The lights are out on South King, even at the Union

In the more than six years I’ve lived in South King, Newtown, I’ve seen countless shops come and go. I always feel something for them – the shop owners, that is – when the Closing Sale sign went up in the window only to be replaced by the For Lease sign.

I’ve seen a crepe shop close and become another crepe shop, only to close again and open up as a boutique make-up artist shop with a massive and fantastic Cupie Doll window graphic. But even that has since shut down. Now that shop is another clothing store. Designer, boutique, ubiquitous. Closed and lifeless, like the pubs. 

Bob Hawke at the Carlise Castle.

It’s not hard to imagine how many of the static shopfronts I’ve walked past over the years will soon have For Lease signs in their windows soon too. They all have the virus, whether they show the symptoms or not. 

South King has always been thought of as the lesser half of Newtown. The top side – the flatter, longer stretch of King Street that meanders down from the university and hospital toward the station – has always been the prime of place for local businesses. That’s where the students and commuters are, or were. It was home to Gould’s Books, the musty stack of second-hand tomes and paperbacks. But this institution of Newtown has gone in the opposite direction and shifted to South King into a shadow of its former warren. 

The chemists are open at night, but nothing much else is. 

No entertainment on King Street, Newtown. 

Today, in crisis, foot traffic is down because everything has been shut down. The small enterprises are locked down, shoppers isolated as local and national economies are put in the deep freeze. One day we will unfreeze these engine rooms of the economy, but no one can say when or how much of it will have freezer bite and need to go straight in the bin. 

Up top is the cinema (closed), the pharmacies (open) and the churches (closed, but services have moved online), the sex shops (open). At 9pm on a Wednesday it feels like 3am on a Monday. 

One of the many post-norm core op-shops of South King. 

For some South King staples, the Covid-19 pandemic could not have come at a worse time. The Retrospect dress shop was blessed with an angled window frontage that, as you strolled down the hill toward St Peters, allowed four dresses to be displayed: three on one side leading to the door, then the prize had its on spot. It caught the eye as you walked by. Often it was a dazzling frock, sometimes it was a zutsuit, but never easy to ignore. Frontages like this are characteristic of South King; it has window display constructions that draw you into the shopfront and pull you inside; vestiges of the art of window shopping from a time of consumer arts, not manipulation, when there were few big name brands and a crafty, creative diorama was needed to reel in shoppers.   

The dress shop has since moved topside, away from the grungy end of town. I wish it well in the big leagues, but it could not have made the move at a worse time. The same goes for the Pastizzi Cafe – a mainstay of South King so popular that patrons never lined up for food; they crowded. Its wide range of Maltese pastries, pasta and sweets made it a popular spot in South King, but it never had capacity to meet demand. To house its mass of customers it moved up in the world, to a much larger place on Top King in early March.

“Finally. Finally. Finally. We are moving – 5th March,” the poster in the window proclaims. “We love Pastizzi Cafe. Don’t leave South King,” some fans wrote on the poster. “Stay open on South End,” pleads another.

Maybe now they wish they listened and stayed; the move could not have come at a worse time. 

In mid-March, the lockdowns started coming. They came in stages, “Stage Two” lockdowns on one day, “Stage Three” a few days later. How we adequately measure these quantitative measures will be one for the pointy heads, but in micro economic terms it would seem our South King neighbourhood is fucked. 

Play time is over. 

You only need to take a walk along King Street – call it exercise, so the jacks don’t slap you with a $1,000-$11,000 fine for breaching new orders of isolation and containment – to see how hard-up our world is. Step off the main drag to a playground and you will find swing sets strapped up, slides marked out of order, and all manner of play equipment deemed unsafe in this time of Coronavirus. Everything is roped off, No Fun is to be had, play time is over – according to Inner West Council and all other local governments. But if you want to use the bubbler, go right ahead. No tape there telling you no. 

To me it’s always been “the St Peters-end of Newtown”, but now it’s its own neighbourhood. South King has had a growing culture of its own, with a number of bars and pubs that host live music, post-norm core op-shops and record stores. But it’s all on ice in a city whose culture has been on ice for the better part of a decade. If you put it back in cold storage it will thaw out, but it might be trash. 

This sad reality is manifest in the empty and lifeless Union Hotel. That’s the one on the corner of King and Union streets, so called because during the Great Depression out-of-work men would gather, hungry and desperate for food and opportunity. So hungry, so desperate were these men that when police came down and push become shove, leading to the first arrests in Australia under the common law Riot Act in 1931, according to historian Nadia Wheatley, a must-read for understanding the anti-eviction movement of the Great Depression. 

The Union Hotel on South King, home to Australia’s first official riot. 

There is no rhyme or reflection between then and now. Then, we gathered in breadlines. Today our lines must have adequate of 1.5 metre spacing. (Props to the Morrison Liberal Government for bringing back literal dole queues for a short period). 

Today, The Union Hotel sits empty and quiet. It boasts live music and “proper good beer”, but with people observing adequate social distance measures it’s hard to find union and build solidarity among us. With no customers there are no shops. With the neighbourhood in lockdown, there is no life South King. 

The shops are closed, the pubs are shut, but we still have the people. We must start building our resistance and viability now – before our time is up. There is power in a union. Start building with workers and neighbours. 

Time to strike in a new direction – Part III: Striking back, in solidarity, with strangers

Read Part I: Struck down by the rules

Read Part II: Striking out at strangers

With every new hurdle, every new outrage, we are worn down that little bit further. That’s why we lash out at our loved ones and strike out at strangers, because it’s easier, we get a response. With life getting more expensive and harder, we find it harder and harder to love. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicted as much when he wrote: 

“You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.” 

It’s getting harder for us to think positive when there are so many negatives to focus on. When we see so little action on climate change and the environment the intention is to have us despair. If we cannot prevent the planet from warming, we must accept this fait accompli and stop trying. That is their goal, to make as angry and tired and worn down and prematurely senile so we cannot find the will to take action. That’s why it’s more important than ever that we build stronger bonds among our fellow workers than ever before.

 

Scabs! Scabs!

