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.

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

Seams of discontent

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Farmers, teachers and retirees are fighting controversial gas exploration plans in South Gippsland.

ON a rainy Saturday morning in early June, three-dozen men and women, nearly all middle-aged and wearing sensible shoes, sit in the council chambers at Leongatha, learning how to be activists. “The battle lines are drawn at Seaspray,” says Wendy, from Poowong, a dairy town in South Gippsland. “Something will happen, and we need to know how to conduct ourselves.”

Julie Boulton, a dairy farmer at Seaspray, a tiny town on Ninety-Mile Beach, explains that she’d been involved in a flash blockade a fortnight earlier, confronting the gas company Lakes Oil. “It was scary,” she says. “I want to learn heaps today and take it back to my community.”

Participants have arrived from all over Gippsland. Farmers, teachers, doctors and retirees, there to learn the basics of non-violent, direct action protesting. They hear about all manner of civil disobedience – blockading, locking-on, sitting-in – techniques employed successfully by residents in NSW’s northern rivers, where two coal seam gas companies recently suspended their operations.

South Gippsland is blanketed with more than a dozen licences for unconventional gas exploration – which uses controversial techniques to access hard-to-extract resources. For now, nothing is happening. In August 2012, the state government announced a moratorium on coal seam gas exploration and on the drilling method known as fracking, in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground at great pressure to fracture coal or rock, and release gas.

Even so, people are worried, fearful about risks to water supplies and local health, as well the price and productivity of their land. Poowong has declared itself “coal and coal seam gas free” and six other towns are likely to do the same before the year is out. The South Gippsland Landcare Network – which comprises 18 smaller groups – has publicly opposed the industry. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve never been against anything their life and they’re willing to go to jail over this,” says Mark Walters, the network’s vice president.

The training session in Leongatha is coordinated by the Lock the Gate Alliance and Quit Coal, a Melbourne group affiliated with Friends of the Earth. Julie Boulton listens intently, anxiously twirling her ponytail. For the last three months, she has been leading the campaign in Seaspray. When the facilitator from Quit Coal warns the Gippslanders that the police will probably keep track of them – as “activists and trouble-makers” – Julie turns to her daughter, who is a teacher, wide-eyed.

Ray, from the Strzelecki Ranges, has no such concerns: “If we stop ’em at Seaspray, we’ll stop ’em all over Victoria!”

Lakes Oil had been preparing to frack a well to the west of Seaspray, on land adjoining the Boultons’ dairy farm, in October 2012. The company wants to exploit an unconventional gas resource known as tight gas – which is held in sandstone, much deeper below ground than the coal seams – but the moratorium scuppered its plans.

Local angst has not abated. Over summer, Seaspray Primary School refused a cash donation from the company. In May, the board members – including former Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer and outspoken climate change denier Ian Plimer – visited the site to watch the flaring of a well, but were confronted with protestors instead.

Rob Annells, the CEO, is undeterred. He says he understands locals are worried, but believes their concerns are based on misinformation. “Wells all over the world are always drilled through water tables. Providing the regulations are good and adhered to, there’s no danger.”

“There is some disruption to the farmland at the time of drilling and fracking, but once it’s in place and the land is restored, you can hardly see where we’ve been.”

Annells is urging the government to lift the moratorium. He says the company could re-commence testing within six months, and if all goes according to plan, begin production within two or three years.

In late May, the Napthine government released its response to an inquiry into mineral exploration in Victoria. Its two-dozen recommendations are largely designed to secure resources, speed up approvals and reduce costs for miners.

The day before the meeting at Leongatha, energy ministers from around the country agreed on regulatory guidelines for the coal seam gas industry. In Gippsland, there’s growing apprehension that the moratorium will soon be lifted.

Ursula Alquier, from Warragul, is a coordinator with the Lock the Gate Alliance. She says the Minister for Energy and Resources, Nick Kotsiras, has refused to answer calls from Gippsland residents. “The main reason people are frustrated is because they’re being totally ignored,” she says.

