Janet Albrechtsen’s capacious fear of the bureaucratic regulation must be studied as a form of fungal infection, like the cordyceps parasite that commandeers insect motor systems and marches them to their doom.
Ed Yong can take it from here, briefly:
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.
So it was for Janet Albrechsten who, even on a pleasant Spring-time hike in Canada’s British Columbia, found the threat of officious overreach so unnerving as to be chemically lobotomised by it. Here she was, going for a simple stroll, when she saw a sign that advised her the track was ending and chose to ignore it because she was sick of rules and then promptly became lost on a mountain for several hours surrounded by bears. Terrible. Some of those bears went home that day white as ghosts because they ran into an Albrechtsen.
Even the Robert F Kennedy Jnr brainworm can follow basic trail directions. What’s Janet’s excuse?
Few anecdotes better capture the essential anti-regulatory spirit of the libertarian topoi than that of the conservative columnist who, having ignored not even a rule, mind you, but a sign put there for the wellbeing and safety of hikers just like her, got mad about said warning sign, kept hiking, got lost ‘for hours’ and then eventually called an emergency ski patrol number saved in her phone from a previous ski season and asked the not-for-profit volunteer service for help to save her from herself. Nay, nothing better captures this spirit than doing all of that and then filing a 1500-word piece for the national broadsheet about how this was all the fault of Warren G and Nate Dogg.
I’m not even being hyperbolic. Here’s Albrechtsen, condensed:
We need not dwell on different tolerance levels to rules to understand that overregulation turns adults into infants, wrecks small businesses, shrinks big businesses, and means we have libraries of reports by different agencies over many years warning us about the high costs of overregulation – only for our ruling classes to carry on overregulating.
I’d love to see an Australian government efficiency commission led by Elon Musk
Two things.
An efficiency commission in Australia led by Elon Musk — not only the world’s most insubstantial man but number one in the eyes of people who have mistaken idolatry for personality — is a tremendous idea if you’ve always thought planes have too many rivets.
The only thing worse than a Musk efficiency commission is recommending one. Albrechtsen, the irony is not lost on me, just answered that thought experiment that has sent a certain kind of straight man into a confused fury. Lost in a mountain wilderness, she’d prefer to run into the most dangerous man in the world instead of a bear.
I don’t want to be too unfair to J’Albrechtsen. She hints at a passing self-awareness in the column and may even, at points, be striving for a tone that approximates tongue-in-cheek. At one juncture she suggests, by way of explanation for her current mindset, that perhaps she was hit in the head by a large rule book as a child. It is the closest thing we have to a diagnosis for her condition, the symptoms of which include the mesmerising dissonance of her concluding thought: ‘Getting lost was no one’s fault but mine – and the warning sign was silly. Both things can be true.’
Damn it, Janet, they cannot both be true!
You got lost for hours and had to call for help! The sign was definitionally not silly at all! Why are you like this!
And all this from the law connoisseur herself. One gets the sense Albrechtsen would headbutt Isaac Newton for deigning to even describe the physical laws of the universe and then walk off a cliff because gravity has no right to make such demands on her person.
There is something so childlike about it, to see a sign and have the exact opposite reaction to it that Ace of Base had. That takes a real grotesque kind of effort, you know? Tantrum-adjacent but you’re an adult and this is your whole schtick and, worse, it masquerades as intellect.
I grew up on Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and love to make fun of a nonsense rule as much as the next person. Years ago I remember the then Anna Bligh government in Queensland tidying up a suite of statutory bodies and quasi-agencies under the banner of paring back red tape. One of the little outfits axed was an authority called the Red Tape Reduction Taskforce. Delicious.
When I smoked I understood perfectly well why those eating lunch in a pub’s outdoor garden didn’t want people sucking on darts while they ate but never could get the hang of the reverse law which stipulated, quite seriously, that a smoker couldn’t eat so much as a pie in the smoker’s section to satisfy the same rule.
