Violent Australia: The Mob Rises: The Best of 2020. A Sense of Place Magazine, 31 December, 2020.

 Violent Australia: The Mob Rises: The Best of 2020.

Australia has never seen anything like it.

And somehow we’re all fine with it.

This extremely distressing footage of yet another pregnant woman being violently and aggressively arrested in Melbourne went viral within hours yesterday and is likely to be seen by as many millions of people as saw the now infamous footage of a woman in her pajamas being arrested in her own home in front of her children for a Facebook post.

To state the obvious: This is not just bad for the individuals involved, but for the country as a whole. And extremely bad for the nation’s once happy-go-lucky reputation.

“We’re getting used to seeing footage like this around here,” says Rebekah Spelman, who has been following the lockdown demonstrations closely and is running for her local council in Melbourne on an anti-lockdown platform.

“One person in the video can be heard saying, ‘she’s bleeding, she’s bleeding’. It looks to me from what I can see that this is true.

“We’re seeing so much unnecessary police aggression against ordinary people living their lives. We’re not criminals. None of these people are criminals

“We just want our freedoms. It is about human rights, and our human rights are being trampled and our freedoms stolen.

“To protest under these circumstances requires courage, and foolhardiness perhaps. But certainly courage.”

Ms Spelman has her own experience of being aggressively arrested as a peaceful protester.

“We all know how poorly the police are acting through this, and it’s a disgusting disgrace how they seem to be reveling in their ‘authority’.

“As a law abiding citizen, I should not have to be fearful of being arrested and charged for breaking no laws, or of earning myself a criminal record that will affect the rest of my life – but here we ALL are.

“I was at a protest in Melbourne. The riot squad appeared all of a sudden and together with the horse squad, they surrounded a small group of about 15 of us. One young riot squad rookie was so gung-ho that he started shoving the man right next to me, unprovoked, and screaming at him to move. This act alone could have started a big fight that would have ended very badly if the man he pushed was aggressive.

Melbourne Meltdown

“Thankfully he was not; he ignored the young officer until a more senior officer next to him told him to stop.

“After being surrounded, the riot officers walked at us in groups of 5 and one by one, dragged us out of the circle where regular officers cuffed us, made us stand around for awhile, then checked our ID and issued a fine for being more than five kilometres from home, and set us free.

“I was detained by an aggressive little female cop who clearly had plenty to prove. She was rude and loving it, and when she went through my backpack to find my ID, I asked her to be careful not to let the photograph that I keep in my wallet fall out and blow away. Her response was sarcastic: ‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do?’

“They seemed to enjoy the show that they put on, arresting this pack of ‘violent lawbreakers’ for the whole nation to marvel over.”

In the early months of the Covid panic Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison preened himself daily in front of the cameras as some kind of latter-day saviour of the nation.

Now he is missing in action, watching from on high as his country crumbles.

And while pregnant women are arrested.

Police Arrest Pregnant Woman for Facebook Post

The footage of this woman being arrested in front of her children has now been seen millions of times around the world. Apart from the outrageous conduct of the police, the most striking thing about this woman was just how gutsy she was. A classic Aussie battler.

Having ignored the advice of leading epidemiologists from around the world that lockdowns don’t work, Morrison has destroyed the working lives of millions of Australians and as a result of his tragically misguided policies destroyed tens of thousands of businesses for no good reason.

As Oxford University graduate and esteemed journalist Steve Waterson put it in The Australian: “We’ve handed control of our lives to a clown car packed with idiots who have wasted billions trying to defeat this virus. They will never admit it was all for nothing.”

The latest outrages in terms of policy is that while many thousands of ordinary Australians remain stranded overseas, the rich are being rolled out the red carpet. Holders of business innovation and investment visas are allowed to enter Australia without having to apply for a Covid-19 entry exemption. Meanwhile Australians on average incomes can neither enter nor leave.

But in the end, what does it matter?

Australia’s governing class has one modus operandi: Rob the Poor. Give to the Rich.

The kleptocracy, the plutocracy parading as a democracy that was Australia, is now exposed for all to see.

Here is another piece of footage of police brutalising a young woman:

The face of the Corona Virus in Australia is Daniel Andrews, the foppish, supremely arrogant Premier of Victoria whose daily press conferences, now more than 60 in a row, have attracted a cult following because they are so patently absurd.

Acting as Daniel Andrews’ private henchmen, enacting what is essentially martial law under the guise of public health decrees, the black-shirted Victorian police have brought the entire nation’s police forces into disrepute.

