Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
‘The
Liberal party and the National party are helping sow the seeds of
mistrust. They learned the lessons from One Nation and are now poisoning
the well.’
If the Uluru offer to talk together is not accepted, discredited notions of assimilation and denial are back on the agenda
In
1920, halfway through the Irish war of independence from centuries of
colonial control, W.B. Yeats published a poem, The Second Coming, which
has an eerie echo here now.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Yeats
was writing about a very different time and place. His was a world
devastated by the war to end all wars and a pandemic that had killed
even more, in a country that had long craved independence and was ready
to fight.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere;
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Australia’s federation fathers, and
the second-rate poets who gave voice to their ambition, had convinced
themselves a couple of decades earlier that theirs was a nation (the
only one, ever) founded without bloodshed.
They
were wrong. As politicians and regular newspaper readers they knew they
were wrong, but the shame of acknowledgment, of saying it out loud, of
owning the genocidal behaviour, meant Australians convinced themselves
that the First Peoples were a “dying race”, and this myth grew in the
vacuum.
For years the violence that preceded
the nation was wrapped in the white blanket of forgetfulness; now its
contemporary version, fearing division while promoting it, is paraded,
and shouted.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We are now participants in an
existential struggle between myth and truth, between meaningful
recognition and a void, between hope and the active cultivation of
mistrust.
Trust is the secret sauce of
democratic politics. It is the reason all sides traditionally seek to
uphold institutions, to ensure robust debate does not tip out of
control, to acknowledge the primacy of the parliament and the democratic
oversight of the courts.
John Howard campaigned on restoring trust to Australian politics
in 1996, but ever since, despite an early Covid blip, it has fallen.
Institutions have revealed their structural flaws and lost authority.
Just as importantly, as robodebt showed, governments are reluctant to
trust the people. Politicians wring their hands in despair but do
little.
WB
Yeats’ The Second Coming, written in a world devastated by war and
pandemic more than a century ago, still rings true today, as division is
weaponised. Photograph: GL Archive/Alamy
What
makes the voice campaign different is that two major political parties –
the Liberal party and the National party – are helping sow the seeds of
mistrust. They learned the lessons from One Nation and are now
poisoning the well in which they operate.
Embedded
in the carefully tested messages that shaped the no campaign is an
apparent ambition to foster mistrust in the parliamentary process to
develop legislation, in the Australian Electoral Commission to conduct
elections, in the high court to judge cases on their merits.
The
no case in the AEC brochure encourages people to visit three websites:
riskyvoice.com; oneandfree.au and Australiansforunity.com.au. Loaded
words designed to provoke a response. Click through and they take you to
the Liberal party, National party and Warren Mundine’s
taxpayer-supported group.
Distrust and mistrust are self-propagating, but can be countered. Big things can grow from little seeds
For the first time in recent yearsAustralian
retail politics teeters on the brink of violence. Racist attacks are
rampant. In suburb after suburb, there are nightly battles to restore
vandalised yes posters and replace those that have been stolen. Women
who are visible yes supporters routinely post videos
of those not seeking a discussion, but an opportunity to abuse. Elders,
welcoming guests to country at major events are more likely to be
heckled, as happened before the Wynton Marsalis Lincoln Jazz Orchestra
in Brisbane. It doesn’t take a lot for things to fall apart.
But this is not just a story of cultivated mistrust, and the anarchy it invites.
It
is about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being willing to
trust government and the Australian people after decades of betrayal.
That is not something to tinker with.
Distrust
is the bedrock of their experience. It has solid foundations. It is the
kernel that shapes the responses of those who still wake in fear of a
knock at the door, those exhausted by intractable legal processes, those
who patiently keep notes every time government landlords fail to keep
properties habitable, or the police fail to respond to emergency calls.
In
Australia, the bottom million, the most impoverished, the most
incarcerated, are overwhelmingly Indigenous – their position hard baked
into the system since before federation.
Distrust
has grown in response to empty promises. It began in the earliest days,
through the years of protection and assimilation, and in the tardy
responses to royal commissions and inquiries.