Rallying is not enough. We must make new connections and build bigger networks. We must forge links between workers and their unions and the environmental and climate movement. Our strength will come through the unity of action and aim. Workers’ rights are environmental rights. A Green New Deal means a just transition in our energy sector and climate justice for workers and their families everywhere. 

This is a fight we’ll have in the halls of parliament and it’s one that we will have in our streets. In cities, in towns, in regional and rural communities, we can win this if we work as one. We must stand as one in the face of fear and threats from the ruling class and their foot soldiers. 

To win we must break new ground and break the rules. 

Over the past two years we’ve seen massive union roll-ups in Australia. We’ve had record-breaking rallies in major cities and country towns, with our Australian Unions family out in force, loud and mighty and proud. We banged the drum to Change the Rules and flew our flags high. Melbourne saw record numbers roll through its streets. At least 150,000 marched there in May 2018, a number beaten in October that year as 170,000 people rolled down Swanston Street from Trades Hall. More than 250,000 people rallied across the country. Record numbers, all sanctioned, all legal. 

We saw the same again in May this year, when unions and members did their thing in the lead up to the federal election. With such a strong show of force, it’s a wonder that we lost. Perhaps it’s our problem that we tried the same thing as before. 

Our rallies notched up great numbers. They were bright and colourful occasions. The speeches were bold and inspiring. But they were all the same. The flags were the same, the rallying cries were the same, the faces were the same. We can hope to continue to show up and rally in ever larger numbers – they look good on the TV news and they make for great pictures – but unless we’re reaching out and engaging new people about what their rights are and what it means to be union, why worker solidarity matters, we will continue to whither. Unless we educate those people dismissed as “scabs”, and help them understand we are all workers living on one planet, then our rallies are little more than the party sanctioned “Two Minutes of Hate”. 

Pick your poison.

The government already has the power to tell us when and where can rally, granting us permission to proceed only if it won’t harm the economy. As Shane Reside discussed in Overland last year, our movement is a muscle, not a machine. And with every new restriction of our movement, we are weakened, we atrophy like a leg in a plaster cast. That’s why the police, the FWC, and the ABCC will strike out at those workers with punitive fines if they step outside the strict parameters set down for us. 

If Labor’s loss at the federal election in May has taught as anything, it’s that our movement cannot simply be a machine rolled out to help the “workers’ party” win election by targeting marginal seats. We must strike out into new frontiers and communities, speaking with those people we have typically overlooked or ignored or taken for granted. Some of these people live in the poorest parts of the country, some are in under-privileged, under-resourced suburbs, some are miners – erstwhile traditional working-class people who feel that the workers’ party no longer speaks to or for them. Not that many didn’t try.

In the lead up to the May poll I spent many long days, weeks and months in Sydney’s southwest in what was the marginal seat of Banks. Through all kinds of weather I knocked doors and spoke with strangers about backing the ALP candidate Chris Gambian, a local boy with a strong union background who would represent the people of the electorate and Australian workers well in parliament. Like Bill Shorten’s Labor Party, Gambian was not successful. The end result saw none other than former NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma launch into an online tirade, dismissing the campaigners as “transients” and “keyboard warriors”, signing off with a call for us to “fuck off out of the Labor Party and take your ilk with you”. 

During those six months of door-knocking I was not a Labor Party member, but not once did I see Iemma out on the streets knocking doors with us to get his local candidate elected. As jarring as the comments were, they were little more than the same shallow, misplaced anger that permeates too much of our lives. 

It’s too easy to sling anger at hate. It’s easy to lash out, to strike a blow against a stranger. It’s harder to stand tall and stand together – especially after a loss, or when the fight ahead is Herculean. 

Maybe some of what Iemma had to say had some points. The very small target strategy worked for the Liberals in the election, so why wouldn’t a campaign focused on roundabouts win some favour with the people of southwest Sydney. It doesn’t justify bashing into your side when they were out talking to the people of your neighbourhood when you were nowhere to be seen.

Fortunately I don’t dwell on former state Labor leader. I prefer to focus on the interactions I had with strangers in the street, at their homes and over the phone. One conversation in particular has stuck with me. It was Thursday night, about 8pm, two days before polling day. I cold-called Theo* to ask who he was voting for. 

“Probably Liberal, always Liberal,” he said, reluctantly, his accent still thick with the home country. I asked him why. 

“Well, I don’t know. Probably because Alan Jones.” 

Theo was in his mid sixties, a construction labourer who climbed up and down ladders all day, every day and had done since he’d arrived in Australia from Italy four decades ago. He rattled off the Liberal Party talking points as delivered to him through the party mouthpiece on 2GB/4BC/2CC: franking credits, negative gearing, higher taxes. Not that Theo would be affected; working his whole life on a labourer’s wage he was a renter and would be on a pension. Theo had voted Liberal ever since he became a citizen, but after nearly 20 minutes on the phone, reminding him that he was voting for a government that wanted to raise his retirement age to 70 (oh, and look the Tories are at it again!).

“Ok, you’ve convinced me,” he said. 

For the first time he was going to vote for Labor. 

Clearly no one had really spoken with Theo about politics or what policies and changes might actually affect him and his family. He was only years off retiring and poised to vote for a party that had recently wanted to move the goalposts on him, to keep him trudging up and down those ladders and labouring just a little while longer. He had never been in a union, had never been on strike, so what did it matter if there were large, record breaking numbers of us rolling through the streets of Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, banging drums and calling for rules to be changed. He likely didn’t hear what McCormack said and probably has no idea who FWC SDP Hamberger is. 

But after years of being hit with the parroted propaganda through a one-way medium, he finally had a chance to think on it. In a first for his life, Theo decided to have a strike at something different. 

What mattered was a two-way conversation, someone taking the time to ask questions and listen to what he had to say. It’s not radical and not a traditional mass movement, but we must strike out in new directions and forge new connections with all our fellow workers. 

If record-breaking rallies won’t change minds, a 20-minute conversation with a stranger might.    

When we give our fellow workers a reason to fight, maybe, hopefully they will join us in the streets. When they do, we won’t need permission to strike.

*Not his real name. 

What next? You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

And you can take to the streets.