The famous SS Uniform of Nazi Germany

The increasingly famous Victorian Police Commissioner Shane Patton, sporting his black uniform with SS style insignia. The full uniform includes black shirt, black tie and black jacket.

The Victorian Police have famously done everything from arrest a pregnant woman in front of her children to smashing car windows and dragging screaming women from their cars.

Their extremely heavy crackdowns on anti-lockdown protesters has made international news, while at home his Twitter mob howl for Daniel Andrews to go harder, harder.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.

HANNAH ARENDT

As Ms Spelman recalled of a subsequent encounter: “I just went through a police checkpoint. I told the officer that they have lost so much respect from the people and that once this is over, it’s not going to just come back. I asked her if she was fine with the way things are right now, and she replied cheerily: “Yes I’m fine with it”.

Yes I’m fine with it.

VICTORIAN POLICE OFFICER

As one of the Twentieth Century’s preeminent intellects Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the fickleness of the mob is legendary and it is no better to be ruled by the mob than it is by a dictator.

“While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.

“For there is no denying that this evil has befallen us with the full complicity of the people itself . . . The people is not God. Anyone could have foreseen that this new divinity would someday topple to his fall.”

Street gangs have been replaced by Twitter mobs.

In Australia today there is no freedom of expression. No right to protest. No honour. No dignity of belief.

If you don’t agree with the dictates of Australia’s multiple federal, state and local governments you face, as citizens are now facing in Victoria, arrest, handcuffing or brutally and aggressively being slammed to the ground. For doing what you sincerely believe to be right.

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Press Release Journalism Favours Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party: The Best of 2020. As Editor. A Sense of Place Magazine, 31 December, 2020.

 Press Release Journalism Favours Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party: The Best of 2020.

By Rashad Seedeen with Independent Australia

Of late, it has become increasingly frustrating to follow the news.

During times of relative stability and peace, poor journalism is an annoyance. But during times of crisis, mediocre reporting has far greater consequences.  

There’s much criticism that we can examine but let’s look at just one area of concern — press-release journalism. This is a lazy and even tribal form of reporting where journalists simply repackage the sound-bites and press releases of politicians.

It is rather easy to dissect the rabid partisan muckraking of Murdoch’s usual suspects. Instead, let’s examine some leading journalists who I would consider to be usually fair in their political assessments —Australian Financial Review’s Phil Coorey and The Australian’s Peter van Onselen.  

What is really wrong with our media: The Eden Monaro example

Only by supporting progressive, independent, factual and fearless news sources, can Australians overcome “conservative” media propaganda

  

We can do this by examining two issues that have become most prominent of late — contact tracing and border restrictions.

Following the Victorian government’s announcement of the roadmap to COVID normal — the Federal Government came out swinging, the feel-good mantra that “we are all Melburnians now” long forgotten.  

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Health Minister Greg Hunt distributed a joint press release openly criticising the extension of the stage 4 lockdown, the strict criteria to ease restrictions and Victoria’s supposed inferior contact tracing system.

This was then followed by an accusatory news conference.

Feeding the Chooks: Scott Morrison’s Triumph Over Mainstream Media

The mass media almost immediately followed suit in a group pile-on, with Phil Coorey resorting to simply reporting the Prime Minister’s commentary, not wasting any time to research contrary evidence or even providing the Victorian Government with a right of reply. 

Peter van Onselen provided a more measured account but followed Morrison’s crowing in describing NSW’s ‘far superior contact tracing systems’ in such glowing terms you would be mistaken to think it was akin to a NASA control room with laser-sharp precision in suppressing outbreaks.

Without really explaining what this superiority was, van Onselen’s reporting lacked substance and appeared to be mimicking Morrison’s sound-bites. 

The Israel lobby and media independence

The media skews towards affording pro-Israel voices a substantial amount of exposure, largely excluding Palestinian perspectives, Dr Evan Jones contends.

Head of Biosecurity Research Program at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales, Raina Macintyre, has countered with a detailed account of how contact tracing systems work and how they still follow the same process: ‘manually and all use whiteboards’.

What Macintyre correctly points out was that NSW never experienced such overwhelming high case numbers and wide-spread community transmission to follow up. If such an outbreak occurred in NSW there’s a very real chance the state would be in the same boat as Victoria.

It is worth sharing here Macintyre’s assessment:

‘No health workforce in the world, no matter how organised, well-resourced and efficient, can do manual contact tracing successfully when an epidemic becomes too large.’

Such conclusions would never feature in a Morrison press release but should be included in fully researched news pieces.

