Michael Green

Writer and producer

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

In Social justice, The Age on

THE State Coroner has adjourned a hearing into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River, and requested that police reinvestigate the case on his behalf.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

Julian Burnside, QC, appearing as an assistant to the Coroner, applied for the hearing to be halted in light of evidence given by Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, about the likely location the body had entered the river.

Dixon had not been interviewed by Footscray police investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, before the inquest began.

Burnside submitted that the investigation should be resumed with a senior officer. “It may be embarrassing for Mr McKerracher to be sent out to uncover things he has overlooked. It may be the evidence is no longer available. To avoid that embarrassment it is preferable that a senior officer be sent in.”

The State Coroner, Ian Gray, said it would be an independent investigation on his behalf and that new dates for the inquest would be set within two weeks. He said that the adjournment was not “intended to imply any criticism of Mr McKerracher”.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, said he did not believe the investigation into his son’s death had been “thorough and rigorous”.

“The whole Ethiopian community does not have trust in the Footscray police investigation,” he said.

Reem Yehdego, from Imara Advocacy, a youth group that formed after Atakelt’s death, said the community had been demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment his body was found.

“Despite assurances to the community from Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana of the quality of that investigation, this has not been the case. The Coroner’s decision today to suspend the inquest and order that a more senior investigator step in is of profound significance.

“The community is delighted that as result of the State Coroner’s intervention Michael’s death is finally getting the investigation it deserves,” she said.

In December 2011, Fontana, who was then assistant commissioner for the north-west metro area, told a public meeting in North Melbourne that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He also said that he had “total confidence” in Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

At the same meeting, Detective Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

The police brief to the Coroner said Atakelt may have entered the Maribyrnong River at the Smithfield bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On Thursday, Sergeant Dixon said that it was “very unlikely” that Atakelt’s body had entered the river near the Smithfield Bridge. He said it could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream and it is more likely that the body entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

The Footscray police had not investigated the possibility that the body entered the river upstream of where it was found.

Earlier yesterday, Mourad Mohammed, 21, from Footscray, gave evidence that on the evening he went missing, Atakelt was upset about being held in police custody two nights earlier. He was also upset about a dispute with his girlfriend and the death of his grandfather in Ethiopia, of which he had been informed that morning. Atakelt told Mohammed he was going to take a long walk.

The hearing was scheduled to last for ten days and hear evidence from 34 witnesses.

A spokesperson for Victoria Police said it would be inappropriate to comment because the matter is currently before the court.

Read this article at The Age online

For more information, you can read previous articles I’ve written for Overland Journal about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’ and ‘Watching a hearing’.

Dee and Rob

In Social justice, The Big Issue on

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

In May, she sent me this:

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Michel Streich

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre dailies

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

The Co-operation

In Community development, Social justice on

A food-bowl community experiments with working together.

Overland Journal, Spring 2012

KEN and Ruth Covington were sacked last May, along with their 144 co-workers at the Heinz factory at Girgarre, in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley. It was the latest in a series of manufacturing job losses in the region, but after it happened, the Covingtons hosted two days of parties. The first day was a wake; the second, a surprise wedding.

It began on a Friday. Normal shifts were cancelled and all the employees asked to gather at the factory. The driveway into the plant, on the eastern edge of the small town, is called Progress Street. Ken and Ruth, who had worked there for nearly 13 years, drove in with their son-in-law, who had been employed for nearly seven.

Shortly afterwards, the company put out a press release, headed: ‘Heinz Australia announces productivity initiatives to accelerate future growth.’ It announced 344 job losses across three locations, including the full closure of its Girgarre plant.

Covington, a stout man with a grey-flecked handlebar moustache, was the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union delegate for the site. He is in remission from bowel cancer and moves with a stiffness that communicates pain. Immediately after the announcement, he walked around and spoke to a lot of people. ‘Remember, it’s only a job,’ he said. ‘You haven’t died. You can get a new job.’

The managers invited the workers to gather in the smoko room for tea and biscuits, but few wanted to stay. Many headed for the Covingtons’ farm instead. When Ken arrived home, cars lined both sides of the road, and his co-workers had already begun a long day and night of drinking and commiserating. In the wee hours, a union colleague wondered aloud about taking over the plant themselves. ‘There’s no way we could do that,’ Covington replied. ‘We put sauce in bottles, that’s as far as our expertise goes.’

The next day was Ruth’s fiftieth birthday party, at a local hall. At 9 pm, a celebrant took the stage. The curtain was drawn, revealing – to surprise and mirth – Ken wearing a suit. Their grandchildren wandered in holding flowers and their eldest son gave Ruth away. They’d been together for nearly three decades, but hadn’t got around to the formalities. The festivities continued; there was music and a dance floor, and a big bonfire outside.

I drove to the Covingtons’ farm in May this year. It happened to be almost a year to the day since Heinz’s announcement. Ken reminisced about his surprise nuptials. “The mood was still great,” he told me. “Get a few sherbets into us and everyone forgot. We just put it behind us for the night – you got to.”