 

Time to strike in a new direction – Part II: Striking out at strangers

Read Part I: Struck down by the rules

The deputy Fair Work commissioner who made the decision on the Great Sydney Trains Strike, Johnathan Hamberger, was former Liberal staffer in the employ of former Howard government industrial relations minister Peter Reith. We cannot say for certain that this may have impacted the deputy commissioner’s decision, but given his close proximity to the 1998 Waterfront dispute, it’s not unreasonable to deduce that his political pedagogy had some influence on striking down the rail workers’ plea to strike. (Or perhaps when retweeting then-employment minister Michaelia Cash’s anti-union, anti-Labor remarks in 2016 he revealed some biases). No so, said the Fair Work Commission, but he was warned it is “not generally appropriate for members of the commission to express publicly views about matters of party political controversy”. 

Tsk, tsk, deputy commissioner. Your behaviour was unbecoming of an impartial, independent umpire. 

Hamberger deleted the tweet but the memory remains. So too does the lingering sense that there is something not right about someone whose professional history implies he might not be a truly independent umpire. But what do we do? What are we allowed to do? 

FWC’s Jonathan Hamberger: the independent umpire. 

When we can no longer take to the streets we are left with little option but to internalise our anger, to shout into the online void, or at friends and family. Our own industrial laws prevent us from striking so we strike out at strangers, we lash out at loved ones. We’ve become customarily reactive to the maddening outrages that are thrown at us daily. Denied the proper avenues to channel our righteous anger, we sublimate on social media. Shouting at strangers is our new national pass-time.

As much as we hope to we cannot escape the thoughts that bubble away at the back of brains, ruminating on what insult or injustice will come next. Our lives are increasingly consumed by invective and revilement. We are led to believe we are becoming more divided, more tribal, when the only divide that grows is the one between rich and poor. According to the Australian Council of Social Services 2018 report on Australians’ financial health, the richest 20% of Australians saw their wealth increase by 53%, while the bottom 20% declined by 9%. Household wealth also “shifted from younger to older age groups between 2004 and 2016”. 

We’ve never had it so good? OK, Boomer. I’m glad you enjoyed free university and affordable housing. We hope you enjoy your negatively geared investment properties, your franking credits and your tax breaks as a self-funded retiree. Pity we cannot afford to cover the costs of your private health insurance. We don’t want to start a generational war, but you’re the ones pulling up the drawbridge. 

Australia’s DPM says if your home disappears beneath rising sea water you should shut the fuck up and pick his dangleberries. 

Unfortunately, this fighting among ourselves – inter-generational, inter-racial, inter-cultural – keeps us divided at a time that more than ever we need solidarity. (These fights among ourselves only benefit the masters). 

Australia is experiencing a period of record-low wages growth at a time when union membership is at its lowest. Things are so dire even Reserve Bank Governor Phillip Lowe is calling for action on public sector pay to spur the lagging economy. Australian workers should be calling for action, we should be taking to the streets. Instead we strike out online at trivial short-lived outrages. This is no accident. It is all intentional. 

There’s no denying that Donald Trump has infected our psychies to the benefit of the ruling class. We have come to accept that utterances that would have once seen politicians reprimanded, if not fired, have become common-place. Whether it’s the hypocrisy of Christian moralists engaging in extramarital affairs or ministers claiming exorbitant expenses, or failing on countless occasions to declare possible conflicts of interest, we are hit with barrages of scandal that weaken our defences, wearing us down that little bit more each day. We barely have time to respond to yesterday’s outrage before today’s scandal hits. We struggle to take action, we cannot strike out where we must because everything has been cranked up to 11. We live in a hypernormalised time, a term coined by Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe the collective sentiment leading up to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Everybody knows the status quo is done. Yet denied the proper avenues to strike out with righteous anger, and leaders on all sides lack the will to take meaningful action on anything from stagnant wages to climate change, we continue to live in hopelessness and misplaced aggression. 

Take recent comments from the Deputy PM Michael McCormack about “pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies” who had the temerity to link the current bushfires in NSW and Queensland to climate change. At 8am on a Monday the minister for regional development went on the warpath against urban folk rather than go in to support those in the regions whose homes and land were being obliterated in another “unprecedented” firestorm. 

McCormack’s rant comes only months after another abhorrent comment about our Pacific neighbours – same trigger, different target. 

Faced with genuine existential threats brought on by climate change, members of the Pacific Island Forum called on Australia to take real action on climate policy and pursue a just transition away from fuels, including the inevitable end to the coal industry. But Australia strong-armed its neighbours into watering down the forum’s communique. References to the “climate change crisis” were removed while Australia was the only nation of the 18 not to agree to a global ban on new coal-fired power plants and new coal mines. PM Scott Morrison was at the forum, but the most prominent online invective was aimed at how silly he looked in his colourful flower-crown and Pacific Island attire. 

Filling in as PM back home, McCormack attacked our island neighbours’ ingratitude and dismissed their concerns about rising sea levels, saying they will “continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit, pick our fruit grown with hard Australian enterprise and endeavour and we welcome them and we always will.” Nevermind that Australia is experiencing its worst drought in a century, with crop yields so dire we are importing wheat. Not to gloss over the implication that even if our Islander neighbours lose their homes, they will always have work on our plantations. They can always be our Kanakas working in an industry notorious for insecure seasonal work, where wage theft is rife, the labour hard and long and done beneath the sun in a country that’s getting hotter and drier as the planet heats up. 

They don’t need a homeland, they need to pick our pineapples. We don’t even need to blackbird this because you can’t steal people from their land if their land no longer exists. 

Pacific Warriors: We’re not drowning, we are fighting!

We are outraged. We are mad. We want action. But what action can we take if we know the outcome will be nothing? 

McCormack faces no consequences and he is unlikely to suffer any. Just like his hypocrite government colleague who had a love child with a staffer or the one who failed to declare links between off-shore accounts and multi-million-dollar government water buy-backs. There are no consequences. And if we cannot hold elected officials to account, what hope do we have of reckoning with the apparent biases of relatively unknown officials and commissioners who make us jump through every hoop only to still tell us “No”.  

Check back for Part III. You can read Part I here.

