Michael Green

Writer and producer

Dee and Rob

In Social justice, The Big Issue on

TWO years ago, I began researching a long story about homelessness for The Big Issue. My article followed the fortunes of two people: Albert, who had been homeless most of his life; and Dee, who was on the brink of it, for the first time.

It was a privilege to be let into their lives. Afterwards I tried to stay in touch, but Albert changed his number before long; I don’t know what he’s doing now. Dee and I, though, are still in contact. After the article was published, something extraordinary happened that involved us both, and a man named Rob, from Sydney, who happened to buy a copy of that edition.

***

Dee had just turned 40 when I met her. It was two decades since she’d moved here from New Zealand. Lately, she’d had a run of bad luck: a serious workplace injury and an associated legal dispute, then cervical cancer, and then her long-term rental house was put up for sale.

She had moved to a flimsy unit, far away from her neighbourhood, but even so, was paying higher rent. One of her daughters moved out. Dee fell further and further behind; the eviction notice was only days away.

When I visited, she introduced me to Brandi, her big handsome dog. “She’s depressed – it’s too small here,” Dee said. “Her face wasn’t grey, but she’s gone grey like me.” She rubbed the dog between the ears. “We’ve turned old, haven’t we?”

Another time, when I left her house, she walked with me as far as her letterbox. In the article I wrote this:

“It was the first time I’d seen her outside her unit, unencumbered by the closeness of the walls and the darkness of her lounge. As I walked away she bent down to pick up her mail and called out, ‘Want to take my bills?’ She gave me a big throaty laugh. I laughed with her and for an instant everything seemed like it would turn out okay, until I remembered it probably wouldn’t.”

That’s what I thought. Albert had found a place in supportive housing – he’d had a tough life, but maybe things had turned around. For Dee, I just couldn’t imagine a way out.

A few days after the article was published, I opened an email from Rob, who found me through my website. He said he’d been “deeply affected” by Dee’s situation.

“I suppose I personally resonate with her story – I’m a Kiwi myself and have been in a similar situation previously. Nowadays life is good and I am successful and affluent in a middle of the road way,” he wrote.

“I do not wish to make things worse by promising things that cannot be fulfilled, but a simple monthly stipend to help cover bills and rent is, I suspect, well within my power. I made a personal promise sometime ago, after pulling myself out of the dark, that I would not fail to act when I have the opportunity and ability to do so.”

I called him to talk about it. Then I called Dee. She was astonished, but wary. She said she’d talk to him.

A couple of weeks later, Rob was in Melbourne on business. I met him and we drove to Dee’s house, near Frankston.

He was about 40, I guessed – Dee’s age – and wore a baseball cap and a blue-collar shirt. He was a straight-talker: before we’d travelled a suburb, he was telling me how he’d nearly become homeless during the financial crisis. He had accumulated debt in the hundreds of thousands, and suddenly, he had no income. For a few months, he covered rent by selling his possessions. He contemplated living in his car, but narrowly avoided it. Slowly, he righted the business. The debt was under control by then, but he was still a renter – not a one-percenter.

His phone rang as we approached Dee’s street, and before we had time to gather our thoughts, she was answering the door.

I sat next to Dee on her L-shaped couch, chitchatting to ease their nerves. After a while, we all stood to make cups of tea, and then Rob sat next to her instead. Dee handed him a stack of bills and paperwork; he made notes as they calculated what she earned and what she owed. He offered to pay her next month’s rent, plus some outstanding bills, and put money in her account every month to top up what Centrelink didn’t cover. For as long as it took.

“Sometimes you just need to know that somebody will be there for you, that you can rely on someone,” Rob said, turning towards Dee, and looking her squarely in the face. “All I ask of you – and I know you’ll do this – is to genuinely look for work. I understand that things take time. It may not happen, and that is okay. I will be here. I’m not going anywhere.”

They hugged. We all cried. “I’ve been around the block,” Rob said. “There’s nothing you can tell me that I’ll be shocked by, and nothing I’ll judge you for.”

