Michael Green

Writer and producer

The force of racial bias

In Social justice, The Age on

Are Victorian police biased against people of particular ethnic backgrounds? A chorus of voices is speaking out about racism and the force is taking steps to tackle the problem.

BJ Kour took the microphone at the Melbourne Town Hall, on a Sunday in August. “I want to stand up because I’m fired up,” he said with a small smile, which was received with gentle laughter by those gathered to listen, in a stately room with worn carpets. He grew serious. “I am from South Sudan. My story is a real story.”

He related several disturbing encounters with Victoria Police, including one while he was a youth worker in Dandenong. He said he faced charges of hindering an investigation after asking the police for their names during the arrest of two young men he knew. The charges were later dropped, but not before an officer had phoned his boss to suggest he might not be a good employee.

Kour was speaking at the People’s Hearing into Racism and Policing. About 200 people attended over two days, and heard distressing testimony from young men and women of African, Arab and Pacific Islander backgrounds. They told of confronting, often violent, experiences with police, many of which had escalated from unnecessary contact.

Mohamad Tabbaa, an executive director of the Islamic Council of Victoria and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, described how as a young man of Lebanese background he was constantly harrassed by police. He told of being rounded up with his friends, thrown into divvy vans, and beaten with copies of the Yellow Pages. On trains, he said, they were fined even when they had tickets, because as one policeman said, “you’re a ‘f…g Lebo’’. The harassment and fines continued, he says. Eventually, he felt so humiliated and disheartened, he stopped buying tickets.

Although he never faced any charges, he still carries a debt of about $10,000 in unpaid fines from those years. But he counts himself lucky. “Most of my friends from my childhood and early adolescent days have ended up in jail, on the streets, on drugs, dead or simply unmotivated,” he said.

The event was coordinated by IMARA Advocacy, a youth-led lobby group founded after the death of a young Ethiopian-Australian man in Melbourne’s inner-west two years ago.

One of the facilitators, Reem Yehdego, believes the forum has ended debate about whether or not discriminatory policing exists in Melbourne. “It was an incredibly emotional and heartbreaking two days, but the general responses were of relief, hope and healing,” she says.

Like Kour, a number of young men began their testimony by affirming that theirs was a true story. It was the mark of people unused to having their voices heard.

This time, however, those stories were recorded and transcribed. They will be submitted to Victoria Police, which is holding twin inquiries into its cross-cultural training and the way officers deal with people they stop in the street.

Victoria Police agreed to the inquiries in February as part of the settlement of a long running racial discrimination case. Several young African-Australian men had sued the police, claiming they were regularly stopped around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted.

The case is set to have a deep and lasting impact on policing in Victoria.

Among some 70 public submissions to the inquiries, the Law Institute of Victoria provided a particularly strong critique, calling for “profound cultural change” and an “overhaul” of standards, including restricted stop and search powers. The first step, it said, was “to acknowledge that racial bias exists in current policing practices”.

Reynah Tang, the institute’s president, says his members consistently report that clients are regularly stopped for reasons of their race or religion.

Similarly, a submission co-authored by Jeremy Rapke QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, stated that racial profiling and racial bias “exists throughout the institution of Victoria Police”. Racial profiling occurs when police stop people, either consciously or unconsciously, because of their race.

In response, the Chief Commissioner of Police, Ken Lay continues to walk a thin blue line, defending the reputation of the force while also rebuking “individuals whose attitudes are intolerable and offensive”.

He says the huge majority police interactions with the public are positive, but the submissions from the People’s Hearing will provide a “wake-up call”.

“I’m not going to try and defend the indefensible, I know that at times our people let us down.”

The inquiries’ final reports will be released in December, and Lay says he is “open to anything possible”.

“I know there is a level of discomfort, distrust and bad behaviour. This is why this work is important to us. Out of a really, really difficult situation, Victoria Police will be a better organisation,” he says.

He has just appointed former AFL executive Sue Clark to a new high-level role. Beginning in late September, Clark – a former senior police officer – will oversee the implementation of the inquiries and the force’s cultural engagement practices.

In recent months, Lay has become increasingly vocal about racism within his ranks. He has condemned a series of racist stubby holders produced by officers, printed with slurs mocking the Sudanese, Aboriginal and Vietnamese communities.

In late June, he recorded a video for his members, in which he described the incidents as “mind numbingly stupid and insensitive” and “a failure of leadership”.