Kotsiras, however, insists there will be “proper and thorough community consultation” before any decision is made about the moratorium. He says his department has begun identifying the changes necessary for Victorian rules to match the new national standards for coal seam gas, but it has no plans to assess tight gas.

Meanwhile, the federal government has funded new research, including a bioregional assessment of the Gippsland basin and a study of the chemicals used in fracking, but it will be about two years before they’re complete.  

Kotsiras says he will pay close attention to the science, but won’t promise to wait for those studies before deciding. The ban on fracking and coal seam gas is likely to remain in place until the end of the year. An announcement about community consultation is expected within weeks.

Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is the member for South Gippsland. He maintains the government won’t “abandon those rolling green hills”.

“We are not going to risk our aquifers, or put farming in jeopardy – let alone our liveability – for the fact we may or may not have this resource underneath us,” he says. “This will be done very appropriately and in a timely manner.”

North east of Seaspray, Gregor McNaughton runs sheep on one of the largest farms in the area. He’s familiar with miners: they’ve been drilling on his property since the early 1980s and pipelines from Esso’s offshore oil and gas fields pass beside his paddocks.

For the last decade, he has received rent for ten gas wells on his land, which are now owned by a joint venture between Ignite Energy Resources and Exxon Mobil. As well as the income, he’s enticed by the prospect of new irrigation water, which would be created by the extraction process, should the companies go into production.

“We’ve never had any problems with mining companies here,” he says, as we bump over his paddocks towards the wells. “I’d be dead against them drilling on a small farm or close to town, but on broadacres like ours, I’ve got no objection. They’ve been very kind and they’ve kept up with their commitments.”

The wells haven’t yet produced anything. There’s a strong chance they never will, because Victoria’s resources are far from proven. Over the next two years, Ignite and Exxon plan to drill seven new wells in the area, continuing the search for coal seam gas.

Rick Wilkinson, from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, expects that onshore gas production here, from “whatever the rock – shale, coal or sandstone”, won’t occur for “another five to ten years at the earliest”.

All of Gippsland’s coal is brown. Wilkinson is not aware of brown coal seam gas having been produced anywhere in the world. “It would be particularly difficult and quite surprising if it actually comes to fruition,” he says.

Even if the gas flows, water may not. Most of the brown coal in Gippsland is subject to a groundwater cap, managed by Southern Rural Water. Producing gas is a thirsty business, and as it stands, miners will be forced to buy water rights from an existing user.

But the industry argues that exploiting unconventional gas is necessary to avoid shortages in coming years. Exxon Mobil spokesperson Chris Welberry says conventional gas fields in Bass Strait will diminish by mid next decade.

Critics of the industry, such as Mark Ogge, from the Australia Institute, say that any pressure on supply isn’t due to local demand, but rather, the lure of exporting gas to Asia at higher prices. “No one would consider drilling for gas in Seaspray if we weren’t about to begin exporting liquefied natural gas.”

Given our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he argues, it makes more sense to phase out gas in favour of renewable energy.

The Climate Commission last month released a report stating that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. “Why burn gas when renewable energy has no emissions, is often cheaper and getting even cheaper just as gas prices are about to skyrocket?” Ogge says.

At 66 years old, Gregor McNaughton remains a keen tennis player. He noticed recently that friends from the tennis club in Seaspray have put up Lock the Gate signs. The yellow triangles are appearing on more and more properties, bearing this warning: “Entry to this property is prohibited to coal and gas companies”.

“Something like this, it splits towns,” McNaughton laments. “People need to get educated about the facts.” But then again, he admits, others would say the same about him.

And whose facts, anyway? Last month, the Australian Water Association hosted a capital city tour on unconventional gas, featuring Dr Ian Duncan, a geologist from the University of Texas. In Melbourne, he told regulators and industry attendees that in the USA, where there are hundreds of thousands of shale gas wells, there was almost no evidence of adverse effects on groundwater or human health. The risks associated with coal seam gas, he suggested, were even fewer.

Wilkinson, from the petroleum association, ascribes worries about safety to “fear of the unknown”. “If half the so-called facts I’ve seen flying around were true, I would be worried about it as well,” he says.

