Michael Green

Writer and producer

Round and round we go

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

After more than 20 years and countless campaigns, the Save Albert Park group is still trying to save Albert Park.

IT’S a Monday evening at the 3CR studios in Collingwood, and Save Albert Park’s radio show has just begun.

When the rousing theme song – “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Misérables – ends, host Barbara Clinton introduces the guests. Owing to circumstances, there’s been a sudden change in programming: she had to bump a public parks expert from New York.

“Tonight we’re devoting our programme to the state government re-signing the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Albert Park for a further 5 years,” Clinton says.

“Firstly, I’d like to ask Peter Goad, was this a surprise to us at Save Albert Park? What was your immediate reaction?”

“Well, Barbara, we’ve been protesting against this event now for 20 years,” Goad, the group’s president, replies. “I’m not really surprised to hear they’ve re-signed, but of course it’s still a blow. We are perennial optimists. We think that eventually something has got to go right.”

The group has hosted a half-hour weekly radio spot since the mid-1990s. Today is a particularly dark day: Premier Denis Napthine graced the pages of the Herald-Sun waving a chequered flag. The event will continue in the park until 2020, at least. The Premier described the race as a “key pillar of Victoria’s major sporting events strategy” and congratulated Grand Prix Corporation chairman Ron Walker for “getting the best deal for Victoria”. As usual, the government would not reveal how much it paid for the contract.

On the radio show, Peter Logan – a former Port Phillip councillor and the group’s media spokesperson – ridicules the idea that the race offers value for money. “To use Joe Hockey’s phrase, the Grand Prix is a leaner, not a lifter,” he says. “It’s getting a multi-million dollar subsidy every year.”

Save Albert Park is a story of extraordinary community activism and persistence against overwhelming opposition.

The group held its first official meeting in February 1994, in the Albert Park library. Peter Logan was among the 50-odd people there, outraged both at the impending loss of their park to commerce, and that the deal had been done in secret, without any consultation. They hoped to stop it before it began. “We were a bit shell-shocked. We weren’t sure how to go about it,” he says.

Before long, they figured it out. A newspaper article the following year referred to the group as “one of the strongest campaign organisations ever built up in Australia”. Its organisational chart contained 18 specialist subgroups, including a legal group boasting about 40 lawyers, two QCs and a former County Court judge.

Goad now says that at its peak, the group’s membership was about 3000, but plunged when the Labor Party embraced the race. Now, they have about 300-400 households, or 1000 people. Two-thirds are from further afield than the neighbouring suburbs, he’s quick to affirm. Since 1996, every Port Phillip council has opposed the race, but it has never just been a case of the NIMBYs.

Although its numbers are diminished, Save Albert Park endures. As well as its radio show, the group runs weekly working bees at the park and produces a monthly newsletter. Volunteers staff the South Melbourne office each weekday morning.

The state member for Albert Park, Labor’s Martin Foley, meets with them 3 or 4 times a year. Despite his party’s support for the race, Foley admires the activists.

“This community is all the better for Save Albert Park,” he says. “They’re locals giving up so much of their time and energy for a very noble pursuit: protecting open space for parks.

“Because their activism comes from the very best of intentions and is not party-political, the community can trust them. That means a great deal – it’s one of the reasons they’ve been able to sustain their efforts for so long.”

Peter and Rosemary Goad meet me at their office the morning after the radio show. It’s a modest nook in South Melbourne Town Hall, adjacent to the quarters occupied by fellow travellers, the Friends of the ABC.

High on a bookcase, entirely forgotten, sits a delightfully provocative sculpture: a golden fist in middle-finger salute. “I can’t remember where it came from – we’ve had it so long,” explains Rosemary.

The couple, who live in Middle Park, were recruited to the cause by Logan in early 1994. They met him at a Save Albert Park stall at the South Melbourne market.

Goad pulls a wealth of documents from his shoulder bag. Both sides of politics have endeavoured to keep their dealings with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation secret. Save Albert Park has done its best to draw out the evidence.

He produces a well-thumbed copy of the 2007 report by the Victorian Auditor-General, which questioned the “brand value” benefits for the city and found the Grand Prix amounted to a net cost to the state of $6.7 million. An updated analysis using the same methodology – this time commissioned by Save Albert Park – estimated a net cost of over $60 million in 2012, accounting for traffic congestion, noise and loss of access to the park.

The corporation’s annual report for 2013 showed the government gave it a $58 million subsidy. It also reveals that it spends nearly $30 million to install and remove the race’s infrastructure every year. “Ridiculous!” Rosemary exclaims. “It’s just busywork.”

The group’s objective remains the same as ever: to remove the race from the park. Instead, it could be held at Avalon, Goad says, where a purpose-built track could be a year-round boost for the Geelong economy, rather than months of traffic snarls and inaccessible parkland for Melbourne.

He closes his eyes in concentration when he makes an important point, which is often. He has been president for over a decade. He formulates his arguments – clear, rational, well-founded – again and again but nothing gives. Still the cars go round.

What’s it like defending reason in the face of two-decades of unreason?

“We are acting for a large number of people who are sympathetic but can’t do anything – they haven’t got the time. It’s just like the people who are protesting against the East-West link, which has no business case and nothing to justify it. They’re doing the [protest] work for me – I’ve got enough to do already,” he says.

“To a degree, we’re the conscience of Victoria. Somebody’s got to do it, because the whole thing is so basically dishonest. You’ve got to be philosophical and not get too emotionally involved. It’s depressing, but what does keep you going is the fact that you’re battling against something you know is wrong.

“And Ron Walker keeps us entertained.”

On the wall is a magnificent green tapestry commemorating the early years of the struggle. It marks key moments in the fight: the 10,000-strong rally in May 1994; “Chainsaw Tuesday”, in December that year, when over 100 trees were cut down around the lake and beyond; and “Flag day” the following year, when the group’s giant 40m by 20m flag was unveiled.

