Interzone

2 Jan

The pages of William Burroughs sprung to  life on top of the St Kilda yacht club on New Year’s day, except rather than penniless pound cake eating, fingerless glove wearing junky hustlers swiping wallets, this was an entirely commercial caper.
Entry price was $140 – thankfully my ticket was free. For that you got a free bar between 1 and 3pm. After that there was a strange Bernie Maddoffian system involving small cardboard $40 drink coupons. Thirsty punters were funnelled over to a cash register to buy these cardboard coupons. Most were laying out hundreds of dollars for several at once to save the hassle, I suppose, of repeating the process while half jarred later on. They licked fingers and unfolded wads of 50′s, exchanged them for coupons and then meandered to the bar for these to be hole-punched like tram stubs in exchange for warmish $10 bottles of beer or glasses of  fashionable vodka.

Hustling is now a commercial activity, as predicted by this hustler

Realising that forty bucks was the starting price for a drink conjured a blend of amusement and outrage, an ambience more impromptu back room customs examination than party. No real drama, I wasn’t planning on staying long, a few beers was always going to be it. Ten bucks a beer with a minimum of four per coupon confirmed it. Plus I’d eschewed the rampant rip-off class-A scene years ago.

This was a purely observational gig, I was interested in the reaction of people who planned on staying there all day and into the night, possibly blowing four or five hundred in some kind of horrendous anti-new year’s resolution mind wipe. There was a sign – It said: “any unused drink coupon can be redeemed at closing time. This will strictly be for one hour”. This was thievery writ large and spelled out on the wall. Amazing. No one gave a shit. As one guy said to me, spitting cotton and wild eyed, “this is a business see, what do you expect?” It was like I’d woken up at a train station with a mouldy hangover and my wallet gone.

Occupy Melbourne

21 Oct

All pics © Aaron Flanagan.

An AES+F devil baby art installation loomed large over Occupy Melbourne’s rain-slicked black plastic covered camp as Lord Mayor Robert Doyle’s order for the protesters to clear out by 9am expired.

About 100 protesters were sectioned off inside walls of temporary fencing. About 30 media were inside with them. One protester outside ran the gauntlet and commando rappelled over two sets of fences in the blink of an eye to the cheers of all.

Everyone outside wanted to get in too. “Let them in!” was the chant from inside the fenced-in camp.

Outside, spilling onto Swanston street were another 300 – an assorted collection of passers by stopped to see what the fuss was, determined protesters and media.

About 60 police were bolstered by 50 tactical response unit officers dressed in dark blue. All bristled with intent to clear the vicinity and disable the encampment. These were large men, well over six-foot and fit. Some had full sleeve tattoos like the kind sported by football players.

The strategy of the response unit came in organised waves. They first corralled the protestors outside the central camp under the statue of Burke and Wills on the corner of Swanston and Collins street. Then they arrested some inside and put them in paddy wagons. They set up more fences and forced people off the footpath and onto the road. A man among the protestors wearing a CFMEU jumper quizzed the fencing contractors, “Mate, are you in a union?”

Trams rang their bells but eventually gave up and came to a standstill as protesters marched down in front of the number 6 Glen Iris service and sat on the tracks. “This is a peaceful protest,” they chanted. They began handing out pink roses, even offering them to the response unit.

The response unit was quick to react, moving in with force, lifting and dragging people off the street forcing everyone back against the shops in Swanston street. Police horses rode in.

“All we want to do is protest. It’s our right to protest,” pleaded a woman forced backwards and down the street towards McDonalds.

  1. Continue reading 

Southport Olympic

27 Sep

Some of Australia’s best swimmers plough through one of ten weekly sessions – this one 7.5km long – under the watchful eye of Glenn Baker at the Southport pool on the Gold Coast.

All pics ©Aaron Flanagan

The billy tea party

12 Aug

(Originally published on ABC news site, The Drum 10/08/11)

By Aaron Flanagan

Demand to deregulate financial institutions and ease the burden on wealthy individuals and companies is astonishingly widespread less than 24 months after deregulated banking practises nearly bankrupted the world.

Matt Taibbi, editor at large for Rolling Stone, described the deregulated culture financial behemoth Goldman Sachs operated in during the original global financial crisis as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And yet allowing Taibbi’s nightmarish squid more freedom to again jam its funnel into its preferred food is precisely what a growing number of free marketers and liberals are advocating.

Barack Obama tried to cut through this befuddling dose of amnesia during last week’s debt raising amendment crisis in America, repeatedly using blunt terms like ‘billionaire bankers,’ ‘private jet buyers’ and ‘yacht owners’ to describe those who are pleading for a loosening of restrictions on behaviour that only recently robbed the world blind.

Greedy banking practice is continuing unchecked. Image: Aaron Flanagan

Rather than observe the latest global jitters as evidence of financial hubris, Australian shadow treasurer Joe Hockey is instead blaming things like the government’s climate policy as a cause of the global economic crisis rather than unfettered cash lending by institutions such as Goldman Sachs.