Macintyre did also provide an important insight that the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has been the victim of successive budget cuts from twenty years of state governments.

Media ethics and journalistic integrity

The decline of journalistic standards has appreciably contributed to the political malaise we find ourselves in. 

Osman Faruqi, in The Saturday Paper, has provided an even more comprehensive and damning assessment of the lack of staffing, poor processes and the misguided neoliberal approach to outsourcing work to a patchwork of private contractors. Faruqi, unlike van Onselen and Coorey, has provided a detailed account of how contact tracing completely failed in Victoria, that was admitted to by Victoria’s Chief Medical Officer, Brett Sutton, himself.

Some might believe that such analysis vindicates Morrison and the mainstream media’s characterisation of contact tracing in Victoria. But if it wasn’t for Faruqi, we wouldn’t truly understand the extent of this policy failure because political journalists like Coorey and van Onselen presented the issue like a couple of ambassadors for the federal government without research or a real explanation.  

Meanwhile, journalists everywhere seem to have forgotten Morrison’s failed implementation of contact tracing with the near defunct COVID Safe app.

Let’s now look at the issue of state border closures. Morrison and many in his Party built a cause célèbre against the Queensland government over its strict border closures twisting the denial of an ACT woman’s request to attend her father’s funeral in Queensland as an act of cruelty towards a family deserving of compassionate consideration.

Without a second thought, the mainstream media jumped on board in their attacks upon the supposed cruel, inconsistent and nonsensical border rulings by Queensland’s Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk. Palazczuk’s decision to back her Chief Health Officer’s decision to deny entry offended van Onselen so deeply that he declared ‘I can’t respect that’ and described border officials dealing with massive case loads of applications as a group that ‘couldn’t organise a piss-up at brewery’.

Regional media ripe for independent revolution

It’s simple: local communities want local news regardless of what greedy media oligarchs like Murdoch say.

Phil Coorey, in lock-step with the PM, was also enraged at the injustice and declared on Twitter that it was a ‘raging double standard’.

The Guardian’s political editor, Katharine Murphy, noticed Morrison’s echo chamber too.

Murphy described such a situation eloquently:

‘I don’t think he needs a rapid response Greek chorus, ululating synchronously as if their lives depended on it … Various News Corp publications, Ray Hadley on 2GB, Peta Credlin, flanked by a couple of serially angry Sky blokes whose names currently escape me, all reported for duty on Thursday to amplify the sad tale of a young woman unable to attend her father’s funeral.’  

Border restrictions have been quite frustrating and even tragic for many families but Australian state governments have made a point to follow the advice of their Chief Health Officers and implement policies accordingly.

Border closures and limiting movement are a key part of that. They might even get it wrong on some individual cases. But we are in the middle of a pandemic and each government is focused entirely on the big picture of keeping cases numbers down. Context is key.  

The media blackout on Julian Assange’s imprisonment

The same media that has spent years dragging Assange’s name through the mud is now engaging in a blackout on his treatment.

It’s surprising that the mainstream media did not have such outrage weeks earlier in late August when a Sudanese mother was denied entry to South Australia – a state-led by a Liberal premier – on no less than eight failed attempts to see and bury her daughter, who unexpectedly passed away while on holiday.

SBS News was the only major news station to cover the story at the time, with the spotlight providing the catalyst for the South Australian government to relent, authorising her entry to the state a day later.

At the time, Morrison and the majority of the mainstream media did not take notice that such injustices and obstructions existed. In press release journalism, politicians dictate when something becomes an issue worth investigating.

For Morrison, his partisanship is painfully obvious, especially considering Queensland has an upcoming election and unsurprising for a politician of such low calibre. We expect more from leading journalists.

Intervene: How the Government can secure media diversity

We can have a stronger, more varied media if the Government legislates to prevent further takeovers and mergers, writes Ross Thorley.

Furthermore, Morrison and the mainstream media have appeared to have forgotten the Sri Lankan family languishing in detention on Christmas Island. They were put there by the federal government in a border policy of extreme cruelty as an electoral race-baiting policy and to remind refugees everywhere how they treat those seeking asylum in Australia.

Morrison and the mainstream media seemed to have also forgotten that, in 2011, Morrison was vocally opposed to flying a family of refugees to Sydney for funerals of people killed in the Christmas Island shipwreck. 

Such accusations of double standards against the Morrison Government don’t seem to be in the lexicon of our mainstream media at the moment.

Journalists should never be led by the nose on the behest of a prime minister, especially some of our best. When reporters resort to press release journalism, they allow themselves to simply become tools in a high-stakes political game.     