As Goad says, they were “heady days”. Nearly 700 people were arrested for various acts of civil disobedience, from sitting in proscribed zones to locking themselves onto trees marked for felling.

One year, several dozen protestors blocked access to the Grand Prix’s depot during track building. “The Grand Prix Corporation is denying us access to the park, so we are trying to deny them access to their stored equipment,” spokesperson Diana Burleigh said at the time. During the race that year, 60 protesters blocked the VIP entrance gate. Two were dressed as ducks. Four were arrested.

Among the civilly disobedient were many prominent citizens. Carrillo Gantner AO, actor, director and theatre founder, and subsequently, city councillor and Victorian of the Year, was one of them.

“I’m not against the Grand Prix. I am against it being located in Albert Park,” says Gantner, currently the chairperson of the Sidney Myer Fund.

He decided to take a stand when Premier Jeff Kennett introduced the Grand Prix Act, which exempted the event from various other pieces of legislation and removed the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. People whose houses were damaged by track compaction works could no longer sue for compensation.

“That seemed to be a bridge too far, because people have been fighting and dying since the Magna Carta – and probably well before – for the right of appeal to an independent judiciary against a wilful executive,” Gantner says. “So along with a few friends we resolved that it was time to be visible in our protest.”

It was a “fairly unusual group” he says, including as it did, the daughter of a Liberal Premier, Julia Hamer; the son of a state governor, James McCaughey, and a prominent artist, Mirka Mora. They sat where they weren’t supposed to – in the place designated for the pit building – and refused to budge.

“The police were very polite and asked us sweetly to move to the other side of the tape on the ground. To move our arses three feet to the left, basically,” Gantner says. “And we said ‘No thank you, we came down to be arrested’.”

They were never charged. For all the arrests, not a single conviction was recorded.

Gantner was a dues-paying member of Save Albert Park for “some years”, and remains sympathetic. The campaign has endured, he believes, in part because the governments have been “so dishonest and opaque” about costs and crowd numbers.

The initial, prolonged militancy had its place in the broader tumult that finally undermined Jeff Kennett’s premiership. But when even a change of government yielded no progress, their mobilising moment had passed.

“That was our heroic age. We’re now in the stoic phase,” Goad says. “It was so intense it burnt a whole lot of people out. The only way to continue to fight the Grand Prix was to concentrate on the facts and the economics, rather than the demos.”

The group’s other tactical shift has been to volunteer in the park itself. The Goads take me on a tour of their works. Peter navigates their Subaru through the park with a proprietary air, shifting bollards where necessary for ease of vehicular access.

Out of the Grand Prix’s reach, they’ve planted hundreds of trees and installed nearly two-dozen Cyprus pine bench seats. They revegetate and guard over a small patch of bushland, adjacent to the Junction Oval, which contains the Corroboree Tree, a lone River Red gum estimated to be up to 500 years old. The tree bears wounds on its trunk where it was clipped by passing trucks. Save Albert Park successfully campaigned for VicRoads to install a barrier.

It’s one of many small wins around the park. When Lakeside Drive opened as a four-lane, 60 kilometre-per-hour thoroughfare, Save Albert Park documented every accident. The speed limit was reduced and the road narrowed.

“All the things we’ve done!” Rosemary chuckles.

Most famously, the group held a vigil at the park just off Albert Road. It lasted from 1994 until 2005.

In early 2000, Peter Goad was interviewed for an Age article, uncharitably titled “Why on earth do they bother?” By then, the vigil had notched up 1672 days. The journalist concluded her article by asking: when, if ever, will you give up?

Goad answered that he would campaign for “as long as it takes”, and certainly wouldn’t quit within 20 years.

Another long time volunteer, Reg Boyd, answered that he’d give up “when they put me in a box”.

Boyd is seriously ill with cancer, but remains the group’s treasurer. “Reg is indomitable,” Goad says. “His quote was correct.”

This latest extension has deflated Rosemary, however. Her spirits are “dampened, totally dampened”, she concedes. She’s not sure if their fight will continue beyond the terms of this contract: “Age will not allow.”

But Peter literally scoffs at the idea of giving up. “They’re such bastards, you can’t let them get away with it,” he says. “You have to fight it, even if you fail.”

 

Read this article at The Age online

A death in the family

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

It’s over at Alcoa.  The last shipment of alumina unloaded from the pier, the fires extinguished in the furnace, and smelting pots shut down. No more jobs for life.

STEVE Beasley stands on the long factory line, with the crane controls at his waist. Hanging before him is the crucible, which looks like a huge steel teapot, with a long, downward spout for siphoning the molten metal.

He manoeuvres the crucible forward so its spout extends into the smelting cell, where – with the help of extraordinary amounts of electricity – alumina is turned into aluminium, at 950˚C.

He’s been doing this for years, but something is different this time. The smelting cell – known as a “pot” – has already been switched off. There are 368 pots at Alcoa’s Point Henry smelter; this month, the operators have gradually shut them down.

At lunchtime, Beasley sits with his shift partner Wayne Palmer in the canteen. On one wall is a pinboard decorated with photos from the site’s 51 years. On the other, is a jobs board.

“There’s life after Alcoa,” Beasley says, over a plate of chips and gravy.

“It’s time to get it over with,” Palmer says.

Tomorrow, it’s over – nearly six months after the plant’s closure was announced in February. Today, the workers flick the switch on the last functioning pots, and siphon whatever metal they can get. The aluminium rolling mill, adjacent to the smelter, will close by the end of the year. Altogether, 800 people will lose well-paid jobs.

It is the latest of the mass-manufacturing job losses to hit the town, but Point Henry’s demise resonates beyond its economic impact. The Alcoa plant, with its iconic water tower, has been a constant presence in Geelong, visible to the east across a narrow stretch of Corio Bay. From father afield, too, it was a symbol of Australia’s post-war industrial optimism.