But in a well-regarded report released last October, Dr John Williams, the former chief of CSIRO’s land and water division, concluded that the risks to water systems, agricultural land use and biodiversity were serious. Our piecemeal approach to regulation is leading us towards “degraded and collapsing landscapes”, he wrote.

Similarly, the National Water Commission has warned that coal seam gas poses significant risks to surface and groundwater systems. Recently, the commission’s chair, Karlene Maywald, said that while regulators had begun playing catch up on the science of coal seam gas, they were neglecting to prepare for tight gas.

In Queensland there are over 4500 coal seam gas wells – projected to increase 40,000 within two decades – which now provide a third of the gas used in eastern Australia.

Dr Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer from Monash University’s engineering department, has been speaking about the risks at community meetings across Gippsland.

He says projects in Queensland have been approved without adequate background studies. “It’s absolute blindness to pretend there have been no impacts so far,” he says. “The problem is that evidence is often anecdotal, because the industry has been developed and regulated on the belief that there won’t be any impacts – so why waste money on monitoring?”

Down a dirt road out of town, Julie Boulton is showing me the spot where the locals blockaded the Lakes Oil board members, when a four-wheel drive comes the other way.

Bob Thompson, liaison officer for Lakes Oil, is taking a departmental inspector on a tour of the wells. “What’s your concern?” Bob asks, tersely.

“I’m concerned about our groundwater,” Julie replies quickly. “I’m concerned you’ll take a risk and damage our aquifer and we won’t be able to farm and live here anymore.”

“We don’t touch the aquifer,” Bob says. “There’s steel casing and concrete on the well.”

“But how long will that last?”

Bob brushes it off. He turns away and complains to the government man that she won’t believe him.

Afterwards, at her house, Julie and her husband David say Bob was right about one thing: “We don’t trust them. It’s too risky.”

On their table they have the results of a door-to-door survey conducted by local volunteers. All but a handful of residents agreed; they’ll to fight to keep Seaspray “gasfield free”.

GAS IN GIPPSLAND

Coal seam gas: Methane trapped in coal deposits.

Tight gas: Methane held deep underground in hard, impermeable rock, sandstone or limestone.

Fracking: A drilling technique used to extract gas by injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to fracture coal or rock. Fracking is always used to produce tight gas, but only sometimes for coal seam gas.

Read this article at The Age online

Bill McKibben

In Environment, Social justice on

Interview published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

Writer and activist Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change. Now he’s piloting the fastest growing social movement in the world: the campaign to sell out of fossil fuels. This is how he explains it:

IN the mid-1980s I was reading the early science about global warming and thinking about it. Then came the ungodly hot summer of 1988, among the worst in North American history to that date. Crops withered, barge traffic on the Mississippi ground to a halt. It wasn’t as bad as 2012, but at the time it seemed horrific. Suddenly the science felt very real.

The next year I published my first book, The End of Nature. In part, it was the first book-length piece of reporting about climate change, but it was also part philosophical essay about its meaning. I was interested in the way that suddenly no place on Earth was unaffected by human presence – that’s what the title meant. My dominant emotion was sadness, not fear. Over time I’ve come to have more practical reasons for working to slow climate change, but that sadness lingers.

For me, a new line of thinking opened up last year once I saw the numbers put out by an organisation called Carbon Tracker. I’ve followed this all closely, but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of the story was written. That unless we somehow change it, there is no room for speculation or wishful thinking. The fossil fuel industry has five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn.

Once you understand that, you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.

The other side is that – at least in American politics – the same companies whose business plan guarantees that the planet will tank are also the ones who are most efficient at corrupting our political system. They give the most money in campaign donations and spend the most money lobbying and advertising. They are the reason we never get anything changed.

So it seemed to me it was high time we went on offense against this industry, instead of forever playing defence.

In November we launched the Go Fossil Free campaign with a tour of the US, calling for universities to sell their shares in fossil fuels. We started the night after the presidential election. We sold out big concert halls every night, all across the country. That was exciting, but the most exciting thing was helping midwife an explosive movement. When we started there were a handful of campuses thinking about it, and now, there are more than 300.