“The government must act immediately to boost confidence by repealing the flood levy and cancelling the introduction of the mining tax and carbon tax,” he says.

“The government must cut wasteful spending and start to live within its means.”

This ties into the tactics of American Tea Party republicans in stymieing the smooth passage of reforms needed to assist America’s financial woes for political purpose.

This style of demagoguery, Taibbi says, wrongly assumes “an overbearing, interventionist government that seeks to control, tax and regulate everything it can get its hands on – operates the same everywhere.”

It’s a quarrel deliberately couched in a recognisable grassroots perspective, he says, as a ploy to link perceptions of  government meddling with personal frustration that points to evidence of federal reformist incompetence.

Harping about cost of living pressures is deviously posited as evidence that macroeconomic national reforms are a hex on productivity and wealth generation. Increasing petrol or electricity costs are an indication, they say, that government is putting a needless handbrake on business and damming up money and opportunity.

Deregulation, be it tax cuts for big business, scaling down government size or slashing regulatory funding is a foundation of trickle down economic rationale; a utopian concept where capitalist endeavour is allowed freedom to better lube the way to future financial joy for all.

Creating a subsidised home insulation program – pink batts – is a recent example of utopian farce here in Australia.

Failure to regulate the installation of foil and batts into roofs led to wide-scale opportunistic installation chicanery with tragically fatal consequences.

Incredulously those most vehemently critical of this are now proposing we embark on another and start slashing the influence of government in the financial affairs of the most powerful corporations.

Well-intentioned utopian naivety is one thing. Hypocrisy is another.

The federal opposition in Australia and its economic policy champions, such as institutions like the IPA says doing this will make things easier, ‘grease the wheels,’ is how Hockey describes it.

Hockey pronounced support for deregulatory utopia by vociferously pronouncing an intention to fire 12,000 public servants employed to regulate the government’s carbon reduction policy on last Wednesday’s Lateline.

What didn’t sound as good was the concurrent necessity to hire 15,000 to regulate their own direct action policy. Lessening government influence to the tune of 12,000 fewer bureaucrats sounds great to the punter angry at paying eight bucks for a punnet of strawberries. Increasing them by 3,000 not so good.

Reducing the size of government means transferring power from Canberra, where government dithering can be quickly noticed and publically flayed on the nightly news, to an anonymous unelected board of directors sitting around a mahogany table in Sydney.

Adherents to deregulated utopia believe these directors, away from the interference of public scrutiny, will find ways to let money, grocery discounts, better jobs and the rest of it trickle down. Unfortunately these are the same mob that only a few years ago turned the world’s financial system into a casino.

Trickle down economics is like doing away with the walls at the lion enclosure at the zoo. We could let the kiddies pat the cute animals and tickle them under the chin except for the nightmare of increasing dramatically the prospect of their livers being eaten in front of our eyes. Therefore it’s better to have the walls up.

No space for MySpace in Murdoch’s old media world

8 Jul

(Originally published on the ABC news site, The Drum 08/07/11)

MySpace’s diminished return.

By Aaron Flanagan

This week Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation sold the original social media phenomenon MySpace for less than 7 per cent of what they bought it for in 2005.

It represents not only a spectacular failure by News Corp to manage new media business, but also is an indication of establishment media’s unwillingness to engage innovatively with anything outside their pre-internet comfort zone.

Under News Corp, MySpace’s subscribers fell from a peak of 300 million and a valuation of $US12 billion to 91 million and a valuation of $US35 million.

Internet sage Clay Shirky characterises the reluctance of media companies in adapting to the shift suddenly forced on them by the rapid growth in popularity of the internet as them having to deal with ‘an unthinkable reality’.

News Corp, blinkered as such, was reluctant to embrace the innovation necessary because their corporate agenda was still coming to terms with the unwelcome suddenness of the internet appearing like stink at a linen table-clothed soiree.

Success in the digital age defies established business profitability logic.

Twitter, recently valued at $US7.7 billion, hasn’t yet found a way to fully monetise their popular social media offering due to nervousness about irritating the delicate relationship with the millions that regularly use it.

The internet’s popularity as an alternative to TV, magazines, movies and newspapers has cleaved a new media publishing philosophy that has split old media business habits in two and dragged the whole shebang, reluctantly, into a new light.

Creativity and alacrity of thought within the old media paradigm, says Shirky, “are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse”.

A notion of a polarity in how digital content should be produced and distributed as a contemporary Australian issue was ignited by the 2009 MacTaggart speech, The absence of trust, made by News Corporation senior executive, James Murdoch, and a subsequent rebuttal by Mark Scott, managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during his lecture, The Fall of Rome: Media after Empire.