Warren Sharp has worked for Alcoa for 24 years. For the last three “eventful” years, he’s been the smelter manager at Point Henry. He is in charge until 7 pm tonight, after which the years-long decommissioning process will begin.

The closure announcement in February was no surprise, Sharp says, but it was still a shock – in the same way as the death of someone with a terminal illness can be. The years since the global financial crisis have been trying: the combination of a low aluminium price, a high Australian dollar, and old technology has proven lethal.

Alcoa’s newest smelter, in Saudi Arabia, is four times larger than Point Henry and much more automated. The company’s Portland smelter, opened in 1986, will continue to operate.

“We’ve pushed our technology as hard as we can,” says Darrel Linke, the manager of the electrode division. Linke started at Point Henry in January 1979 as a graduate electronic engineer. “We’ve always had good people here. We find a way of doing things.”

They know how to run the plant. But shutting it down safely, while continuing production, has been another challenge altogether. “It’s been a good distraction for us, that’s the truth of it,” Sharp admits.

For the last couple of months, each week has marked another melancholy milestone: the last shipment of alumina unloaded from the pier, the last anode made, the fires extinguished in the furnace, and ever more smelting pots shut down.

Both Sharp and Linke have observed the bittersweet truth that as the end nears, their admiration for their colleagues continues to rise. The challenge of working together has grown, as has their sense of mutual satisfaction from a job well done.

“The teamwork is tremendous,” Linke says. “I reflect on that. It’s going to be the hardest thing for me to say goodbye.” He has no job to go to next.

This week, as each crew has finished their final shift, they’ve gathered in the canteen to mark the moment and receive a commemorative booklet tracing through the site’s half-century history.

Alcoa of Australia was founded by mining engineer and businessman Lindesay Clark. He convinced the American parent company to invest; and, crucially, persuaded the Australian government to protect the industry with import restrictions. The new venture would mine and refine bauxite in Western Australia, and smelt, roll and fabricate aluminium in Victoria.

The smelter at Point Henry poured its first hot metal in April 1963. In ‘White Gold’, a company history published in 1997, Geoffrey Blainey wrote that the Americans cancelled a gala opening ceremony, which was to be conducted by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, for fear of industrial espionage by Japanese experts who’d been invited. They instructed that no official guests – not even Menzies – were to set foot inside the buildings.

The modernist photographer Wolfgang Sievers photographed the Point Henry site in its first year of operations. He returned several times in the next two decades, and as always, sought to portray the dignity of work and his faith in a notion of progress that united men and machines.

Linke recalls that when he started, 35 years ago, he was proud to join an industry that extended beyond primary production, and brought jobs and money into the country. “To me it felt good to do that, as opposed to being a miner. Having that whole supply chain, right to the end,” he says.

“It feels a little bit like we’re regressing. It’s sad – paring back the vision that the founders of Alcoa of Australia had.”

His pride in the company is not unusual. It is common to the managers, workers, receptionists and even unionists. Ben Davis, the Victorian secretary of the Australian Workers Union, says the smelter has a good relationship with its employees and the whole region. “Alcoa has been so much a part of the social and economic fabric of Geelong since it opened,” he says.

(The shop floor has been tense at times, however. In 1973, the workers staged the ultimate provocation: a strike on VFL grand final day.)

The average length of employment as an “Alcoan” at Point Henry is 18 years. But now, those jobs are gone. In retrospect, Wolfgang Sievers’ photos evoke a belief in progress that has long since eroded. As photographic historian Helen Ennis has written, his images “express no doubts about the future”.

“Their vision thus seems worlds away from contemporary concerns about the negative impacts of technology, pollution, environmental degradation and climate change,” she writes.

Her observation is especially apt in the case of aluminium, often described as “congealed electricity”. At Point Henry, Alcoa consumed over 7 per cent of the state’s electricity load, or about three times that of Geelong’s households.

In his review on climate policy, Ross Garnaut noted that Australia was among the world’s least efficient aluminium producers, and his modelling suggested that smelting would gradually move offshore.

The company’s brown coal power station at Anglesea is up for sale. It was built especially for the smelter and provided 40 per cent of its electricity.

Now, the power station has become the source of controversy for its 80 workers and for Surf Coast Air Action, a local campaign calling for its closure. The group is concerned about the plant’s sulphur dioxide and other emissions and its bushfire vulnerability. On August 10, it is staging a rally and march to the mine.

Without the carbon price, Anglesea power station has become a viable economic proposition, says Professor Mike Sandiford, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute at University of Melbourne. But if it continues to supply the grid, despite plummeting demand, it will be a significant contributor to what he describes as “a dire emissions outlook”. Our electricity supply is set to become more carbon intensive for the first time in half a decade.

*

Every Friday, Rebecca Casson writes an upbeat column in the Geelong Advertiser. Casson is the CEO of the Committee for Geelong, whose members comprise large and small businesses in the town.

“Geelong’s economy is changing, but is manufacturing really dead?” she wrote recently. “According to recent feedback, definitely not! Evolving and innovative? Yes. Exciting? It sure is.”

Casson points to smaller manufacturers, such as Boundary Bend Olives, the Little Creatures Brewery, or high-tech wheel maker Carbon Revolution, and to other growing industries, such as insurance. The National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Transport Accident Commission are both headquartered in the city.

“It is the job of the committee to be positive, but not to put spin on it,” Casson says. “We are realistic, we do know that the city is going through this huge change and we would be foolish to say everything is fine. Everything is not fine.”

“These new jobs might not come immediately, and they might not be in familiar industries. But if people are willing to retrain there are a lot of opportunities.”

On Monday morning, the city’s “job shop” will open its doors for the first time. Located at the Gordon TAFE, in a heritage building near Geelong railway station, the walk-in centre will offer careers counselling and advice on work available in the area.