So far six colleges have divested, but it’s early days. It’s actually happening faster than we thought. The City of Seattle divested its funds too. A number of religious denominations are thinking about it.

Divestment in this country has a real history – it’s a tool we use every once in a while. Most of the time when you have a problem with a business, it makes more sense to pass a shareholder resolution, hold a boycott, or run a petition, because it’s something the company can easily fix. If we’re mad at Apple for paying low wages to Chinese workers it’s not because we hate iPhones. But in this case, it’s not like there’s a flaw in the business plan; the flaw is the business plan.

But we’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon – a group of colleges selling their stock is not going to do that. We’re trying to take away their social licence, trying to reduce their power to dominate events, trying to make people understand that these guys are now outlaws against the laws of physics.

These are hard fights. It took Harvard seven or eight years before they partially divested during the campaign against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. It won’t happen easily. All these students know that. But they also know this is their future.

One of the reasons that universities are such a powerful place is that it makes little sense to pay for people’s education with investments in companies that guarantee they won’t have a planet to carry out that education on.

The same goes for retirement funds. Unless your goal for retirement is to work in endless emergency response to fires and floods, you can make wiser choices about where to put your money.

The movement is getting bigger and it’s spreading around the world. There’s something on our side: public perception that climate change is real has shot through the roof.

In the US, more than three-quarters of us are worried about global warming. It’s hard to get three-quarters of Americans to agree on anything – half of America thinks Elvis is still alive. It demonstrates that there’s a limit to how much money the fossil fuel industry can spend and how much damage Rupert Murdoch can do. At a certain point, who are you going to believe: Fox News or your own lying eyes?

If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. In January, you guys broke every temperature record, day after day.

I’m visiting in June, listening to people talk about their experiences with the changing climate and showing the basic math that makes our predicament so difficult. If there’s one lesson I’ll try to draw, it’s this: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Literally. It’s time to stop digging up new coal deposits.

Read these related articles: Bursting the carbon bubble and Unburnable carbon

Fields of dreams

In Community development on

They’ve started dirty wars, inspired beat poets, ruined lives and eased pain. Poppies are the planet’s ‘most dangerous plant’ and they’re grown in Australia’s smallest state.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

OUT the back of Campbell Town, across the railway tracks, down a gravel lane – somewhere in Tasmania’s golden triangle – the Lyne family are preparing their fields for a covert crop. Shh! On the other side of town, off the highway and over a hill, the youngest son, Angus, has been ploughing another paddock. The family recently bought this extra land so they can grow even more of the state’s most lucrative, secretive harvest.

They’re growing opium poppies. I’m a witness.

Lyne is 28 years old; a handsome, wholesome, 6-foot-5-inch, “very uncoordinated reserve ruckman” and 8th generation farmer. His father, Crosby, grows poppies, and so too does his brother, Sam. We’re sitting in the front of his ute, looking out over the dry midland valley to the green hills beyond.

“There are probably twenty families in the area that could tell you the same thing,” he says between bites of his sandwich, utterly bewildered by my interest.

No – it isn’t really a secret. But opium poppies are, however, Australia’s least known, most successful, least dispensable and, potentially, most dangerous industry.

Tasmanian farmers grow half the whole world’s supply of poppies for pain relief. Morphine, codeine, oxycodone, oxymorphone and more; if it hurts real bad, you’ll be treated with the Apple Isle’s best.


“For some reason people don’t like to be quoting this, but it’s the only Tasmanian industry in which we’re a significant world player,” says Rick Rockliff, from Tasmanian Alkaloids, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, and one of the major poppy processors on the island.

Rockliff was the company’s first employee in Tasmania, way back in 1975. His family grows poppies too, on the rich red soils at Sassafras, west of here, south of there, somewhere else in the golden triangle.

“It’s really been the salvation of Tasmanian agriculture,” he tells me, early one autumn morning. “It’s the only thing farmers can make a few dollars out of. Most of their income comes from poppies.” Rockliff is speaking with pride – this is the high point of our conversation. Otherwise, he is polite enough, but keeps his arms crossed and his sentences clipped.

