The City of Brisbane has not yet finished punishing Labor
delivering a handsome victory to the LNP in the Council elections. Suffering a swing of 5% since 2008, Labor is likely to lose three seats barely a month after being trounced in the State election. The city is Australia’s largest municipality and incumbent
Mayor Graham Quirk is heading towards an easy victory with 60% of the vote with almost 65% counted. Labor’s Ray Smith is polling a disappointing
24.69% while the Greens candidate the high profile and former Democrat senator
candidate Andrew Bartlett is also not doing as well as some expected with
10.36% of the vote.
The Greens are doing much better in the councillor vote, in
some inner western seats overturning Labor as the main opposition. The LNP will comfortably retain their big
majority in council and are likely to take three seats from Labor with another
two Labor seats in the balance. In Central, Heather Beattie (wife of former premier Peter Beattie) is heading for defeat as she trails
Vicki Howard by 51-31 percent with over half the vote counted. This was the
seat vacated by Labor powerbroker and former deputy mayor David Hinchliffe
ending a 24 year run by Labor in the seat.
There are 26 one-member constituency wards in Brisbane and
at the time of writing, the result looks like being LNP 19, Labor 7 (20-7 including the Mayor). Two of
those seven Labor seats are still in the balance: Wynnum-Manly (43-41) and Northgate
(51-49). Two more are definitely lost. In Karawatha
(Woodridge) sitting ALP councillor Gail MacPherson stood down but her
replacement Adrienne Cremin is losing easily to a candidate with a very un-LNP
like name: Kim Marx.
Labor's John Campbell is the only sitting councillor likely to be unseated as he trails Ryan Murphy in Doboy (Tingalpa)
by 54-46. In the
Indooroopilly-based Walter Taylor ward, the Green’s candidate Tim Dangerfield
(19.77 per cent) outpolled Labor’s Adam Atkins (14.33 per cent) to finish
second to LNP’s Julian Simmonds (65.91 per cent), with nearly two-thirds of the
vote counted.
Meanwhile Labor looks set to retain The Gabba which is in Anna
Bligh’s old seat of South Brisbane. Bligh’s former election agent Jackie Trad
has narrowly won the South Brisbane by-election which also took place yesterday
though the LNP is not yet conceding just 800 votes behind with over half the
votes counted.
Delighted with his own win and the win in Central, returned Brisbane Mayor Graham Quirk said
it was the first time the LNP had held inner-city Brisbane at all three levels
of government. "Tonight, ladies and
gentlemen, is an opportunity - a very unique opportunity - for a high level of
co-operation between the Premier of this state and the lord mayor of this city,
to work in a cohesive and co-operative way," Cr Quirk said. "I think it is a
very good thing for Brisbane and for Queensland."
correction: Tennyson was won by an independent not by the LNP making the result LNP 18, Lab 7 Ind 1 - thanks to Bird of Paradox for the pick-up.
(Kym Charlton of QPS speaks at Eidos. photo: Fiona Muirhead)
One of the predicted outcomes of climate change is more frequent and intense severe weather events (today’s report in The Australian predicting exactly the opposite should be treated with caution due to the paper’s well documented ideological biases.) Given the likelihood of such events increasing, a conference called “Social media in times of crisis” held yesterday in Brisbane was timely. Organised by the Eidos Institute, the conference brought together a number of speakers from academia, media, public relations and public affairs to discuss the use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook in crises, particularly in the 2010-2011 Queensland flood event.
First speaker Kym Charlton was ideally placed to talk to the topic. Head of Queensland Police Service media unit, she was responsible for the delivery of a service that set the gold standard in crisis response. Charlton told the audience she set up the QPS Facebook Page in May 2010 without asking the powers that be for permission.
She admits it was a risky move in a notoriously risk-averse organisation. Without telling anyone about it, the page grew slowly through word of mouth. Charlton eventually realised she needed high level signoff for the page and approached her boss Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart (who would later play a critical leading role in the flood response). The tech savvy Stewart agreed to trial the page for six months and by December 2010 the page had 6,000 likes. Early experiments such as live-streaming the funeral of an officer who died on duty failed, but the experience gained was crucial.
Then on 15 December as Charlton laconically put it, “it began to rain”. Many people, myself included, signed up to the QPS Facebook feed in the days that followed as it sent out reams of useful and relevant information covering the flood events across a huge area of the state. Then on 11 January, a torrent of water rushed through Toowoomba and into the Lockyer Valley below. Journalist Amanda Gearing would later take the conference through a harrowing blow by blow of events in the region from her eye-witness perspective.
There was a desperate need for credible and quick information about missing family and friends. USQ’s Kelly McWilliam told the afternoon session how one person’s page Toowoomba and Darling Downs Flood Photos and Info was set up within an hour of the flood (well ahead of scanty official responses from the Toowoomba Regional Council) as a repository of photos and information about the missing. It remains the most popular site with 37,000 fans.
QUT’s Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess measured Twitter use of the #qldfloods hashtag. They noted a huge spike in tweets on the day marked “Lockyer” (there would be an even greater number marked “Brisbane” in the days that followed.) The ABC’s Monique Potts told the conference how the national broadcaster used tools such as Ushahidi to map crowdsourced incidents in the flood (and later cyclone) region.
On the day of the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flood, the QPS Facebook page was a crucial resource. Suddenly as Kim Charlton said, their facebook page feed was on the pointy end of social media. 16,000 fans of the page became 160,000 in just 24 hours as people across Queensland, Australia and the world desperately sought to get information about those in the disaster zone. There were 39 million views of the page in that day, over 450 views every second. “Thank heavens it wasn’t our website,” Charlton said. “January 11 blew us out of the water.” The pressure remained intense to get timely and accurate news out all week as the wall of water headed towards Brisbane. Just as valuable as the information sharing were the QPS “mythbuster” posts and tweets which punctured the many rumours that were rife at the time. Then “after a week off” as Charlton put it, tropical cyclones Antony and Yasi struck the north coast pushing the QPS team into overdrive again.