Just as the Covingtons’ did with their wedding, so the community has decided, improbably, that the show must go on. When I visited, the current edition of the local paper, the Kyabram Free Press, carried five articles on the official launch of the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative, its soon-to-begin training initiatives, its ambitious million members campaign and the out-of-towners who blew in to support it.

The co-operative has only recently formed as an entity. It is not yet producing anything – other than grand plans – but already very many people have taken an interest. ‘It is going to be a paddock-to-plate co-op, so everyone from the farmer through to the marketer is going to be a member,’ Covington said. ‘It’s radical in its concept. If we get this up and going, it could be a template for other places in Australia that want to do the same thing.’

In the last year, Covington has become a regular media performer. He has been interviewed for news and current affairs shows on every television channel, as well as several radio stations and newspapers, both local and national. This April, he and Ruth appeared on an episode of SBS’s Insight dedicated to the decline of manufacturing in Australia. ‘The New York Times too,’ he said, as we sat in the autumn sun, between his ramshackle shed and the disused dairy. ‘Someone rang up from there.’

Despite the encouragement he offered his co-workers on the day of the sacking, Covington is worried about the lack of work. Before they started at Heinz, he and Ruth were full-time dairy farmers. They moved to the Goulburn Valley 22 years ago, hoping to establish a farm that could withstand generations. Back then, every property on their road, for 14 kilometres north to Kyabram, was a dairy farm. Just seven of them are still milking.

‘We came up here from Gippsland because we thought this is where our kids would have the best chance to follow us into agriculture if they wanted to. Now there’s no hope. We sold up. It’s just a hobby now – we grow a few beef, a few horses,’ Covington said.

Since the factory finally shut in January he’s been unemployed, although the hope of a truck-driving job hovers a month away. Each day, he wakes at 5 am and spends an hour or two answering the co-op’s emails.

He can recite examples of hundreds of recent job cuts at local manufacturers, and list nearby farms that are now foreign-owned. ‘I’m really scared of the future of this country,’ he said. ‘What are we doing, where are we going?’

He has a knack for down-to-earth, parochial sound bites. On ‘Australia All Over’, the popular Sunday morning ABC radio show broadcast throughout the country, Covington told the host, Macca, that it had poured with rain at both their rallies. ‘After ten years of drought, we take that as God’s way of sayin’ He’s supporting our cause,’ he said, on air.

Covington has been on ‘Australia All Over’ three times. ‘He’s been great, Macca,’ he told me, ‘because the cause we’re fighting for is exactly the cause he’s fighting for all the time on his program: keeping things made in Australia.’

***

Not far from the Covingtons’ farm is Chilgala, the property formerly owned by Sir John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, a short-term Prime Minister (23 days, after Harold Holt vanished at Portsea) and long-term Country Party enforcer. When McEwen was 20, unhappy about the prices that he and other local farmers were receiving from the nearby butter factory, he founded the Stanhope Dairy Co-operative.

In the evening, after I met the Covingtons, I drove to Chilgala to visit its current owner, Les Cameron.

Several graduate architects and their friends were there too, bunked in for a week, building an experimental rammed-earth studio and renovating the McEwen-era farmhouse, which is sometimes used as a training venue for Cameron’s business, the National Food Institute. The Institute offers accredited training for food industry companies, including Heinz; for most of the week Cameron works from the head office, a converted foundry in Brunswick, in Melbourne’s inner-north.

Inside the house at Chilgala, which Cameron has owned since the early 1990s, the young designers were hatching various plans. Cameron held court over the chaos, leaning over the kitchen bench, his reading classes dangling round his neck. ‘There’s nothing innately good about co-operatives,’ he told me. Some are run by well-intentioned folks who don’t charge enough to cover their costs; others by self-interested primary producers seeking monopoly rents.

‘Black Jack’s co-operative was a group with common interest – they were all farmers on territory they’d stolen off the Aboriginals and they were there to maximise their own outcome. Not something particularly praiseworthy as far as I’m concerned,’ he said.

Cameron is fit and broad shouldered and speaks in a low, insistent murmur. He wears woollen cardigans and has a habit of leaving sentences half finished while he pushes on to the next thought. On the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative’s Facebook page, there’s a collection of photos from the launch in Kyabram, including one tagged ‘Our leader Les Cameron’, in which he stands behind a microphone, gesturing with an open hand.

Another day, when I interviewed him, Cameron protested at this notion. He rebuked me for asking too much about his past – as a teacher and principal in community schools, and, until the early 1980s, as a member of the Labor Left (he once stood for pre-selection against Bob Hawke) – and warned me against overemphasising his role among the co-op’s many contributors. ‘It’s very important that it comes through that this is a huge collaboration,’ he said.

