And Related Matters

send help

I’ve been quiet on here recently because I have had a lot going on professionally and personally and also there are only so many times I can come here and write a version of an entry that expresses how profoundly upset I am at the world.

And also I bought the new Civilisation VII game and have been trying to wipe Charlemagne off the map for many tens of hours because he built a settlement that was directly in my way, forcing my exploration of the rest of the map to be incredibly slow.

I think this counts as irony.

A fortnight ago now I was in Sydney for the entire week attempting to juggle work one, my other other work, seeing friends I haven’t seen in a long time and sorting out my two storage sheds that contain the sum total of my life’s possessions that I left behind at the end of 2022 on the assumption that I would be back sooner rather than later to retrieve them.

Ha!

Through an unnatural application of effort to life admin I managed to give away some of my furniture to my best pal, sell my beloved Dyson vacuum cleaner on [redacted] marketplace to a man who used an alias and give my lockdown exercise bike away to a strong man from Campbelltown who drive all the way into Sydney — and beyond! — because he did not know how to drive in Sydney and he got lost in a series of tunnels and, inexplicably, the Anzac Bridge. This is how I came to be sitting on said bike for 45 minutes outside a storage facility in Sydney’s inner-south while guiding an increasingly panicked man through the the centre of Sydney and back to where he was supposed to be. He kept wanting to listen to the navigation assistant who I stressed could not be trusted under any circumstances because he was stuck in a self-referential loop of directional error. A U-Turn ouroboros.

If I hadn’t intervened, I fear he’d still be there now, veering across four lanes of traffic in perpetuity.

you can see me if you squint

I tried to give my king-size bed frame to a taxi driver after he dropped me off at the facility.

His wife said no.

Everything else was able to be squeezed into a single (still rather large) storage box that contains a fridge, washer-dryer combo and about 142 cardboard boxes filled with books and God knows what else. I thought I was being clever all those years ago, slowly absorbing material items into my orbit because that was what I thought adulthood was supposed to look like.

Now, of course, with the exception of the books, I want it all gone and to be unburdened by stuff. And possibly my entire life but that is not the discussion we are having today! More on that at a later date (I’m changing my name to Mick Rorton and becoming an itinerant worm scientist).

I’ve been getting emails inviting me to join the Grand Illuminati straight to my spam inbox which is very funny to me because what if it really was them and they couldn’t even organise a mailout properly? What then?

And who needs ‘em, anyway, when you have plenty of other chicanery to get on with. You’ll note the National Anti Corruption Commission which has now had three former judges (Holmes, Robertson and Nettle) from the state, federal and high varieties say ‘hey you were wrong to do precisely nothing with the Robodebt referrals’. Plus a formidable barrister, Gail Furness SC, and whoever that smart and probably vibrant NACC triage staffer was who was overruled after first recommending the corruption body should, uh, look into corruption. As my boss wrote in the editorial this week, they argued against their own existence with that one.

Am I here to gloat? Not yet. Not until the job is done. Given the way this turducken of corruption realignments has so far unfolded — with a series of ever more serious reminders to please do your fucking job nested inside the one that came before it — I am prepared for yet more ways invented by the nascent NACC to set their own house on fire. Exactly who will do this investigation now is not clear.

According to the agency, the ‘Commission is now making arrangements to ensure the impartial and fair investigation of the referrals, as it did with the appointment of Mr Nettle as independent reconsideration delegate. The Commissioner and those Deputy Commissioners who were involved in the original decision not to investigate the referrals, will not participate in the investigation’.

Commissioner Brereton and two deputies, Nicole Rose and Ben Gauntlett, are ruled out due to being involved in the first decision. And didn’t that go swimmingly. The last and only deputy commissioner not tainted by the fallout is Kylie Kilgour who began her appointment in January last year, several months after the October 2023 meeting when the substantive decision to do ten-tenths of fuck all was made.

As the political cartoonist Jon Kudelka joked after I made this point on social media: ‘Fair bit of overtime coming up for Kylie then’.

Former High Court Justice Geoffrey Nettle was an excellent choice to do the review of the initial decision, even after the NACC soured the whole thing with the bonus-and-then-aborted approach of former Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson to do the job because it worried about a former Coalition minister causing trouble, and who knows whether they can ask him to do this. Or will they fumble the ball once more, on the finish line, by bringing in someone else who also seems to make the same egregious misreading of the NACC law that Brereton makes, painting corruption as a ‘private benefit’ when the law is explicit that no personal enrichment or benefit needs to take place for corruption to exist?