Commitments
were not kept; bureaucratic processes twisted to protect the status
quo. Even after prime ministers accepted responsibility the response has
fallen short. Children were taken from their familiesthe same year as Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations,
Paul Keating took responsibility for taking the land but did not shift
the onus of proof in the native title process which meant cases took
decades, Julia Gillard continued the Northern Territory intervention
long after its failure was evident.
Or
as Uncle Rick Nelson who welcomed the concert for yes in Castlemaine’s
Theatre Royal on Dja Dja Wurrung land said as he urged a yes vote: “Vote
yes. But know, those government buggers can play tricks on you. We’ve
got to be careful how we go.”
Putting distrust
aside to propose a better way of working with the Australian people and
government was the great imaginative leap of faiththat
emerged from Uluru. A deliberate choice not to give in to despair, not
to allow distrust to breed cynicism, or violence. The antithesis of a declaration of war.
That is why the Uluru statement is often described as generous.
Distrust
and mistrust are self-propagating, but can be countered. Big things can
grow from little seeds. If the Uluru offer to talk together is not
accepted, things will get worse: discredited notions of assimilation and
denial are back on the agenda. With vigilance and generosity things may
not fall apart; the centre may hold.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Sam Elsom has taken a gamble on groundbreaking science in an attempt to transform the way we keep livestock.(Australian Story )
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Prince
William believes Sam Elsom is onto something that could help heal the
planet, but right now, Elsom's golden elixir sits in a tank in a
Tasmanian field, unsold and on a countdown to becoming useless.
He's
got 10 months. Ten months to shift $1.5 million worth of a seaweed
supplement he has devoted the past five years of his life to producing
or it will outlive its shelf life.
Yet
Elsom remains optimistic his plan to put a dent in climate change will
succeed. Frustrated, but optimistic. He's got to persevere.
"You've got to believe you can do it," he tells Australian Story.
His
aim? To significantly reduce the methane emissions from livestock by
feeding it an extract from a special type of seaweed called
asparagopsis.
Elsom says cow burps are no joke — about 15-16 per cent of global emissions come from methane livestock production.(Australian Story: Luke Bowden)
By feeding livestock a small daily dose of an asparagopsis extract, farmers can help drastically reduce methane emissions.(Australian Story: Luke Bowden)
Elsom
knows it's just one potential solution "in a whole buckshot of
solutions", but believes there's only "a sliver" of time left to turn
the climate crisis around.
And there is hope. "We have to take that hope and throw everything at it," he says.
Elsom's
made huge advances since embarking on his ambitious quest. He's created
the country's first large-scale asparagopsis farm through his company
Sea Forest, built a world-class laboratory, made a seaweed-based feed
and has the positive results and the drive.
What he doesn't have is the market to take all his stock.
Bureaucracy,
pricing and farmer cautiousness are the stumbling blocks to adoption in
Australia, prompting his team to look overseas for buyers.
Earthshot
heralds Sea Forest's work as revolutionary, saying: "Applying such a
solution to 15 per cent of the world's cattle population could reduce
three gigatonnes of emissions globally."
As
a finalist, Sea Forest now has billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a former
New York mayor and business media magnate, as one of its global advisers
for a year.
And come November
7, Elsom will learn if he's one of five winners, receiving more than
$1.9 million aimed at turbocharging innovative climate change
solutions.
He'll walk down a
green carpet at a star-studded affair in Singapore, where guests are
encouraged to wear sustainable or recycled fashion.
That will suit Elsom just fine — in a past life, he had his own sustainable fashion label.
Sam Elsom has been heralded as one of the world's most innovative movers and shakers in climate change solutions.(Supplied: Sam Elsom)
Fashion designer-turned-seaweed farmer
On
a windswept peninsula on Tasmania's east coast, Elsom regularly plays
host to farmers keen to learn more about the seaweed solution that
started taking form in the tiny town of Triabunna in 2019.
Elsom
explains how the business now employs dozens of locals, how the
asparagopsis seaweed is grown, and how his scientists have developed the
seaweed extract that, in current farm trials, is reducing methane
output by up to 40 per cent.