When Rob dropped me off, back in the city, I called Dee. She was relieved, giddy. She said she felt as though she had known Rob a long time, as though he was fatherly towards her. In the car, he’d told me he felt like he knew her too. It turned out they’d grown up not far from one another and on the same side of the tracks.

In her flimsy, darkened lounge that day, I got shivers all over. And I still do, every time I think about it.

***

It hasn’t been easy, since then. Every few months Dee and I exchange a text message or an email. She writes like she talks: fast, without fuss or restraint. I got an urgent email one day asking me to contact Rob, because she hadn’t heard from him.

“…im pissed. and hurt i opened up and shared my life with him and he dumps me like a piece of crap with no explanation. hope youre well and happy new year. dx”

In May, she sent me this:

“…now impossible to survive without robs help. thank god hes been my saviour and weve been talking a bit so thats awesome. My plan is to get a JOB!!! But shit michael ive just had ultrasounds of my elbows and been diagnosed with golfers elbow, lol funny name aye… my arms swell and ache for days sometimes…”

About a year after they first met, Rob wrote me this:

“Dee and I patched things up. I sent her a long email and laid things out honestly, and she understood that what felt like me ignoring her was actually just me struggling to keep faith with all my commitments… ”

***

I called them both this week. Rob was on the Gold Coast, on business again. Business is good, but it means he works very long hours – the work of about three people, he guesses. And that means he doesn’t call Dee as often as he’d like. “I feel a bit guilty that I haven’t helped her in other ways that aren’t financial. But I’ve come to realise I really don’t have the time,” he said.

This kind of arrangement, he said, is “probably not for everybody, but there probably should be more of it. There are a great deal of us who have the wherewithal to do it, but we don’t, because it’s too hard, or someone told us once that everyone should fend for themselves. So we just let other human beings go to the wolves.”

He said “probably”, because he knows that helping is not simple. But there was one idea he wanted me to write down:

“If someone is in trouble and they are going to be helped, they need to be helped for a long fucking time. People don’t just get well and all of a sudden it’s peachy. That’s Hollywood. That’s storybook. That’s not how it works in the dirty messy world.”

The day I spoke to Dee, one of her daughters had just returned from New Zealand. They will live together this year, and that’ll help with the bills. When she gets over her golfer’s elbow, she wants to work again. But lately, her depression has been worse than ever, and Brandi, too, has gone grey all over.

Dee and I reminisced about that afternoon when the three of us sat in her lounge. “It still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck,” she said. “And every single day I know I can pay rent because of Rob. He is making my life bearable. I wish I could yell it out to the world.”

Illustration by Michel Streich

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre dailies

Read the original article on The Big Issue website or here.

Better Block

In Greener Homes on

Residents can take urban planning into their own hands.

IS there a streetscape near you where no one goes? Somewhere ugly to look at, hard to walk, and too scary to ride?

Just go ahead and fix it. That’s what Jason Roberts did in Oak Cliff, a rundown part of Dallas, Texas.

In 2010, with a crew of volunteers, he staged a one-off community event, called Better Block. For a weekend, they widened the footpaths and brought in tables and chairs and trees in pots. They started pop-up cafes and shops, and painted temporary bike lanes on the street.

In the process, they broke all kinds of council rules. But people loved it. Their “guerrilla art” idea has spawned a movement: in the last two years there have been 41 Better Blocks held all across the United States.

Mr Roberts is visiting Melbourne this month as one of the keynote speakers at the Sustainable Living Festival, which began yesterday and runs until February 24.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“By doing all those things, we created a more humane environment, and that made more people come out and use the space,” he says. They created permanent change, too. Many of the zoning rules have been scrapped, and some businesses have stayed on.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Dallas or Australia or Bangladesh, we all enjoy sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee and watching a musician play. We all love strolling through outdoor flower stands,” he says. “They’re universal things.

Mr Roberts was an IT-consultant and musician. Then, ten years ago, he and his wife visited Europe. They were astonished by the vibrant life of the cities: the bike riders and buzzing markets, the street-side cafes and public plazas where old people lingered with their grandchildren.