“It has shown me there is a dark, ugly corner of Victoria Police and I don’t like it. It embarrasses me and it should embarrass you,” he said.

So far, however, he has refused to accept that there is a systemic problem with racial profiling.

“It’s an ugly tag,” he says. “It has a connotation of a racist organisation that is out to hurt people. That’s what doesn’t sit well with me.”

At the People’s Hearing in Melbourne Town Hall, Mohamad Tabbaa was clear in his diagnosis: while there is a problem with overt racism among a minority of officers, the gravest issue is pervasive, implicit bias.

“For those of us on the receiving end, we know that the problem of police racism and profiling is endemic. It is a problem of police culture, and not individual attitudes. It is a problem of systems and structures, not of bad apples.”

Among the officers within those systems, diversity remains low. The force doesn’t keep complete records on its members’ ethnic background, but Lay acknowledges that it comprises “a large number of white Anglo-Saxon men”.

***

The theatre at the Police Academy in Glen Waverley is arranged with blue tables and blue chairs, aligned in rows on the blue carpet.

The room is full of recruits, both uniformed and protective service officers, in only their first and second weeks of training. They’re here for a session called Community Encounters.

It’s a kind of speed-dating the “other”: the recruits rotate among a dozen volunteers from different religious groups, ethnicities, physical abilities, sexual orientations and gender identities.

“People are quite complex,” warns Acting Senior Sergeant Scott Davis, before the conversation begins. “You can’t pick one thing about them and think it explains everything.”

Mohamed Saleh has been volunteering here for three years. He is 27; he grew up in the flats at North Melbourne, and eventually, he’d like to join the Federal Police. He speaks fast – he only gets 15 minutes with each group and he’s got a lot to say.

Saleh describes the cycle of profiling and exclusion he has witnessed, which was a common theme at the People’s Hearing a week earlier. “Listen,” he concludes. “When you get posted somewhere, even if your seniors tell you, ‘Forget Community Encounters, that’s all crap’, remember what you’ve learnt.

“A lot needs to change. It comes down to treating people with respect and dignity. You have power and it’s about how you engage with it.”

But all the questions he fields are about social issues in the flats, not policing. One recruit asks how people there can better assimilate with society.

Saleh isn’t deterred by these responses: “A lot of them are very eager – they want to be good officers,” he says later.

At the end of the encounters, Davis tells the recruits they are responsible for making cultural change in the organisation. “I put it fairly and squarely on your shoulders,” he says.

For now, however, they’re not being equipped to carry that burden. The community engagement training for police officers comprises only about 15 hours out of the 33-week course. Most of those are scheduled during the first two weeks, and some sessions continue to reinforce stereotypes.

On the third morning of their course, recruits hustle into class after a fitness test. The session, on multicultural communities and policing, begins with a discussion of the difference between migrants and refugees.

Then, a liaison officer who arrived in Australia as a refugee tells his harrowing story of state persecution in his former homeland and warns that he didn’t trust police here, as a result.

For the remaining time, the recruits respond to scenarios – they must contend with an Indian and an Afghani man who are fearful and angry towards them. One trainer warns the recruits that people who speak broken English might be faking it, to avoid fines.

In its submission to Victoria Police, the Law Institute of Victoria argued that the academy’s training should be much more sophisticated.

“People have a whole bunch of inbuilt biases, which are a way of coping with a complex world,” Tang says. “You need to critically examine them, particularly if you’re in a responsible position like being a police officer, and understand the assumptions that are driving you.”

American academic Lorie Fridell conducts “anti-bias” training through her organisation Fair and Impartial Policing. It trains recruits, as well as senior commanders in law-enforcement agencies across the US.

Fridell argues it’s misleading to characterise police as overtly racist. Social psychology research shows that discrimination is now more likely to be unconscious – but that doesn’t diminish the problem.

“In policing, implicit bias might lead the officer to automatically perceive crime in the making when she observes two young Hispanic males driving in an all-Caucasian neighbourhood,” she explains.

This kind of stereotyping happens everywhere. “The science tells us that even the best officers might practice biased policing because they are human.

“Agencies need to educate their personnel about how biases manifest and provide them with skills to reduce and manage them.”

That’s the sort of training advocated by the Law Institute. Tang says that without it, the community will lose faith in the force. “At the end of the day,” he says, “this is about community confidence in police.”

Policing the statistics

LAST year, The Age published a story quoting police statistics that Sudanese and Somali-born Victorians were about five times more likely to commit crimes than the wider community.