Honestly, watching all of this unspool gave me the same feeling as watching a baby deer trying but failing to walk on a frozen lake

There is another section of the NACC Act which allows the Attorney-General, in this case Mark Dreyfus, to appoint an acting Commissioner if the existing Commissioner is ‘for any reason, unable to perform the duties of the office’. In practice, this would allow such an appointee for any given period of time to work parallel to Commissioner Brereton, who should be as far away from any of this as possible. Preferably on Mars.

Dreyfus could do this via legislative instrument and he could do it quickly. He probably won’t.

It’s been a moment of return to many long-running interests of mine.

Late last week, the chief executive of the Bureau of Meteorology Dr Andrew ‘not a meteorologist’ Johnson told the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek that he would be ending his second term — he’s been there nine years — early, in September. As far as I can tell there wasn’t a singe wet eye in the place when the news finally dropped to staff and, if the computer models predicted any, the new-ish national production forecasting desk wouldn’t have been allowed to update the prediction.

The last story I wrote about the BoM, a focus of mine since I accidentally broke the story about the farcical ‘not-a-rebrand’ exercise and the cultural malaise that sat behind them, is about how it has run out of money and woefully mismanaged the maintenance schedules of its 15,000 strong assets that make up the weather observing system.

So, like Alan Joyce at Qantas, Dr Johnson is on the way out when the structural problems set in. It is likely his right-hand man Dr Peter Stone, who followed him from the CSIRO when Johnson was appointed by the Coalition to the weather agency. Stone has been a loyal foot soldier. Most recently, he was found by a federal circuit court judge to have engaged in a ‘deliberate attempt to mislead’ the court during a case in which the same judge also found the BoM executive concocted a sham redundancy to get rid of an executive they no longer wanted.

After that ignominious episode, I wrote about the senate estimates hearing that followed with the opening line:

Bureau of Meteorology chief executive Dr Andrew Johnson turned up to Senate estimates last month without his right-hand man, Peter Stone, many of the bureau’s other executives and, apparently, his briefing notes.

Ah, memories.

Not as bad, perhaps, as his BoM creating a tailored service for Woodside Petroleum at its shiploading docks by layering more work on its then lone aviation division forecaster in Western Australia and adding pressure to the work done by public forecasters across the agency.

May the automatic weather balloon launcher systems sound the traditional 9-balloon salute when Johnson officially departs in September, if there is anyone there to maintain them, that is.

My reporting these days almost exclusively involves a species of official power, especially where it rests in otherwise opaque departments and Commonwealth corporate and non-corporate entities. Last week delivered a bizarre version of this when my probing following Louise Milligan’s cover story for The Monthly revealed the Department of Social Services had sent legal letters accusing my colleagues of committing criminal offences in disclosing protected information under the National Redress Scheme for institutional child sexual abuse directly to the Catholic Church’s redress vehicle, Australian Catholic Redress Limited, which were then promptly leaked to The Australian newspaper which reported them gleefully, of course.

Two things about that. Firstly, the DSS legal position is not certain and has never been tested — and in any case, the law is rather ambiguous and doesn’t say what they think it says — then, more egregiously still, the idea that in responding to a complaint from the Catholic Church, as the department was doing here, you need to send them the actual private legal correspondence to which they were not a party to show them how you had acted on that complaint is, to rearrange the letters slightly, ever so astonishingly compliant.

By complaining of the reporting of abuse survivor’s stories of redress at the hands of a senior Church official, with their full permission, the Catholic Church was able to secure some free, and incorrect, legal advice from the Department of Social Services and then quote it back forever and a day. Cheap day at the office!

Despite all of this, I had promised Mum we would watch the film Conclave together at the end of last week, long before I came to be writing about the above. I wouldn’t say I am a fan of the Catholic Church but nor can I be counted as a fierce critic, softened as I am by the fact that I grew up in the religion and have often found much to admire in the expression of its faith through the grassroots membership.

Mum is not what I would call a cinephile. She likes to watch a movie but rather a lot of these have Paul Hogan in them. And not all of those are good. Still, she quite enjoyed Conclave, even if her overriding interest in it was the voting system and papal election logistics.

‘I wanna know how they get the smoke colour,’ she said while Ralph Fiennes delivered one of his luxurious lines. The best of many, by the way: ‘Well, don't be blasphemous, Ray. Hell arrives tomorrow when we bring in the cardinals’.