Time to strike in a new direction – Part I: Struck down by the rules

We showed up in massive numbers, record-breaking numbers. We rolled up. We rallied. We marched in crowds so large that our numbers had not been seen since the anti-war demonstrations of the early 2000s. And we all remember how successful those protests were. 

We striked! With permission, we struck, on the whole. Although, there are some rebel workers from construction sites and wharves – CFMMEU members, of course – facing individual fines of $42,000. The Australian Building and Construction Corporation (ABCC) is chasing these workers down for allegedly taking “unlawful” strike action. They didn’t have permission. Because in Australia you need to permission. In Australia, if you want to roll up, if you want to rally, if you want to march, it must be sanctioned, pre-approved and signed off by police and bureaucrats. 

No other developed nation in the world has industrial laws as draconian as ours. No bosses anywhere enjoy the obtuse lack of freedom bestowed upon their workers. If you want to withdraw your labour, you better have permission. If you want to strike, you must first ask please, take it to the Fair Work Commission (FWC), jump through the hoops, get the lawyers involved. Then, when all parties are satisfied that no party is satisfied, then you can go on strike. Maybe. 

Retweeted by the independent workplace umpire – totally not biased. 

Australia’s industrial relations arbitration system gives too many trump cards to employers. As we know, the FWC is the result of the Rudd Government’s malpractice. Labor removed the Howard Government’s WorkChoices cancer, but not all of it. As industrial relations lawyer Josh Bornstein noted, The Fair Work Act “overwhelming left in place the limitations upon the right to strike prescribed by WorkChoices”. 

These restrictions were made clear during the Great Sydney Trains Strike of 2018 – a strike so great it was barred from going ahead. 

Amid the peak of another hot, record-breaking summer in Sydney, train drivers were being stretched beyond their limits. A new rail timetable had been introduced in November, implementing some of the biggest disruptions to routes and journey times since the city’s rail network was built. But the Transport Minister, Andrew Constance, did not consider – or, likely, did not care – that the greatest disruptions would be to drivers and train guards’ lives. 

New runs took longer to complete. Drivers were forced into overtime. Over-stretched and over-worked in summer heat, stress and exhaustion rose, as did absenteeism. Sydney Trains workers and their union, the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, called for a 24-hour strike across the city. It was planned for Monday January 28, the first day of the new school year. Ostensibly, this is when life returns to normal after the long summer break. What better time to disrupt order and the usual, natural flow of things. 

The NSW Berejiklian Government and Sydney Trains took the union to the FWC where deputy commissioner Johnathan Hamberger ruled in their favour and agreed the strike threatened to “endanger the welfare of part of the population” and “cause significant damage to the Australian economy or an important part of it”. A ban on overtime was also struck down, while workers were prevented from taking any industrial action for another six weeks. 

Despite jumping through all the hoops, despite playing by the rules, the train drivers were told they could not strike. They were told to sit down and cool off. They were barred from withdrawing their labour because their labour was integral to the economy. Yet this is exactly the point of the strike: a reminder to bosses that without us workers, there is no production; the flow of things comes to a halt at we stand up and fight back.

Try to smile.

Following the ruling ACTU Secretary Sally McManus said, “the basic right to strike in Australia is very nearly dead”.

“When working people and their union go through every possible hoop and hurdle and are still denied these basic rights, it is no secret why so many workers haven’t had a pay rise,” she said. 

The workers wanted to strike. They followed every rule that allowed them to strike. They were struck down.

This is a three-part post. Check back for the next instalment. 

Take a stand: Police beat me at the Melbourne IMARC blockade but they won’t break my spirit

It’s been great to have so much support from my family and friends these past days while I’ve stood with comrades on a blockade to disrupt a conference of climate and environmental criminals at IMARC in Melbourne. 

Photos and videos tell the story: police are there to protect the wealthy and powerful enviro-vandals. They’ve not held back to oppress fellow protesters – many of them much smaller than me. 

Police getting out the battons to try and get #climate criminals into #IMARC #mining conference @akaWACA @blockadeIMARC19 pic.twitter.com/LAcQhR5WLT

— Sam Cossar (@samcossar) October 28, 2019

Police shoved me, clawed me in the back, punched me in the throat, head and hands. I was batonned in the back and ribs, thrown to the ground and dragged away. It took four of them move in the end, a huge struggle shift my large dead-weight body; not resisting, not complying. 

“Oleoresin Capsicum” spray cakes on you and burns for hours.

And that was day one. On day two I was pepper sprayed along with 30 or more other demonstrators as police charged in to make arrests. The foam looks innocent but I’ll take a dozen baton whacks to the back over that spray any day. It’s an incapacitating chemical strike with a deep, sustained burn. When police struck me with it I tried my best to hold strong and standing with those around me but soon hit the ground. I was prostate, helpless, senseless as the pepper foam did its work. I don’t know who picked me up and walked me to safety but I am thankful for their effort and the dozen others who washed me throughout the half-hour until I could open my eyes. The skin burns took several more hours and a shower to let up.

Despite the painful fallout from the OC spray, it’s the beating that looks the worst. The pepper spray looks like a foam party, blown out over people like froth from a beer. But the baton beating shows the unrestrained violence police used on protesters. It’s undeniable. 

The baton continues to look bad. A video shows police hitting Emma Black before I was hit. Black, wearing blue, was the spokesperson for the blockade and clearly had her hands up when she was struck. The small man swinging it is enraged, over the top. What you can’t see are the goons around him throwing body-blows, or the one using his truncheon to jab me hard in the ribs. 

Vic police using pepper spray on protesters at #IMARCBlockade ⁦@australian⁩ pic.twitter.com/2pECjK8uSE

— Tessa Akerman (@TessaAkerman) October 30, 2019

This brutality has been shown around the world. It’s hard to watch but I am glad to see it shared widely, so that people see the truth about Australia’s increasingly militarised police force that is rolled out in the service of the rich and powerful. 

But those hits were nothing compared to the excessive force the police used in their escalating violence. And the violence used on protesters will continue to escalate as more and more people join the fight in the climate wars. Already more older people are joining the fight, taking a stand against the Adani mine and laying down in the streets, facing arrest as part of Extinction Rebellion. Victoria Police have been rightly and widely condemned for their heavy-handed tactics at the IMARC blockade. What will people say and do when they bring their truncheons down on the grey guard, the senior citizens that stood with us on the blockade? 