It is part of Skilling the Bay, an $11 million state-government program managed by Greg Leahy, from the Gordon. He’s tasked with lifting education levels and workforce participation across the region. Geelong’s high school completion rate is well below the state average. Youth unemployment is particularly high.

Young men can no longer follow their fathers to Ford or Alcoa, Leahy says. “Instead they’ll be coming out of school or university and getting a job with a small to medium-sized enterprise in West Geelong or Ocean Grove. The path to those jobs is nowhere near as clear.”

The path for retrenched workers is equally muddy. Leahy acknowledges there “isn’t a perfect fit” between their skills and the region’s growing industries – healthcare, community work and construction.

But the Gordon has been working with Alcoa employees for months. The company has paid for resume writing workshops and short courses, and offered extra funding for training in whatever field employees choose.

“The workers are at different points in the journey: some are resigned to their fate, some are thinking laterally, some are in denial,” Leahy says. “We’re trying to create a family-friendly environment. We don’t want people confronting these issues on their own.”

In the lounge room of their neat, brick home in Geelong’s eastern suburbs, Damian and Bethany Young are explaining their revised plans.

When Damian began at Point Henry in 2000, he thought he had a job for life. But earlier this morning, the couple signed a lease on a shop in East Geelong. They are converting Bethany’s part-time, online kids and homewares store, Ryder Loves Miller – named after their two young sons – into a bricks-and-mortar business.

The city’s main street is pockmarked with empty shops, but the couple believe they’ve identified a niche. “We’re positive,” Bethany says. “We don’t think Geelong is dead at all, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this.”

For Damian, 39, it’s a wild career change. “I’ve gone from one extreme from another,” he says. “I never imagined myself in retail. I find it a bit daunting, but Bethany reassures me.”

“He is a little institutionalised,” she laughs.

It’s a word that comes up often in conversations with, or about, “Alcoans”. They’ll have to get used to “the real world”, Bethany says: lower wages, fewer sickies and less flexibility for time off with family.

Young, 39, took his redundancy a few weeks early so he could start work on the shop. Even so, he still speaks about Alcoa in the present tense. “I work in the potrooms,” he explains. “It’s hard work. If it wasn’t hot, they wouldn’t pay us the rate they do.”

His workmates are mates – they’ve attended each other’s weddings and kids’ birthdays – but he expects catch-ups will become rare as life moves on. As the former union delegate for his shift, he is worried about their welfare – especially those who’d committed to big mortgages. A few have jobs, but many have been forced to search farther and farther afield.

On his last day, in mid-July, Young was told he could leave early – but he wasn’t ready to go. “I got changed and it didn’t really hit until I was having that last shower. I was like: I don’t want to get out yet. But Bethany was coming to pick me up. “So I left. I shut the locker and walked out the gate.”

For better or worse, he stepped into a new Geelong.

Read this article at The Age online

Smarter urban water

In Environment on

After the drought, there’s a quiet revolution in the pipelines.

This article was published by the Guardian UK

TWO blue glass boxes rise from the grass next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. If you glance at them – on your way to an Aussie Rules game, of course – you’ll notice some pipes inside.

Nothing special, really. Only a sewer mine.

Or, as the officials prefer: the Yarra Park Water Recycling Facility.

Below ground, a large pipe snakes uphill, avoiding tree roots. It taps into the main vein below the snooty suburb of East Melbourne, and sneaks off with its shit.

In summer, the large parklands around the ground are irrigated entirely with recycled water. In the winter, it flushes the loos of tens of thousands of spectators each weekend.

The facility supplies cheaper water than the gigantic Victorian Desalination Plant, which was built with considerable cost and controversy one hundred kilometres south-east of the city. Both were completed in 2012. But the desalination plant, unlike the sewer mine, has never produced a drop.

The Yarra Park Water Recycling Facility. Photo by ARUP

Something strange and remarkable has happened in Melbourne. Five years ago, the city of over 4 million inhabitants nearly ran out of water. Now it is regarded among the most innovative, water-smart cities in the world.

From 1997 to 2009 southern Australia suffered through the “millennium drought”, its longest dry spell on record. “The drought was a huge wake-up call,” says Dr Cathy Wilkinson, an executive director at the Office for Living Victoria, the government body now in charge of water policy. “The way water was managed had a huge impact on people everyday. Waterways were drying up, junior sports clubs couldn’t play on their ovals because they were too dry and dangerous.”

The government issued tight water restrictions. Newspapers reported on neighbourhood water vigilantes; people using rainwater tanks feared being seen with green lawns. Water consumption dropped 40 per cent, per person per day. Without that shift, drinking water supplies would have run out.

In panic, the then Labor government ordered a mammoth desalination plant – with a top capacity of half the city’s water consumption – and a pipeline to bring water from the north of the state.

The imminent threat concentrated minds elsewhere. Local councils, unable to water outdoor space, began to seek alternatives.

Professor Ana Deletic, associate dean of engineering at Monash University, explains that research flourished, especially into reclaiming stormwater – the polluted rainfall that flows off roads and car parks, into the bay.

“The same amount of runoff goes into Port Phillip Bay as we use in Melbourne each year,” she says. “We were talking about how we could capture some of that water and reuse it, but also save our streams in the process.”

The university now hosts the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, which has over 70 researchers and a budget of over $100 million. It’s a multi-disciplinary body, with programs looking at social drivers, planning, technology and, importantly, how to get it all adopted in real life.

Professor Deletic’s speciality is green walls that treat greywater. “It’s a technology that cools your city, makes it beautiful but also produces water,” she says.

Enter a conservative state government in 2010. It mothballed the desalination plant and the pipeline and established the Office of Living Victoria, with an holistic mandate – much like what the academics had ordered.

Dr Wilkinson says that, historically, water planners sought to predict and provide. The city was a drain; waterways just pipes to the bay.

Now the vision is decentralisation. Catch and store water where it falls. Treat stormwater and wastewater locally, where possible, and reuse it to irrigate parks and gardens. Use drinking water for drinking, not for everything.