At the group’s first rally, in the footy sheds at Girgarre last August, Cameron called on the crowd to raise their hands and then step to the front if they wanted to join the committee that ‘takes it to the next level’. About three-dozen people stood up. The active members include farmers, food processing workers and engineers, as well as a food supply-chain academic from Sydney and a local who used to be a financial manager for a large multinational.

At first, the group proposed to Heinz that they’d run the factory for them, producing the same sauce lines. Later, they offered to purchase the site outright, drawing on funding from some members’ superannuation and a promise of two dollars million from a white knight investor. Heinz refused both offers. In early April, it sold the site to an undisclosed buyer.

Meanwhile, the group decided against accepting the large individual contributions in favour of funding itself through member-ownership. Lifetime membership costs $50. ‘Six of us could have bought it, but before long we’d turn into Black Jack,’ Cameron said. ‘This is a different sort of co-operative. Everybody in this community is dependent on each other, because all of a sudden it is not viable to run production here without collaboration.’

The co-operative’s model, described at the launch, is based in part on the Mondragon co-operatives from the Basque country, in Spain. Beginning with two-dozen workers making paraffin stoves in 1956, the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation now comprises a web of over 250 businesses (including a university and a bank), half of which are owned by their workers.

‘We’re talking about production in the widest sense,’ Cameron said. ‘We’ve got to have the farmers, the workers and the distributors. We have an education arm, a fund that’s building up, and a manufacturing arm that will start up. That’s what links us to Mondragon’s philosophy: those three things. You can’t do just one.’

Within a fortnight of the launch in Kyabram, it had nearly 500 members, all signed up in anticipation of a promise: that they’re willing to try another way. ‘Here’s the real story,’ Cameron told me. ‘This is not just a few people in the Goulburn Valley getting their act together. This is the end of global capitalism in the way we know it, and we’ve got to reform our society.’

***

Each year, Australian Bureau of Statistics Year Book is threaded with articles on designated themes; in 2012, it features the United Nations’ International Year of Co-operatives. One of its diagrams, taken from the International Co-operatives Alliance, outlines co-operative values: democracy, equality, equity, solidarity, self-help and self-responsibility.

There is something disorienting about scrolling official websites and finding sanctioned celebrations of co-operation, so completely has the idea vanished from public debate. In a paper called ‘The disappearance of co-operatives from economics textbooks’, Finish economist Panu Kalmi scoured the texts chosen by the University of Helsinki between 1905 and 2005. Before the Second World War, the analyses of co-operatives were extensive and complex; more recently, they were thin and unsystematic, if at all. Yet over the decades, co-operatives had continued to grow in Finland. Kalmi blamed the simultaneous rise of neo-classical economics and the increased reach of the state – solutions were only to be found by means of regulation or by the absence of it.

Co-operatives, he said, use local knowledge and seek local, institutional answers instead. In simplest terms, they are organisations in which each member has an equal vote. They exist to serve their members, rather than shareholders or customers.

The Year Book describes a sector in decline, but still much larger than you might think – there are about 1700 co-operatives, mutuals and credit unions in Australia. Last year, the top hundred of them had over 13 million members and employed over 26,000 people. Worldwide, more than a billion people are co-op owners, and nearly 100 million people work in them.

One of the contributors to the ABS Year Book was Professor Tim Mazzarol, from the University of Western Australia. He is a business academic, with an interest in small business and entrepreneurism. Four years ago, at the behest of Co-operatives WA, he began researching co-operatives.

In the course of an extended literature review, he found himself reading through old economics and social geography journals. ‘In the United States, the peak of interest in co-operatives was from 1930 to 1933,’ he told me. ‘And I’m seeing the same trend now.

‘Since 2008–9 we’ve seen the collapse of the paradigm of conventional business, particularly in the finance sector, but increasingly in other places. It’s as big, if not bigger, than the Great Depression. I don’t know where it’s going, but it isn’t finished.’

The Year Book also describes the progress of an unheralded legislative reform: the Co-operatives National Law. After five years of negotiation among the states and territories – which are responsible for laws about co-operatives – the New South Wales parliament recently passed standardised rules. The rest must do the same before next May, and when they do, it will become much easier for co-operatives to register, trade and report.

‘The form has been around for a long, long time and in recent years it’s been overlooked. The new legislation gives it some new life: it’s old wine in a new bottle,’ Mazzarol said.

‘We have to understand a co-operative as a hybrid that is about generating economic capital and social capital. It is there for the community – that is embedded in its principles. And we need more of that because too often capital is very transient and footloose; it will come into town and set up, but as soon as the business model suggests there are better profits offshore, it’s gone.’

***

Last year, as the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative surfaced and began scouting for solid ground, Race Mathews visited Mondragon. It was the fifth time he had travelled there since the mid-1980s. He wanted to see how the co-operatives were coping with the struggling European economy.

Mathews was the chief of staff to Gough Whitlam in opposition, and afterwards a long-serving Labor member of parliament. For decades, he has championed the mutual sector in Australia. ‘I’m a true believer,’ he told me. He is straight-backed when standing, but when he sits, he slouches deep in his armchair, in the manner of someone accustomed to lengthy deliberation.