It was an astonishing effort for a team with just one acknowledged social media expert in an organisation with no official social media policy. Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader Eileen Culleton (herself a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when it took days to let the world know what happened) would later tell the conference that setting a social media policy was a must for all organisations with a public presence. Culleton noted how the Brisbane City Council galvanised the "mud army" to help with the clean-up with their use of social media.
But for Charlton the QPS social media updates were simpler still; it was something they had to do to save lives. The conference's final speaker UQ’s Mark Bahnisch put these usages in a social sciences context of “social resilience”. Disasters, said Bahnisch, expose our social structures more sharply than any other important event. They unsettle us by taking us out of our normal rituals. But panic is rare, Bahnisch argues and there is a social good of new communities created out of the common bond of crisis. Social media go a long way to help creating those communities, not to mention as the QPS found out, saving lives.
It’s no wonder Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said her state was like a war zone. What Queensland has endured in the last three weeks was war with constantly changing battlegrounds. Nature did battle with life across a warzone of a million square kilometres. Around 70 towns and about a quarter of a million people have been directly affected and millions more indirectly. (photo from Toowoomba flood:Wikipedia)
As of Saturday night 16 people were confirmed dead and 15 more are missing, likely to have been washed away by nature’s heavy artillery. Among the dead were Donna Rice, 43 and her 13-year-old son Jordan who were swept off the roof of the car in Toowoomba. Jordan Rice has become an on-line hero for insisting his younger brother be rescued ahead of him. Meanwhile three members of one family died when Fire Truck 51 of the Rural Fire Brigade became inundated on the Gatton-Helidon Rd. Two others on the truck escaped.
The others who died were in Grantham, Murphy’s Creek, Marburg, Dalby and Durack as the Lockyer Valley took the brunt of the savage attack. All that water ended up in the Bremer River causing further havoc in Ipswich before heading on to Brisbane where it caused mayhem in the riverside suburbs and associated creeks on Wednesday and Thursday.
Normal routines were obliterated as the city shut down and emergency workers took over. No-one batted an eye-lid as Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale threatened vigilante justice by turning supposed looters into “flood markers”. There may have been some small-scale looting but it was likely over-sold by media just as they exaggerated the natural response of people wanting to see what happened as “rubbernecking”. A more profound reaction was shown today with reports of over 7,000 volunteers showing up to help with the clean-up.
One of the saddest sights for me in the Brisbane floods was the footage of the floating pontoon sailing down the river. It felt and looked like a funeral. A barge was there to act as cortege as it moved slowly and sombrely down towards the sea. The pontoon is certainly a structure I will remember with fondness. I used to often ride along its path which linked New Farm with the Howard Smith Wharves under the northern side of the Story Bridge (a site where a planned hotel might no longer be so attractive an option).
There were shorter ways of cycling from Wooloowin to the city but none so attractive as the paths that hugged the river. The pontoon at the end of Merthyr Road was the best part as it went right out on the river. It was exhilarating to be on a bikepath in the Brisbane River’s thalweg. You were part of the water traffic and if you were foolish enough, you could attempt to race against the Citycats as they glided past elegantly over 20 knots an hour.
On Thursday morning it was the pontoon itself that was dashing past at 25 knots. It broke clear of its moorings in the height of the flood around 4am. The Brisbane River was peaking at 4.46 metres. The combination of all the water coming down from the ranges and into the river system, plus the necessary spill-offs to save Wivenhoe Dam and finally a king tide pushing water in from the coast, put too much strain on the design. Off it went towards Moreton Bay. The flood was high enough to do great damage but a metre below the 1974 record peak the experts thought it was going to break.
With a ground floor unit in a street that floodmaps say got some water in 1974, that news was a personal relief. Elsewhere the destruction was intense. Mayor Campbell Newman said the river transport infrastructure was "substantially destroyed" and 20,000 homes flooded. It was the city's sixth biggest flood in its 170 year history. Those who lived through the last big one in 1974 like John Birmingham have it branded in their memories as the "warning from the west”.
Wivenhoe Dam was one answer to the 1974 western warning. It gave Brisbane massive support during the 2011 flood. Its engineers had to open sluice gates that contributed to the inundation but it does not bear thinking about what might have happened to Brisbane this week if Wivenhoe was not there. Its role re-opened the debate over dams. An awkward alliance of Marxist left and centre-right libertarians will struggle to sell confident environmentalists there is any good in dams.
Standing in the centre, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has been praised for her disaster response. Her role became that of communicator-in-chief and the bearer of bad news. Flanked by silent politicians, police chiefs and a signer for the deaf, she did what she does best: she mastered the detail.
The media ate it up. The floods are a great news story in an otherwise flat time of year. The commercial TV stations tried as usual to shamelessly turn themselves into the story but it was old-fashioned radio that stole the show. ABC Local Radio was consistently the best outlet for latest news on the floods across the state. Unlike the 24-hour television stations it didn’t need pictures to sell the stories. It was able to use its wide network of reporters to link in well with the goodwill it has from its listeners and providers of content. Newer media showed their uses too. The Queensland Police Service Facebook page became a vital and well-updated cog in the delivery of important information, and just as important, the quashing of rumours. Many of those rumours emerged on Twitter which was its usual chaotic self. The #qldfloods hashtag was a goldmine of some astonishing images from the flood regions.
Also on Twitter was the self-serving and mostly useless “prayforaustralia” campaign (Brisbane is a sprawling city but NOT the size of France and Germany) which trended across the world during the “war”. Other than making those praying feel good about themselves, it didn’t achieve much. Far better would have been to contribute to a flood appeal. Not necessarily a Queensland one (or Australian – the warzone spread to NSW and Victoria) but also to the more needy who have suffered in less reported but even more devastating floods in Brazil or Sri Lanka. As in any war, the poorest always suffer the worst.