The comedian Mitch Hedberg once said he was asked to move by security because he was standing next to and, according to them, blocking a fire exit. His response? ‘As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.’
Don’t bet on it, pal. Janet doesn’t like being told what to do.
The difference between me and old mate Signfeld here — the sign was too big, it was too big, it was offputting — is more than a matter of degrees. You can survey every last person on Earth and each one will have a rule they find absurd, oppressive or even cruel somewhere on the spectrum of regulatory grip. Some will be necessary, others redundant and still more inhabiting the space between.
So no, it’s not that.
Janet thinks she is better than rules and regulations. Oh sure, she wants to benefit from them where she can benefit from them — not having every second driver on the road doing 160km/h while she’s trying to cross the road at the beach, for example — but loves the law only insofar as the law serves her.
The problem one faces when turning this into an entire mode of anti-regulatory sophistry is that you might start to believe the bullshit.
And, again, I must impress upon us all that a sign is a not a rule. It was only trying to help you, Janet. Like Walter Sofronoff.
Now look what you’ve done.
Observations
Jack Be Nimble
And so it came to pass that our almost 14-year-old blue heeler Jack was able to come home from the emergency vet hospital in Brisbane after five days fighting for his life. We arrived late on Tuesday to collect him. He was walking but had so far not eaten and his demeanour was dented. It wasn’t really him at all, I noted. He was excited to see Mum and me, of course, but this was tempered by his hollow gaze. He did not eat that night, or the next day on Wednesday. He slept, and occasionally went outside to the bathroom, but otherwise he did not seem to me to be the dog that had first been bitten by the paralysis tick. It was a difficult week, as discussed, but by Thursday morning I was filing for work again and Mum had gone out to her hydrotherapy class — rarely has water, even ocean flotsam, seen less coordination — and while I made my coffee in the kitchen Jack came and sat before me and stared gently.
He was after food. I gave him some chicken from the fridge and he gulped it down perfectly. As the day wore on, our boy returned. He barked at the fluffy dog that walks past our house, growled at the cat (they are loving brothers) and farted so chronically and powerfully that I briefly considered the living room as the Soviets might have considered Pripyat. Every hour since we have hugged and adored him. Having spent the first half of Saturday mourning the dog, Jack was back and it felt like a genuine miracle. It is hard to describe the feeling I get now when I see him and especially when I see the way he lights up at Mum’s attention and zooms in for pats like a hippo torpedoing across land. We joke about him being the $5 million dog — give or take — and how we best might set him to work to repay the debt though of course a single wag of the tail was enough.
Just Over Two Weeks To Go
We are oh so close to publication day on the Robodebt book Mean Streak. A lot has been happening in the space when honestly I worried everything and everyone would shut up shop and move on. How wrong I was. Not that our institutions haven’t tried silencing the whole thing, as is the natural institutional reflex.
Now we have an investigation by the National Anti Corruption Watchdog’s inspector into its decision not to hold an investigation and the extraordinary bid to reopen the class action based on the claim the Commonwealth either deliberately or mistakenly withheld critical evidence from the class action legal team which they now know about thanks to the Royal Commission.
There is a lot of misunderstanding, even among those who watched a lot of the royal commission, about what actually went on. I hope in some small way that the book will be a corrective to that and serve at least as a companion historical document to the royal commission report, in the homes of people, so that this saga is never forgotten. Forgive my broken record on this front but if you are minded to pre-order the thing, that can often determine the fate of a book as the sales count toward early figures and dictate whether the thing has momentum or falters and goes nowhere. If you have already may I say I love you and if you are like me and prefer to impulse buy in person I also totally understand. Here are some links you can use to order now or any time really. Try see if your local independent bookstore is listed below, otherwise the major chains will answer the call if you’re in a regional or remote area. That said, Indies also post!
Or:
Now on to the admin of the book tour.
Brisbane Event! 16 October 2024
We are launching Mean Streak with the beautiful people at Avid Reader in Brisbane, off site at the South’s Leagues Club in West End. You can book on the button below.