A stream of farmers has visited the Sea Forest facility at Triabunna in Tasmania.(Supplied: Sea Forest )
Grow tanks at Sea Forest HQ, which looks out to Maria Island across Mercury Passage.(Supplied: Sea Forest )
Sometimes,
as he talks in passionate detail about seaweed and photosynthesis and
ruminant methane, they'll ask if he is a scientist.
"It's
pretty funny when I share with farmers that I have a background in
fashion," Elsom says. "I've made a huge career pivot and it does
surprise a lot of people."
His life, he says, has always been a bit unpredictable.
Fashion
wasn't in the mix when Elsom left school. Chemistry and biology were
his pet subjects and he'd been accepted into biomedical science at the
University of Queensland.
Elsom walks the catwalk during Mercedes Australian Fashion Week in 2006.(Getty Images: Paul McConnell)
But
he decided to take a gap year and head to London. For a "surfie" boy
from Noosa, London was a dizzying world of possibilities, captivating
him with its range of creative career options.
He'd
always loved drawing and had his own fashion style. His mother, Vicki
Wood, recalls that when other kids were wearing boardshorts and
T-shirts, Elsom would don an op shop waistcoat, topped off with a
bandana or maybe a jaunty pair of John Lennon-style glasses.
So,
he enrolled in a fine arts course, which led to fashion design, and he
was hooked. On his return to Australia in 2000, he worked for other
designers before creating his own label.
It
was going to be different. "Ethical practices" and "sustainable
products" were the hallmarks of his brand at a time when such buzzwords
were just entering the lexicon. "We were trying to create elevated
fashion with sustainability at its core," says Elsom, whose beach
upbringing instilled a deep connection with nature.
His
garments were stocked in leading department stores in London and New
York, and Elsom found himself travelling the world to meet with
suppliers and ensure workers' conditions were good.
But
the idea was before its time, with consumers unprepared to pay the
extra cost. Elsom struggled to shift his garments. He scaled back and
started to look for "something with more purpose and meaning and a way
to have a bigger impact on the environment".
Sam Elsom working as a young designer with a focus on sustainable fashion.(Supplied: Sam Elsom)
It
arrived in 2017, when he and his designer partner Sheree
Commerford watched a Climate Council webinar about the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Commerford
recalls: "We were both shocked and horrified. It scared us. We could
see data on how fast global warming was occurring and how real that was
for the first time."
At the end of the presentation, some solutions were offered. One involved seaweed.
"Sam turned to me, and he said, 'That's it, I'm gonna grow seaweed,'" she says. "And I was like, 'OK. Really?'"
Elsom
says: "I felt like it was almost a call to action that we need people
with entrepreneurial nous to roll up their sleeves and help drive this
for the planet."
Elsom’s team has learned how to fast-track seaweed growth in the lab.(Supplied: Sea Forest )
He
plunged deep into research and discovered a groundbreaking 2016 paper
from James Cook University and CSIRO that showed asparagopsis seaweed
has a suite of compounds that switches off the bacteria that produces
methane in the digestive systems of cows and sheep.
"I was really excited," Elsom says. "I thought, 'Wow, this is so easy.'"
It
wasn't. He'd need all his entrepreneurial nous to take a research paper
and bring it to life as an innovative, methane-busting business.
'We gave it a crack': Taking research commercial scale
It's
good for a giggle, the idea of burping cows. "I remember when it was a
bit of a joke," Elsom says. But it's deadly serious for the planet.
There
are, says biologist Lesley Hughes, a member of the Climate Council,
about 1.5 billion cows in the world, and about 1.1 billion sheep.
"That's an enormous amount of methane going into the atmosphere," Hughes
says.
"Methane has always
played second fiddle to carbon dioxide in discussions about global
warming. But that fiddle is getting noisier because the concentration of
methane in the atmosphere is accelerating faster than the concentration
of CO2."
Elsom can rattle off
the statistics; methane has about 28 times the warming impact of carbon
dioxide, and agriculture accounts for about 15 per cent of global
emissions.