‘There was a golden age of mutuals in Australia, when they were a very significant part of the economy indeed. And that really came to an end with a bang in the early 1980s when the first wave of demutualisations hit the sector – initially, it was the big agricultural co-operatives, but it gradually fanned out to cover just about the lot,’ he said.

‘What you’ve got at the moment is a shrunken, demoralised, disorganised collection of co-operative businesses all going off in their separate directions. Signs of hope are few and far between.’

Mathews’ book, Jobs of our own, first published in 1999, makes a case for worker co-operatives as a means for distributing wealth and reinvigorating civil society. In it, he traces the growth of the Mondragon co-operatives, and the thinking of their founder, a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarreta, who argued that solidarity between classes was necessary in order to create a more just social order.

Arizmendiarreta died in 1976. Beginning in the late 1980s, Mondragon embarked on an aggressive growth strategy. At its peak before the global financial crisis, it was the seventh largest business group in Spain, employing more than 100,000 people. But only one-third of them were member-owners.

Throughout the 1990s, American academic George Cheney spent several months studying three of the co-operatives, interviewing members and observing meetings. Afterwards, he described a waning culture of solidarity and participation, one that missed ‘a forceful commitment to their social ideology’.

Both workers and managers tended to uncritically accept market dogma – the imperative to grow, or die – and had adopted corporate management language. ‘When I next visit Mondragon,’ he wrote, ‘I would not be surprised to hear description of different departments of a co-operative as ‘suppliers’ and ‘customers’.’

Another American academic who studied the co-operatives in the mid-90s, Sharryn Kasmir, went further. She argued that Mondragon’s workers didn’t meaningfully consider themselves owners, and also, participated less often in the community’s wider struggles. One lesson, she wrote, was ‘to be skeptical of models that make business forms rather than people the agents of social change’.

More recently, however, the co-operatives’ general assembly resolved to offer membership to all the workers in its retail chain, Eroski, and to convert its international subsidiaries to worker-ownership too, so far as possible.

Since the downturn these plans have been put on hold. Even so, to his great satisfaction, Mathews discovered that the group is proving more resilient than much of the Spanish economy. Employment has remained steady for the last three years, and the co-operatives are turning a profit. Their durability reaffirms Mathews’ belief that only the ownership of work provides strong enough motivation to hold co-operatives together ‘for the long haul’.

In October, a speaker from the Mondragon Corporation will present at a national conference on co-operatives in Port Macquarie. Australia has had many financial, agricultural and retail co-operatives, but so far, little experience with worker-ownership. ‘That’s really what Mondragon is about – a triumphantly successful exercise in the hiring of capital by labour, rather than vice versa,’ Mathews said.

***

Cameron and I left Chilgala and drove to the house of another of the co-op’s board members, Graham Truran. It was very dark and we got lost on the way. When we arrived, the others, including Ken Covington, were already there. It was the first board meeting since the group had been officially registered as a co-operative.

Six of us sat on leather couches in Truran’s large living room. Discussion nagged at one key concern: how could they process memberships and respond to all the questions? Enquiries were coming in fast since the launch in Kyabram but there were glitches with their website’s system. ‘How will we deal with 100,000 emails, when we’ve just got Ken answering them?’ Cameron asked.

The money they raise will create a ‘food bank’, but for the time being, they don’t know exactly how it will operate. Their fledgling drive for members reminded me of a story I read about the first Mondragon co-op. In an interview forty years later, one of the founders, Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, had recalled that at the time, they weren’t really sure what they were embarking on; with hindsight it all seemed much clearer. But they were sure about their values and their commitment ‘to creating employment and more generally benefitting our community; that dedication made possible the great personal sacrifices that secured the position of the co-operatives,’ he said.

The British co-operative academic, Johnston Birchall, describes the importance of social capital – the trust and the deep civic connections among people in regions such as the Basque country and the north of Italy, where the most worker-run co-operatives are located. In the lounge room, the task of securing so many members seemed implausibly large. Two of the board members hadn’t turned up, without explanation. I wondered if those common values were strong enough, both in the room and the region.

The other matter for discussion that night was the introductory session, to be held the coming weekend, for people interested in becoming worker-owners of the co-op’s first project: a new factory in Kyabram, which aims to create up to 60 jobs, manufacturing niche lines from local produce. (At the launch they gave away samples of tomato bread and tomato sausages). Covington said he had invited the ex-Heinz workers, but he wasn’t sure how many would show up. Whoever signs on will complete a year-long training course with the National Food Institute, during which time they’ll collaboratively design the enterprise, from the equipment and logistics, to the products and marketing. The Institute will donate its subsidy for the training – about $4000 for each graduate – to the newly qualified workers, as their starting equity in the factory.