They are on the wrong side, but the fight isn’t against the jacks, not really. It’s with the people they protect. The people Matt Canavan, minister for mining, bows down to hollow attempts to seem folksy. 

He was in the conference, boasting that activists “present themselves with a lot of huff, a lot of puff… but so often they don’t blow the house down”. 

We know this only because it was recorded inside. His speech isn’t on his website and regular Australians couldn’t hear it because a barrage of shock-troop police guarded him and the mining bosses whose interests he serves. (This isn’t hyperbole. Just look at what he said when he was almost s.44’d: “It’s been an honour to represent the Australian mining sector over the past year” – Sorry Matt, you represent people, not corporations).

It was Black’s piece in Jacobin “The Proper Way to Welcome the People Destroying the World” that spurred me into making the trip down south in the end. I read it on Monday morning and was in the car that afternoon to ensure I was on the line first thing Tuesday from 6am.

Black details the reasons why mining companies do not deserve a red carpet and should be held to account for the death and destruction carried out across the world in their endless pursuit of profit. Companies like BHP, linked to 250 deaths in dam collapse in Brazil this year; RioTinto, which continues to dig uranium out of Kakadu, one of the world’s greatest wilderness areas; or OceanaGold, which has walked hand in hand with the Filipino dictator Rodrigo Duterte to destroy the rainforests, only to be stopped by a local blockade. 

At no point does Black say these companies must be crushed like they would do to forests and indigenous people. And I’m not saying we need to end all mining, either. I couldn’t communicate this now without the materials and minerals mining extracts – the metals and plastics necessary to build my phone and computer, the rare earth metals required to help processors and chips communicate. Even the wind turbines, solar panels and batteries needed for the post-carbon energy production will require minerals to be mined from somewhere. 

This is a peaceful protest. We are not the aggressors. We encourage environmental vandals to go and enjoy the sights of Melbourne#BlockadeIMARC #shutdownIMARC #ClimateEmergency #ClimateAction #StopAdani pic.twitter.com/nnlbSXDSVR

— nicholaskmc (@nkmccallum) October 28, 2019

What I and others are taking a stand for, this week and into the future, is a system that is fair, a system the puts land rights, workers rights, environmental rights first. A system where the people whose homes, communities and the environments are given more say and return over what happens to their world than the international mining, oil and gas, and extraction industrial giants that reap billions but give nothing back.  We can no longer accept that these companies plan to adapt their business models when they see continued growth in the status quo. We can longer accept their green-washing and slick PR campaigns that have been running since the 1990s suggesting they are doing something. These companies plan to increase production over the coming decade, the same period of time the science says we need to get net-emissions to zero.  The system is broken and collapsing. It needs to be rebuilt. And I’m not going to sit on the sidelines anymore. 

Peaceful protesters marched on by the full force of Vic Police #shutdownIMARC #BlockadeIMARC #ExtinctionRebellion pic.twitter.com/MpC6Vt9pGW

— nicholaskmc (@nkmccallum) October 28, 2019

Moments after @VictoriaPolice kicked, punched me in the face and throat at, stomped and dragged #BlockadeIMARC

Cover the officer’s face because he wasn’t one of the thugs #shutdownIMARC #ExtinctionRebellion pic.twitter.com/rASaLcqN8v

— nicholaskmc (@nkmccallum) October 28, 2019

Battered, bruised. But not beaten ✊🏼#BlockadeIMARC#shutdownIMARC #ExtinctionRebellion #StopAdani pic.twitter.com/erWYRqU8PE

— nicholaskmc (@nkmccallum) October 28, 2019

These companies will continue to loot and plunder. They will continue to ignore the plight of those beneath them. Today it’s the poor of the global south and first nations people kicked off their land. Soon it will be the rest of us with the boot on our necks. 

The ugly scenes that played out in front of IMARC in Melbourne this week are an entree to what the world will look like under eco-fascism. We can stop it getting worse, if we all stand together against the rich and powerful to hold them to account. 

As the planet gets hotter and drier, the temperature of our temperament will get hotter too. But by then it could be too late to take to the streets. More of us need to take a stand.

With every month bringing more record-breaking temperatures, more frequent freak weather events, more extremes, more of us will wake up, stand up, fight back. 

We might get battered, bruised and burnt in the fight, but it’s one we must have because we have a world to win.

Small soldiers beat women and men while their backs are turned.

UPDATE: Life imitates art: Star Trek DS9 enters our reality

It seems I spoke too soon about correlations between the reign of Donald Trump and Deep Space Nine’s uncanny depiction of our time. 

Among the maelstrom that is the Trump administration and reporting coming from the US, I missed the story where the president launched an attack on California and threatened to round up the states’ homeless and cajole them into a pen of some kind. 

Some dis-used federal buildings, like an FAA facility, have been floated as possible camps for the homeless and destitute. 

It’s all a little too close to the fiction, yet no one is really talking about it with all the noise. 

This Washington Post story is from September 11, 2019. 

‘The way we were’: The things wouldn’t/shouldn’t happen today

Whoever said the new ABC chairwoman Ita Butrose would be a plant for the Murdoch Press? They have underplayed her role as the head of Aunty just a bit because it seems she’s a stalking horse for an entire generation of homogenous Australians. 

Ita isn’t there to do the work of one newspaper empire, she’s there to do the work of Empire. Namely, the British Empire, or at least the erstwhile Great Britishers who were more British than the British: the White Australians of yesteryear. 

This week we had Ita popping up on the ABC to ponder about how everyone has lost the ability to have a laugh at themselves, in particular those men and women who work together. 

“I agree 100 per cent, that we don’t talk to each other the way we used to,” she told the ABC breakfast programme last week. 

“Even in the workplace, the way men and women used to talk to one another, which was quite fun, I think, doesn’t exist today.

Australia has changed over three generations of Packers

“When I think of some of the conversations I used to have with Sir Frank Packer, for instance, they simply wouldn’t happen today.”