“When we do our long-term water planning, we need to think about the complete range of sources, and match the right water for the right job,” Wilkinson says. “At its heart it’s about how Victoria can be resilient and liveable in the face of a whole heap of changes that are going to happen.”

Chief among these changes are a fast growing population – up to 7 million by mid-century – and a harsher climate. Droughts are projected to become more frequent and severe. Rainfall is likely to decrease, but when it does rain, it’s more likely to pour. The millennium drought was followed by two dangerously wet years, including the wettest summer on record, which flooded a third of the state.

The government has begun funding suitable projects and “whole-of-water-cycle” management plans are being drawn up across the city.

The office’s modelling anticipates an astonishing range of gains by 2050: nearly halving mains demand, cutting one-third from wastewater volumes, reducing stormwater runoff by 40 per cent, and saving one-third of the electricity used in the system. All at a tidy saving of up to AUD$7 billion.

What makes this all the more peculiar is that otherwise, the government has been environmentally backward. This March, the state’s commissioner for environmental sustainability quit early, claiming the government was advising bureaucrats not to use the term “climate change”. The Office of Living Victoria has been the subject of controversy too. An investigation by the Ombudsman into its procurement practices is expected within weeks. There are also rumblings about a lack of transparency in its modelling.

Michael O’Neill, senior environmental consultant at ARUP, was part of the team for the MCG sewer mine. He says Melbourne’s approach is internationally renowned, “not just in academic and policy circles, but also in the multinational engineering firms”.

The Yarra River, which winds through the city, is infamously brown. It was clear when the colonists started the city on Wurundjeri land, but now it’s said to run upside down. So, when American tennis player Jim Courier dived into the river after winning the Australian Open in 1992 and 1993, the rest of the city shuddered.

“One day,” O’Neill says, “maybe, one day, we’ll get the Yarra back to a situation where we can to swim in it. Anything is possible.”

Read this article at The Guardian online

What happened to the fair go?

In Social justice, The Age on

THE room was already full at Trades Hall in Carlton on a cold Wednesday night in July, but the floors creaked with people still walking in. “I’m not Thomas Piketty,” said Mike Berry, emeritus professor at RMIT, with a wry smile. “I understand some of you were expecting him.”

Piketty, the French economist and author of the best-selling tome, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, is in great demand – and short supply.

Translated from French this year, his 685-page book sold out all over the English-speaking world. It is already the all-time best selling book for its publisher, Harvard University Press, which ran 24-hour shifts at its warehouse to keep up with orders.

In Melbourne, the independent bookstore chain Readings ordered just ten copies at first; since then, they’ve been selling it hand over fist, re-ordering a hundred at a time. For several weeks, incoming shipments sold out well before they arrived.

So, at the Trades Hall meeting to discuss the book – notwithstanding the absence of the author himself – the audience was particularly attentive. “Every so often a book just catches interest,” said Berry, a professor of public policy. “It’s broken out of the scrum, partly by sheer weight of evidence.

“Piketty shows that capitalism inevitably and remorselessly leads to increasing inequality. In short, unless we do something about it, we’re headed back to the 18th century world of haves and have-nots.”

For his efforts, Piketty has joined the exclusive, counter-intuitive class known as “rockstar economists”. In May the ‘New Yorker’ described the backstage clamour of Nobel Laureates eager to meet him before a public lecture.

But more importantly, inequality is now a global, mainstream concern. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum – a coterie of large corporations – listed income inequality as chief among 31 risks “threatening social and political stability as well as economic development” in the next decade.

In Australia, too, as debate continues over budget cuts to welfare, health and education, commentators across the political spectrum are warning that our society has become dangerously unfair.

The top decile income share in Anglo-Saxon countries, 1910–2010. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2

‘Capital’ is based on fifteen years of Piketty’s research, in collaboration with scholars around the world. He has collected and analysed wealth and income data as far back as he can find it. In France and Britain the records stretch beyond two centuries.

Unusually, he spends little effort analysing the bottom end of the scale, and instead, takes aims at the dynamics of the top. Since the global financial crisis, it has been this research that has turned the world’s glare upon “the 1 per cent”.

This is what his data shows: over the long term, the wealth tied up in capital – assets such as property and finance – accumulates more rapidly than economies grow. In broad terms, that means inheritance trumps merit, and wealth concentrates.

“The past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly… than wealth stemming from work,” Piketty writes.

His research upends an article of faith of neoclassical economics: that inequality will decrease as nations’ incomes continue to rise.

That theory was developed in the mid-20th century, at time when the gap in wealth and incomes had narrowed considerably. Piketty argues this period was an aberration, caused by the century’s great shocks – two world wars and the Great Depression – together with the resulting government policies: tight regulation of financial markets and steeply progressive taxes.

In recent decades those policies have been unwound and economic growth has slowed. Inequality has risen again. We are witnessing “the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism”, he writes.

Piketty’s data debunks any notion of trickle-down economics. Really, we live in a suck-it-up system : the wealthiest swill the surplus, and leave the poor to take whatever they can get.

On this matter, the Parisian academic is not a lone voice.

Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, Professor Joseph Stiglitz recently visited Australia on speaking tour. The ‘Capital’ phenomenon, he says, is no surprise to him. In 2012, Stiglitz’s own book on the subject, ‘The Price of Inequality’, hit the bestseller lists in the United States.

“Inequality has risen to the top of the concerns facing America and most other countries – not that we’ve actually been able to introduce policies that deal with it, so far,” he says.

This April, Stiglitz told a US Senate committee that the American dream was “a myth”. For the last 25 years, median wages have stagnated and lowest wages have fallen, in real terms. Since the global financial crisis, nearly all the gains of the “so-called recovery” have accrued to the top 1 per cent, he said.

His message that day in Washington was scarcely contested by conservatives, he says.

