Michael Green

Writer and producer

Many happy returns

In Community development, Social justice on

Can private wealth cure social ills, at a profit?

An edited version of this story was published in Smith Journal, Volume 8

THE Peterborough prison was opened in 2005, at the old Baker Perkins engineering works, half a mile from the centre of town. Where once they had manufactured industrial machinery, now they would punish and rehabilitate humans.

The jail was designed and managed by Sodexo, a French multinational hospitality company; the UK’s prisons chief said it would provide a blueprint for prisons of the future. But initial results were troubling: after just three years, a leaked assessment revealed that Peterborough, an hour north of London, ranked last out of 132 clinks across the country. Among other deficiencies, it had scored poorly for reducing the rate of re-offending.

What to do? The authorities doubled-down on privatisation.

In mid-2010, the justice minister Crispin Blunt went on location to announce a world first: private investors would fund a scheme that worked with 3000 short-term jailbirds to help them stay out, once they got out. He called the initiative a “social impact bond”. Investors would provide the cash to pay for the social workers and support staff, and if reoffending fell by more than the target amount, the government would give their money back, plus 13 per cent interest.

The payoff hasn’t yet come, but already the Peterborough bet has been replicated elsewhere around the world. In New York, Boston, London, Leeds, Manchester and Sydney, on recidivism, chronic homelessness and child welfare: private investors are now speculating on cures to society’s most challenging problems. It is only the beginning. Governments in Canada, Scotland, Germany, Israel and Ireland are eyeing the bonds too.

“This promising financing model has potential to transform the way governments around the country fund social programs,” said Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, announcing a plan to work with young men at Rikers Island prison, bankrolled by $10 million from Goldman Sachs.

Mayor Bloomberg’s personal philanthropic foundation guaranteed a loan on the scheme. “Social impact bonds have potential upside for investors,” he says, “but citizens and taxpayers stand to be the biggest beneficiaries.”


In early spring last year, academics, bureaucrats, bankers and do-gooders gathered at the Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel, near Circular Quay, for the “Inaugural Social Finance Forum”, organised by the Centre for Social Impact, at the University of New South Wales. For a day, they debated social impact bonds.

The first speaker was Peter Shergold, formerly Australia’s top public servant under Liberal prime minister John Howard. His talk was called “Creating a win-win for government, social enterprise and investors”. He stressed the financially volatile times in which we live, when governments face increasing pressure on their budgets. It was an oft-repeated theme, including in the keynote speech, by David Hutchison, the CEO of Social Finance, and the broker of the Peterborough bond.

Hutchison described the government spending cycle in the grip of austerity: funds are directed to acute needs and cut from prevention; over time, this leads to more demand for crisis services, and further diminishes the budget for prevention – and so on. Social impact bonds, he argued, break the cycle by funding early intervention.

Earlier in 2012, the New South Wales government had announced a pilot scheme comprising three “social benefit bonds”: two would aim to reduce the number of children in out-of-home care, and the other, like Peterborough, would target recidivism.

For now, more than two-in-five prisoners in the state are back in the slammer within two years of being released. Cameron Robertson is the treasurer of Mission Australia, the large charity that is negotiating the recidivism bond, together with private prison operator The GEO Group. Financially, reoffending is costly all the way along the line, he explains, from the policing and the courts, all the way to the building and running of jails.

“If a program reduces reoffending it brings savings to everyone – that’s the financial side. More importantly, there’s a significant benefit to the individual and to society more broadly.”

Even before his bond has been issued, Robertson is confident that on the financial markets, there’s “significant demand for this type of product” among “high net-worth individuals, super funds and corporates”.

The investors in the Peterborough bond were almost exclusively charitable trusts. They’ve funded a program that works with criminals sentenced to fewer than twelve months. The men receive additional support inside jail and on the outside, and so too, do their families.

This June, the UK government announced interim results – a slight fall in reconviction rates from 41.6 per cent to 39.2 per cent. Elsewhere around the country, re-offending has risen by 2 per cent over the same period.

The measures were different to the ones specified in the bond, so it isn’t clear whether or not the program will meet its target for investors. The philanthropists won’t know until halfway through 2014 if they’ll get their money back. Nevertheless, Chris Grayling, the justice minister, described the results as “very encouraging indeed”.

The market for social impact bonds is a tantalising prospect: investors make money, governments save it, and prisoners, the homeless and broken families make good.

At the social finance conference at the Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel, Shergold put it this way: “In the best of the possible worlds, this can be a win for the private sector, a win for the public sector, and a win for the community sector.”

That day, several speakers turned their minds to the obstacles between the world as it is, and the preferable world – the one with social impact bonds. Among the chief difficulties is the task of creating a market – establishing buyers and sellers, prices, measurements and yields – where once there was only taxing and spending, philanthropy, or nothing at all.