The statistics appeared to justify racial profiling of people from those communities, in order to cut crime rates.

Yet academics have consistently rejected a causal link between ethnicity and propensity to commit crimes, explains Associate Professor Steve James, a criminologist at University of Melbourne.

He says police statistics “tell us much more about how police behave than they do about the real rates of crime in the community”.

Some people and some crimes are more likely to be reported, policed and prosecuted, he says. Broad comparisons are fraught, too.

“The peak offending period is young men between about 16 and 24. If you’ve got a bulge of that demographic in your population stats, then you’re going to have more crime.”

James Lombe Simon was born in Sudan and lives in Footscray. At the People’s Hearing into Racism and Policing, he spoke about the criminalising effect of those statistics.

“How does somebody trust me enough to give me a job, knowing that I might be five times more likely to cause crime in their workplace? How will somebody let me rent their house?”

Victoria Police subsequently apologised for releasing the statistics, which were used in a briefing with community leaders. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay admits that it was “damaging” for the force’s public relations. “This wasn’t about trying to demonise,” he says. “This was about trying to say, ‘Well how can you get better at preventing these young people falling into a life of crime?’, which we were worried about.”

But Professor James argues that the numbers, which relate to alleged offenders, are unreliable. He says better evidence came from the Victoria Police LEAP database (which records officers’ interactions with people) during the racial discrimination case settled earlier this year.

Those records revealed that young African-Australian men in Flemington were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds. A statistician for the police accepted these findings.

 

Read this article and Policing the statistics at The Age online.

You can read Mohamad Tabbaa’s full submission at the People’s Hearing at Right Now.

Fair Food Week

In Greener Homes on

It’s time to question what’s in the kitchen

THIS year, for the second summer, dozens of residents in South London have planted an unlikely crop in their gardens, backyards and allotments. They’re growing hops to supply the Brixton Beer Company.

The results of last harvest, a pale ale called Prima Donna, were particularly popular: the beer was served in three different pubs, and downed in a single night.

The project was coordinated by an organisation called City Farmers. Its purpose wasn’t mass production, but rather, to get fingernails dirty and loosen lips on the matter of urban agriculture and the sources of our sustenance.

That’s exactly kind of conversation Nick Rose and his collaborators replicated around Australia during Fair Food Week, which finished recently.

There were nearly 100 events around the country, from forums and films to farm tours and suburban food swaps. In Wodonga there was a cheesemaking workshop; in Beechworth, an open day for the neighbourhood kitchen; and in West Brunswick, a tour of the community garden and food forest.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“The idea of Fair Food Week is to shine a spotlight on the inequities and unsustainability of the way the food system is developing – this push towards very few big farms producing a small range of commodities, and the retail sector being dominated by a couple of companies,” Mr Rose says.

“We’re concerned about the long term sustainability and resilience of that system – I’m talking about problems like the obesity pandemic, the degradation of our soils and the cost-price squeeze on farmers, as well as the loss of our food processing capabilities and our vanishing high streets and greengrocers.”

The week was coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. The organisation also released the “People’s Food Plan”, a document prepared with input from hundreds of people in dozens of meetings around the country.

“Our vision is for something much more diverse, much more decentralised: a whole ecology of food production, processing, distribution and retailing which is about connecting people with the source of their food,” he says.

Householders can help those alternatives grow. “For fresh produce, particularly in a city like Melbourne, there are so many sources – markets, farmers markets, or vegetable box schemes, such as CERES’ Fair Food, which operates with local growers.”

Mr Rose was also a contributing author on a recent report on urban food security prepared for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.

The academics noted recent floods had revealed the fragility of food supply lines into cities and concluded that the viability and productivity of our current farming system is “likely to be seriously compromised” by climate change.

They concluded that while cities wouldn’t become self-sufficient, urban food growing could contribute nutritionally, environmentally and socially. Because local food systems reduce dependence on oil and cut wastage, and also, bring people together, they can help cities both moderate and adapt to climate change.

“We found that Melbourne is a hotbed of urban food in Australia,” Mr Rose says. “There are outstanding examples of people growing large quantities of food in their own gardens, as well as different models of community gardening and productive streetscapes.

“Through Fair Food Week we’re promoting a broader public discussion about the challenges of our food system, but we’re also celebrating the achievements of the fair food pioneers in Australia who are working for something fairer and better.”