Three-quarters of Queensland has now been declared a flood disaster zone - an area about 1.3 million sq m. This is roughly the size of Peru, the world’s 20th largest country. The widespread devastation is finally heading to Queensland’s largest population centre, with a major flood predicted to peak on Thursday. And Brisbane has had it coming for some time. (picture of flooding in Ipswich today courtesy of the Toowoomba Chronicle)
It was all so different in January 2010 when a parched Brisbane had 40.2mm of rain for the entire month. It was the back end of a typical 10-year El Nino Southern Oscillation weather pattern that was about to break spectacularly. February (272mm) and March (162) had high falls. The back end was worse still - October had 306mm and December 479mm.
12 months on and La Nina now in her element, things have changed drastically for the city. In all 1658mm fell in 2010 (the highest since 1974) and all the signs are for a repeat performance this summer. After a few dry days to see in the new year, 41.8mm fell on Thursday. There was another 35.6mm on Friday and 23mm over the weekend. Then yesterday, the monsoon hit and dumped an incredible 110.8mm in 24 hours – three times what fell in the entire month of January 2010.
Brisbane’s rainfall pattern was repeated through the southern and central parts of the state. After getting a drenching from October through to Christmas, the soaking catchments were unable to deal with the deluge dumped on Boxing Day in the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Tasha. On 27 December (the day I tried unsuccessfully to return to Roma after spending Christmas at Maryborough), flooding broke out in several parts of the state. Dalby and Chinchilla, towns I needed to get through, went under. So did Warwick. All three towns are in the Murray-Darling basin and they sent walls of floodwaters to downstream centres such as Condamine, Surat and St George. In relatively flat country it could take many more weeks for it to inundate parts of NSW further south.
North of the Great Dividing Range, there was havoc on two other river systems, the Burnett and the Fitzroy. On the Burnett, towns like Eidsvold, Mundubbera and Gayndah all suffered flooding and the waters finally made their way to Bundaberg where streets around the iconic distillery all went under. Further north still, tributaries of the Fitzroy started filling up. The Dawson River rose so high, the entire 450 people of Theodore had to be airlifted to safety. The Nogoa River reached record levels exceeding waters in Fairbairn Dam over 100 percent capacity. The dam could not save the nearby town of Emerald from intense flooding.
The swollen Nogoa, Dawson, Comet and McKenzie come together to form the Fitzroy in the largest river catchment to flow into eastern Australia. Sitting near its mouth, the large town of Rockhampton was the next Queensland settlement to bear the flood burden with the town closed off and the Fitzroy peaking around 9.4m last Wednesday.
Still the rain kept coming across Queensland. It was the Mary River’s turn on the weekend, a fourth river basin swelling up causing major flooding in Kilkevan, Gympie and upstream at Maryborough. Then the focus turned back south with the news of Toowoomba’s horrific flash flooding yesterday so graphically captured in this incredible amateur video:
Torrents of water gushed through town sweeping cars and vegetation aside. Much of the water rushed down the ranges below Toowoomba and into the vulnerable Lockyer Valley below. Small towns like Withcott, Murphy’s Creek and especially Grantham had no chance as an 8-meter high “inland tsumani” rushed by, tearing houses apart and stacking cars on top of each other leaving many dead.
Back up on the ridge, towns like Warwick, Dalby and Chinchilla were getting ready to face the floodwaters again – this time possibly even higher than before. I saw myself the Balonne River at Surat 6kms wide on Saturday, after the first flooding. It is receding now but can expect to get even bigger with the next lot of floods predicted to arrive on 18 January. (Surat from the air last week PHOTO: Maranoa Regional Council)
Brisbane, with a quarter of Queensland’s population, has been watching the growing the flood crisis with horror as it got steadily closer. The massive Wivenhoe Dam, built as a lesson from the devastating 1974 floods, was straining to keep its waters sitting at a seemingly impossible 175 percent full. It is pumping record amounts of water through its five gates but is still increasing. Meanwhile that released water is heading towards Ipswich and Brisbane. Allied to heavy local rain and king tides, it is preparing a muddy cocktail for the capital. Worse still if the waters ever overtop the dam, it would produce a deluge that would make the event in Grantham seem like a picnic.
That is the worst case scenario. But even more sober predictions make grim reading for Brisbanites. Premier Anna Bligh has conceded the effect will be the city’s worst flood since 1893, with up to 40,000 properties at risk of being affected when the Brisbane River peaks on Thursday. Evacuation centres have been set up and the CBD shut down adding the already heavy economic impact of the crisis. It was no surprise to hear the Aussie dollar fell 2 cents today against the greenback.
Out here in Roma we are far from the world’s stock markets and surprisingly free from flooding this time round. At the top of the Murray-Darling basis there is no upstream water to worry about and the rains have mostly missed us out. Nearby Surat is a different story but there is now a common thread here as both towns become isolated due to the flood crisis to the east. Supermarket shelves have emptied of basics and there is no chance of re-supplies for possibly weeks to come. This is the “invisible flood” where businesses suffer despite having no waters running through their premises. It makes for less emotive television but the impact is almost as severe. The Maranoa local government region is not yet a flood-declared council so it misses out on many types of flood relief. Many other western regions will face similar issues. Dealing with these issues will cause authorities many headaches in the months, and possibly years to come.
Today’s Courier-Mail has a front page splash that purports to tell the “real story behind a Queensland political myth”. The article is about former premier Peter Beattie’s involvement in the 1971 Springbok tour riot in Brisbane and a vintage picture of the former Premier complete with impressive 70s style moustache adorns the front page. The article is based on a newly released police dossier which the Courier-Mail trumpets as “Forty years on, the facts come out”.
The bland inside headline of “Two sides to every story” hides far more than it reveals. With Beattie among 400 protesters facing off against 500 police there were at least 900 sides to this story, not to mention the important parts played by politicians, the unions and the media, of which the Courier-Mail was the most craven example. Given the subsequent revelations about Queensland’s police corruption and their role in the brutal repression of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era with the complicity of the media, a 64-page police dossier from the time is hardly to be trusted as an independent verification of what happened. Nor is today’s article the first time “the facts” have come out about the 1971 riot.