“The International Monetary Fund has now stressed the role of inequality. The IMF is not a radical organisation, so nobody should think of this anymore as a left-wing agenda. You almost have to be radical not to take it onboard.

“Inequality used to be a question about how we were treating the most disadvantaged in our society. Now we’re debating how our whole society is functioning.”

Among the ill effects of inequality, Stiglitz argues, is “worse economic performance, no matter how you measure it”, whether by GDP or more holistic benchmarks of wellbeing and sustainability. In the US, the vast numbers of citizens with diminished incomes and poorer levels of health and education constitute a waste of the country’s “most valuable resource”.

It also feeds a further vicious cycle: a failing political system, which represents the affluent at the expense of the rest. “We have a democracy where most of the citizens think the system is corrupt,” Stiglitz says. “Not corrupt in the sense of stuffed paper envelopes, but in the sense that money has found legal ways influencing the process to get what it wants.”

Yet he is not without hope. Neither he, nor Piketty, accept that rising inequality must be so. It’s a product of public policy – the combined outcome of our schools, healthcare, financial systems, tax laws and corporate regulations.

In ‘Capital’, Piketty advocates for highly progressive income tax (with a top marginal rate set at more than 80 per cent) to prevent accumulation of wealth through soaring salaries, and a progressive global wealth tax, to prevent its further concentration.

“Inequality is not a fact of nature,” Stiglitz says. “It’s a consequence of the policies we put in place.”

*

In Australia, inequality is not so vast as in the United States, or Europe at the turn of the 20th century. But it is rising.

A new report from The Australia Institute, drawing on ABS data, reveals that the top fifth of households earn five times the income of the bottom fifth, but they hold 71 times the wealth.

It says the richest 7 individuals in Australia – including Gina Rinehart, Frank Lowy and James Packer – hold more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households.

Meanwhile, the dole continues to fall well below the poverty line. The Australian Council of Social Services estimates that one child in six is living in poverty. Over 100,000 households – the bottom 1 per cent – are living in the red, with negative net wealth.

Yet, like the US and other immigrant societies, Australia has not been shaped by inherited wealth as much as Europe. Inequality has risen significantly since the 1980s, but for other reasons. In his book, ‘Battlers and Billionaires’, ANU economics professor turned federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh attributes the rise in inequality to three forces, in equal measure: higher earnings at the very top, inflated by technology and globalisation; the decline of unions; and less progressive taxation.

Leigh believes that Piketty’s theory is more relevant for our future than our past. Given high savings among the wealthy and a slower growing economy, inequality will worsen, he says.

So what is to be done?

Last year, Richard Denniss, director of The Australia Institute, took part in a televised debate, coordinated by the St James Ethics Centre, on the question: “Should the wealthy pay more tax?”

Income tax cuts introduced since 2006, by both the Howard and Rudd governments, have overwhelmingly favoured high earners, he says. The Institute estimates those cuts have cost the government about $170 billion, of which the top ten percent of earners have received significantly more than the bottom 80 per cent combined.

It hasn’t always been this way. At its peak between 1942-44, the top marginal tax rate in Australia was 93 per cent. Throughout the Menzies prime ministership, the top rate was never lower than 67 per cent. Now, even with the government’s proposed deficit levy, it will temporarily rise to just 49 per cent.

Likewise, tax breaks on capital gains and superannuation overwhelmingly advantage the wealthy.

Super concessions amount to $35 billion in forgone government revenue, Denniss says, most of which goes to the top five percent and none to the bottom fifth. And because women tend to work fewer hours and years in the formal economy, and are under-represented at the upper end of earnings, the super tax breaks also systemically favour men.

“You could only say that increased inequality has been the objective of subsequent governments in Australia, because everything they’ve done has exacerbated it,” Denniss says.

Alongside him in the St James Ethics Centre debate, also for the affirmative – surprisingly – was Geoffrey Cousins: former advisor to Prime Minister John Howard, current member of the Telstra board, and latterly, a high-profile campaigner against the James Price Point gas hub in the Kimberley.

Cousins sits on Telstra’s remuneration committee. In the 2012-13 financial year, the company had eight senior executives whose pay packages topped $1.5 million per year.

Yet, for the audience, Cousins joked that he wanted to wear a t-shirt saying: “I’m rich, tax me”. Afterwards, Denniss had one printed and sent to him, and Cousins swears he wears it – even outside the house. (“I wore it kayaking on Sydney Harbour,” he says.)

He has received a mixed response from well-heeled acquaintances, but if anything, his position has firmed. “I did a lot of research. The information was completely compelling regarding growing inequality around the world, and the fact that wealthy people generally pay a much lower percentage of their income in tax, one way or another,” he says. “It’s not just me: all sorts of wealthy people have said it’s a ridiculous situation.”

He believes the Abbott government’s budget has sharpened the debate in Australia. “There’s a great lack of fairness in what the government is doing and I think most people believe that.”

At the Ethics Centre debate, but on the negative side, was economist and former Liberal Party leader John Hewson. He argued the proposition was too simplistic; comprehensive tax reform is necessary.

But Hewson, too, is deeply concerned about inequality. Last month, he launched a report entitled ‘Advance Australia Fair? What to do about growing inequality in Australia’, which documented the deliberations of a conference held at Parliament House in January.

The participants included a range of civil leaders and academics, from economists to epidemiologists, invited by the non-profit group Australia21. Their report argues the case that more equal societies do better, with higher rates of social cohesion, mental and physical health, and even economic productivity.

Among its many policy recommendations were lifting pensions and benefits to the poverty line, directing more school funding and early childhood education to disadvantaged kids, and implementing significant tax reforms – such as ending tax breaks for superannuation, capital gains and negative gearing.

To the report’s suggestions, Hewson added one of his own: all major policy proposals should be subject to an “inequality impact statement”.

“Our land of ‘the fair go’ is disappearing,” he said.

“There is an urgent need for a mature community debate about how inequality is impacting on our lives, our culture, our economy and our society.”