It’s probably chemicals, I told Mum, and when she saw the drum of coloured smoke being loaded in the Sistine Chapel chimney she seemed satisfied.

Another half hour passed and the movie was getting to the pointy end, — there were scandals afoot — when Mum piped up again, unprompted, to declare: ‘I’d like to see the white smoke for myself one day’.

I was being agreeable and suggested immediately that we could make a trip to Italy.

‘Oh I don’t want to go to Italy,’ she said.

I sucked my teeth, shifted in my chair better to face her and stared without speaking at blank expression.

‘You’d prefer to see it in Rockhampton?’

The next morning we awoke to the news that Pope Francis was in a critical condition and agreed we would prefer not to see any smoke at all, in Italy or the Beef Capital, for some time yet.

Get well soon, Papa Frank.

Observations

The Big Varuna

A few years ago now I taught a short course on writing for Varuna, the National Writers’ House. It was specifically about using humour to craft creative non-fiction (or fiction!) that reads as if it wasn’t written by a textbook editor having a mental breakdown. These masterclasses are intimate and deliberately kept to between six and eight people and usually pitched at people in the early or middle stages of their writing lives. In my class there was a book editor, two multiply published authors (and another about to be twice) and two with big projects underway.

It was a tonic, and I count each of the participants as my friends. I like to think I have a few tricks up my sleeve in the writing game but I can’t be sure I had much to teach the members of our group. What I do know is that the act of thinking and talking openly about this strange thing we do was so valuable, so Socratic and, not incidentally, genuinely inspirational (in the productivity sense, if not spiritually).

All of which is to say, when the kind and clever people at Varuna asked if I would host another such masterclass I was properly chuffed because I realised I missed the purpose I felt in conducting such a course; that is, to think even more deeply about the things I love but which capitalism has taught me to only prioritise if they can align with paid work.

As above, the applications aren’t open until April and the course doesn’t start until late July but if you’re at all interested in this kind of stuff and have a writing project you want to continue with, or get back into, start mulling it over now and see if this is something you might like to do.

All the info is right here.

Varuna runs carefully curated classes like this throughout the year. There may well be others you’d rather join, that better suit what you’re looking for, and I would encourage you to have a squiz at them. I want to do some of them myself.

So Festy

And so, as the conservative outrage farmers among the nation’s newspaper editors feel the hairs on their neck stand up at the threat of discourse and ideas, we must acknowledge the start of writers’ festival season for the year.

Which really means: logistics!

I’ll be at Adelaide Writers’ Week from Saturday 2.30pm for Late Night Live (in the mid-afternoon lol) hosted by David Marr on the state of the nation. I’ll be on with Rebecca Huntley and Bob Carr. Almost all events are free, as is this.

On Sunday we are going to have a lot of fun at Adelaide Town Hall during a live comedy show of sorts called Mistakes Were Made hosted by the brilliant Richard Fidler and the stellar Sarah Kanowski. We will take turns telling stories about the times things went seriously wrong, for us and others. This one is at 12.30pm and ticketed at $39.

On Monday March 3 at 5pm (west stage) I’ll be in conversation with Tory Shepherd about my book Mean Streak about the Robodebt saga (have you heard I wrote a book about the robodebt saga!?)

And on Tuesday March 4 at 5pm (north stage!) the Stella Prize judges Astrid Edwards, Leah Jing McIntosh, Debra Dank and yours truly will be live announcing the longlist for the 2025 Stella Prize. Yassmin Abdel-Magied is also a judge but is based in the UK and won’t be able to attend the announcement. This has been the most rigorous literary judging process I’ve been involved in now, and I’ve done more than a few!

Honestly, I’m exhausted just typing all of that out.

Newcastle Writers’ Festival

I’ll also be at Newy on Saturday April 5 doing two sessions for my Hunter Valley based Nervous Laughers.

In the morning at 10am it’s all about how fucked up the news media is with me and Eric Beecher and by evening, at 6pm, I’ll be having a one-on-one chat with Abby Millerd about my robodebt book Mean Streak (did you know I’ve written a book about robodebt called Mean Streak!?)

Oh And This Happened?

I told the Australian Public Service Commission Gordon de Brouwer to ‘grow up’ at the end of the book so he hasn’t made it to that part yet.

But they are using it for integrity training, which is either a fantastic thing or terrifying. I’m not sure which yet.

Has this been a fun read? Almost certainly not! Has this newsletter only served to elucidate and extend my various cataclysmic personality flaws? But of course!