***

When I saw Cameron the following week, he was enthusiastic. About 40 people had attended. ‘Almost all of them were ex-Heinz workers who are under some distress and it certainly gave them hope,’ he said.

There was something else too. The Indigenous unemployment rate in the Goulburn Valley is very high: in 2006, it was 20 per cent, well above the national Indigenous average and three-and-a-half times the rest of the local population.

Recently, Cameron found out that the National Food Institute had over a hundred Indigenous students, most of them from the valley. Provoked by this information, he was buzzing with the idea of Indigenous membership in the co-op. ‘Think of the potential of that!’ he said. ‘It blows my head.

‘Towards the end of the training session I actually said that to all these other whitefellas in the room: “How would you feel about that proposition?” And what I loved was that there was unanimous support for it. That notion of fairness is just a stunning opportunity.

‘I’m quite happy to say we’ve got a range of people here that could be called from the far Right to the far Left. What we have in common is the notion of co-operation and fair play. And that is very strong.’

Follow this link to read the article at Overland online. You can read a Q&A about the article there too.

The hard sell

In Social justice on

An entrepreneur searches for the ideal business

(Smith Journal, Volume 3)

IN October last year, Simon Griffiths walked across a stage in Melbourne and addressed his audience. It was a TEDx event, with speakers invited on the theme of ‘innovation’. Griffiths wore sombre garb – tan slacks, a grey shirt, and a buttoned-up grey jacket – his beard was trimmed and fair hair plastered down.

“Today I want to talk to you about a very serious issue, and it’s something that’s been close to my heart for a long time. It’s been in the news a lot recently and a lot of politicians have been talking about it,” he said, and then paused for effect.

“I want to tell you about how we can all save the world, using beer and toilet paper.”

Griffiths plied the crowd with many more gentle jokes over the next 18 minutes – he was on a roll with toilet paper puns – but it wasn’t long before he grazed their ears instead, with a troubling insight he’d gained while working on an aid project in South Africa years earlier.

“I realised I’d been in the developing world on and off for about ten years, and I’d seen a lot of the poverty that you guys have no doubt heard about – the 884 million people without access to clean water, the 759 million illiterate adults and the 2.4 billion people without decent toilets,” he said.

But, at the current rate of change, he figured, we wouldn’t achieve global sanitation until 2080 or literacy until 2085.

“I’m 28,” he said. “I’m not going to be alive to see that happen, and I think that’s pretty shocking. We’re leaving these problems for the next generation.”

His next observation was that all aid projects, no matter their merits, lacked sufficient investment. It is this – the funding and philanthropy – that he decided to address. And that’s where the beer and toilet paper come in.

Griffiths’ latest schemes are a bar, called Shebeen, which sells booze from the developing world and pours all the profits from each sale into projects in the drink’s source country; and Who Gives A Crap, a toilet paper brand that’ll flush half its profits into sanitation programs.

The morning we’re scheduled to meet, Shebeen is only weeks from opening, and Griffiths and his team are putting the finishing touches on a crowd-funding campaign for Who Gives A Crap.

Years of capital raising, months of research, weeks of wavering confidence, and – through it all – long days powered by imagination and passion: all of that is about to come alive.

I knock on a door in a narrow street in Fitzroy, in inner city Melbourne. Inside, several bestubbled young men are working at a long table, programming code scrolling down their computer screens.

Griffiths bounces down the stairs to meet me. In person, he’s taller, more dishevelled, and more colourful than he appeared on video. He’s wearing sparkly gold runners and a burgundy jumper patterned with half-peeled bananas. Yes, I think to myself, this is what a social entrepreneur should wear to work.

***

Rewind a few years, however, and the banana jumper wasn’t even a twinkle in Griffith’s eyes. When he was at University of Melbourne, studying engineering and commerce, he was surveying suits instead. For two years, he called and emailed and bothered McKinsey & Company, the top international management consulting firm, for a graduate position.

At the same time, he also applied for a Rhodes Scholarship for postgraduate economics at Oxford University. (He made it to the top four, but eventually missed out.)

“The application process really got me thinking about what my values were and what I truly cared about,” he explains. “I realised that, yes, I loved the problem solving and innovation work you do with someone like McKinsey, but the real outcome is that you’re helping another company to maximise their profit and perhaps they’re not doing it in a way you’re super-psyched about.”

So, when McKinsey finally came knocking with an offer, he turned them down.

“The Rhodes process made me realise I was more interested in the developing world. I wanted to use my skills to create change that I cared about.”

With friends from university, he founded Ripple.org, a search engine in which users click on ads in exchange for charity donations made by the advertisers. Then he skipped town for Durban, where he helped establish Schools 4 Schools, the Oaktree Foundation’s program linking Australian schools with counterparts in South Africa and Cambodia.

But something still wasn’t right. Working in traditional non-government organisations just didn’t appeal; the sphere of influence seemed too small.

“I could see there was a really big funding problem, and everyone was suffering from it. So I started to think about how to change the way people engage with philanthropy,” he says.

