@PRODUCTION

September 16, 2019

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Sitting on the big couch last night, weaving raffia, Carmel let out a little noise that showed me she’d be interested in the upcoming 4Corners program which, the ad professed, would lead us through the maze of media info now known as fake news and help us to make sense of it.

So, while we still had an NBN connection I let the streaming flow (we don’t have a TV), even though I’d just performed my usual grandstanding act from the small couch, questioning the credibility of the 7.30 Report and asking who gave them the right to start building a case for Australia to go to war with Iran (unbelievably) in the same way the mainstream (not just Murdoch) media convinced the western democratic republic to take up arms against the Iraqis way back when.

So, after a compilation of Paul Hogan sketches, laughingly referred to as an Australian Story documentary, the buy-in from an independent filmmaker came on under the 4Corners banner. This show started off making sense, showing us what we already know and tickling our fancies by re-running all the footage we saw before of the rioting and dictatorship toppling and police-state crack-downs that citizen journalists (i.e. all of us) have been reporting since Steve Jobs launched the all-in-one hand device we now call our phones. I myself pulled mine out just the other day while waiting for a Vegan Burrito at the Greyhound Terminal in Alice Springs and the cops appeared with a sniffer dog and started sniffing all the passengers and their luggage, in the hope there might be some action that I could sell to Channel 9. No such luck.

It really wasn’t until the end of the 45 min program that I realised that for all the earnest commentary, I’d not learned anything yet, and then they said that people should be cynical but not too cynical because young people now are so effected by fake news that, unlike us oldies, they don’t even trust the BBC or the New York Times. Up on my feet again! Swearing at the screen, oh really? And who was it that convinced the public to buy Colin Powell’s historic lie to the UN that these misty grey shapes on the overhead projector image were in fact weapons of mass destruction and that we should collectively determine to exterminate as much of the poor, uneducated and mistreated population of the entire middle-east as our UN Conventions would allow over the ensuing years and cause a backlash that would burn and scar commuters in our cities for some further time to come. Let me think……Ah, that would be the BBC, the New York Times and our very own Aunty ABC, would it not?

So, as the white frilly collars of the 7.30 Report presenters flap noiselessly in the studio air-conditioning while another war-mongering spokesperson for the not-yet-outdated Military-Industrial Complex sprouts analysis designed to lead our troops into battle with Iran’s robo-soldiers, just ask yourself – why am I watching this?

August 16, 2019

When the gutless tool of the mega-rich investors in Australia’s fossil-fuels sector, who calls himself our leader, strong armed the coalition of Pacific Island nations into watering down their call for action on climate change like a schoolyard bully, he was basically opening the bung hole in the leaky dingy we are all riding into the future. While everyone is talking about the peril of the low-lying islands in the Pacific, we ignore the fate of our own people facing inundation with every storm season that approaches in the Torres Strait.

For some reason we fail to comprehend that the Torres Strait Islanders who now occupy the mountain tops of the land bridge that used to join Cape York and Port Moresby, before it was inundated 8,000 years ago, are at the frontline of our climate crisis. In the past two years the Qld and Federal Governments have spent $24.5 million building a sea wall around Saibai Island to protect the community there from a forced relocation. Cost blow-outs in this project have left a measly portion of the original $26.2 million pledged to protect six islands from inundation, to barricade the other five islands against imminent sea level rise caused by climate change.

While the Liberal Party leader is holding up a brick of coal in our Parliament like a eucharist at Sunday mass and the National Party leader is proclaiming “Let them pick our fruit” from his balcony in response to the fears of Pacific Islanders for their very survival, our own Torres Strait Islanders are bucketing sea water out of their lounge rooms every storm season and trying to keep their gardens productive after the water subsides leaving a salty infestation over the land and in their fresh water lagoons.

Who are these people you might ask and why do they continue to regurgitate the litany of lies about Australia’s pathetic inaction on climate change that seems to validate the observation of one of the scriptwriters on the British spy series Deep State; “People aren't interested in the truth anymore. It doesn't play like it used to.” More to the point, who are they working for?

May 19, 2019

Friends, as they say in the Labor party (now that they’ve given up all the trappings of left-wing politics including the salutation “Comrades!”), I’ve been taking great comfort in the shared misery of those who hoped for a change of government on Saturday and I must say I feel terribly let down by all those cardiganed retirees and rural poor whose worst nightmare is not being able to afford their annual holiday at Bribie Island. Those in receipt of Franking Credits, on the other hand, were never on my list. They are in a class unto themselves having been created by previous Labor & LNP governments, who thought it might be a good idea to create a shareholding class of Australians, below the established aristocracy, to divert their savings, formerly held in the publicly owned Commonwealth Bank, into the privately profiteering CBA, Telstra and all the power companies created when the state-owned power plants were unceremoniously sold off.

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All those frightened pensioners in Queensland and the dirt poor chainsaw mechanics in Tasmania mostly didn’t make it through high school and they now take comfort in their beliefs that this thing called climate change is some kind of ruse that will somehow serve the purposes of those unruly communists still hiding under the bed. They think they are doing the right thing just like they think that anal sex is a sin and will result in an eternal roasting of the soul. For these dumb arsed bastards, I feel sorry. Not so for those coiffed and bejewelled retirees in their Gold Coast condos waiting for the rent cheques to come in, the annual dividends to be released and the fucking Franking Credits to be refunded by those actually working for a living.