Shergold, who is now a key advisor to the New South Wales government on social investment, observed that no one knows whether investors will come. “Information is scant. Risks are hard to predict,” he said. Even so, he predicted that public sector contracting “will increasingly take the form of bonds”.

When Hutchison launched the Peterborough initiative, a big investor enquired about a derivatives market – four or five social impact bonds combined in a portfolio and exchanged like stock options, say, or sub-prime mortgages.

But even if there can be such a market, should there be?

***

In Australia and the UK, citizens volunteer to donate their blood to strangers for uses they will never know. In the US, some people donate theirs, while others sell to commercial blood banks as a way of making money.

The market for blood, thought British sociologist Richard Titmuss, is a market well worth dissecting. In his book, The Gift Relationship, published in 1970, Titmuss analysed the practicalities of blood supply and use. He argued that commercial exchange was less efficient: wastage and costs were higher in the US than in the UK, shortages more frequent, administration more excessive, and the risks of contamination more acute.

Titmuss began with those details – “the particular and microscopic” – but zoomed out to questions about the role of altruism in society. One consequence of blood money, he argued, was the creation of a new class: “an exploited human population of high blood yielders”. The redistribution of blood “from the poor to the rich appears to be one of the dominant effects of the American blood banking systems”, he said.

He believed that his subject illustrated something corrosive about economic thinking: rather than simply expanding people’s choices, as economists argued, establishing market mechanisms can take something important away. The commercialisation of blood “erodes the sense of community” and “represses the expression of altruism”, he said. Why give when others are earning?

“The ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions – and particularly its health and welfare systems – can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man; such systems can foster integration or alienation; they can allow the ‘theme of the gift’ – of generosity towards strangers – to spread among and between social groups and generations,” he wrote.

“Where are the lines to be drawn – can indeed any lines at all pragmatically be drawn – if human blood be legitimated as a consumption good?”

***

As with Titmuss and the buying and selling of blood, the arguments against social impact bonds can be marshalled along both practical and ethical lines.

First, the practicalities – measurement. In the case of the Peterborough bond, Professor Sheila Bird, from the University of Cambridge, observes that it “might well be a brilliant success; it might achieve little. But we aren’t going to know either way.”

Neither the prison, nor the prisoners were chosen at random. The warden nominated his facility, and participation is voluntarily. Their reoffending rates will be compared against other convicts who don’t receive support, but under these circumstances, Bird says, no one can be sure it’s a good comparison. Did those crims have better attitudes, or fewer drug and mental health problems? Did the hard cases stay clear? Did the warden’s enthusiasm make a difference?

Neither will the trial explain attribution. Should the results be put down to the particular social work program, to the extra money alone, or to the innovative private funding mechanism?

To know if government is getting a good deal, these are crucial questions. Assessing impacts is always complex – arguably too complex to form a base for a financial product. It’s complex no matter who funds the program, but with bonds, the stakes are higher.

The Benevolent Society is one of the charities taking part in the New South Wales trial. Together with Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank, they’ll run a program designed to keep vulnerable children safely at home, and out of the child protection system.

At the social finance forum, Jocelyn Bell, the charity’s business development manager, referred to modelling on the scheme’s results. One option, she said, is to provide a level of service that ensures the highest number of children stay home, and therefore, offers investors the maximum return. But that level of service “would not sufficiently support children to thrive in a home environment”. There’s a trade-off between the interests of the kids and the money-makers.

The second practicality – money. This one, says Christopher Stone, from progressive think tank Centre for Policy Development, is one that should be apparent to economists: why pay more, when you can pay less?

“Governments could borrow that money at a far lower rate than the private sector does, and they won’t expect to make a profit,” he says. “Logically, government investment in these same programs would be more sensible than private investment.”

With social impact bonds, the public sector ends up paying anyway – it just pays significantly more. Year upon year, bond upon bond, the extra costs will mean governments can afford fewer programs overall.

At the social finance forum, Hutchison – the founder of the Peterborough bond –noted that public servants in the UK had struggled to justify high payments for bonds, when they could borrow at a risk-free rate and deliver the services directly. He believes the bonds are worthwhile because they’re more likely to succeed and the public won’t pay if they fail.

Stone is sceptical. He was one of the authors of ‘Big Society and Australia’, a report on the privatisation policies of the Conservative government in the UK and how they might apply in Australia. “There’s a question about whether government can ever really transfer risk,” he says. “And there are examples where even when the outsourced firms fail, they can still win.” Most of the claimed benefits of the bonds, he argues, such as extra investment in prevention, or a rigorous focus on outputs, can be achieved by other means.