The best story of what happened when the white South African rugby team came to Brisbane during the Apartheid era was told in 2004 by Raymond Evans' “Springbok Tour Confrontation”, a chapter in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (edited by Evans and Carole Ferrier).
Evans began his account with an ABC audio tape of Sounds of the Seventies. Protesters and foreign journalists (the local ones at the Courier-Mail stayed on the police side of the line) recounted events with fear audible in their voices. “[The police] just chased us with a big grin on their faces,” said one. “When people got to the bottom of the hill, they realised they had been trapped. I think that’s when they started to be brutal,” said another.
The voices were describing the events of the cold winter’s night of Thursday, 22 July 1971. The Springbok tour party was staying at the Tower Mill Motel on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace. They were separated from the 400 protesters by a line of 500 quasi-military style police officers. The protest turnout was poorer than expected partly because of the police intimidation and partly because Brisbanites bought the official line “sport and politics should not mix”.
But while the Springboks did not save the PM, it amply served the Premier. Joh was in the job less than 2 years and still untested when he began to try out anti-democratic practices which became familiar in the next 16 years. Eight days before the game, he declared a State of Emergency to secure the Exhibition Grounds, suspending civil liberties for a month in the process. The legislation gave police carte blanche to treat protesters as they liked. The day before the Mill protest, 200 students marched to the city centre. 36 were arrested as police applied excessive force. TV cameramen and press photographers were also hassled by police and had their film confiscated.
Trade unionists kept out of the protests believing the convenient lie about sport and politics. But unions had make life awkward for Joh in the lead-up. The game had to be played at the Exhibition Grounds because BWIU unionists blackbanned essential plumbing works at the Ballymore rugby ground. The BWIU also halted the production of police batons and the AMIEU stopped the transport of police horses to the demonstration. But on the night of the protest, most sports-loving unionists stayed away from Tower Mill. It was students like Beattie who filled the police cells that night. It was easier to demonise the students in the media as hippies and long-haired layabouts. The other major protesters were Aboriginals who paralleled South Africa with Queensland. This was a truth the media could also ignore. After all, weren't Queensland's Aboriginals, as Joh said, "living on clover"?
The numbers of students, aboriginals and academics outside the Mill was swollen by plain clothes police who acted as agent provocateurs. With no warning, the line of uniformed police marched forward and ordered the protesters to clear the footpath. The demonstrators were forced to flee down the steep and pitch-dark hill into Wickham Park. The police attacked with fists, batons and boots as plain-clothes colleagues joined in. Some protesters escaped by jumping an eight metre high embankment into the busy traffic of Albert Street below. Some were simply thrown over.
Others still, including Beattie, sought sanctuary in the nearby Trades Hall building near Jacob's Ladder (now demolished to make way for the IBM building). One unionist saw a girl held and punched by police while a youth (later identified as Beattie) was also jumped on and held to the floor. Two of the three police attacking him were forcibly ejected from the building and the third became frightened when he realised he was alone. The last policeman, Lindsay Daniels left the injured Beattie alone and became quiet. He was wearing two different police numbers at least one of which was wrenched off by students who now greatly outnumbered him.
Outside, 50 police attempted to gain entry to the building. When ambulance officers were allowed admission, police followed them in and were restrained only because they were accompanied by an inspector. Beattie was taken under armed guard to the orthopaedic ward of the Royal Brisbane Hospital for observation of suspected spinal injuries. According to the Courier-Mail report, two doctors told police no excessive force was used in the attack.
According to another report years later quoted by Evans, Beattie said he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest though he was the one assaulted. “I will never forgive or forget what happened next,” Beattie said. “I was verballed by the police who manufactured the most incredible statements about the whole thing.” Beattie was later released on bail and police never pressed charges.
The day after, angry students at the University of Queensland held a political strike. That night protesters significantly outnumbered police at the Mill and officers refrained from repeating their tactics from the night before. The day after was the Saturday of the game. Just 6,000 attended instead of the anticipated 30,000 full house. With the Oval ringed by barbed wire, protesters demonstrated in nearby Victoria Park instead. 2,000 people turned up faced by 900 police. Led by Labor Senator George Georges, marchers went down Fortitude Valley and into the city conducting the first sit-in at Queen Street. Violence was minimal during the day as Labor MP Bill Hayden urged caution. But the peace did not last.
After some outbreaks of violence in the city, a thousand gathered once more at the Mill that evening. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod commanded his men to drive the protesters down into the park once more. Whitrod, who was inside the motel, claimed the police charge was in response to a rock thrown into a motel window. The offending missile was never produced and glaziers called to fix the window insisted the fall of the glass suggested it was broken from inside. But with country officers present threatening a no confidence motion in Whitrod’s “soft handling" of demonstrators, he was determined to act tough. He was supported by Joh who wanted to “stop all this business of going soft on all these demonstrations” because he could see it “leading to complete anarchy”.
The only anarchy in town that weekend was caused by rampaging police officers sanctioned by the Government while the Courier-Mail looked the other way. 40 years on, the paper is as cowardly as ever, preferring to concentrate on the irrelevant issue of whether Beattie called the police “pigs” rather than question the nature of the assault. The Springbok riot set the template for one and half decades of police brutality and corruption sanctioned by an undemocratic Premier who could hose down a meek press simply by “feeding the chooks”.
Queensland had its little slice of this year’s Sydney Walkley Media Conference when US journalist John Nichols came to Brisbane on Thursday to talk to local industry workers. Nichols is a political writer for esteemed American periodical The Nation and is also an editor of the Internet-based The Capital Times in his home state of Wisconsin. He has also published several books on journalism most recently co-authoring The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again with Robert McChesney. The thesis of the book is that journalism should be seen as a public good and that the US government should subsidise newspapers and other media outlets to save American journalism.