The comments were made among a lamentation about how we just aren’t the way we were anymore. Y’know, how we’re all “far too sensitive” because political correctness has gone too far because we have to tone down the larrikinism and the sexism and the racism.

Well there are many things that went on back in the day that “wouldn’t happen today”, like belittling, degrading and diminishing woman to being mere sex objects. Maybe the other women of the workforce that maybe didn’t have the pleasure of a chinwag with the esteemed Sir Frank (like some of the female employees who worked in a certain Burkshire Hunt’s backyard?)

For most workers, women and men, life out on the shopfloor is very different to what goes on in the C-suite. But that was the way it was back then. People knew their place and they kept their bums and voices down as we all had a fair-dinkum red-hot Aussie go. 

Perhaps Aunty Ita is trying to drum up a certain nostalgia that has been playing out on the ABC over the past few weeks and months – years, even – as the public broadcaster has been doing its best to be more on side of Team Australia. Ita’s comments about the way we were weren’t made in a vacuum. 

Only one week prior to Ita’s comments, the ABC played a very nifty and nostalgic special on the creative advertising duo Mo-Jo that had such an impact on Australia’s commercial cultural identity.

Things change: no more ciggie ads

How Australia Got Its MoJo was hosted by Gruen mainstay Russel Howcroft (former advertising guru turned chief creative officer at accounting firm KPMG (a bunch of bean counters who have been given plenty of taxpayer dollars even before their staff were being given carte blanche to put ABC TV specials together).

As the blurb puts it, this was the story of “two of Australia’s greatest admen – Alan ‘Mo’ Morris and Allan ‘Jo’ Johnston the creatives behind some of the most iconic ads of the 70s and 80s that helped define Australia”.

“Anyhow, have a Winfield”, “You ought to be congratulated”, “I feel like a Tooheys”, “C’mon Aussie, C’mon” – these were all stella, unforgettable and quintessential Australianisms that are traced back to one pair of ad men. Think Mad Men, but they’re Aussie blokes. Creative juices that flowed in the back of a boutique advertising studio in Sydney’s Paddington; a time when white men ran things and women were very much in their place (other than Ita). I know the ads, the songs, the taglines and many of them pre-date me.

The MoJo offerings helped define Australia, but their product was entirely defined by Australia. The ads were all very white Australia, with lifeguards on beaches rowing boats and blokes playing cricket and suburban mums cooking a great spread of meat and three veg, dolloped in layers of canola spread.

They were hit because the essence that defined Australia was more pure in those days; it was easier to distill because Australia was only coming to terms with the changing, post-colonial “end of empire”. It was easier to paint the portrait of a nation when it was only differing hues of white. There were other colours, but these were on the margins. These ads date back to a time when Italians and Greeks were the Wogs and there were very few Lebannese, Chinese and Vietnamese. It was much easier to sell your ciggies and beer and that slice of Australiania when the target audience was all white suburban with few aspirations other than a pool out the back; the kind of world where the world didn’t exist much beyond the borders of your suburb or city, where there wasn’t much a world out there at all beyond Australia’s sandy white beaches. 

It’s like the kind of land that you could sell with someone like Paul Hogan – the epitome of the Aussie manliness. The same man who not only appeared in the MoJo special, but who also had his own Australian Story special that ran over the two weeks before the MoJo special. 

The hour-long trip down memory lane took us back to a time when men could get away with almost whatever they wanted when it came to women, regardless of what they said and how they acted when around them. 

To its credit, this was acknowledged by those interviewed in the programme, as was the lack of diversity on the TV screens and ads cranked out by MoJo. 

There was, at least, an acceptance that we have moved on as a people, as a nation. We know that the things that were once said and done behind locked office doors are no longer – and should no longer – be acceptable. 

That’s why it’s no accident that Ita’s comments came so soon after these two specials aired – and Ita even appeared in one, alongside a host of celebrities and talent that so resembles that face that once was Australia, including ad-man John Singleton and Delvene Delaney, Hogan’s female sidekick who admitted on Australian Story that many of the blokey jokes that painted women as bimbos in bikinis would simply not fly today. 

And that’s the way it is. Times have changed because there are more women in the workforce, working in roles that would have been off limits to them back when Ita was rolling and rollicking with Sir Frank. We don’t expect workers to grit their teeth, grin and bear such gratuitous sexism anymore. 

However, we do tolerate far too much bullshit when it comes to wage theft and unpaid overtime that the working men and women would not have tolerated back then. 

If we are going to talk about things that have changed over the past half century in Australia, it should be the massive drop in industrial action that parallels the decline in wage growth – with strikes down 97% since the days Mojo and Sir Frank.

Life imitates art: Star Trek DS9 enters our reality

Some of us might hope our future looks something like the universe depicted in Star Trek, something of a near-utopian. But sometimes its depictions are a little too close to our reality for comfort. 

I’ve always been a fan but I’ve gone back and binged the back catalogue for the first time since I was a child. Back in the day, my brothers and I watched The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager on VHS – taped from TV by dad when it played in the early hours of the weekday morning on whatever night Channel Nine decided to play it (often subject to change without warning). 

Recently I’ve been going back through the series in full and consecutive order. It’s made me somewhat nostalgic while also giving me something of an uncanny, uneasy feeling about our reality.  

There was one DS9 episode that was particularly striking: “Past Tense”. A two-parter in season three that originally aired in 1995, “Past Tense” is in the time-travel trope, taking Commander Benjamin Sisko, Jadzia Dax and Dr Julian Bashir back to San Francisco in the year 2024. 

As a Star Trek episode from the mid ‘90s, the studio sets and production quality are far from what we’re used to today. But still, there is something eerily familiar about this depiction of the United States in the 21st Century’s third decade. 

The future is now: DS9 comes to San Francisco in 2024. Source: Paramount/Screenshot

Our heroes are unwittingly transported back in time, waking up woozy and disoriented with no idea about when and where they are. Thankfully Sisko is a scholar of history and triangulates where they are in time and space.

San Francisco in the year 2024 – 200 years in their past, but only five years ahead of our own.  