Elsom believes farmers should receive carbon credits for using the feed additive.(Australian Story: Luke Bowden)
But
when he first picked up the phone to talk with Rocky De Nys, one of the
authors of that groundbreaking paper, he was just a man with a dream.
"I remember being nervous about having the right language and
understanding some of the science," Elsom says.
De
Nys was intrigued by this environmentally conscious fashion designer
and set aside time every Friday afternoon to talk about seaweed and
methane.
Elsom grasped the
scientific work quickly. "He's obviously a very clever individual," says
De Nys, who has a "really simplified" way of translating the effect of
reducing the burps of livestock. "Think of a cow as a car and that the
methane emissions from a cow equal a car on the road," De Nys says.
"[If] you take one cow and reduce its emissions completely, you've taken the emissions from a car off the road."
De
Nys, who has since started working for Sea Forest, applauds Elsom's
courage to take research and laboratory work and turn it into a
business.
But if Elsom was
going to grow asparagopsis – which would be a first — he needed someone
to help drive the business and secure finance.
Roughly speaking, one cow equals one car when it comes to harmful emissions(Australian Story: Luke Bowden)
He
talked with his good friend Heidi Middleton, the co-founder of fashion
house Sass and Bide, who recalls him "waxing lyrical about this amazing
seaweed". She put him in touch with Stephen Turner, who had been
involved in getting her sustainable fashion business off the ground.
Turner
figured he'd have a cup of coffee with Elsom, then say farewell and
good luck. A week later, after doing his own research, Turner called
Elsom. He wanted in.
There'd
be little chance of raising capital without proof they could grow the
seaweed. They started on land first, a two-year process of trial and
error, with Elsom and Turner footing the bills for university research
and scientists.
Their brains
trust finally cracked it, but the next hurdle was growing seaweed at
commercial levels, which meant growing it at sea. Many doubted it could
be done. But, Elsom says, "we gave it a crack".
One
day, an underwater drone was deployed to look at the seaweed they had
"planted" on ropes submerged in the waters off Tasmania. It was in full
bloom.
Elsom and his team have shown asparagopsis can be successfully grown both in ponds on land and at sea.(Supplied: Sea Forest )
Sea Forest staff ran a series of experiments where they seeded small amounts of the seaweed onto ropes submerged in the ocean .(Supplied: Sea Forest Australia)
1.5m doses of seaweed ready to go
With
a few calibrated squirts of the oily seaweed supplement into their
feed, the dairy cows on Richard Gardner's Tasmanian farm become far more
pleasant to be around.
"There's
absolutely no doubt we're getting at least 30 or 40 per cent reduction
[in methane emissions] and could be getting well more," says Gardner, a
keen observer of climate science.
For
about two years, Gardner has been trialling the supplement on 600 cows,
about half his stock, through funding from dairy giant Fonterra. It
makes no difference to the milk and has not affected the cows' health.
But
Gardner knows Elsom has taken a huge gamble. "I heard a lovely quote
the other day: 'It's the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world who do.' And I think Sam's one of those people."
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows in the world.(Supplied: Sea Forest )
Elsom
has had big wins. With proof of concept, Elsom and Turner secured $5
million from private sources and $10 million worth of state and federal
government grants. And this year, beef from cattle fed the supplement
has been used in a burger produced by a leading Australian-owned
chain.
Plus, Elsom has proved he can produce at scale — 1.5 million doses of the seaweed supplement are sitting in his tank.
But
there's one big problem: It's hard to sell. "I never dreamed in a
million years that we'd have a situation where we'd have more stock on
hand than there were farmers willing to feed their animals," Elsom says.
"But this is the situation that we find ourselves in."
The
roadblock, as it was in his fashion days, is money. It costs about a
dollar a head per day to add the supplement to feed, and while Elsom
says that would have a small impact on a retail litre of milk, it's "a
cost that has a significant impact on the primary producer".
Says Gardner: "At the moment, the economics of this don't work for a farmer."
'Tiny cost, huge environmental outcomes'
So,
the fashion designer-turned seaweed farmer is now a politician
wrangler. He spends a large part of his time lobbying for carbon credits
for the feed additive, which would help absorb the cost for farmers.