And so, Shebeen was born. Or at least, the idea of Shebeen. Another of his university friends, Zanna McComish – who now studies at Harvard Business School – dreamed it up after volunteering in Tanzania. It was going to be a slapped-up, 50-seat, ramshackle venue, replicating the bars they’d drunk at on their travels in Africa. That was five years ago.

They took the concept public in late 2009, seeking to raise $150,000. “We had a huge response and I went on Christmas break thinking, ‘That’s it, we’re going to be trading in a few months time. We’re living the dream.’ Three months later we realised that just wasn’t the case,” he says.

“Everyone says it takes five false starts to get it right and that was probably number one.”

By then, Griffiths had turned his back on a conventional work pathway, and for what? “My friends were saying, ‘What are you doing? There’s no way you can get back into the corporate world and how are you going to make a career out of this? Do you ever want to buy a house?’”

***

Griffiths shows me upstairs, past the nest of hirsute programmers, to where he lives with his partner Melissa Loughnan, the director of independent gallery Utopian Slumps. (The banana-skin jumper is the work of one of her artists, Misha Hollenbach.)

We sit at the kitchen table in the large, open-plan living room. Light refracts through a row of jars along the windowsill, and falls on the concrete floor and the kind of easy-cool artwork and artefacts you’d expect in the home of curator. While we talk, the conversations from the shared studio downstairs rise up like the background hum of a brain.

One reason for Shebeen’s false start, Griffiths speculates, is that even a few years ago, no one really knew what a social enterprise was. “We were too far ahead of the curve. Now, it’s much more common – we don’t have to explain it anymore.”

Microfinance charity Opportunity International says there’s been a decade of “explosive growth” in social enterprises overseas, but only in recent years has Australia begun to catch up. Now, it claims, the sector is one of the fastest growing in the economy.

Social enterprises come in all shapes and sizes, from non-profits in rich countries that create jobs for the long-term unemployed (say, The Big Issue), to profit-making traders in poor countries that sell products to improve the lives of the buyers (say, farm machinery that boosts yields).

The model Griffiths picked is to do business in Australia, and use the proceeds to fund “the smartest guys in the room”. To him, that means aid projects that take an enterprise approach, too.

“We don’t work with handout models,” he says. “We’re always looking at models where individuals who are customers make a purchase, or spend time working on the product, so they have a physical level of commitment.

“We want to invest in organisations that maximise their social impact, and have data on it, and can improve their benchmarks year after year.” At Shebeen, for example, buying a South African wine will help fund libraries and local-language publishing, via Room to Read, a charity set up by an ex-Microsoft executive.

Griffiths is enlivened by this new wave of business-oriented development – despite the sparkly shoes, he’s a data kind of guy – and, likewise, by the potential to secure funding by changing the way ordinary people consume.

In his TEDx talk, he cited products sold by some of “the biggest companies in the world”, including Coca-Cola’s mango smoothie, called Odwalla, which supports Haitian farmers (10 cents from every bottle sold), and a Louis Vuitton bag made with Bono and his wife – part of the company’s “Core Values” campaign – which supports African development projects.

“I think this campaign has a little bit further to go,” Griffiths observed, “but it’s pretty impressive to see someone like Louis Vuitton having a crack at consumer-driven philanthropy.”

Can this be right? Louis Vuitton and Coca Cola doing good? It’s been nagging at me, so when we meet, I ask.

“Yeah, I know. It’s Coke, right?” he replies. “But that’s what’s interesting. These guys who’ve been unethical operators are starting to think more ethically about what they’re doing.”

But for multinationals and start-up entrepreneurs alike, declaring altruistic motives won’t deter the critics – if anything, it invites extra scrutiny. Both Shebeen and Who Gives A Crap promote change by means of aid, trade and consumption – and every inch of that proposition stands on shifting ground. Griffiths has waded into the mire.

“A really tricky part of both businesses is that there are a lot of ethical conundrums and you have to figure out where to draw the line,” he says. “And that’s not easy.”

***

In 2008, Dr Paul Farmer was driving along a road in south-eastern Rwanda when he received a phone call from the Skoll Foundation (a think tank, venture fund and academy for social entrepreneurs, all rolled into one) telling him he’d been picked for their Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Farmer, the founder of an organisation called Partners In Health, is a physician and anthropologist. He has worked for many years in Haiti, Rwanda and several other countries, and was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Over the decades, he’s received many awards.

But he was ambivalent about this new accolade; he felt it brought him “both honour and shame”. Later that year, he described his reaction at the Skoll World Forum, a conference run by the foundation (PDF). He “winced”, he said, “that we live in an era in which simply seeking to provide high-quality medical care to the world’s poorest is considered innovative and entrepreneurial.”

From the podium, Farmer challenged the “ideology” that the poor must always pay, in order for them to value the support they’re given. True development, he argued, would not occur without investment in public education and public healthcare. “Among some entrepreneurs, it’s not popular to talk of rights. We speak, instead, of ‘product’ and ‘brand’. Patients and students – children! – become ‘clients’ or even ‘customers’,” he said.