Nichols spoke to this theme in his talk at the Regatta Hotel on Thursday night which was billed as a “casual conversation”. Nichols was in good form, boisterous and humorous but his tone was far from casual; he had serious matters to discuss about journalism with his Australian audience. He began with his own start in the industry. Aged just 11, he went to the editor of the local paper in Union Grove, CT and told him he had read the Constitution and Tom Paine and asked he be given a job. The editor took him on a whim and and poorly-paid prayer. His big moment came a year later when Democrat heavy and then Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to town during a presidential primary and he submitted to an in-depth interview from the 12-year-old Nichols.
Looking back he said it was a highlight of his career which corresponded with a lowlight in Humphrey’s just before his unsuccessful run against Nixon in the 1968 election. But the grilling the young Nichols gave him was important. Journalists were not stenographers to the Royal Court or there to put a smile on the faces of their interviewees. They were there with a “profound responsibility” to be upsetting and ask difficult questions. Anything else was simply PR not journalism, he said. “Journalism can be obnoxious, challenging and unsettling, as long as it conveys information.”
Nichols quoted from the famous Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Carrington where he said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” While this quote is enshrined by newspaper owners such as Murdoch, Nichols reminded us of Jefferson’s other opinion on newspapers as “evil and lying but we’ve got to have them.” Nichols said the way of the world was that the wealthy always triumph over the poor and it is journalism’s job to break that inequality.
Nichols said 30,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in the States in the last two years and the situation is almost as bad in broadcasting with 19,000 jobs lost in 10 years. Yet he said there was no evidence people are consuming less hard news - he said the websites for The Guardian and The Independent had higher numbers of visitors from the US than from Britain. Nor did he blame the Internet, saying the decline of US newspaper circulations date back to the 1950s. Instead, Nichols pointed the finger at the changing nature of newspaper ownership.
In the last 30 years the newspaper companies which made large amounts of money from their exclusive access to classified ads were taken over by larger non-media companies. When they started losing their monopoly to the Internet (more of a nod wink than finger pointing to Nichols), the new owners reacted to the sudden loss of profits by closing papers or bureaus or laying off journalists. This was despite the papers not yet being unprofitable but they just weren’t making their new owners super-rich. The result was, he said, more journalists covered Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign in 1940 than covered Barack Obama in 2008.
Nichols said there was a knock-on dumbing down effect on political life and democracy in the US. He has testified in FTC inquiries into the status of the press, inquiries he said were a “very big deal” for which “transformations may occur”. To underscore why thought this was important, Nichols pointed to the Baltimore study done by the Pew Centre which confirmed old media, and especially newspapers, still produced the largest amount of news.
But the city’s largest paper The Baltimore Sun has lost 73 percent of its journalists in 20 years. The news gap, he said, was being filled by PR, a finding in common with recent Australian research. “Journalism is no longer speaking truth to power,” Nichols said. “Power is speaking its truth to us.” With four workers in PR for every journalist in 2010, excessive corporate and government propaganda was wrecking the Jeffersonian ideal of the press.
Nichols said new ownership models were needed. He suggested new owners needed to emerge from the government, local communities or not-for-profit organisations. “Just because they are not making the large profits of years ago means they have to close down,” he said. He said this was a problem for democracy not just for journalism or the media. “Don’t think anyone else is going to do the job,” he warned.
The conservative and contrarian state of Queensland remains the toughest parliamentary challenge for the Australian Greens though they are starting to make some inroads. Ronan Lee was briefly a Greens State MP after he defected from Labor in 2008 - though he was turfed out of office by the voters a year later. Larissa Waters (who went up against fellow Senate candidate Barnaby Joyce on Q&A last night) is taking her second tilt at a Senate seat in 2010 hoping to improve on her 7.3 percent in 2007 which saw her defeated on the final count for the last Queensland seat. Labor won that 27th count with the help of Pauline’s United Australia preferences but with La Hanson now firmly out of the political scene, the Greens may finally have a sniff of a Queensland Senate seat.
Meanwhile an ex-Queensland Senator is making the Greens’ most serious fight yet for a Lower House seat. Former Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett is the most high profile recruit to the Greens north of the Tweed since Lee. Bartlett was a casually elected Senator for the Democrats in 1997 after the Labor defection of Cheryl Kernot. He successfully defended his seat in 2001, was party leader as they began to unravel in 2004 before being defeated as the Democrats disintegrated in 2007. In November 2009 he announced he would be standing for the seat of Brisbane held by Labor’s Arch Bevis.
I interviewed Bartlett during his unsuccessful 2007 campaign and as he is now a candidate in my electorate I have repeated the exercise three years on. Brisbane is an inner city seat covering the CBD and surrounding suburbs north of the river. Bevis has held the seat for two decades and won comfortably in 2007 with a 2PP vote of 57 to 43. In that election the relatively unknown Elizabeth Guthrie took 11.8 percent for the Greens and it is safe to predict Bartlett’s name recognition value will add substantially to their vote this time round. In the only polling done so far in the seat, a Galaxy poll for WWF, Bartlett said he is polling between 18 to 20 percent.
Liberals are also putting up a strong candidate in Brisbane, former Redcliffe MP Teresa Gambaro. Bartlett will have his work cut out in a tough contest between three candidates who have 40 years of legislative experience between them. 20 percent of the vote is unlikely to beat either Bevis or Gambaro. But the WWF polling is another solid indicator the Greens have a base that is slowly and steadily growing.
Bartlett said they were in government in Tasmania, held the balance of power in SA’s upper house and had 20 MPs and a 100 councillors including a mayor in Byron Bay and three mayors in Melbourne councils. Bartlett said this bottom-up approach was a key difference between the Democrats and the Greens. “The Democrats were in power federally almost from the start - we had the balance of power within a year of being formed,” he said. “But the Greens have a more sustainable foundation.”
Bartlett blames the upheaval over the GST deal the Democrats struck with the Howard Government in 1999 for its ultimate demise. “When a party’s ethics is based on honesty, [the change of direction] led to a massive hole in its core,” he said. He said the Greens now remind how the Democrats used to be and said he wants to be a part of their parliamentary push. “I felt I still have something to contribute,” he said. “Ever since 1989 I felt very strongly the two party system was not capable of delivering enough”.