They need to do better. They need to do their job.https://www.youtube.com/embed/RV_L5HRSXRU?rel=0&wmode=opaque

Rashad Seedeen is a school teacher and a PhD candidate in International Relations from La Trobe University, Melbourne. He tweets at @rash_seedeen.

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Covert-19: Government stacks Covid Commission with Oil and Gas Mates: The Best of 2020. As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 30 December, 2020.

 Covert-19: Government stacks Covid Commission with Oil and Gas Mates: The Best of 2020.

By Sandi Keane with Michael West Media

The Government is quietly blowing away years of environmental protections under cover of Covid. Its Covid Commission (NCCC) is stacked with executives from the gas and mining lobbies in what is turning out to be a bonanza for multinationals and yet another destructive blow to Australia’s efforts to curb global warming. Sandi Keane investigates.

His declaration in Parliament, “This is coal; don’t be scared”, came back to haunt Prime Minister Scott Morrison when summer’s catastrophic wildfires brought global media attention over his handling of the crisis and Australia’s response to climate change.

Fast forward from bushfires to COVID-19 and his reputation has reversed thanks to the handling of the virus. Yet, while the attention of the nation has been drawn to the daily COVID-19 count and embracing the digital world of schooling, working and socialising from home, the fossil fuel industry – with help from the Morrison Government – has quietly seized the opportunity to entrench its power and profits.

A report from environmental advocacy group 350 Australia has detailed 36 individual policy changes or requests for project-specific support — all under cover of COVID-19.

The findings are shocking. While we’ve been in a deep funk, as of May 7, 69% of demands from the fossil fuel sector have already been enacted or agreed to by the Government. Concessions and sweetheart deals include 14 requests to slash important environmental or corporate regulations, 11 requests for tax cuts and financial concessions, and 12 instances of requests to fast-track project assessment.

Lucy Manne, CEO of 350 Australia, called it out:

“It is rank opportunism for the fossil fuel lobby to call for slashing of corporate taxes and important environmental protections under the cover of COVID-19.”

Taking a cue from Howard’s love-in with the mining industry when alone among the rest of the developed world, he took key mining lobbyists to Kyoto rather than climate scientists, Morrison awarded key positions in the PM’s office to former mining executives and lobbyists. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Committee (NCCC) has been:

“stacked with fossil fuel company executives and gas ‘kingmakers’ whose vision for Australia is framed by pipelines and fracking wells, which will lead to runaway climate change,” as Manne says.

COVID-19 National Co-ordination Committee’s links to fossil fuels

The NCCC was set up on March 25 with no terms of reference, no register of conflicts of interest with even less divulged about its financial resources. So let’s look at what 350 Australia has dug up on its links to fossil fuels.

Its six-strong Executive Board of Directors is supported by the Secretaries of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Philip Gaetjens, and Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo. Gaetjens was intimately involved with the controversial community grants pre-Election. NCCC’s role is described as two-fold … “to help minimise and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on jobs and businesses and to facilitate the fastest recovery possible once the virus has passed.”

Here are the key players:

Neville Power

chair NCCC, Nev Power (image courtesy https://australianminingreview.com.au/)

Chair, Neville (Nev) Power, former Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) CEO is also Deputy Chair of Strike Energy which is seeking to exploit gas reserves in WA and SA. Power’s shareholding in Strike had a market value of $1,639.675 as of May 4, 2020. His shares in FMG have a market value of $16.2 million as of the same date.

Power told The Australian on April 20, “…. we have abundant energy, particularly in the form of gas that we can deploy to make sure that we can manufacture all those large volume products [fertiliser and petrochemicals] ourselves.”

The Australian Financial Review also reports that Power has advocated for a gas pipeline linking the West and East coast to facilitate an expansion of onshore gas in WA.

Both Attorney-General Christian Porter and Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Ben Morton record in the Register of Member’s Interests, that “I travelled on a return flight at the invitation of Mr Nev Power from Canberra to Perth on Thursday 9th April 2020″. The Age reports that Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was also on the flight but failed to report it on the Register.

Andrew Liveris

Andrew Liveris (Image courtesy https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/)

Andrew Liveris is a special advisor to the NCCC and Deputy Chair of WorleyParsons as well as Board Member of Saudi Aramco. He is reported in The Australian to have advised the NT Government on the development of the gas industry, noting the potential of Beetaloo Basin. Last May, Liveris was reported in The Australian as saying: “There is a lot of gas sitting under the ground in Australia onshore (which could be tapped by) working with state governments.”