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Here’s my prediction: Let’s say the youngest of these retired early to hit the deck chairs at Surfers Paradise at around 45. It’s now a well-known fact that the first person to live to 150 has already been born but that the medical technology that will allow this will only be available to the very rich, the super-rich and the obscenely rich (we can only hope that Rupert Murdoch is already too old for it to work on him). So all these rich arseholes are paying out for gene-therapy that will cure aging and in 50 or 100 years time, when Cormack McCarthy’s The Road becomes a reality, they will one day while lying on their day-beds at the clinic, hear some chanting downstairs followed by sirens, then gunfire, smashing glass and the rabble of a desperate mob storming the hospice. Soon enough they will find themselves being carted off into the woods where they’ll be kept alive in cages made from wooden stakes until, one-by-one they will be brought out to the communal fire and roasted alive and then eaten by the starving hordes while the others still in the cage look on in horror and disbelief.

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December 23, 2016

In his annual plea to persuade more Australians to subscribe to his online news service, Stephen Mayne evokes a bygone era when journalism wielded power and made money. This role, he says in his Christmas message to anyone who has ever looked at Crikey and inadvertently left their email address, “has been usurped by social media, clickbait, fake news, spin and the mindless pursuit of mass audiences.” So be it. Journalism is probably dead and the question that’s staring us in the face is what will replace it? But haven’t we always had clickbait, fake news and spin, swirling around the media like dirty laundry in a twin tub washing machine?

Television is entertainment, newspapers are walking dead and Stephen Mayne and his merry band of journos, who may well be making a last stand for independent trustworthy news making, can’t make a buck. They pitch to us like the Salvos. ‘Help these old deros get some clean pants.’ It’s sad, and unfortunately true in a post-truth kind of way.

Where will we go from here? Let’s think about it. Will we keep watching the suck-hole press gallery churning out PR for the major parties? Will we campaign to save Four Corners from the clueless ABC boss in the hope of getting more expose’s on juvenile justice? Will we urge our friends to support the Saturday Paper and the Monthly in the hope that they will one day become interesting enough to capture a real audience? The mass market has been blown up by the internet anyway, so now there isn’t a way to capture a full sized audience anymore unless you are a cooking show or a home renovation series. As our information economy evolves everyone will live in their own impenetrable bubble absorbing all the personally curated information they need to support their preferred lifestyle choices.

In the future, journalists will work for companies, organisations and politicians delivering their stories directly to their publics. It’s not the journalists who are a threatened but the media companies they presently work for. So in the future, more so then now, we’ll just have to take everything we read with a grain of salt.

December 09, 2016

The disenfranchised white working class of the globalised capitalist world are gaining a lot of traction. Their recent ascendency is posing an unexpected but serious challenge to the Baby Boomers who were fairly confident that they would, upon retirement, inherit the earth, if they didn’t already own a thick slice of it. Well, after ignoring calls from the socialist left for decades now, not to disenfranchise the working class, the Boomer class (let’s think of it as a class rather than a demographic because that’s really what it is) is acting all surprised that these angry people are now wrenching power away from them through sheer force of numbers.

But, in a style that typifies their arrogance, the share owning Boomers believe that their recent defeats at the ballot box are simply the last gasps of a dying statistical set, as ably explained by Christos Tsiolkas in his recent Monthly essay. What do they think will happen next, mass extinction of the unemployed? A conversion of the angry disenfranchised into a complacent class of have-nots, satisfied to sit in the gutter to watch as the shareholders are wheeled into their plush retirement homes? I don’t think so. The so-called white working class are being joined everyday now by those of every class and every colour, who are being thrown onto the post-industrial scrapheap to face an uncertain future with nothing but their accumulated superannuation and a downloaded Centrelink application form.

Last night I gave in to an impulse to pay good money for a download of the latest Jason Bourne movie, even though I knew this franchise is well and truly ready to run out of steam. I was not disappointed. It has run out of steam but the first action sequence, lasting about a third of the film, takes place against a backdrop of rioting in central Athens. This is not science fiction, it’s history. When you combine this narrative with climate change you end up walking Cormac McCarthy’s road and that’s The Road to extinction.extinction.

November 30, 2016

In wars gone by it was soldiers who marched down the main street never to return, leaving those who loved them to imagine the gristly details of a gruesome death on a battlefield somewhere far away. These days the safest thing to be in a warzone is a soldier. By far the majority of casualties in modern war are civilians. Most soldiers die nowadays by accident or when somethings goes wrong. Gone are the days when rows of armed men went marching across a field to be cut down by the dozen or arose out of their trenches to be slaughtered by machine gun fire. Here in the 21st Century they play at war like Wall Street bankers play the stock exchange. The do the maths, take a gamble and run for cover.

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So all the fresh blood flowing down the streets of Syrian cities that we now know by name, is really the blood of innocents. Soldiers fire their weapons around corners for the TV cameras, mucking around. It's the surgical strikes that systematically destroy the city and take the lives of ordinary people, reluctant to join the queue of refugees seeking salvation, on our shores.