He enjoyed serving on parliamentary committees across many areas of governance during the years when the Democrats had the balance of power though he concedes they may have spread themselves too thinly in the end. After Howard won control of the Senate in 2004, Bartlett had more opportunity to study the Greens which were growing as the Democrats contracted. He said the Greens broadened their focus from being a pure environmental lobby group and their willingness to negotiate meant he was seeing more common ground with the party.
Bartlett defended the Greens decision to reject the Labor Government’s CPRS last year though he acknowledges it would have been a politically easier decision to support it. “You should explore every avenue to negotiate as you go but in the end you must decided whether it is worse than doing nothing,” he said. “It’s like designing a bridge – if the direction and trajectory are wrong, you don’t say build it anyway and we’ll fix it up later.”
Climate change remains the biggest challenge. “If we accept the science, its ‘past urgent’,” he said. He said the Greens were on the cusp of giving people a viable alternative to the two major parties. Bartlett said he wanted to use his campaign to remind people of the importance of the Senate. “I was the last person in the Senate from Queensland who wasn’t Labor or the Coalition,” he said. Bartlett believed Waters stood a good chance of being elected.
He also understood the need for the Greens to move beyond the environmental fringe. “We need to become more literate in other areas,” he said. “If we do become the balance of power we can’t just have an opposing role - we’ll have to tackle issues like taxation and superannuation.” In the event Bartlett is not returned to parliament, he will surely find a role in the background poring over documents to help the Greens turn those next policy corners.
Brisbanites flocked to the GOMA this weekend to catch the last two days of the much talked about Ron Mueck exhibition which has been touring Australia. I went along on Saturday morning to check out the hype. There was a long queue outside the venue but it moved quickly in the pleasant sunshine and I was inside admiring Mueck’s work within a half hour of arrival. It didn’t take long to see what the fuss was about. There were only a dozen or so of his works on display but each was intensely enthralling and engaging.
Ron Mueck is a Melbourne-born hyperrealist who seeks extreme verisimilitude with his work. His extraordinary detailed high resolution works had the audience constantly snapping on their cameras and phones. His early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films. He then established his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry.
Mueck is married to scriptwriter Caroline Willing, the daughter of artist Paula Rego. Rego watched Mueck created a giant sand sculpture of a dragon for his two young daughters on the beach. When she was working on drawings for a show at London's Hayward Gallery, she asked him to draw a Pinocchio. Mueck created a metre-tall, ultra-realist Pinocchio, wearing only undies and an embarrassed expression.
Rego put Mueck in the path of a professional artistic career. Mueck gets incredibly convincing detail through the meticulous use of polyester resins and multiple moulds. His works demand to be seen close-up so people can inspect the hairs, freckles and blemishes and scrutinise the peculiar expressions his subjects have. Whether the look represents fear, shock or yearning they are always drawn with sympathy and extraordinary care.
No more so than the first work in the GOMA exhibition Dead Dad (1996–97), commemorating the death of Mueck's father through a smaller than life-size sculpture. Though diminutive, the touching naked portrait of his own dead dad made of silicone, acrylic paint and his own human hair manages to cast a spell on the crowd it kept for the entire exhibition. It was Dead Dad that first brought Mueck to world attention at the 1997-1998 Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists in London, Berlin and New York (but notably rejected by prudish Australia) which featured the work of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin among others.
The second GOMA work goes the opposite route to Dead Dad in terms of sex, size and age. This is the five metre long 2006 sculpture “A Girl” of a just-born infant complete with smears of blood and a dangling umbilical cord. If Dead Dad forces us to contemplate the mystery of death it is this intensely over-alive newborn daughter that screams (or is about to) with the possibilities of life.
Wild Man (2005) is also naked, but unlike Dead Dad is very much alive. Wild Man is three metres high and is complete with long hair and unkempt beard. He sits nervously clutching his stool with his feet raised in a slightly fearful expression. His eyes stare off to some unknown danger to the right. Has he been caught out or was he threatened? A similar puzzle confronts us with the two old ladies ("Two Women" 2005) who Mueck portrays gossiping to each other. One looks away from the other towards the audience as if slyly aware of their eavesdropping.
This sense of invading personal space is also keen felt with the giant woman “In Bed” (2005) covered by an enormous white doona with her knees raised under the blanket (picture from Wikipedia above). Her right hand is raised to her face is quiet contemplation perhaps of a missing partner. By contrast the Still Life (2009) of a slaughtered and plucked giant chicken lacks the nuance and therefore interest of his human pieces.
I quickly drifted to Drift (2009) another puzzling human piece though not as intriguing as his earlier works. A man in his thirties or forties lies on a sunbed or inflatable raft his eyes covered by dark sunglasses. He wears board shorts and expensive jewellery but is emotionless and probably asleep. With the raft hanging from the wall, his outstretched hands create the impression of a crucifixion, but it is hard to care why he is drifting. A better recent work is Youth (2009), a black teenager who lifts his bloodied white t-shirt to examine with horror what looks like a deep knife wound to the stomach. The piece is only 65cms high but Mueck takes us into another of his dark, dangerous worlds as we attempt to craft on the backstory.
This perhaps is why Ron Mueck is so successful. Despite his often grand canvasses and hyperrealism, he leaves ample room for the viewers to impose their own imagination on the works. Here is a great original talent who deservedly gains popular acclaim to go with the critical stuff.
My second visit to the Powerhouse on Friday was to see the American band the Polyphonic Spree. The Spree is a Texan outfit with anything from 17 to 27 members on stage at any one time. Possibly due to the difficulties of playing in Australia (though this was their second visit in two years) they were down to the “bare bones” 17 that took the stage in New Farm. This included two percussionists, two guitarists, a bassist, three piece brass section, four piece Polyphonic Choir, a flautist, a keyboard player, two piece strings and front man and lead singer Tim DeLaughter. DeLaughter and fellow Polyphonics Pirro and Bryan Wakeland were in the band Tripping Daisy which disbanded in 1999 after the drug overdose death of guitarist Wes Berggren.