For now, it seems Australians want to be more egalitarian, even though we may be unaware just how unequal we are. The Australia Institute’s recent survey showed that no matter what people earn, they tend to assume their incomes are about average.

Similarly, research conducted for the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 2011 found that most people vastly underestimate the real level of wealth inequality in society. When asked to describe their ideal distribution, they chose a division of wealth even more egalitarian again, regardless of their own position in the hierarchy.

But arrayed against these preferences, Denniss says, is the force of the business lobby, which describes welfare cuts as fiscal consolidation and derides new taxes as class warfare. So long as unemployment remains low, it’s easy for politicians to ignore entrenched poverty.

“I think inequality is an idea whose time has come,” Denniss says. “But what hasn’t arrived yet is a political party that will do something about it.”

*

At Trades Hall, the audience was comprised mainly of baby boomers. During the questions, one man stood and commented that Piketty’s book could benefit the rich, if rising inequality is understood as inevitable. “How can we make it help us?” he asked.

“Firstly, you’ve got to read it,” Professor Berry replied (understandably; it is a hefty volume). “And secondly: politics matters.”

To stimulate change, the buzz about ‘Capital’ would have to go beyond the media, he said, and suggested that people could form discussion groups to debate its themes.

Berry is author of ‘The Affluent Society Revisited’, which re-examines the work of economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the context of the global financial crisis.

‘Capital’ is the perfect book for the swirling discontent since the crisis, he says. Then, we found out that financial markets don’t function according to the textbooks. But so far, our approach to governing them hasn’t changed.

“There’s a sense of crisis in popular ideology about what the hell is happening out there in the real economy.

“But the critical thing is that although Piketty identifies remorseless tendencies towards inequality in free-market, freebooting capitalism, they are not laws. There are ways of countering them through political means.

“Policy is not dead, it’s just sleeping.”

 

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Little fox, big problem

In Environment, The Age on

In some parts of the city, there are as many as 20 foxes per square kilometre. Are they friend or foe?

IN Melbourne, even foxes like footy. Or, rather, they like football grounds.

Last year, the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology used GPS technology to track foxes from Melbourne’s outer east.

One pair lived at Lloyd Park, home of the Langwarrin Kanagroos, throughout the winter. The week after the grand final, the foxes moved on: there were no more sausage rolls to scavenge.

“They were there on game days, within 50 metres of hundreds of people – and no one knew,” says the centre’s deputy director, Dr Rodney van der Ree. “They’re able to live in very close proximity to us without getting spotted.”

The European or red fox – Vulpes vulpes – is a handsome animal. It has a pointed muzzle, auburn coat and bushy tail. In Quentin Blake’s famous illustrations for Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular mammal wears a waistcoat.

But they are one of the worst invasive species we’ve got. Foxes are considered a threat to 76 kinds of native birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, including the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, spotted quail-thrush and western swamp tortoise.

“The fox and the cat, between them, have been responsible for the decline and extinction of many species of native mammals,” Dr van der Ree says.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology 

Never mind! We are still fascinated by them; fox mad, even. Our championship winning netball team is called the Melbourne Vixens (last month, for the 2014 flag, they made mincemeat of Queensland’s Firebirds).

Search the internet for foxes in Melbourne and you’ll see the city declared “the fox capital of the western world” on the authority of the RSPCA, no less. Contacted by The Age this week, the RSPCA could not confirm it had ever made such a claim.

In fact, we can’t be sure how many there are. The last estimate came from CSIRO research in the early 1990s.

John Matthews, from the Department of Environment and Primary Industry, says there’s no reason to think numbers have changed significantly. But there are more than you think: in country Victoria, foxes number between 1 and 4 per square kilometre. But in the city, where the living is easy, there are four times as many.

Around the wharves and wastelands of Port Melbourne, the vulpine population is at its peak: as many as 20 foxes prowl every square kilometre.

Most sightings happen in autumn, when naïve pups leave the den in search of food and territory. On the citizen science website Foxscan, where people can list glimpses of foxes, the number of reports has been steady.

“They’re quite timid and shy, and they do whatever they can to avoid any interaction with humans,” says Matthews, who manages the state’s control programs for feral foxes, pigs, goats and rabbits from Casterton, in the Western Districts.

Nevertheless, sometimes we glimpse their secret lives at night: stalking along the train tracks in Elsternwick, slinking across a road in Box Hill, or padding over the flatland by a bridge in Essendon.

Sometimes, we even spy them in the day. Recently, two foxes were photographed on a rooftop in Mount Waverley after lunchtime. More often, however, we see them as roadkill in the morning: in the absence of urban predators, cars are their biggest threat.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology

Greater Melbourne may or may not be the fox capital of the western world, but it is the first place they called home in Australia.

The new colony’s gentlemen brought them out for sport. In 1860, Edward Wilson, the owner of the Argus newspaper, lauded the benefits of fox hunting for youth. It “tends to prevent them from sinking into mere dawdlers in an opera box or loungers in a café”, he wrote.

A recent historical study by zoologist Ian Abbott contends that it took several attempts over decades before a fox population took hold.

He believes the successful culprits were the wealthy Chirnside brothers – Thomas and Andrew – who were among the largest landholders in the colony. They had already established a herd of deer, and by 1870, began importing foxes for hunting expeditions on their Werribee estate, where, soon after, they began constructing the mansion that still stands today.

Within two decades, foxes were declared a pest species in Victoria, and within four they pawed all the way into Western Australia. They’d long since conquered NSW and Queensland. Now, the red fox ranges over three-quarters of the continent.

Surprisingly, however, there were no recorded sightings in the centre of Melbourne until the middle of the 20th century. In 1948, a fox den was spotted at the cemetery in Parkville.

Now, they’re thought to occupy the entire metropolitan area. “There’s ideal habitat in the city,” says Matthews. “There’s ample food – lots of bins – and there’s really no predation.”