“We need to be aware of the limitations of any culture that sees all services as commodities and very few as rights. Let me be clear: this is not some sort of ‘anti-market’ stance. It’s merely the argument that the market alone will not solve the problems we face … we need to do everything in our power to make sure that the public sector does not shrivel and die.”

But once you’re in the mire, it’s hard to stay clean – even for Dr Farmer.

Two years earlier, Bono had fronted the launch of (PRODUCT) RED, a kind of meta-brand licensed to large companies, who donate a portion of the profit from their special RED product lines to finance HIV/AIDS health programs in Africa.

“Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands,” Bono said. “RED is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce.”

It’s the realm of the “causumer”, where you make the world better by shopping more – by buying a RED iPod and a Gap RED t-shirt, for example, or by maxing out your American Express RED card. “Has there ever been a better reason to shop?” one Amex ad asked.

In their book Brand Aid, academics Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte criticise Farmer for lending his authority to RED, as an “aid celebrity”, along with Bono and economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The causumer model, they argue, addresses the manifestations of poverty but not its origins. Corporations look good without really changing their business practices, while “consumers engage in low-cost heroism” without learning about “global production-consumption relations or the struggles of living with HIV/AIDS.”

The RED campaign has its own spoof: the BUY (LESS) website, which invites viewers to give directly to RED’s beneficiary, The Global Fund, and to other causes, without consuming anything first. Just below the website’s banner, there’s a stinging call to action: “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.”

***

While we’re discussing conspicuous consumption, Griffiths gestures at a brown handbag at the top of the stairs – Louis Vuitton. “It’s Mel’s,” he laughs. “And it’s second hand.”

By his own habits, Griffiths is a conscious consumer (“I like to get as close to full information as I can, but in a relatively short time period,” he explains.) He favours second hand goods over new, and after being a long-time vegetarian, only recently began eating a little meat. Occasionally, however, he ignores the rules and just buys something he wants.

“If I didn’t enjoy consumption, I don’t think I would have ended up where I am. My main view is that people should be aware of the impact of their decisions – generally speaking, too much consumption of new goods is not a good thing,” he says. “I want to see that flipped on its head, so consumption can be more positively impactful.”

Who Gives A Crap, Griffiths’ most recent enterprise, also represents a progression in this thinking. A bar can be a great business, but it has certain limitations: some people choose not to drink; young people aren’t allowed to; and most people don’t live nearby. And some aid partners refuse to accept funding derived from alcohol sales. Griffiths has qualms too: “I’m not super excited about people coming into the venue and getting drunk,” he says. “But that’s inevitably something we’ll have to deal with.”

With these drawbacks in mind, he began to puzzle over something new – a suitable mass-market product.

One day, as he walked into his laundry, he glanced at a six-pack of toilet paper. “I had a quarter-second moment where I was like, ‘Toilet paper! And we’ll work with WaterAid on sanitation! And we’ll call it Who Gives a Crap!’” he says, his voice rising with each recalled revelation. “I called three friends and they all just said, ‘You’ve got to do it.’”

As far as causumer products go, toilet paper is the antithesis of a Louis Vuitton bag: it’s a staple, cheap and necessary. But even toilet paper comes with seriously scrunchy dilemmas.

Together with Jehan Ratnatunga – a co-founder of Ripple who now works for YouTube in Los Angeles – Griffiths developed a rigorous business plan. But the duo’s research revealed that they couldn’t turn a profit by manufacturing in Australia. When Griffiths journeyed to China to visit potential suppliers, he was shaken by the working conditions he observed.

“There was a moment where I was sitting on the train back to Hong Kong from China and I was feeling sick in the stomach, thinking, ‘We can’t produce in Australia, but I’m not comfortable producing over here. What do we do?’

“And I sat there and looked at myself and realised that 100 per cent of the items I had with me were made in China and I had no idea where any of the factories were or what the conditions were like inside them. There’s just no transparency.”

He resolved to forge ahead, but to lift the working standards in their chosen factory. “Instead of boycotting, we need to make sure companies who produce in China do it in a way that makes workers’ lives better. With the toilet paper, we can do that up front. It’s a big part of who we are as a company.”

And then there’s Shebeen: visiting every brewer would break its bank. “We’re comfortable enough to trade – brewing is a capital-intensive process, so there’s less incentive to screw your workforce – but we’re not super happy about it,” he says. “In the long-run, we’d like to understand how they work.”

***

I meet Griffiths again, a few weeks later, on location in Melbourne’s CBD. He pedals up the alleyway and brakes at the entrance to a bar – the doorway that will soon lead to Shebeen. Today, he looks more like his TEDx self – tousled hair trimmed and slicked, banana-patterns and runners forgone for a red-striped woollen knit and respectable leather lace-ups.