I always wondered how DeLaughter and co managed to make money out of touring given the number of band members and they went further in this tour handing out hundreds of free hats, Indian chief headgear, necklaces, masks and bracelets. It made for a colourful audience who expectantly waited for the Spree to emerge from behind the screen. The foliage was dense. Finally the band did emerge and put on a terrific show with their own music interspersed by such eclectic offerings as Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die,Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline and Nirvana's Lithium. Went upstairs to get a better view. This was a restricted ticket area only but I mumbled something about being a journalist and was allowed to take a few photos before being booted out. foliage heaven. Cowboys entertaining Indians. A clue to how the band pays for its expenses. Apparently DeLaughter also makes big money from UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's use of "Light and Day / Reach For the Sun" for its advertising. Tim takes centre stage. Tim takes side stage. Stuck in the middle again with you. Mad balloon time. End of Act 1. Just Tim left on stage with half the Polyphonic Choir. More balloons yet to fall. The Interval shows the foliage in all its glory. Back for Part 2 in traditional kafkan garb. Now its paper time and the venue briefly resembles an Argentinian football game. I loved the Polyphonic parapharnalia over the stage. More paper lace. Finally the white balloons are released. As Tim takes the final encore. Time for a victory salute. Before bowing to the audience. And lining up to say farewell. An enjoyable (and eventful) gig is over.
On another enjoyably busy weekend in Brisbane I went to the New Farm Powerhouse twice on Friday for different events. The first was the Walkley Press Photo 2010 exhibition and the second was a gig by American band the Polyphonic Spree (which I’ll feature tomorrow night). Every year more than 1000 photographs are judged for selection in the Walkley Press Photo Awards. This exhibition showcases over 100 works by Australia’s best photojournalists selected on the short list nomination for the Walkley Award. The photos chronicle the news, events, elation and tragedy of the year in media. Sorry about the glare in the photos of the photos. While I take photos as part of my job, I doubt if I’ll be worrying the Walkley panel on this evidence. Renee Nowytarger of The Australian won the 2009 Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year. This was one of her photos called Tears of Stolen Love. The woman in the photo is 33-year-old Essina Sullivan who was a member of the Stolen Generation. Essina was captured crying as she spoke of her removal from her family in Northern NSW aged just two. It was her last memory of her grandmother who was beating her hand on the boot of the car that removed Sullivan from her family. This photo “Displaced Future” is by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Kate Geraghty who was a finalist for best photographic essay in the 2009 Walkley Awards. Geraghty flew to the DRC where five million have died and another million displaced making it the world's deadliest conflict since World War II. Geraghty visited the displacement camps near Goma in eastern DRC. Conditions inside the camps are dire, rows and rows of banana humpies housing entire families with nothing but volcanic rock to sleep on. Thousands queue for food and water and diseases such as dysentery and cholera spread throughout the camps filling the mass graves in near by banana plantations. Geraghty said “many I photographed had lost everything, were terrified, in shock and in mourning but I also encountered dignity and hope where one would expect to find anger and bitterness.” "Bekasi Waste" by Kate Geraghty. This haunting image is of 91-year-old Muchitar walking down a mountain of rubbish as the day breaks over the Bantar Gebang rubbish dump in the Jakarta suburb of Bakasi. Muchitar scavenges for rubbish, among 5,000 people doing the same at the dump. This was Brad Hunter’s Lin Family Funeral. The quiet Sydney suburb of Epping was shocked when an entire family was murdered last July. Newsagency owner Min Lin and his family were found bludgeoned to death in their beds. On 8 August over a thousand mourners from the local community paid their respects to the five Lin family members at the Badgery Pavilion in Homebush. Hunter is a photographer at the Northern District Times and he took this shot at the Pavilion. This was the press photo of the year by Renee Nowytarger. Called “Party Blues” it captures then Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull at a retirement home the day after an unfavourable news poll. The photo epitomises Turnbull’s position (and self-pity) which was soon to become untenable. See a better version of the photo here. This was one of the many iconic photos from Black Saturday when 179 people died in bushfires in Victoria on 7 February 2009. The Age’s Jason South took this photo of an exhausted firefighter at an unknown location. This was another Black Saturday moment captured by Alex Coppel of the Melbourne Herald-Sun as firefighters are forced to retreat as a giant wave of flame approaches. The photo was infamously used by a London tabloid (the Daily Mail if memory serves) with the odious headline “hey Bruce the fire is that way”.
I took in the APT6 at the Gallery of Modern Art on a whistlestop visit to Brisbane this weekend. APT6 is shorthand for the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and having been greatly impressed by the last three triennial incarnations (in my ten years or so living in Brisbane), I was looking forward to seeing the latest version. I was not alone in my excitement. The exhibition has attracted 200,000 visitors in the opening six weeks since it began on 5 December.
This level of patronage is not unprecedented. 1.3 million have visited the six exhibitions but numbers really took off with APT5 in 2006 when it moved into the gleaming new GOMA building on Kurilpa Point. First established in 1993, the APT is the Queensland Art Gallery’s flagship international contemporary art event. It is the only major series of exhibitions in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia.
The 2009 exhibition shows the work of over 100 artists from 25 countries, including a number of artists and artist collaborations never seen in Australia including works by artists from Tibet, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia and Burma. According to Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Ellwood, APT6 looks at a number of thematic links, including “the dynamism of collaboration, the power of popular culture to articulate perspectives on contemporary life, the impact of rapid social change on local communities and cultures, and the practice of drawing”. The exhibition continues until 5 April 2010.
Here are some of my favourites from this year's collection.