Inspector Glenn Lathey doesn’t want to talk to me either. He’s from the Tasmania Police poppy squad, which guards against “diversion” of the crop. “It’s not something we talk about, for obvious reasons,” he says. “I’m not going to talk to you on the phone. You could be anyone.”

***

Humans have been using poppies since we began farming and maybe before – the seed pods have been unearthed at more than a dozen Neolithic sites, settlements from several thousand years BCE, way back in the New Stone Age. Later, the Sumerians cultivated it in Mesopotamia – modern day Iraq. They called it hul gil, the “joy plant”. The Egyptian goddess Isis gave opium to Ra, the sun-god, to cure his headache.

According to the opium poppy’s botanical name, Papaver somniferum, it’s the sleep-maker. Over centuries, it’s been used to treat everything from bad eyesight, coughs and sleeplessness, to asthma and diarrhoea, and by everyone from the Ancient Greeks and the Islamic Empires, to injured soldiers and beat poets.

The plant contains dozens of alkaloids – a kind of chemical compound that does profound things to the nervous system of humans and animals (other alkaloids include caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, strychnine, quinine and mescaline).

So far, scientists have deduced uses for only a handful of the poppy alkaloids, but as research continues, they’re likely to find more. Morphine was the first – it was isolated from opium gum in the early 19th century – and it takes its name from the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus.

But the plant has also caused nightmares, too many to comprehend.

Among the ethical abominations perpetrated by the British Empire, the Opium Wars rank particularly highly: at the time, one parliamentarian said there had never been “a war more unjust” or “more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace”. Having introduced the habit of smoking opium with tobacco to the Chinese, the British then fought wars to stop the Qing Empire from outlawing it. Twice in the mid-19th century, they attacked the Chinese coast to defend their right to sell large amounts of the drug into the country, and take out boatloads of tea in profit.

Shortly after, a British chemist named C.R. Alder Wright synthesised heroin from morphine. He was searching for an alternative that wasn’t addictive, but he failed very, very badly. This spring, 140 years later, Afghani farmers are likely to produce a record opium crop, which will find its way through traffickers and corrupt officials and onto the streets, in an illicit heroin trade bigger than three-quarters of the world’s economies.

***

On 29 January 1986, a small group gathered in working class Devonport, on the northern Tasmanian coast, wearing suits on a sunny morning. They unveiled a bronze plaque to a man – long since dead and from far, far away – named János Kabay.

In his speech, the Hungarian diplomat Pal Ipper expressed his official astonishment: “That here in Tasmania there are people who want to dedicate a memorial to a Hungarian from 20,000 kilometres and 50 years away is practically unbelievable,” he said.

The memorial was sponsored by the local poppy growers and processing companies. Without Kabay, there would be no poppies in Tasmania.

During the great depression, not long after his country was defeated and broken-up in World War I, Kabay worked speculatively and feverishly in Budszentmihaly, the small town where he was born. Trained as a pharmacist, he discovered a way to extract morphine from dried poppy capsules.

The original process for doing so – now used only in India – requires the production of opium, initially, by scoring the head of a green poppy and scraping the sap that seeps out.

Kabay’s method, however, bypasses the opium stage. Farmers leave the poppies in their fields until they dry on the stem. Then, once harvested, the “poppy straw” can be stacked and stored for months before processing. His insight allowed the creation of a commercial industry, one where the production could be more easily controlled and monitored.

In Devonport that sunny morning, Kabay’s son and daughter – who emigrated after he died and made Sydney their home – were listening as seven different speechmakers praised their father. Sir Edward Williams, from the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board, paid tribute: “Today we honour a great pioneer,” he said. “Here is a man who really made an industry.”

While he was alive Kabay did not receive so many accolades. Tormented by ill health, family disputes, money shortages and bureaucratic hurdles, he died young, in great pain, on 29 January 1936. In his final hours, he refused morphine.

