say:

I came face to face with a terrible injustice playing out under our noses.

I now refer to myself simply as an ex-member of the silent majority.

John Stapleton is the founder of A Sense of Place Publishing. He worked as a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian for more than 20 years. He is an occasional contributor to The New Daily. A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.

Born in Holland, the eldest of five children, Peter van de Voorde migrated to Australia with his family when he was eleven years old.

His family spent the first four years living in a tent on the northern beaches of Sydney.

My basic needs were met. I was safe, I was loved by my parents, and it taught me that you don’t need to grow up in a mansion. I never once felt like a second class citizen. I was happy.

Adventurous and with an early love of music, carpentry, horses and farming, he went on to become a musician and entertainer, licensed builder, farmer, resort manager and ultimately a researcher, producer and broadcaster.

A life-changing event would have an impact on the rest of his life and cause him to commence a totally unexpected journey of discovery.

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Wednesday, 17 October 2018

Richard Trevaskis Meets Malcolm McLaren, Medium, 18 October, 2018.

Richard Trevaskis Meets Malcolm McLaren

Hunting the Famous

Malcolm McLaren arrested in notorious Queen’s Jubilee 1977 Sex Pistols boat cruise which saw the band performing God Save the Queen, She Ain’t no Human Being on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament. A moment in time now seen as Punk’s pinnacle. McLaren’s arrest guaranteed maximum publicity.

“Malcolm McLaren is dead. Cancer.”

The mother of my children relayed the news in 2010. We were lounging in the muggy heat by a Phnom Penh pool. We were behind 20 foot high mansion walls; the chaos of potholes and beggars that characterised the nearby streets entirely lost on her.

“Can you believe that? I loved Buffalo Gals. I loved the Sex Pistols.”

I just nodded. Remained silent. Saying nothing was a safe place to be.

But it immediately took me back some thirty years to that day when, as per arrangement, I went to interview Malcolm McLaren in his offices Covent Garden with a very dear friend, Richard Trevaskis.

Halcyon Days

London of the 1980s was always bound up with a band of Australians I had known for years.

Richard Trevaskis was one of the stars in a play I wrote back in the 1970s called The Police Commissioner’s Grandmother.

The play ran for two weeks in a theatre in Adelaide and received largely positive reviews.

I experienced for the first and last time the pleasure of sitting in a theatre listening to an audience laugh at something I had written.

Theatre Australia declared: “Mr Stapleton makes no bones; he is out to make you laugh and by Christ you will.”

None of the reviewers paid any attention to Trevaskis’s sterling efforts.

But the rest of us did.

We were all a little in love with Richard.

Fast forward

London, although we hadn’t realised it at the time, turned out to be Richard’s high water mark.

Richard Trevaskis, Centre with Kim O’Brien and Justin Brash

He was the barman par excellence; looked smashing in black and white. Trevaskis had a knack of wrangling jobs in some of London’s trendiest restaurants and nightclubs, including that massive cathedral of hedonism known as Heaven.

Richard was always a loyal friend.

He had a knack of spotting our little gang and swishing us drinks from behind the bar across the six deep queues of customers clamoring for his attention. With the greatest of panache.

There were always privileges to knowing him. Until there weren’t.

Richard didn’t finish work until late; and often drank heavily through until dawn. For a long time he got away with it. Women adored him. Gay men swooned.

The lethal speed he kept scoring across a particular counter up Kings Road in Chelsea kept us running at a million miles an hour.

Richard was always up at three or four in the morning, perfectly happy to see a visitor.

Late at night the holy rituals led us to states of euphoria no human should endure.

For years after he died I kept expecting Richard to show up in the early hours of the morning with a bottle under his arm; a sunny smile plastered across his ever appealing face, give me a big hug and talk about everything and everybody, just for the fun of it.

How were we to know?

But way back then, in London, Richard had been an aspiring young photographer and the idea of photographing Malcolm McLaren had excited him greatly. He hoped it would be the beginning of a great career.