He returned and saw with new eyes the concrete freeways and barren footpaths of his own city, and resolved to make them “more like Paris”.

His first project was an impromptu art show, called Art Conspiracy, in an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. It happened fast: the artists painted one day and sold their canvases the next. Unexpectedly, 700 people showed up to see the old theatre back in use.

Next he set up a website – the Oak Cliff Transit Authority – promoting the reconstruction of the old tramcar that used to run through town. He was the only one in the “authority”, but no matter. A journalist wrote about it, and other enthusiasts joined in. Their crazy plan has come true: the city is actually building the tramcar line. With the help of a large federal grant, construction should be finished by 2014.

Then, a couple of years later, Mr Roberts founded Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – even though he didn’t own a bike at the time. “We just said, ‘We’re the bike part of town’, and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he explains. “With time, people started buying bikes, and people who liked bicycling started moving into the area.”

He’s got three tips for would-be urban activists: show up to your local community groups; give your event a name; and set a date and publish it – that way you’ll be forced to make it happen.

“The projects have been successful because we commit to quick action and get local people working together to make a better place,” he says. “Even if it’s temporary, people keep talking and they say, ‘Why don’t we fix this street permanently?’”

Read this article at The Age online

Other people’s cars

In Community development, Culture, The Age on

I’D been invited to a wedding in Darwin in July. Somehow, August arrived. I was still in Melbourne, mired in the worst of winter, those bitter weeks when the calendar says it is nearly spring. A friend said a knot had formed in my forehead.

“Bugger it, I’m going north,” I decided. “Who knows what’ll happen?”

I cadged a lift with two bushwalkers on their way to the Grampians. There, I waited by the highway, smiling and waving at cars. Within minutes a taciturn Brazilian named Carlos, who delivers phone books for a living, stopped his small truck and drove me all the way to Adelaide’s central market. Whoosh! But it wasn’t until the next day that my brow really began to lift.

I’d been dropped at the turn-off to Port Pirie and I was standing in the dirt, head down, scribbling in my notebook: “Bobbi and Tim, maroon Mazda 323, nurse and plasterer, adult kids, Coca-Cola beanie, booze and bipolar, the golden rule tattooed on Tim’s left forearm…”, when a white van pulled up ahead.

It was Harm, a wiry fellow with a thin grey ponytail and great joy in his face. The joy is always there – I knew that straight away – but he was particularly elated right then, thrilled by my means of travel.

We enthused together. He reminisced about his wandering days after migrating from Holland, and showed me his gallery and home in the old shipwrights’ workshop in Port Germein. He made coffee and explained how, for more than two decades, he’d been growing tree seedlings and giving them to locals.

Later, I walked the town’s long jetty, one-and-a-half kilometres over the shallow Spencer Gulf, while the sun set on the Flinders Ranges behind me. I looked back and saw the once-barren port nestled in green.

From there I went north through the desert, gathering momentum, standing by the road and sitting in other people’s cars: Squizzy the resentful, racist roofer; Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, Arabunna mob on their way to a mine; Speeding Amy, the Vietnamese woman too tired to sleep; and Dave, who’d crashed into a tree and broken all his body, but found his backbone – he was moving north to make a better life.

Before long I was in the Alice, both attracted and repelled. Attracted by the rocky MacDonnell ranges and the sharp, generous people I met; repelled by welfare dependency and idyllic ex-pat cafes. Attracted by a football final with its mixed, lively crowd. Repelled by a day watching court. I was shocked by the nihilism of the drunks and the recklessness of a new government removing controls on alcohol supply. I was confused and spellbound by it all.

In Yuendumu, about 300 kilometres north-west, I volunteered at the community arts centre. I filled paint pots and took the artists cups of tea, listening all the while to the sounds of Warlpiri: the fast, rolling combinations of the consonants j, n, p and r, and the vowels a and u. I read a book by an anthropologist who’d lived in a women’s camp there. She learnt to abandon planning her days, to submit to the collective will instead. She gave up control, but gained a profound curiosity upon waking each morning.