***

“So what’s the process?” I ask Rohan Kile, casually. We are in the belly of the triangle, where it all began: a town called Latrobe, somewhere near Devonport. Kile is the crop-supply manager for pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith Kline, and he’s leading me into a giant shed – about 70 metres long and 40 wide – which harbours a three-storey mound of dried poppy straw, ready for processing.

“For extracting alkaloid? I can’t really tell you that,” he replies, with an inscrutable grin. “As an industry we don’t advertise how we extract alkaloid out of plants. People do try different things.”

In the shed, we stay well back from the precarious poppy chaff cliff. It’s a monstrous pile, but it’s only the remains of the harvest; ten times this amount has gone through here in the last two months.

Kile’s job is to make sure exactly the right quantity is grown. Each autumn, he calculates the contracts with growers, specifying the acres they’ll cultivate come springtime.

It’s an uncommon industry: obsessively regulated and managed at every stage. Together with state and federal bureaucrats, the processors licence, register and monitor the exact amount produced. Prospective growers must pass a police check to qualify for a licence, which is administered by the Poppy Advisory and Control Board. When the plants are in flower, from late spring, the board’s inspectors roam the back roads and fields, searching for signs of tampering.

Their numbers are fed all the way to the top. “Globally, the United Nations keeps track of how much legal opiate material is available,” Kile explains (he too, must pass regular federal police checks). No more than a year’s supply is stockpiled.

The processors hire their own contractors – not the farmers – to sow the seed and do the harvesting. Kile supervises a dozen field officers, who counsel the growers week by week, if need be, until the year’s job is done. “They advise on everything from pre-planting and ground preparation right through to managing the crop and harvesting,” he says.

Kile was born in the year of Tasmania’s first commercial crop, 1971. Twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of World War II, the Allied countries were seeking a stable, secure source of poppies for morphine. The drug company Macfarlan Smith hired an agronomist called Stephen King to conduct trials in England. After several washouts, he continued the quest in the southern hemisphere, with experimental crops in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand (Victoria said no). “On a couple of days Stephen had spare, he came to Tasmania to have a look around,” Kile says. “He decided he liked what he saw  – and the rest is history.”

King set up his headquarters in Latrobe, and began to grow. It’s grown ever since: the pain business is good business. As global population and incomes rise, so too does the demand for painkillers. The poor put up with it, or die – or both. But once you’ve got enough money, you’ll pay what it takes for blessed relief.

***

For decades, all over the country, young people have been leaving the land. Farms are growing bigger, and farming communities, smaller.

“Anyone who’s half-smart realises they could get more money elsewhere than the rural industry can afford to pay them,” Angus Lyne says. “They go to the mines.”

Not him, though. After several years travelling and farming in Australia and Europe, he returned home five years ago. “I wouldn’t do anything else. I feel very lucky to be a farmer,” he says. “It’s the whole package really, all the clichés: being your own boss and working outdoors.” He saw his opportunity in poppies.

Since then, the family has significantly increased the acreage they devote to the crop, and Lyne has begun share-farming to expand even further. He stewards a hefty harvest on other people’s land.

“Back in the drought I started doing that so there’d be enough work for all of us,” he says. “Now, with the way the industry is going, we’ll probably have to employ someone else here because we’ve got so much work on.”

They grow other crops too – barley, wheat and canola – but the return on poppies is much higher. Per hectare, he says, the margin is about five times that of wheat. On the Lynes’ land, poppies account for less than one-tenth of the territory, but half the farm’s income.

“They’re more intensive to manage. But the reward is there if you grow a really good crop,” he says.

Today hasn’t been Lyne’s best – he spent the morning dead-bored behind the wheel of the tractor, ploughing and talking on the phone to pass the time. It’ll be another three days before his digging is done. Now, he’s wolfed his sandwiches, and it’s time to get back on the machine.

“Is there anything else I should include?” I ask, searching for some intrigue to smuggle back across the border from the golden triangle, a good yarn gleaned from these taciturn Tasmanians. He’s silent, so I press again. “Got any curious stories?”

Only this: “If you eat them you’ll die.”