A case of police oversight

In Social justice on

“DO you believe the Footscray police has done their duty of care?” Getachew Seyoum asks. He is standing at the bar table, during the coronial inquest into the death of his son, Michael Atakelt, who was found dead in the Maribyrnong River in July 2011.

“I don’t think I could comment on that,” Acting Senior Sergeant Tatter-Rendlemann, from Williamstown police station, replies.

The exchange is translated into Tigrinya for the family and members of the Tigray community, of northern Ethiopia, who have been present throughout the inquest. But there it ends. He does not explain why he can’t comment. He just doesn’t, and no one asks again.

Tatter-Rendlemann is the detective investigating the case on behalf of the Coroner. His evidence is this: he has “absolutely no results or theories” about what happened from the time Atakelt was last seen until his body was recovered eleven days later.

The initial investigation was completed by Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, from Footscray police station, whose best guess was that Atakelt had entered the river several kilometres downstream from where the body was found.

But during the first stage of the inquest – in February 2013, more than a year and a half after Atakelt died – Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, said it was not possible for a body to move such a distance upstream. McKerracher had not investigated any upstream clues, and he hadn’t spoken to Dixon, or to the search and rescue squad, who retrieved the body and who have since provided similar evidence.

And so, with nothing to go on, the Coroner suspended the hearing. He directed the police to reinvestigate with a different detective in charge.

Tatter-Rendlemann took over, but was assisted by McKerracher. On the Coroner’s instructions, they followed up evidence that had never been collected. They sought CCTV footage and security information from several locations, but it was two years too late. Wherever there was footage or other records, they had long since been deleted. The detectives put out a media release and distributed posters asking for witnesses. No one replied. They sought further interviews, but couldn’t track everyone down. Those they did find offered no new clues.

***

Almost from the moment Atakelt’s body was found, community members have repeatedly requested an independent investigation, and that Footscray police not be involved.

At a public meeting in December 2011, Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana defended the decision to assign the case to Footscray, explaining that it was standard practice for the local crime investigators to handle such a case, and he would not deviate from that practice.

But he assured his audience that not only was an experienced investigator in charge, but also that his work had been closely overseen by the Homicide Squad, and monitored by both the Ethical Standards Department and the Office of Police Integrity. It was, he promised, “a very thorough investigation”.

Detective Senior Sergeant Sol Solomon was also there that day. Solomon, from Homicide, took the microphone and offered his sympathy to the family and community for their loss. He continued: “I can assure you that the investigation has been thorough and totally dedicated to finding out exactly what happened to Michael and why he lost his life in the river. I’ve seen the quality of the investigation myself and it is first class and you can be assured that all possible leads have been explored.”

Subsequently, in an interview with me on 29 December 2011, Fontana reiterated his comments at the forum. He explained that by “oversight”, he meant: “actively monitoring all stages of the investigation”.

Did that supervision occur? Were all levels of police oversight satisfied that the investigation of this young man’s death was “first class”? If so, who will hold them to account?

***

In February, Victoria Police settled a long running racial discrimination claim brought by several young African-Australian men. The young men say police regularly stopped them around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted them.

Victoria Police denies the allegations, but as part of the settlement, it agreed to hold public inquiries into its cross-cultural training and “field contacts” policy.

These inquiries are being conducted now. They are independent and open to public submissions. The final reports are due in December. Ken Lay, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, has made several strong public statements about the importance of these inquiries and the need to stamp out examples of racism in the force. “We need to have the public’s trust and confidence in what we do,” he said, announcing the public submission process.

One document released from the racial discrimination case – statistical evidence based on police data – shows that young African-Australian men in the area were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds.

But, as Michael Atakelt’s case demonstrates, overpolicing is only one part of the problem. “The flipside of overpolicing is underprotection,” explains Associate Professor Steve James, a criminologist from University of Melbourne. “You target certain groups and you overpolice them, but you don’t provide for them the same rigor of victim services.

“Police can do just as much damage to community relations by simply underpolicing as they can by overpolicing.”

***

After a six-month pause, the inquest into Atakelt’s death resumed last Monday. The Coroners Court is on the eleventh floor of an ordinary office building on Exhibition Street. Each day, about three-dozen members of the Tigray community attended. The presiding coroner, Ian Gray, was careful to ensure that everything was translated into Tigrinya and, also, that Seyoum, who is representing himself, has been able to ask whatever questions he would like.

For most of the week, evidence centred on the failed attempts by Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tella, to report her son missing. It took four separate visits and several phone calls over three days before a police officer lodged the report, by which time Tella – whose English is limited – had become very agitated.