Star Trek fans will be aware that San Francisco was always the StarFleet capital, home to the academy and central headquarters. It’s a legacy of the city’s 1960s spirit of unity and possibilities, an Atlantis on America’s Pacific seaboard. 

But this city is nothing like the city of the ‘60s or that of the StarFleet future. It is a lot like our own. There are massive divides between rich and poor. The wealthy complain that their European travel plans have been disrupted because of student protests in France – radical leftists that have not been put in their place by the “neo-Trotskyists” (whoever they are). There is heavy government control of people’s movements, with the poor and destitute rounded up into “Sanctuary districts”. Sound familiar? 

Sanctuary districts: a place to place the homeless and jobless. Source: Paramount/Screenshot

Dr Bashir admits he’s not a student of this period in our history, “too depressing”. Well, frankly, this depressing depiction of our time is very much our present reality. 

I don’t remember seeing the episode from the first time round watching DS9 back in the day, but I did catch it around 2012, during the Obama administration. At the time I thought the “Sanctuary districts” sounded a lot like the “FEMA camps” many right-wing nutters thought Obama was going to rollout across the nation in a tyrannical crackdown after taking away their guns and imposing a UN administered World Government as part of Agenda 21 where a multicultural LGBTIQ PC police force enforce law and order. As the conspiracy theory supposed, these concentration camps, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would be set up in every major population centre, under the guise of a crisis. 

We know that didn’t happen, but something else did. 

Our times are “too depressing” for Dr Julia Bashir (left) but Benjamin Sisko (right) is a student of our time. Source: Paramount/Screenshot

“Sanctuary cities” have become common in America as urban progressives square-up and protect vulnerable people from persecution and municipal governments actively resist cooperation with federal governments.

An ancient concept that goes back to the Old Testament, the sanctuary city has been given new credence in the US with undocumented immigrants facing arrest and deportation as ICE and DHS cracks down on brown people and other undesirables amid a new wave of fascism. And here they are, depicted more than 20 years before the term became common parlance. The Centre for Immigration Studies describes them as:

“…cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.”

“By the early 2020s there was a sanctuary in every major city in the US,” Sisko tells us.

Indeed we are now seeing almost every major US city (including entire states, like California) enacting laws preventing local law enforcement from assisting federal foot soldiers from the raids and round ups of undocumented migrants. However, one thing in DS9 that does not match our reality is the lack of a militarised police force. The security forces depicted in the show lack the armour and human-growth enhancements idiosyncratic with modern US police enforcers. And they treated the undocumented suspects, Sisko and Bashir, with some decency instead of viewing them as sub-human and dangerous others. 

Part of that interpersonal respect might come from the fact that the sanctuary inhabitants appear to be economic domestic refugees – not the “foreigners” and undocumented aliens painted as the enemy in our times. Sisko describes them as, “Just people, without jobs or places to live.” 

With every passing day of bad press in the financial pages, this is becoming more of a possibility. “Hoovervilles” were common during the Great Depression as “Okies” and other displaced people left the dustbowl American Midwest in search of work and sustenance to support families. They were tent cities and shanty towns, sometimes set up in parks in the centre of cities.  

Another economic collapse would be all the excuse needed to round up the many, many homeless that fill every city in America. All those people who live in squalor beneath bridges and overpasses, in abandoned shopping malls and derelict factories could all be rounded up and pushed into walled ghettoes, making them easy to police while taking them out of sight and mind of the wealthy. 

Already the US cannot contend with its growing homeless population, many suffering mental illnesses. In the DS9 episode, the two driving factors for being down and out – mental illness and hard times – are boiled down into slang epithets: “gimmies” and “dims”. 

To the gimmies and the dims go no spoils. Source: Paramount/Screenshot

Unable to find work, gimmies are written off as welfare cheats and dole bludgers. The dims are the dim-witted, suffering under the breakdown of state and institutional care (we don’t know how many dims in the Star Trek universe are veterans, but in our reality many of America’s homeless are former soldiers).

“The dims should be in hospitals, but the government can’t afford to keep them there, so we get them instead,” a US government bureaucrat tells Sisko and Bashir. The US healthcare system, such as it is, was always destined to be a failure. This was known back in the 90s when the episode was made, and well before the wealth gap had expanded to the chasm it is today. 

Assuming we continue on our current economic trajectory, with automation destine to put many out of work and a climate catastrophe likely to destabilise whole environmental and economic systems, we are looking at a future where bosses lay-off low-skilled workers while natural disasters will hit those at the bottom worst, we must contend with governments doing the wealthy’s bidding. 

It is likely draconian governments will seek solutions in herding the have-nots into open air prisons. Conveniently, for wealthy corporate elites and the rentier class, the poor, the sick and the undocumented can all be pushed into government-administered ghettoes, walled off and denied opportunities to disrupt commerce and convenience through protest and riotous action. 

Hipsters are somewhat predictable. Source: Paramount/Screenshot

In the Star Trek universe’s vision of San Francisco, the hip, young troublemakers look all too familiar to the cool kids our world. They don the wide-brim Akubra hats and wear lambswool-lined jackets with unkempt, long hair. They lack the conspicuous tattoos and piercings seen in our reality, but let’s not forget they are not your inner-city hipster trustafarians. These hipsters are also incarcerated within sanctuary prisons. To deal with their desperate situation they (SPOILER ALERT) form gangs, arm themselves and take hostages. One even suggests getting a plane out of dodge and heading for Tasmania, another all-too-real aspect of the story. Tasmania has become de facto destination for Baby Boomer “climate refugee” retirees who can no longer stand the heat on Mainland Australia so they head for the temperate climates of Van Diemen’s Land. 

However, with climate change going unmentioned in the Star Trek universe, the DS9 hipster reasons Tassie is a good choice because, “Errol Flynn was born in Tasmania”. 

Hipsters in wide-brim hats, sanctuary cities, massive divides between rich and poor, collapsed welfare states and economic disruptions hitting the poor and desperate, oppressive federal security agencies rounding people up in the streets – it all sounds like our current reality, or certainly the trajectory we are on. 

Of course, other than climate change, the only real pressing matter that isn’t mentioned in the episode is Donald Trump. 