I was glad of his company.

What was the point of meeting famous people if you couldn’t share the experience with someone afterwards?

We had shown up at McLaren’s offices in Soho and while I did the interview Richard fussed around with all his photographic gear, pretending this was just another routine assignment.

In fact it was the first time he had ever photographed a celebrity.

We were the boys from Australia, hicks from bumfuck nowhere as far as most Londoners were concerned.

Malcolm McLaren, having more or less invented Punk Rock and the Sex Pistols, was, on the other hand, already stratospherically famous.

Svengali, iconoclast, provocateur, pivotal, the words scrolled out of social and musical commentators worldwide.

Malcolm had recently discovered opera. His single Madam Butterfly, which I played incessantly till no one could bear to hear it anymore, was just about to come out.

Everything seemed to be soaring then; the music, our lives, our loves; the endless adventures of London nights.

I would stumble back home sooner or later; but nothing much stopped some of us going out all night most every night.

Who was to know that this would be our last hurrah?

That Richard’s dreams of being a photographer or even a filmmaker would never amount to a pile of dust.

That these days, this interview, wasn’t a precursor to an ever more fabulous life and successful career, that this was it.

Sold to the Highest Bidder

McLaren was an interview I had already sold to a magazine called Stilettoback in Australia.

After keeping us waiting for almost an hour McLaren couldn’t have been more charming. It was that rarest of interviews. While not normally a fan of the interview format, I typed up the transcript, changed the order of a few sentences and sent the piece off. It read perfectly.

Richard took photograph after photograph.

I was happy to see his earnest face there. I hated doing these jobs on my own.

During the interview Malcolm disappeared several times into his offices and then re-emerged sniffling slightly, even more articulate than he had been minutes before, expansive on the future of fashion, music, culture, society.

The high quality of the cocaine available in London at the time might have had as much to do with the excellence of the interview as the subject’s natural gifts.

Richard fussed as McLaren expanded on his many themes.

“I genuinely think the unemployed will be the biggest creative force in this country by the end of the decade. I think they will cause great strife in this country politically. No question about it.”

But they don’t have access to marketing, I responded.

“They don’t need it. There’s nothing there for them. That’s what I’m trying to suggest. There is nothing in this country for them.

“New York is a very very happening place. Why? Because the dispossessed there are creating the culture on the streets, in the form of graffiti, in the form of dance music, in the form of turning record players into instruments. That’s happening. They are speaking.

“Rock and roll was the biggest bandwagon that any kid could get on to get outside of the English class structure. It was our way of stepping out. The music was always only ever a means to that end.

“You’re not in the system with CBS trying to dress you up with a skirt or put paint on your face. All you’re doing is saying I’m a wanderer. So I don’t fit. I’m with New Guinea. I’m over here in Mexico. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care that I’m not the manager of Lloyds Bank.”

In later years Richard would always talk about the day he met Malcolm McLaren.

The interview ended on the following note:

Malcolm McLaren: I believe real music comes from ordinary people dancing. Not from record companies.

Richard Trevaskis: One last question, is all this scratching making you rich?

Malcolm McLaren: I hope so.

John Stapleton: All this scribbling ain’t making me rich.

Malcolm McLaren: The life of a writer is a hard one.

And now McLaren is dead.

And Richard is dead — that precocious smile and fine body nothing but ash.

Grow old? Forget it.

Richard died of a drug overdose in 1997, retreating from London to Sydney and finally to Adelaide, along the way helping to organise some of Sydney and Adelaide’s wildest mega-parties before becoming an incoherent shell in his mother’s giant house. It was the most pointless of deaths.

When the whole of Sydney turned clean and sober overnight and self-help programs became the trendiest thing on God’s Earth, I took Richard to a recovery meeting in the hope he might join the throng — instead of spending his nights in that Elizabeth Bay apartment with the harbor lapping on the sandstone walls outside — when empty bottles of beer and high class booze began to clutter his apartment in an embarrassing way and he became pathetically glad to see any of the old gang.

