‘Eviction by dereliction’: the decay of public housing

Barney Gardner is one of the last public housing tenants still living in Sydney’s Millers Point. The 72-year-old former painter and docker has lived in public housing his entire life. He has experienced firsthand the complete disregard of state and federal governments for the wellbeing of the “invisible” Australians in housing such as his.

“We can mix with wealthy people,” he says. “I have no desire for greener grass. But can they live with us? It’s disgusting the way that public housing tenants are treated.”

Gardner has watched as his community disappeared, first slowly, then rapidly. They were shunted from one dilapidated property to another, with seemingly no right to basic maintenance, let alone a modest standard of living as their heritage-listed homes were sold to private buyers.

And Gardner is one of the lucky ones, having inherited his parents’ worker’s cottage under the “succession” provision once ensured by the Maritime Services Board. Although Gardner helped to fight and win several cases allowing some of his neighbours to retain their families’ leases, the “succession” provision was eventually dispensed with.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/04/09/eviction-dereliction-the-decay-public-housing/164942640013672#hrd

 

Assange’s legal torment has gone on long enough

The British High Court’s decision to unblock the process of extraditing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US to face espionage charges has reopened a debate about whether Australia should play a more active role in the long-running case.

Lord Justice Holroyde overturned a previous judge’s ruling that Mr Assange should not be deported because of the high risk he could take his own life in a US jail. Lord Holroyde accepted US assurances that it would guarantee Mr Assange’s safety.The decision comes as a further blow to Mr Assange, who has already spent almost a decade either in jail or holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges – which were dropped in 2019 – and then extradition to the US for publishing in 2010 the contents of US military and diplomatic cables.

https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/assange-s-legal-torment-has-gone-on-long-enough-20211212-p59gx6.html

 

The strategic reverberations of the AUKUS deal will be big and lasting

JUST OCCASIONALLY, you can see the tectonic plates of geopolitics shifting in front of your eyes. Suez in 1956, Nixon going to China in 1972 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 are among the examples in living memory. The unveiling last week of a trilateral defence pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (introducing the awkward acronym of AUKUS) is providing another of those rare occasions.

AUKUS envisages a wide range of diplomatic and technological collaboration, from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence, but at its core is an agreement to start consultations to help Australia acquire a fleet of nuclear-propelled (though not nuclear-armed) submarines. One consequence of this is Australia cancelling a contract, worth tens of billions of dollars, signed in 2016 with France for diesel-electric submarines. In announcing AUKUS on September 15th with the prime ministers of Australia and Britain, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson, President Joe Biden stressed that it was about “investing in our greatest source of strength—our alliances”. However, America’s oldest ally, France, has reacted with understandable fury. Jean-Yves Le Drian, its foreign minister, called it a “stab in the back”. On September 17th President Emmanuel Macron withdrew France’s ambassadors from Washington and Canberra (though not London).

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/09/19/the-strategic-reverberations-of-the-aukus-deal-will-be-big-and-lasting

 

Bitter harvest

Seen from the top of a small, extinct volcano known as the Hummock, the countryside east of Bundaberg is a fertile patchwork of green fields and freshly tilled red-brown earth. Extending inland, this is perhaps Australia’s richest food bowl, pre-eminent in avocados, macadamia nuts, passionfruit, sweet potatoes and sugar cane, says the chief executive of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers, Bree Grima. That’s the sugar cane used to make the rum that bears the town’s name.

But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bitter harvest

 

How ‘prestige, status and power’ led to Australia’s war crimes

Australian military commanders were told some of their soldiers in Afghanistan might be committing war crimes, but because the information came from Afghans they didn’t believe it.

After a four-year investigation, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) has this week confirmed what has long been reported: that between 2005 and 2014, and particularly during 2012, some Australian special forces soldiers murdered and tortured civilians while deployed in Afghanistan.

As part of the inquiry, Professor David Whetham of King’s College London found that complaints of substance were lodged by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and local Afghan elders, but were brushed off as “Taliban propaganda or motivated by a desire for compensation”.

“It is clear that there were warning signs out there,” Whetham writes. “But nothing happened.”

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2020/11/21/how-prestige-status-and-power-led-australias-war-crimes/160587720010724#mtr

 

The Great Barrier Reef’s Great Big Complicated Story

Headlines have portrayed Australia’s bucket-list destination as dead, or dying. But that’s an oversimplification of a complex story—and the most dire threat from tourism may be what you least expect.

Page 53 of my dive log from 1992 contains the details of my 26th scuba dive. For location, I wrote: “study site, Davies Reef, GBR.” Under purpose: “Acanthaster fert expt.” 

At the time, I was a 25-year-old graduate student in marine science at the University of Southern California. I had a berth on a research cruise organized by the Australian Institute of Marine Science to the Great Barrier Reef near Townsville, about midway along its latitudinal expanse. The project’s aim was to understand the population explosion of the sea star Acanthaster planci. These prickly echinoderms have the common name crown of thorns starfish, often shortened to COTS. 