I was expecting the North Korean art to be showy in a Stalinist way and while they do promote Dear Leader's Juche they are surprisingly touching and endearing. The work from the Mansudae art studio display a heart and affection for their subjects I simply wasn't expecting. Chen Qiulin's enormous installation is a poignant reminder of what rural life along the Yangtze River was like before Three Gorges Dam hydro-electric project flooded the entire region. If the house is the ghost of Three Gorges past, his video Garden 2007 is a equally fascinating walk through the towns that now exist in the area. The Funky Buddhas is a work by London-based Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso. This work is supposedly for the kids as you get the chance to place colourful stickers all over the buddhas. But although there were no stickers available to put on the Buddhas when I was there, I still enjoyed the humour of the piece and its fantastic location looking out to the new Kurilpa footbridge. Ah yes, the elk. Impossible to walk past and deservedly gets a room all to itself. The 2.5m taxidermied elk, or to be precise Pixcell Elk#2 is by Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa. It is covered in glass, acrylic and crystal baubles of varying sizes which magnify and distort the object’s form in different parts to various degrees. Called "People Holding Flowers" this installation by Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu is the signature piece for APT6. The work is made of synthetic polymer paint on resin; velour, steel wire, dacron, lodestone and cotton. There are 400 figures all holding flowers in a deliberate memory of Mao's short-lived 1950s mantra of "let a hundred flowers bloom". An overwhelming response to the Hundred Flowers Campaign led to serious crackdowns on dissent. Arguably nothing much has changed in 50 years in China. I loved Rudi Mantofani's collection of unplayable guitars. Mantofani is an Indonesian sculptor and painter whose work transforms ordinary objects into strange or absurd "visual parables". Mantofani's guitar sculptures were inspired by a benefit concert he saw in New York. He said, the gap between American philanthropic rhetoric and the harsh effects of its foreign policies in the Muslim world led him to "create a series of distorted guitars, as a means to express such ethical contradictions." I'm not sure I saw those contradictions in the works but I couldn't help loving the guitars.
Queensland’s Coordinator-General Colin Jensen has approved the building of a $35 million controversial shaft in Wooloowin to ensure the $5.6 billion Airport Link tunnel is completed on time. Jensen’s decision was in response to a change request to address potential adverse impacts of the Wooloowin tunnel worksite. The decision means that tunnel builder Brisconnections can begin construction of a shaft 15m in diameter and 42m deep on vacant land at the corner of Kent and Rose streets, Wooloowin. (photo of Airport Link Kedron worksite by Derek Barry)
The problem arose when difficult ground conditions around the Kedron underground ramps meant extra work to construct more complex tunnel support. Without the change the Kedron caverns providing for the ramp connections with the mainline tunnels under Wooloowin would not be built in time to receive the Tunnel Boring Machines progressing westwards from Clayfield. Brisconnection’s solution was for a 29-month-long worksite to be built at Rose St complete with a large acoustic workshed, a shaft and access passage and a fitout of the tunnels when they have been constructed.
Brisconnections provided the change request to the Coordinator-General on 17 July which resulted in 163 public submissions. The main issues that arose from the submissions were: the change reason wasn’t abundantly clear, concerns about traffic and transport impacts, concerns about large trucks, environmental and social effects, and decommissioning and rehabilitation.
These concerns were also noted by community action groups. In his response Jensen noted three major potential impacts: construction impacts, spoil haulage (construction traffic), and visual pollution from structures such as the acoustic shed. Jensen recommended the worksite time be minimised, form a community consultation committee, immediate rehabilitation of the site, community development and management plans, a complaints resolution process and half-yearly independent audits.
Brisconnections won the bid to build the controversial tunnel in May 2008. The win also entitles them to operate the tolled tunnel for a 45 year concession period. Brisconnections is a consortium of Macquarie Capital Group, Thiess, and John Holland. The latter two are both being independent subsidiaries of Leighton Holdings Group and are jointly responsible for project design and construction. The Coordinator-General approved the initial project in July 2008. There will be two parallel north-south tunnels linking East-West arterial road at Toombul with the Inner City Bypass at Bowen Hills with an exit at Kedron linking Gympie and Stafford Roads.
In evaluating the justification of the Wooloowin change request, Jensen considered three factors: a) other alternatives, b) cost-benefit analysis and c) management of adverse impacts. Jensen sought advice from independent expert Graeme Peck of GM Peck and Associates. Peck told Jensen that the request was the only “reasonable probability” of ensuring the project met the original completion of June 2012. “This means that the benefits of the project to the Brisbane traffic network and hence the community as a whole will be available when expected," Peck said. Jensen noted that all other alternatives would have delayed the project by eight months.
According to Jensen there were “no better feasible alternative(s)”. On the second point he noted the benefits of congestion improvement, employment opportunities and community benefit versus the impact of delay to the project if the change request did not go ahead. He said it was “reasonable to assume” that the benefit would outweigh the $35m estimated cost. He then addressed the mitigation concerns acknowledging there would be negative impact as a result of the new worksite.
Jensen said that local business ambience and customer comfort would suffer due to increased dust, noise and vibration. He recommended a one-way construction traffic route to minimize spoils and haulage impacts and vehicle monitoring to ensure the route was being followed. He also banned haulage vehicle queuing near “sensitive” places including residences. All site workers would arrive via shuttle buses from the existing Kedron worksite. Jensen also placed conditions on the acoustic barrier for noise mitigation and all generators and associated equipment must be enclosed. The report also made recommendations in the area of dust, air quality, groundwater, contaminated lands, and flora and fauna.
A local residents' action group was disappointed with Jensen’s findings. Kalinga Wooloowin Residents Group response coordinator Brian Nally said the work site will destroy their community and force them to endure constant noise, dust and traffic from the shaft's construction. "They are claiming that they are doing this to stop the negative effects on the community at Kedron and Toombul,” he said. “We have shown that there are bigger effects on the communities of Kalinga and Wooloowin with this site." However Infrastructure Minister Stirling Hinchliffe welcomed the findings. "While I understand some sections of the community may not welcome the Coordinator-General's decision - I believe it's necessary to ensure the project is delivered on time,” he said. “[It] will mitigate prolonged impacts for the wider community."