In their evidence for the Coroner, all the police officers maintained they had made the correct decision: at that time, there was no reason for any concern or fear for Atakelt’s welfare – even when the report was finally lodged. The following day, however, he was found dead in the river.

For days, those police officers were questioned at great length about normal procedures and about their conversations with Tella. And so, for most of the week, Atakelt went missing from his own inquest.

He returned late on Friday afternoon, in the final piece of evidence before the hearing adjourned once more: the court was shown CCTV footage of his last known whereabouts.

At 7.07 pm on Sunday 26 June, 2011, Atakelt stepped off the train at Newmarket Station, in Flemington. On the screen, we watched him walking calmly among the crowd of exiting passengers, dressed in a dark jumper with a pale stripe across the chest. He slowed an instant as someone passed through the gates before him, and then, he too, exited the scene. We watched him leave the station as though he were an ordinary young man getting off a train.

The Coroner called a break. Afterwards, community members asked to watch the video again to verify its authenticity. People had noticed that the date and time had not appeared on-screen. How could they believe what they had seen?

Among Atakelt’s family and community members, the conduct of the investigation has produced a vast store of suspicion. And the curiosities continue. Detective McKerracher was overseas on holidays, unavailable to attend for the whole week.

Also missing were the senior police – Fontana, Solomon, and the responsible officers of the (then) Ethical Standards Department and Office of Police Integrity – who oversaw and vouched for the quality of the investigation.

At that public meeting in December 2011, Fontana said this: “We will ultimately be judged on the quality of this investigation by the Coroner and any of these oversight bodies. We’re very conscious of that and the members, in my view, have done a very thorough job.”

Given Ken Lay’s commitment elsewhere to establishing the trust of the community, he should be keenly interested in their explanations. But no one, not the Coroner, nor any of the parties – including the barrister representing the Chief of Police – has so far sought their evidence.

There are still three days remaining in the inquest, scheduled for late September. At the last moment, on a request from Seyoum, McKerracher has been listed as a witness. He may yet have to answer questions about the conduct of the investigation.

Read this article at the Overland Journal blog.

Read other articles I’ve written about this case (most recent first):

Police have no leads in delayed investigation

Changing a whole system : racialised policing in Melbourne

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

Watching a hearing

Between two oceans

Billions and billions

In Blog on

I’M on a winter search for the sun, a few weeks of warmth to help me through to spring. With my friend Roger, I set off north on a drizzly Friday afternoon. We drove to Tocumwal, on the Murray River, and camped in state forest on the Victorian side.

Roger has bad knees, so he can’t walk much. But what he lacks in mobility, he makes up for in curiosity. That’s why we bumped all the way to the end of the muddy track in the dark before deciding on a camp spot: he wanted to see what was round the next corner. I took the wheel next morning, windscreen still foggy, my attention on the conversation, and promptly got us bogged. We got bogged a second time that day, driving off-road to look at an interesting house we’d glimpsed from the freeway.

Our drive to Brisbane, on the Newell Highway – mostly – continued in this fashion: detours, pauses, slow circumnavigations of every town and back again. Ooh, look at that old building! Maps. More maps. A lazy morning spent on the sloping balcony at the Imperial Hotel in Coonabarabran. Fried food. Bains-marie. We got to Brisbane in five days.

Along the way, I finally began to learn about stars. (Here’s Leunig’s take, for the election.)

I’d never before understood the movement of the night sky. I like to look for the Southern Cross, but I’ve never been sure where it would be, or why. I remember reading a picture book called My Place in Space over and over again, and understanding the smallness of Earth had a profound effect on me. But on the whole, I didn’t pay much attention to what was overhead, besides special occasions – school camps, summer holidays at the beach, or travelling here and there.

I’m only partly to blame. Growing up in the suburbs and then living in the city, stars are the exception, not the rule. When Galileo was stargazing on a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way was bright enough to cast a shadow. It still is – but not where people are, not where lights crowd out the cosmos.

The Newell Highway is an observatory tour, of sorts. It passes the Dish, at Parkes; the big telescope near Coonabarabran and the radio telescope compact array near Narrabri.

We bypassed the Dish, but visited the second two. And in the evenings, when we stopped for camp, Roger looked up. He explained how to find south using the Southern Cross and its pointers, talked about the varying expansion rate of the universe, and sung the galaxy song from Monty Python. He also sung the praises of Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer, whose Cosmos television series he’d watched as a young man. “There have been others since with better graphics, but none with better politics,” Roger said.