Elsom believes such government assistance could help Australia meet its
global methane pledge to reduce emissions by at least 30 per cent by
2030.
Another battle is to
change a bureaucratic loophole that denies early adopters of the
supplement access to any future carbon credits, which means farmers are
more likely to wait for carbon credits rather than take the lead and use
it now.
As Brian Mitchell, a
Tasmanian federal MP, put to Elsom at a recent parliamentary
agricultural standing committee: "What you seem to be saying is the
science is established, this stuff works, but you're currently sort of
stuck in this bureaucratic limbo."
Or,
in Elsom's words: "This solution we're building requires little to no
behavioural change for farmers. So, it's business as usual and a tiny
cost has this huge environmental outcome."
Elsom
is encouraged by the fact politicians are engaged. But he can't wait
for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. He's got 10 months.
Sam Elsom, pictured with wife Sheree Commerford and kids Captain and
Sugar, is looking to make lasting change for future generations.(Australian Story: Erin Semmler )
Europe
and the UK are much further down the road to reducing methane emissions
than Australia, Elsom says, and interest there is strong. Trials have
started on farms in the UK through a supermarket chain, and other
European dairy companies are interested, as well as some in Japan.
And
now, the Earthshot recognition is propelling Elsom and his vision
before a worldwide audience. Just in time. "The next year or two is
really critical," Elsom says. "We've really got to find a way to make
this work because there's so much at stake."
For
now, Elsom's desire to spend more time with his young family in
northern NSW is on hold as he crisscrosses the country, meeting with
politicians and overseeing the site in Tasmania.
But,
he says, they're aware this big venture, this big risk, is for their
future and that of the planet, and they're right behind him. "What we're
doing is incredibly risky," he says. "But … the risks are even greater
if we don't."
Elsom is confident in the science, but now he needs farmers, governments and consumers to get on board.(Australian Story: Luke Bowden)
Watch Australian Story's Sea Change with Sam Elsom at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Read any description of the Australian people
and you will quickly see us described as being an egalitarian bunch.
It’s well and truly a core part of our collective national identity. We
believe in the fair go and meritocracy.
Collectively we have a strong cultural aversion to arrogance or
displays of excessive wealth. We even coined the term “tall poppy
syndrome” to describe our deeply rooted instinct to cut down anyone we
perceive as being boastful.
A look at the data suggests that we keep moving away from our
egalitarian ideal. Our rich and poor cohorts keep drifting apart. We are
getting more unequal by the day.
I showed data to this effect and explained how consumer markets reacted to such changes in previous columns but today we will focus on a report by ACOSS (the Australian Council of Social Service) and UNSW Sydney.
For all the visual learners, I handpicked my six favourite charts from the report.
The longitudinal data in the report shows shifts from 1999 to 2019.
Since 2019 we lived through a pandemic and things have got only more
unequal since.
I like the idea to only look at data up to 2019 because nobody can simply blame the pandemic for the outcomes in question.
Wages of the rich grew at faster rates than wages of the poor. A
general pattern becomes apparent here. The poorest cohort (lowest 20 per
cent) suffers economically by the sheer fact of being the poorest
cohort, but their income grew at rates similar to the richest quintile
(highest 20 per cent). It’s the middle that fell behind the most. The
middle-class keeps shrinking.
Source: ACOSS
Income inequality is related to, but different from, net wealth
inequality. The top 20 per cent ($3,240,000) are 90 times wealthier than
the bottom 20 per cent ($36,000).
This is why I have argued in the past
that measuring things in median terms in an environment lacking a
strong middle is silly. A median house will be forever out of reach for
the bottom 20 per cent while the top 20 per cent look down upon such a
house.
Source: ACOSS
Let’s disregard wealth quintiles for a second. Where is Australian
household net wealth stored? The family home (38 per cent) and
superannuation (22 per cent) are the most important stores of wealth.
Logic dictates this is where policy tackling inequality should aim at.
Source: ACOSS
Now let’s look at the same data but split into wealth quintiles. For
the middle 20 per cent, the family home makes up half of the net wealth.