They’re deterred by dogs, but if there are none around, they’ll hide under houses or in tight gaps between buildings, in rock heaps, culverts or up cypress trees. They dig dens in parks or coastal scrub.

Foxes want warmth, security and good shelter, and they don’t want to give it up. They mark their territory with urine and scat.

“It’s a unique smell. But don’t ask me to describe it!” pleas Matthews. “Farmers know it. They’ll get out to the gate post in the morning and say: ‘Hmm, a fox was here last night.’”

Despite the stench, the animals pose little threat to humans – other than as a carrier of worms or, in the case of an outbreak, rabies. They are, however, a mortal danger to suburban chickens.

Many a suburban homesteader has woken to a grisly crime scene, after the one-and-only night they forgot to shut the henhouse gate. Often, the dead chooks remain uneaten. “Foxes are thrill-killers,” Matthews explains. “It’s instinctive. With the clucking and feathers going everywhere, they can get into a frenzy.”

In the countryside, foxes exact a toll on farmers’ flocks. But their impact on native species is far greater than their cost to agriculture.

In the city, there are now very few threatened species – largely because foxes and cats have already wiped them out. But on the city fringe, foxes are still eating endangered species, including southern brown bandicoots, eastern barred bandicoots, growling grass frogs and swamp skinks.

For the authorities in cities and towns, it’s very hard to control their numbers – some municipalities try trapping, or netting and fumigating dens. Citizens can help reduce fox numbers by making sure pet food isn’t left outside, clearing fallen fruit from trees and using a secure compost bin.

Elsewhere around the state, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries and Parks Victoria conduct an extensive baiting program, using the poison known as 1080. And in 2011, the state government introduced a $10 bounty for fox scalps. Since then, 285,000 have been accepted from hunters.

Neither method has escaped criticism. Many landholders are wary of 1080. For its part, the RSPCA states that 1080 “is not a humane poison”. It argues we must conduct more research into alternatives, so the technique can be phased out.

The bounty, meanwhile, has been roundly criticised by experts, who argue it’s a waste of money because foxes breed too quickly. Control programs need to wipe out two-thirds of a fox population over a large area to have a lasting effect.

In any case, if foxes were once the universal bad guy, now their role is much more ambiguous, especially in the city.

“Even in modified ecological systems, top order predators are still important to keep prey populations in check,” explains Dr van der Ree from the centre for urban ecology.

In urban areas, native predators are missing: the quolls have gone, there are no goannas and few powerful owls. That leaves the fox to help limit the populations of feral cats, rats and mice, and even possums.

“If you get rid of all the foxes then feral cat numbers can increase. You need to control foxes, cats and rabbits together. It’s got to be done strategically, over a large scale, otherwise they’ll just reinvade the area.”

It’s a controversial, but increasingly prevalent question: do we need foxes in our cities?

“No one would argue that foxes are not a damaging species, but sometimes they may help us as well,” says Dr Euan Ritchie, an ecologist from Deakin University whose speciality is the role of predators in ecosystems.

We need to rethink the way we deal with pest species more generally, he says. “A lot of the things we do now are expensive and they’re not working,” he says. “Are there ways to better coexist?”

Part of the answer, he says, is encouraging predator species, but doing so in conjunction with guardian animals on farms. Alpacas or Maremma sheepdogs are increasingly used to protect livestock from dingoes.

Dr Ritchie advocates for the re-introduction of Tasmanian Devils to Victoria, beginning with Wilson’s Prom. They’d help threatened species and improve biodiversity, he says, by controlling the numbers of foxes, cats, swamp wallabies and wombats.

“The way people often describe it is: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

It’s an argument made famous in 1949 by the pioneering American ecologist Aldo Leopold in his classic book, A Sand County Almanac. He wrote that he’d seen “state after state extirpate its wolves”, and subsequently, observed their landscapes overrun and defoliated and eroded by deer. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” he wrote.

Dr Ritchie says the scientific community is only just catching on. There’s now a growing push for ‘rewilding’: restoring habitats by introducing or reintroducing key species.

He is coordinating the Australian Mammal Society’s annual conference, at the Melbourne Zoo from 7-10 July. One whole day will be devoted to the ecological roles of predators.

“In the last 200 years, Australia has arguably the worst record in the world for mammal conservation. And globally we’re in the midst of a biodiversity extinction crisis comparable to some of the biggest mass extinction events we’ve had in geological history.

“If we can find any way to start reversing that, then we should prioritise it,” Dr Ritchie says. “We really need to be more bold, because if we keep going down the same path, many more species will disappear.”

A fox captured on camera near the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne. Credit: RBG Cranbourne

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne has a feral-proof fence: it’s 9 kilometres in circumference and 1.8 metres tall, with a floppy top to prevent foxes climbing over. At the base, wire was laid below ground level and set back from the fence line, to stop foxes digging under.

“Once a week, we drive right around the perimeter to make sure there are no new holes,” says Ricardo Simao, the gardens’ land and infrastructure manager.

“The danger is that, sure, we might be keeping the foxes out, but we’re also stopping all other animals from moving through.”

So the fence has another trick: allowing native animals to pass. Simao’s team have crafted gates for bandicoots, wombats and tortoises. Now they’re working on one for swamp wallabies, whose numbers have risen fast in the absence of predation.

The bandicoots’ gates consist of PVC piping with flaps at either end: foxes can’t fit and rabbits aren’t curious enough to brave the flaps, Simao explains.

Southern brown bandicoots were abundant in the south-east when Melbourne was colonised. “Everyone used to see them – the animal wasn’t particularly shy,” he says. But gradually, the animals lost their habitat to urbanisation and their heads to foxes.

In the decade since the fence was built, however, the bandicoots’ numbers have increased and become “quite healthy”, Simao says.

“The next phase is to make sure it’s not an isolated population.”

Read this article at The Age online