Inside, the architects are taking final measurements for the fit-out. They’re here, with Griffiths’ fellow Shebeen director and Melbourne bar-scene sage, Vernon Chalker, to make final arrangements with the landlord before they give the builders the green light.

The existing purple curtains and white-leather couches will be demolished and replaced with corrugated iron, smashed tiles and up-cycled stools, among other things: a carefully designed interior that Griffiths describes as “a bit of fun – derelict but really functional”.

This year, at last, their plans coalesced. After painstakingly securing more than two-dozen groups of investors, the team nabbed a sponsorship deal from spirits company Brown-Forman. All up, they raised $250,000. If Shebeen’s profits flow according to plan, they’ll transform that investment into $800,000 in donations within three years.

Another significant transaction will also occur: once the doors open, Griffiths will finally draw a wage. All these years, he’s paid his rent by tutoring at the University of Melbourne (this year, he’s been scraping by on 4 hours a week), topped up by occasional consulting jobs for other social enterprises and companies interested in social innovation – offers that have arisen more frequently of late. Somewhere along the way, the fugitive from corporate consulting acquired useful skills, perhaps even a career.

Right now, that’s all beside the point. Griffiths, Chalker and the architects are leaning over the bar, telling the landlord about their plan for a corrugated lean-to opening onto the alleyway and explaining how it will fit within the intricacies of council regulations (in short: with difficulty). They’re consumed by the details.

“We want someone to come into Shebeen, have a drink and leave – and come back again. The second time, they’ll find out what the concept is,” he explains. “We’re not banking on the guilt factor.”

Occasionally, someone from a more traditional charity challenges him about what’s doing – can he really justify selling booze for a cause?

Griffiths doesn’t mind. He just says thanks, and gifts them a bottle of Shebeen’s wine. “They’ll call up a week later, and say they realised they were being fuddy-duddies, and that yes, they drink wine anyway and they can do it in a smarter way.

“It gets them thinking about what else that means, about other products and about consumption more generally. And that’s what we’re trying to do – to open it up.”

This article was published in Smith Journal. Find a stockist near you! 

Watching a hearing

In Social justice on

On the coming inquest into the death of Michael Atakelt

LAST Friday, the Victorian State Coroner held another directions hearing for the inquest into the death of Michael Atakelt. About one hundred people attended; once all the seats were full, they stood three deep at the back and along the side of the courtroom.

It is a year since Atakelt disappeared – he went missing late in June and his body was found in the Maribyrnong River in early July – and over six months since the coroner’s first directions hearing. The Ethiopian-Australian community continues to show up in ever-greater numbers.

The coroner, Jennifer Coate, set the date and details of the full inquest into his death. It will run for two weeks, beginning on 11 February 2013, and hear evidence from over 30 witnesses. Its aim is to establish the cause and circumstances of his death, openly and publicly.

The directions hearings, however, have a different role. The coroner went to some length to explain everything as clearly and simply as possible – especially for Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, who has no legal representation. But directions hearings aren’t for onlookers. They’re for the coroner. They’re for the lawyers. They’re to clarify timelines, to set parameters.

The effect is an unsatisfying mix of transparency and mystery. You have a sense that nothing is being withheld, but at the same time, nothing much is revealed. The lawyers have all read the police brief – they’ve seen the evidence and they know the likely outcome.

In the seats, few people know any of that. The experience is something like whale watching on an empty sea: you wait vigilantly, scanning the horizon for fragments of truth to surface. Now and then, shapes emerge: he was involved in an incident in Flinders Lane; police records show he’d only been in custody once in the months prior to his disappearance; one of the pathologists said there may have been a needle mark on the inside of his left arm.

But the great bulk of the investigation swims just below the surface, in the minds and folders of the people at the front bench. You are confused: you know they’ve seen something, but you don’t know what it is.

When the hearing finished, we stood for the coroner to leave the courtroom and then Seyoum turned around and addressed the audience in Amharic, explaining that the date had been set for the full inquest.

Most people I spoke to afterwards had confidence in the coroner. While many didn’t understand the vast delays, or even what had happened in the courtroom just then – ‘Why do they all speak so quietly?’ one person wondered – they thought that the truth would out. Then again, some didn’t; and that lack of trust will be a problem for the frayed relationship between the community and police, until next February, at least.

Outside, Daniel Haile-Michael was handing out postcards for a play called Black Face White Mask, which he wrote with the other members of the Flemington Theatre Group. It is showing at the prestigious Malthouse Theatre in mid-July. The flyer describes it as a ‘fast paced hard-hitting comedy about what it really means to be Afro-Australian’.

Haile-Michael is studying civil engineering, but he’s also an actor, volunteer and activist. He said that his community, especially the young people, must find a way to have their voices heard. Otherwise, the tension he observes among his peers will continue to build, until someday it breaks. ‘And that’s why I’m doing this,’ he said. 

Read this article at Overland online

And here’s a link to Between two oceans, the first article I wrote about this case.