Richard, a walking encyclopedia on cocktails and every form of fancy alcohol known to man, couldn’t think of anything worse than a sober life.

So I took him to a meeting when the slide had already begun, when the good times were in the past and the massive parties which took months of planning and were remembered and discussed for months afterwards were just objects in the litter of the city’s social history.

It was an inner-city meeting I thought Richard might relate to; but far from being inspirational it was just chaotic. An old junky, obviously stoned, droned on for 30, 40, 50 minutes, and nothing Richard heard that evening gave him even so much as a glimmer of an alternative fate line.

Some of Sydney’s meetings were just ridiculous, full of people who didn’t have an addiction problem, they just didn’t fit in anywhere else.

They made up stories of their own dereliction, describing their supposedly terrible rock bottoms by piecing together bits and pieces of other people’s stories.

At least now they felt they belonged somewhere, with a crew as equally dysfunctional and unaccomplished as themselves.

It was a terrible meeting. Even I, filled at the time with the fervour of recovery and the substantiality of a mainstream job, had to admit that.

After the meeting Richard couldn’t wait to get down to the nearest pub, the Lord Roberts in Darlinghurst. Just couldn’t wait.

As I watched, he drank furiously, anything to wipe that dreadful meeting out of his mind.

Richard drank that night and every other night; and was determined not to stop. That dismal meeting, that one attempt at rehabilitation in the soggy streets of Darlinghurst in inner-Sydney, became just another pitstop on the highway of no return.

And Then Came the News

Richard retreated to his old bedroom in his mother’s giant house in North Adelaide 1400 kilometers away. For the last year of his life I heard stories; and wanted to go and visit.

I had a job as a pooh bah journalist on one of the country’s major newspapers, we had our memories of wild wild times.

We occasionally spoke on the phone.

Friends muttered regret or concern at what had happened to him.

Even in his final days Richard would have been interested in the news that Malcolm McLaren was dead.

And then came the news.

Richard had died, 8th of May, 1997.

He was just out of his twenties.

The saddest times, deliberately askew, couldn’t beat the adventures that we had; but now they were just sad little dollops of memory down through the gloom, everything tainted with nostalgia.

Old friends, busy with their momentous new lives, gathered for a messy, ramshackle memorial in Sydney.

There wouldn’t be any visits south.

Revolutionary Intent: Cash From Chaos

Three years later, Malcolm McLaren also passed away; in a Swiss Clinic, his passing making news around the world.

Under the headline “Anarchy rules as Malcolm McLaren funeral draws punk glitterati” The Guardian newspaper recorded:

Malcolm McLaren’s funeral was never going to be a sober affair.

As the hearse bearing the punk impresario’s coffin passed shops selling bondage gear and Sex Pistols T-shirts in north London today, some clapped, most cheered, and one voice which cried “Anarchy!” rose above the rest.

A horse-drawn carriage headed the procession from the deconsecrated St Mary Magdalene church to Highgate cemetery, while McLaren’s coffin was spray-painted with the words “Too fast to live, too young to die”.

It was followed by an overflowing green double-decker bus destined for “Nowhere” and decorated with one of McLaren’s favourite sayings: “Cash from chaos."

McLaren’s final wish was to be buried, wearing a new suit, in Highgate Cemetery north London, close to where he grew up.

The cemetery, known as the spookiest in London and often claimed to be haunted, is famous as the final resting place of Karl Marx.

Son with fashion supremo, longtime friend and partner Vivienne Westwood, Joe Corre told The Guardian newspaper:

“He has an affinity with that place. I have spoken to them and they have some room, fortunately.

“My father was a very special person — a person who changed the world.

“I am incredibly proud of him. He was an old warrior. The world would have been a very different place without him. He produced nothing short of a revolution.”

No such claims will ever be made for Richard Trevaskis.

But some of us who survived miss him still.

Adapted for Medium from the upcoming memoir Hunting the Famous.

John Stapleton worked as a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian for more than 20 years. A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.