He’s concerned about transparency too. In New South Wales, the government says modelling of the costs and benefits of its pilot social bonds, undertaken by the consultants KPMG, demonstrates the good value for taxpayers. But that modelling? You can’t see it. It’s confidential.

***

Titmuss died in 1973. In the four decades that have passed, market values have encroached on social policy in such a way as to support his warning that “no lines can be drawn”. Although markets have not yet acquired blood donation in Australia and the UK, many other elements of the welfare, education and health systems have been privatised or outsourced, at least in part.

Social impact bonds advance the project in a way likely unimaginable to Titmuss: where previously the rich were taxed to reduce inequality and pay for social programs, now they can earn a healthy return on them instead, directly underwritten by taxpayers.

“All policy would become in the end economic policy and the only values that would count are those that can be measured in terms of money,” Titmuss wrote. These are ethical objections to the bonds: they undermine the obligations of governments and wealthy citizens to the struggling. They alter the meaning of philanthropy, too. Why give when others are earning?

Cameron Robertson, the Mission Australia treasurer, acknowledges the experiment: “If, in five years’ time, we haven’t increased the pool of funding, and the wealthy philanthropist who was previously donating his money is now putting it in a bond, then we won’t have been successful.”

He’s hoping they’ll keep the donations and add something extra on top. “If we can get even a small portion of industry superannuation fund money, for example, then we’ll have increased the amount of capital and the number of programs.”

Just before Titmuss died, the philosopher Peter Singer wrote an essay defending the sociologist against economist Kenneth Arrow. In a critique of The Gift Relationship, Arrow had argued that altruism was a scarce resource – we’d better save it for when it really matters, rather than squander it where a price will work instead.

Singer disagreed. Altruism was not limited in supply, like crude oil, but more like sexual potency: “much used, it constantly renews itself, but if rarely called upon, it will begin to atrophy”.

For Singer, the matter came down to a choice of questions: “We must ask ourselves not ‘How can we obtain the most blood at the least cost?’ but ‘What sort of society do we want?’”

Community wind

In Greener Homes on

There’s lots of energy behind locally-owned wind power

LATE last summer, Melbourne artist Ghostpatrol spent a week manoeuvring a crane in a paddock in Leonards Hill. With a small team, he painted a huge image of a girl dressed in green, on one of the two wind turbines that comprise the Hepburn Wind farm, near Daylesford.

The artists camped under the turbine. They had to rise early to paint before the wind picked up, and for good reason: the girl’s name – and the turbine’s too – is Gale.

The community-owned wind farm has now been operating for more than two years. It has produced more than 22 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy, which more than matches the amount used by households in Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane, Hepburn Wind’s community officer, takes regular tours for school groups and university students. “We’re the closest wind farm to Melbourne,” she says. “We believe we’ve got a big role to play in helping to demystify wind power.”

Giving Gale a personality has helped with that, and so too, will a new sign on the road at the front of the wind farm, which will click over with every kilowatt-hour the turbines produce.

“It will address the myth that wind energy is unreliable. Although it’s intermittent, it is really predictable,” she says.

As well as electricity, the turbines also generate money for the local community. So far, more than three-dozen projects – from solar streetlights to public seating at a cemetery – have received a total of $72,000.

“We can see how the people’s consciousness about community-owned renewable energy is growing,” Ms Lane says. “Within the spread of grants this year, there was a solar project, a bio-energy project, and an energy efficiency project.”

It has been a hard road: Hepburn Wind took six years to complete (planning permits and capital-raising were among the thorniest problems). But since then, the project has received local, state, national and global awards. Last year, it won the World Wind Energy award, for best global project, judged by the industry’s international association.

The wind farm is a cooperative – more than half of its 2000 members are locals, and every member has only one vote. It was nominated as the flagship project of the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives in 2012.

Ms Lane also works for Embark, an organisation created by Hepburn Wind’s founders, to support other community renewable energy projects.

“We’ve developed a model for community wind and a model for community solar energy,” she explains. “Right now there are about 70 different groups around Australia interested in developing their own projects.”

One of the most advanced is nearby: Mount Alexander Community Wind, based in Castlemaine, which received 60 expressions of interest from landowners keen to host turbines. They’re planning for up to 6 turbines, but theirs too, will be a long process. All going well, the blades will begin turning in 2017.

Only one wind farm has been approved in Victoria in more than two years. In August 2011, the state government introduced guidelines establishing no-go zones and a requirement that all homeowners within 2 kilometres must approve a development.

The lone successful project, five turbines at Coonooer Bridge, north west of Bendigo, also has a strong community focus: it’s partly owned by neighbouring landowners and will also offer up to $15,000 in local grants each year.

Read this article at The Age online

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

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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