Liveris’s shares in WorleyParsons have a value of $54,204 as at May 4, 2020 and as a director of Saudi Aramco, he receives a fixed fee of $1,125,000 Suadi Riyal equivalent to $466,086 as of the same date.

Catherine Tanna

Catherine Tanna, one of the Commissioners, is the Managing Director of EnergyAustralia, the second largest climate polluter in the country. It’s also one of Australia’s biggest tax dodgers. As Michael West reported in Michael West Media on March 1 (after Senator Rex Patrick called for her to stand down from the board of the Reserve Bank for running a company with a tax haven structure):

“EnergyAustralia, the power generator and retailer run by Catherine Tanna, paid just $69 million in tax on nearly $8 billion of income in one recent year.”

Prior to that, Tanna was Managing Director of Queensland Gas Company which became the BG Group before it was acquired by Royal Dutch Shell. Tanna has form on shying away from tax. In this story, gas industry whistleblower Simone Marsh details how Tanna, then chief executive of BG Group promised BG would pay more than a billion dollars in tax after 2014. It does not appear to have paid any.

In 2019, Tanna announced that EnergyAustralia would be investing $80 million to expand the Mt Pipe coal-fired power station near lithgow in NSW to “…help make sure the plant is around for another quarter century.”

Showing form also on emissions, she opposed the Victorian Government’s draft emissions reduction targets as these would result in the closure of the EnergyAustralia-owned Yallourn coal-fired power station.

James Fazzino

James Fazzino (Image courtesy http://www.armitage.com.au/)

James Fazzino, a member of the Manufacturing Working Group and formerly Managing Director and CEO of Incitec Pivot Ltd, is on the Board of APA, an energy infrastructure company which owns and operates the largest interconnected gas transmission network across Australia.

In its report, 350 Australia has revealed that “APA group is seeking to build a Western Slopes Pipeline connecting Santos’ controversial Narrabri gas project to the Moomba Sydney Pipeline, and a separate pipeline connecting the Moomba Sydney Pipeline to Port Kembla — currently being assessed by the NSW Government.” See map below:

Western Slopes Pipeline (Image courtesy https://www.apa.com.au/)

Membership of Manufacturing Australia consists of Tomago Aluminium Company, which has long advocated for the extension of the life of the Liddell coal-fired power station and Incitec Pivot, one of Australia’s largest consumers of gas (Fazzino’s former employer). Other high energy users include BlueScope Steel, Cement Australia and Capral.

Fazzino holds 31,751 shares in APA Group which have a market value of $348.625 as of May 4, 2020.

Launch of Fossil Fuel Watch

350 Australia’s “Fossil Fuel Watch” website launched today, contains background information of each member of NCCC, including links to the fossil fuel industry, and an interactive list of all concessions being sought under cover of COVID-19 in the form of financial support and changes to regulations (especially environmental). The website is a first step in a national campaign is to deliver greater transparency to the Government’s pandemic response to “ensure Australia emerges as a more just society through the COVID-19 recovery”.

A call for transparency and conflict of interest register

Together with the launch of Fossil Fuel Watch, 350 Australia is calling for three crucial measures to ensure Australians can have faith in the NCCC:

(1) a transparent conflict of interest register, (2) fairer representation of the Australian community; and (3) full transparency of operations of the NCCC and its recommendations to government.

As Lucy Manne says:

“Australians deserve better than to be fed a short-sighted pro-gas agenda, while they are trying to get through a global pandemic.”

A full table of each of the 36 individual policy changes or requests for project-specific support can be found on Fossil Fuel Watch. Entries are listed by Date, The Proponent, The Demand (ah, yes, here you’ll find the IPA demanding the community be stripped of its right to challenge mining projects — and approval given), Type and Government Position. #COVERT19 is well underway ….

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandi Keane

Sandi is MW’s editor-in-chief. She was formerly editor at Independent Australia and before that ran a highly successful business which landed her on the front cover of Personal Investment magazine. Sandi has conducted corporate investigations, principally into the energy and media sectors. Her investigation into the anti-wind lobby and Waubra Foundation was used to support Labor’s Clean Energy Bill, thus, making it into Hansard. Sandi holds a Masters degree in Journalism from the University of Melbourne. For story ideas, contributions, syndications and production issues, please email Sandi at sandi@michaelwest.com.au. You can follow Sandi on Twitter @jarrapin.

This story was originally published in Australia’s leading investigative journalism site Michael West Media.

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