Payday loans and the justification of violence

There is a man on the television who wears a bunny costume and he is on my list of people I would punch in the face if I ever saw them in the street.

It’s a very short list, mind you, and rarely maintained. Many names have been added to it and they are soon forgotten. At present it has just two names: fashion designer and sunglasses-warn-upon-my-head-to-misdirect-attention-from-my-baldness enthusiast Alex Perry and the actor in the Nimble Loans ads.

It’s not fair, I know, to make the poor actor the focus of my anger. But he’s the constant of the campaign. Well, the bunnyman and the stupid people portrayed in the commercials.

OMG i hav no $$$ but these guyz are tots on my side FTW data and FB #selfies

So dumb these people are. So frightfully dumb it’s hard to know who could relate to them. But then you realise, these unfortunate imbeciles are the target audience.

“Just Nimble it, and move on.”

The tagline could not be anymore deceptive and cynical. There is no moving on from the trap of payday loans. It is a never-ending cycle that hooks you in and spins you head over heels over head.

They came up strong leading into the summer of 2014, but these commercials were absent from our screens for most of last year. Then they reappeared toward the end of 2015, right in time for Christmas when money would be tight and the stress of Christmas and the guilt of wanting to spend overcomes us all.

In one ad a young family suddenly finds themselves skint when the bill arrives for the DJ at their one-year-old’s birthday party. Who knows how they managed to pay for the jumping castle and pony rides and presents but neglected to cover the music man. Such inadequate parenting.

In another advert some young, dumb blonde has to face the fact she uses too much data on her phone taking selfies at every opportunity. Rather than live within her means, the bunnyman gives her a better option: “Just Nimble it, and move on.”

Unfortunately, this bunnyman is not the only fuzzy payday mascot abomination on our screens. One of these bottom-feeding finance institutions uses an apparent superhero – or stupid hero – that bashes into the room when the actors – usually a couple – run into financial difficulty. “I’ve crashed the car into the kitchen and we’re broke”, “You’ve just swallowed a trombone and spent all out money. What are we going to do?”

Dah-dah-dah dah-dah! You’re dumb and broke and I’m here to help, clearly.

Said superhero is the mascot for a group called Wallet Wizard. That the advertising geniuses who brought us this campaign conflated superheroes with the the magical world of fantasy shows their contempt for their poor, unimaginative demographic. Imagine putting Superman in Middle Earth to hock loans.

Look on Sky and there’s an ad where a woman just speaks to the camera. There are graphics – mostly aqua, which clashes with the saleswoman’s hair and complexion. At one point while selling the need of wares, the spokeswoman suggests you want “just to treat yourself”. Like why not take the missus out or have a slap on the pokies. Everyone deserves a treat, even if they are broke.

The only place I’ve seen this one run is on the Sky News channel. This shows how the payday loan scheme goes higher than the just poor. Yet we should commend them on the reach. Well done, Loan Ranger, for not having a single atom of righteousness within the whole operation. Never was “High ho, Silver, away!” ever more apt – silver being the money in their pockets, of course. 

The sad fact is, these ads work. And the companies that make them grow more numerous by the day. We are powerless to stop them because the very people they feed on are powerless. They are broke, trapped, with no political agency. Marx would call them the proletariate. Australians would call them battlers.

But we can’t hate them. We can’t hate these losing battlers. We can’t hate the bunnymen or the stupid heroes or the bleached-white spokeswomen. We can only hate the sharks and spivs and shonks that take these poor saps out for the long ride that never lets go until they have all they got.

I saw a film today… oh boy.

I saw Suffragette the other night. It was amazing. Truly inspiring, right from the start. But I soon filled with a deep emptiness.

I won’t go into what the movie is about. If you don’t know who the Suffragettes were, don’t expect a history a lesson from me. Basically, they did something amazing. They stood against the law, in the face of death and pain and suffering. They stood against loss. Against the patriarchy. The stood for something.

It was this something that was amiss. Throughout the film my eyes teared up. My ears rang loud wiht a call. More. There must be something more than this.

Suffragette Emily Davison throwing herself under the Kings Horse at the 1913 Derby. She was killed.

It’s hard being a journalist. Your role is to be objective, observers, sitting on the sidelines watching the game play out, watching the horse race. Then we give an account, a reflection. All of it detached. But these ideals are fraught with contradiction and impossibility. Objective journalism is an oxymoron, as Hunter S Thompson said: “There is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

Enough of this digression. This is no diatribe on journalism; it is a reflection on meaning and place and being part of something bigger. It was a calling that drew me to journalism, but there is a louder, deafening vocation.

I want to be part of something meaningful.

There must be more to life than decking out our dwellings with kitsch, chintzy artisan wares from Etsy. Buying limited make-run throw rugs, rustic knick-knacks and tchotchkes; terrariums; eating niche vegetables at inner-city exposed brick cafes; pop-up shops and food truck vendors. Our food obsession is a plague. We are gluttons concerned with gastronomy, creating 12-course degustations matched with delicate reds and aromatic whites. Chefs have been elevated to the place of public intellectual. Jamie Oliver recently held a cooking show at the Sydney Opera House. Not to take away his efforts at creating a healthier society through his “food revolution”, but I wonder if those who dreamt up that iconic building could have imagined a celebrity chef taking centre stage. We are like the Romans in their final days of a crumbling empire.

All this is the raison d’etat of the hipster. Even hipsters have become oblique yuppies. Their existence has no relation to any advance of culture. They are simply more articulate and pointed consumers.

I should know. I am one of them.

Someone once said to me that culture is dead and there are no new ideas. The realist in me knows this to be true. The romantic in me hopes it is not. Maybe all we need to do is transcend beyond our contemporary cultural morass, our world hellbent on consuming itself in the name of capital and progress.

I believe humanity has a tendency to progress for the better, to meliorate. We can do better and we will do better. We will evolve.

For too long I’ve wanted to change the world, burning my brain, grappling with the sad reality of humanity’s nature. My heart withered away to a black stone grape left on the vine. But it gets better; it is getting better. I no longer want to change the world. I want to make a better one.

Through progress, through protest, the blockade, the battle, resistance, reaction, radicalism and determinism. Humanity can evolve.

I hope.