Once you’ve scraped enough money together to become a homeowner you can
move your way up the ladder.
If you want to tackle inequality, you need to be brave enough
politically to tackle the housing affordability issue. I see modest
political appetite for such reforms for the first time in my 16 years in
this country.
While we are at it, let’s quickly (and superficially) discuss the role of superannuation for our net wealth.
Quick recap: Superannuation exists so that we save enough money to
pay for our own retirement. In the 1990s, some forward-looking
politicians realised that as the nation ages, we couldn’t finance a
pension system for all. So, we put a system in place that forces (we
have to put roughly a tenth of our income into our nest egg) and
encourages us (generous tax cuts for money that sits in our super) to
save money for retirement.
There is no reason (other than our financial self-interest) for our
super to be higher than whatever amount is high enough to disqualify us
from receiving a public pension.
I very much expect super reforms to limit how much money we can throw
into our super. That means a chunk of wealth of the wealthiest
households gets taxed at a higher rate.
How much money was left in your super account when you died? Did you
have a little bit left? We nailed it! Did you have millions left? We
failed to tax you appropriately. We currently have plenty of wealthier
households that have much more money in their super than they need for
their retirement. I am all but certain that policy reforms are about to
tackle that.
Source: ACOSSSource: ACOSS
While everyone got at least a little bit richer, the richest 20 per
cent took share of wealth not from the very poorest but the
middle-class.
If we managed to shrink the wealth gap, the chart below would be
reversed. The highest 20 per cent would lose share of wealth (not
absolute wealth!) while the bottom 80 per cent would grow their share of
wealth. This is a bit of an obvious statement but it shows just how
important this chart is in measuring wealth shifts.
Source: ACOSS
The bottom 20 per cent suffering isn’t anything new. Now that the
middle class feels short-changed too, politics better listen very
carefully. This is a recipe for political tumult. It is very much in the
self interest of the two big parties to tackle economic inequality.
We have now established that when left unchecked wealth inequality
will only intensify. It’s much easier for wealthier households to accrue
and hold on to their wealth. As poor households pay an ever-higher
share of their income for basics such as housing, they don’t have money
left over to start investing.
We’ve seen in Figure 22 above that a large share of the total wealth
for the bottom 40 per cent of households consists of the family home.
Taking the option of home ownership away from the poorer households
diminishes their total wealth. This is an issue for everyone, even the
upper classes.
Home ownership in retirement is the best indicator that you will not
suffer from poverty in old age. We will need to subsidise poor elderly
renters through the public purse. Lower home ownership necessitates more
public spending in old age. It’s much smarter to increase home
ownership in the lower income brackets now than to deal with the
negative consequences later.
If we don’t narrow inequalities voluntarily, there will come a time
where the growing disadvantaged cohort corrects the system. We are not
talking about the French Revolution and guillotines on the streets here,
but we are talking about a radicalisation of the political system.
In a previous column I explained how we voted increasingly for third
parties (anyone other than Labor or Liberal). The preferential voting
systems makes this huge systemic shift a bit hard to spot, but don’t be
fooled. Since 1987 the share of first preference votes going to third
parties rose from 2 per cent to a third of all votes. The two big
parties are in danger, and they better wake up soon if they want to
retain their stranglehold on power.
This short column certainly didn’t solve the issue of increasing
inequality in Australia but at least we pointed to a few levers that we
can pull to narrow the wealth gap.
Ultimately this is the way to adhering to the Australian ideal of
giving everyone a fair go. Our collective goal must be to create an
economic system that ensures that anyone putting in a 40-hour work week
has a decent quality of life, any family on 1.5 incomes has a pathway to
(humble) home ownership open to them, and that we stay clear of the
American model of creating an underclass of the working poor. We don’t
want the political and social divisiveness that comes with that.
I am cautiously optimistic that the two big parties are slowly
catching on to this issue. Shifting housing policy away from
counterproductive interventions like first home buyer grants towards
supply-based solutions is a first important step.
Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The
Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking
focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact
Australia. Follow Simon on Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn for daily data insights in short format.