Back in Alice, I tried my own brand of recklessness. Four days I hid at the freight terminal, ready to hop a cargo train. Four nights I trudged home, nine-parts despondent and one-part relieved – the trains either hadn’t come or lacked a place to stow away. I’d have kept trying, and might have fried like an egg on a hotplate, but for Macarena, a sparky Chilean traveller who offered to hitch with me the next morning instead. I went with Macarena.

On and on I went, north through hot springs and waterfalls, high-school visits and football games, canoeing days and speedway nights. Until, after two weekends of laksas and mangoes at Darwin’s markets, I turned around and came south.

John McDouall Stuart took five years and six attempts to cross the centre on horseback. He searched for waterholes and ached with scurvy. I hitched the Stuart Highway home from Darwin in just four days. I slaked my thirst at roadhouses and scanned the narrow ribbon of asphalt through seven different windscreens.

For Stuart, the desert brought purpose and quietude, an escape from the awkwardness and alcoholism that dogged him in colonial society. For me, it brought conversation and gratitude, and insight into the lives of people I’d never otherwise meet. Exactly 150 years apart, both of us yearned for salad.

After breakfast on a Friday, I walked to the highway near Coober Pedy. At lunchtime, a fitter-and-turner named Greg stopped for me in Port Augusta. He’d wrecked his fender – hit a dingo on the left side and a roo on the right. I said I was headed for Melbourne.

“You’re in luck,” he replied. He was from Cranbourne. He’d drop me to my door.

At 3 am we crested a hill on the Western Freeway and the big city’s lights sent shocks of surprise through my fingertips. I’d gotten into other people’s cars and put myself in Harm’s way: I was joyful. It was late, but my eyes were bright and my forehead clear.

“Who knows,” I wondered, “what will happen tomorrow?”

Read this article at The Age online, with three other great road trip yarns, from Cate Kennedy, Simon Castles and Fran Cusworth.

Peak demand

In Greener Homes on

Too much cooling is putting the heat in our bills.

AS the summer begins to sizzle and you reach for your air conditioner’s remote, there’s something you need to know.

A big chunk of rising energy prices is caused by surging demand on the hottest few days of the year.

In its report on electricity regulation, the Productivity Commission states that just 40 hours of peak use during the year account for a quarter of our bills.

“We invest in the capacity of the network – the poles and wires – so we’re able to turn on the air conditioning when it’s incredibly hot,” says Dr Lynne Chester, from University of Sydney. “But it’s used for a very small proportion of time.”

In the last few years, our overall demand for electricity has fallen, but the peak level continues to rise.

The reason? Air conditioning has gone through the roof. By 2020, it is forecast to double from 2000 levels.

The Productivity Commission (PDF) attributes the change to rising incomes, cheaper air conditioners, bigger new homes and the trend to install more than one unit, “particularly by higher income households”.

It’s an equity concern too: because everyone pays higher network costs, people who don’t use air conditioners at peak times are subsidising those who do.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

But Dr Chester says there’s a broader problem. “As our lifestyles change, we’ve taken things like water and electricity for granted. It’s there whenever we turn on the tap and the switch.”

If we’re to avoid excess investment in the network – and the inevitable higher prices – we need to reduce peak demand first. And that means a shift away from a “predict and provide” approach to electricity, to something more complex.

Householders can expect a more active role in the way we manage energy production.

Smart meters allow electricity retailers to charge more when demand is high. “Time-of-use pricing means that when demand goes up, the price will go up,” Dr Chester says. “The most expensive time will be late in the afternoon, when the kids are home, the TV is on and you’re preparing dinner – that’s when the daily peak is occurring.”

That’s the stick approach, but there’ll be carrots too. Some retailers will alert you in advance of a critical peak, and offer discounts or incentives for switching off, if you can.

In South Australia, distributor SA Power Networks has been trialling “direct load control”, which takes the day-to-day decision out of customers’ hands. If residents agree – in exchange for $100 – they install a widget on their air conditioner and, at critical times, remotely switch off the compressor (but not the fan) for about ten minutes every half hour.