Since the 1960s, swarms of COTS have intermittently infested the Reef, eating coral with the voraciousness of locusts on crops. They were—and still are—among the greatest threats to the coral. Half of the Reef bears scars from COTS outbreaks. 

On dive #26, my job was to scan for COTS, collect them with massive barbecue tongs to avoid getting poked, and return them to the research boat for study. We induced spawning and collected the eggs in a modified giant syringe called a COTSucker. A single female, it would turn out, produces 35 million eggs a year. That kind of fertility is why population control has proven difficult. 

My search target was about the size of a dinner plate, rust- or purple-colored with 8 to 21 arms arrayed around a central disk like petals of a sunflower. During the day, COTS hide in dark crannies. Peeking into those shadows, I met nervous cardinal fish and spider-like feather stars. Sparkling clouds of blue chromis tucked themselves into the arms of branching corals. The pastel lips of giant clams kissed closed as I kicked past. 

https://www.afar.com/magazine/the-future-of-the-great-barrier-reef-depends-on-us

 

Australia’s Fires Give Us a Glimpse of What’s Coming

The environmental catastrophe playing out in Australia provides a terrifying glimpse of the “new normal” facing a warming world. Bushfires burning since September have now incinerated over 11.3 million acres, an area bigger than the Netherlands. At the latest count, eighteen people have died, and over a thousand homes have been destroyed.

Yellow smog hangs semi-permanently over major cities, a cloud so toxic that it caused an elderly woman to collapse and later die from respiratory distress after she stepped onto the tarmac of Canberra’s airport. Millions of Australians are being exposed to carcinogenic particles; simply breathing in Sydney’s air has been described as the equivalent of smoking thirty-four cigarettes a day.

Among the devastation, nearly half a billion animals have died, including a sizable proportion of New South Wales’s koalas. Almost certainly, entire species have been wiped out, as fire has swept through ecosystems never before exposed to flames.

Scenes from the affected areas have become increasingly apocalyptic. Tens of thousands of rural residents remain without power. A state of emergency prevails in New South Wales, the third declared in the past few months. In the Victorian disaster zones, people still await extraction by naval vessels.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/australia-bushfires-climate-change-new-south-wales-scott-morrison

 

Turn up the heat on climate change deniers

The new year has started with obvious signs that global warming is not an invention of scientists, as some politicians claim. Devastating bush fires in Australia, destructive floods in Jakarta and a heatwave in Norway that has people sunbathing rather than skiing are proof of climatic conditions having been shaken up.
Yet the doubters have not changed their views, putting their nations’ economies and industries ahead of international efforts to keep temperatures from rising. They need to change their ways or the disastrous consequences of their poor judgment will be ever-more evident.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, like United States President Donald Trump, is a climate change sceptic. He refuses to accept that the fires that have claimed at least two dozen lives and destroyed nearly 2,000 homes in southeastern states are the result of exceptionally hot and dry conditions brought about by global warming.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3045085/turn-heat-climate-change-deniers

 

Australia’s Shame

Let us suppose that I am the heir of an enormous estate. Stories about my generosity abound. And let us suppose that you are a young man, ambitious but in trouble with the authorities in your native land. You make a momentous decision: you will set out on a voyage across the ocean that will bring you to my doorstep, where you will say, I am here—feed me, give me a home, let me make a new life!

Unbeknown to you, however, I have grown tired of strangers arriving on my doorstep saying I am here, take me in—so tired, so exasperated that I say to myself: Enough! No longer will I allow my generosity to be exploited! Therefore, instead of welcoming you and taking you in, I consign you to a desert island and broadcast a message to the world: Behold the fate of those who presume upon my generosity by arriving on my doorstep unannounced!

This is, more or less, what happened to Behrouz Boochani. Targeted by the Iranian regime for his advocacy of Kurdish independence, Boochani fled the country in 2013, found his way to Indonesia, and was rescued at the last minute from the unseaworthy boat in which he was trying to reach Australia. Instead of being given a home, he was flown to one of the prisons in the remote Pacific run by the Commonwealth of Australia, where he remains to this day.

Boochani is not alone. Thousands of asylum-seekers have suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Australians. The point of the fable of the rich man and the supplicant is the following: Is it worse to treat thousands of people with exemplary inhumanity than to treat a single man in such a way? If it is indeed worse, how much worse is it? Thousands of times? Or does the calculus of numbers falter when it comes to matters of good and evil?

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/09/26/australias-shame/

 

Why Australia’s media front pages were blacked out today

Australia’s major media organisations blacked out their newspaper front pages and websites on Monday in a coordinated push for legislative change to protect press freedom and force the government to increase transparency.

According to the organisations – which include SBS, the ABC, Nine, News Corp Australia and The Guardian – a slew of laws introduced over the past 20 years have hindered the media’s capacity to act as the fourth estate and hold the government and other powerful figures to account.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/why-australia-s-media-front-pages-were-blacked-out-today