At Roma, in western Queensland, Rog turned north for Carnarvon Gorge and eventually, Cairns. I hitched further west, to Charleville.

There’s a tourist site on the edge of town called the Cosmos Centre. I think it’s the best attraction I’ve visited. And there, I found the sun – but not in the way I’d bargained for.

I saw it through a telescope. I was in a group and each of us, in turn, peered, paused, and gasped. A rough looking man wearing tracksuit pants and thongs limped up and put his eye to the telescope. “I see it,” he said. “Oh, wow.”

Through the filter, the sun appeared molten red. I saw dark sunspots, only pinpricks on the lens but larger than Earth in reality; and huge solar flares on its edge, like wisps in the wind.

(The Sun: a photo on my phone through the eyepiece of the telescope – it’s nothing like what I saw, but you get the idea.)

I returned to the Cosmos Centre in the night time too, and saw Saturn and its rings through a telescope, and a globular cluster – stars as bright and close as a field of flowers – and the Swan Nebula, a great dust cloud from which stars are born. The guide pointed out a puff of white in the sky, the Small Magellenic Cloud, and suddenly I could see another galaxy 200,000 light years away with my naked eyes.

It is several days ago now, but it still feels like revelation.

The final episode in Sagan’s Cosmos was called ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ He despaired that it might be inevitable for technological civilizations to self-destruct. For humanity, he was alarmed about nuclear war, and later, about the hole in the ozone layer and about the greenhouse effect. He died in 1996.

But he did have hope: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet,” he said.

“One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the Earth, finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”

Shouting from the rooftops

In Greener Homes on

One million Australian households now produce solar electricity

IN March 2012, Sian Dart had solar panels installed on her roof in Footscray. But it was late May before the system was finally connected to the grid. In the meantime, she spent hours chasing paperwork between the installer, the electricity distributor and the retailer.

It took another four months before the last mix-up was resolved. “It was very frustrating, and I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken if we hadn’t followed up so doggedly,” she says.

Earlier this year, the 1 millionth Australian household – about one in nine across the country – installed solar photovoltaic panels. There are half a million with solar hot water services too.

The process doesn’t always go as expected, for reasons both practical and political: rebates and feed-in tariffs have been in flux in every state. But now there are so many systems on roofs, solar homeowners are gaining a stronger public voice.


Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Victoria, the electorate with the most solar households is Lalor, held by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, with just over 10,000 homes out of 80,000. Other solar strongholds include regional seats McEwen, Indi and McMillan. Altogether, Victorian homeowners have invested about $1.3 billion in solar electricity.

Those statistics have been gathered by advocacy group 100% Renewable Energy, which has prepared “solar scorecards” rating each member of parliament before the federal election. The organisation has also started Solar Citizens, a community project to transform the growing people-power into pressure for solar-friendly policies.

“As individual consumers, we’re isolated and relatively powerless compared to big energy companies who have enormous influence over governments,” says Geoff Evans, from Solar Citizens.

“We want to unite solar households, and people who like solar, to call on decision-makers to grow this technology that enables people to save money and produce clean energy.”

Dr Evans argues solar electricity is unfairly blamed for increasing power prices, and that solar owners must not be lumped with high fixed connection fees.

The Productivity Commission’s recent report on the electricity network, released in late June, supports his claim about price rises. It attributed most of the jump in bills in recent years to “spiralling network costs”, caused in part by poor regulation of the industry.

Regulators and utilities here have so far resisted the shift to distributed power generation, but in New Zealand there are signs of change. Vector, the electricity distributor for Auckland and surrounds, has begun a pilot programme offering a 3-kilowatt solar panel system together with battery storage. It costs $2000 up front, with a monthly fee of $70 for 12 years.

For an average household, that equates to about the same or less cost than normal bills. Participants remain connected to the grid, but the battery storage will help reduce the evening peak demand on the network.

In Footscray, with her panels in place, Ms Dart’s electricity bills have fallen by more than two-thirds. Unexpectedly, generating her own power has also made her more “militant” about avoiding unnecessary waste.

“Since we got the glitches sorted, it’s been drama-free – they’re sitting there doing their job,” she says. “If it’s sunny during the day, I feel good knowing we’re making a few dollars.”

To help avoid the trouble she had, you can prepare yourself with the Clean Energy Council’s guide to buying household solar panels, which includes a step-by-step installation checklist.

Read this article at The Age online