The results are significant: among participants, they’ve been able to reduce peak demand by more than one-third without people noticing any loss of comfort. To make a dent in the overall spike, however, they’d need residents to sign on in large numbers.

Dr Chester says the problem will keep growing, unless our consumption habits change. For that, we need different norms and different buildings.

“We’re treating the symptom and not the cause,” she says. “We don’t build houses with eaves and verandas, or design them for natural breezes. We’re turning on air conditioning instead.

“We’ve got to improve the efficiency of existing stock. We could start by retrofitting public housing; what better way to help low-income households improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills?”

Read this article at The Age online

Corporate greenwash

In Greener Homes on

The carbon revolution is being advertised, but it’s not really happening.

APPLE has got the Earth covered. It’s even got a bright green slogan: “Bigger Picture. Better Products. Smaller Impact”.

But is that really so? The iPhone5, tipped to be the highest selling gadget of all time, has a greenhouse gas impact two-thirds higher than the old iPhone4.

In fact, the total carbon footprint of Apple’s products is rising very fast, says academic and author Guy Pearse, from University of Queensland. “It’s the world’s biggest company, it’s selling itself as green and its emissions have doubled in two years.”

He suggests Apple replace its slogan with “something closer to the truth, like ‘More Products. Bigger Impact’.”

This example is just one of scores uncovered by Dr Pearse in his new book Greenwash: Big Brands and Climate Scams.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Until now, the greenwash debate has spotlighted sins in the marketing of individual products. Dr Pearse took a different tack: he chose to investigate the companies’ total carbon footprint.

For four years, he subjected himself to mind-bending quantities of big business advertising material. He checked the fine print, trawled through hundreds of annual and sustainability reports and drew on documents lodged with the Carbon Disclosure Project. He analysed companies operating in all categories of consumer spending, from banks and beer, to sports and sweet treats.

His verdict is unequivocal. “When you look at the overall carbon footprint, almost none of these companies can claim their emissions will be falling anytime soon. It was a very depressing picture. The climate-friendly revolution being advertised is not really happening.”

Even worse, he says, most big businesses are using an identical greenwashing template to create the opposite impression.

Typically, a company will exclude the impact of the products they actually sell and, instead, only count the environmental impact of corporate headquarters. It’ll install low-energy lighting and solar panels, switch off for Earth Hour, and champion a glossy report.

“By narrowly defining your carbon footprint, you can give the impression the emissions of the brand are shrinking, when they’re growing,” he explains.

“The supply chains of these companies almost all lead back to the developing world, to countries that aren’t constrained by any carbon prices or emission caps. There’s a trail of emissions that’s being offloaded by the big brands.”

Another common tactic is to highlight a clean green product line, to the exclusion of the messy rest.

Take cars, for example. While some companies hype their hybrid or electric vehicles (the Holden Volt has just been released in Australia), they sell them in minuscule numbers, compared to gas-guzzlers.

“The growth that’s occurring in the market is such that the total emissions are going up dramatically,” he says. “Minor improvements in overall fleet efficiency will never lead to overall reductions in emissions from a growing industry.”

Or take Origin Energy, which got good coverage for its Green for Footy campaign with the Australian Football League. It’s the biggest retailer of GreenPower, but nearly half of its electricity generating capacity in Australia is coal-fired.

And, as Dr Pearse notes, it is part of a coal seam gas joint venture in Queensland’s Darling Downs, with a plan to export liquefied natural gas. He says Origin’s share of that scheme equates to “roughly eleven times the carbon footprint of the products [it] currently sells”, and dwarfs the emissions saved by all the renewable energy it has ever sold.

Dr Pearse says householders must understand that “we can’t shop the planet green”. But he argues that individual action – reducing consumption – isn’t sufficient either.

“Ultimately this book is all about why the politics matters and why we need to be angry and active. Real step-changes are the only things that will lead to the emissions reductions the scientists say are essential.

“They’re not going to happen while we’re kidding ourselves with greenwash. The incremental change being embraced by big business just isn’t going to cut it. It’s a reality check that consumers, governments and environmental groups need to have.”

Read this article at The Age online