The sharp and witty Ellen Fanning will do me the great honour of hosting the evening. I’ve never really been one for book launches (apart from my first ever one, which I turned into a huge party) but I already know there are going to be some tremendous people in the room and I am exceptionally lucky for all of it. It might seem like a dark topic — and it is, as we have seen, in many ways — but there is also something of the absurdity of it all that comes through in the book and, I hope, will on this evening, too.
Queenscliffe Literary Festival! 20 October 2024
I’ll be in conversation with the inimitable Sophie Black at Queenscliff Town Hall (I had forgotten about the convention of Queenscliffe the area having an ‘e’ and the town itself not having an ‘e’ which is quaint, or quainte, or what have you) on the Sunday and if you’re in that gorgeous part of the world I simply implore you to come and say hi. You can book here.
Melbourne event! 21 October 2024
We’ve just been finalising this one so there isn’t an online link yet but I’ll be in conversation with XX — yet to be determined, sorry, I’ve had a lot on! — at the 200-seat Sun Theatre in Yarraville and hosted by the fine folk at Sun Bookshop. This will go online this week I imagine, so I’ll try and update it here when it does.
Sydney event(s)! 23 October 2024.
There are actually two of these, really, but the sonorous and cheeky David Marr will be launching Mean Streak with me at Gleebooks, Glebe on Wednesday 23 October and I am so stoked. D.Marr has been a tremendous support from the earliest stages of writing this book, convincing me to forge ahead when I was still so uncertain about whether I should. I was going to ask him to do this event before he came to me, as the new host of Late Night Live on ABC Radio National, to talk about the wash-up from the Robodebt public service investigations.
Now, I have probably now done the better part of 1000 radio interviews in my career and there have been some interesting and even special moments littered among them but nothing has ever approached the level of incredible radio that Marr produced that night. I’m not one to over-sell my work. I have some talent and skills, I wouldn’t do what I do if I didn’t think I had something to offer. So when I say that this 30 minutes of radio was stratospherically good I mean it. I actually listened to it back on the drive home from the airport when I landed back in Brisbane a day after doing it because I knew it was real special. And that’s because of David. I hope maybe we can recreate even a slither of the atmosphere on the night. You can listen to it here.
Sydney Event 2 with Constant Reader, 24 October 2024
I will be at Stanton Library in North Sydney from 1pm talking about the book, Robodebt, and the way government administrations can swallow their own mistakes or malignancies and make everyone go mad wondering what happened. You can book here.
Canberra Writers’ Festival! 26 and 27 October 2024
And, for this initial blitz of in person appearances (italics here are spooky italics) I’m finishing up with two events at CWF including this great panel on the Saturday called Status Anxiety with excellent people like Sam Elkin, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Qin Qin (and Griffith Review editor Carody Culver).
On Sunday, one of this country’s great working interviewers Michael Williams (host of the truly gorgeous Read This podcast where he plies his trade so elegantly and who once so kindly referred to me as the ‘poet laureate of Robodebt’) will join me in the Member’s Dining Room in Old Parliament House to discuss Mean Streak in the city where it was born. I imagine the audience may yield some very interesting questions.
Can I be real with you for a second? Just typing all of that out was exhausting. The first time I published a book this was all very exciting and I was just happy to be involved. Now I am old and jaded and everything makes me tired. I love having spoken to people, and the part where I am on stage having a chat and vibing with the audience, but the sheer logistics involved in doing this stuff with my day-to-day is overwhelming to me. A publicist, the lovely Brendan, is doing all of the actual planning and liaising with bookstores and venues, flights, transfers etc and sends me detailed emails for my confirmation or suggestion and I must sound like the biggest loser in the world when I say I can barely keep up even with that.
This is my way of saying publication month is hell for me. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s hell.
Wish me luck!
x
So glad that Jack made it.
Jack is out of the woods!
Made my Sunday!
And JA is out of. the woods.
Not so much.