The future of media publishing according to Murdoch, and by proxy News Corp, rests with maintaining the profitability of existing media via the collusion of established media ventures to enable a user-pays subscription model.

This seems the over-riding concern for News Corp-style establishment media.

Well-known and respected brands must conform to a standard that sees their hard-earned pedigree translated to the digital medium without being tarnished by the threat of free and unregulated content no matter what.

MySpace died rapidly from 2005, eaten up by rival businesses free to explore digital opportunities that MySpace couldn’t pursue due to being lumbered with reluctance by News Corp to innovate beyond what already worked for them.

One wonders what News Corp thought it was doing when it coughed up more than $500 million to buy the most radical and unorthodox expressions of new media at the time, without considering innovative new directions in managing emergent digital business.

Innovation, such as the seemingly unmanageable and chaotic social networking buzz enshrined within Twitter and Facebook, has added a new dimension to the way the world communicates and helped define a whole new industry – Social Media – worth billions.

Shirky argues that all forms of media production have been indelibly affected by this mass, chaotic adoption of the internet as the inevitable future in how people will continue to communicate.

News Corp failed to consider the media dynamic being altered to this extent, where in just one of many departures from pre-digital orthodoxy, it is no longer a one-way flow of information – media platform to reader, but now one with a capacity for interactivity with a previously static and largely unresponsive audience.

These adjustments were not determined by the industry itself but rather forced on it by the unexpected glee people feel using digital technology. Suddenly people can’t get enough of it.

It is this perceived suddenness that took the reluctant establishment practitioners by surprise.

Establishment media haven’t taken kindly to two-way dialogue, as it’s difficult to corral interactivity into schemes that proved lucrative in the past.

MySpace encouraged interactive conversation and file sharing among subscribers, which won it unprecedented popularity. News Corp alienated their users by remaining static and unresponsive towards the pressing need to continue innovating. MySpace users grew bored and went elsewhere.

Shirky suggests the hesitation of establishment media to embrace the potential of new media is because of a reluctance to let go and take up with an unknown and, likely, less profitable digital media reality.

Significantly altering successful principles that are deeply entrenched and profitable is counter-intuitive to established business practice.

News Corp owns a full spectrum of successful media companies – cinema, print and television. Likely News Corp reckoned it could crowbar MySpace’s multi-million weekly hit metric into their media landscape and leverage this off their established media behemoth.

It didn’t work out. People, says Shirky, have an innate desire to socialise without the spectre of crass commercial exploitation. This is what sets social media apart.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if the new management team of MySpace, including gen-Y wunderkind Justin Timberlake, free from heritage media constraints, make a better fist of it.

Betting payout Blues

7 Jun

(Originally published on the ABC news site, The Drum 26/05/11)

By Aaron Flanagan.

Sports bet companies are crying loud today about having to potentially pay out on ‘betting irregularities’ identified during recent football match punting.

“I think there’s definitely a leak of information coming out and people are profiteering from it,” Alan Eskander of Betstar said.

In severe bad timing for the announcement of the ‘irregularities,’ ex Labour party head kicker, Karl Bitar chose the same time to announce his new role at Crown Casino.

Bitar has gone from The Sting’s Henry Gondorrf to Doyle Lonnegan in one befuddling career swap.

But the online sports betting companies don’t really need the likes of Bitar to help work the numbers if 2010 profits are considered.

Betfair, corporate partners of the Australian Football League, had total operating revenues of AU$522 million in 2010 and Sportsbet, controlled by Irish betting company Paddy Power after their 51% stake buyout in February 2010 for AU$132.6 million, showed a 44% increase in profit for the year.

Despite this apparent rampant success, the mysteriously named ‘AFL integrity office’ instigated an investigation into what it describes as unusual plunges that inspired the profiteering concerns that Eskander talks about.

These plunges were on players who usually fill defensive roles attracting pre-match betting interest for first goal scorer fields and then running out as forwards in premeditated tactical switches.

The struggle for supremacy between punter and bookie is as old as storytelling itself. Punters, as typified in betting folklore by Gondorff in The Sting, are always looking at playing the angles. Surely this comes as no shock?

“If you tried to ban it, it would go underground, such as the illegal betting market in India, and that is the worst thing that can happen,” AFL operation manager Adrian Anderson said. “As soon as we lose track with what is happening with the betting, we lose the ability to properly investigate and control it”.

Karl Bitar’s old mate Federal Sport’s minister Mark Arbib weighed into the issue as well saying, “The ministers will be meeting in a few weeks to consider a national policy on match-fixing in sport. The government wants to ensure we have tough regulations in place to prevent match fixing, while also ensuring we don’t drive betting onto the black market”.

A father and son on their way to the MCG. Photo: ©Aaron Flanagan

What’s all the fuss about then?

Rather than the onus being placed at the feet of the AFL and its wholehearted engagement with aggressively advertised online gambling agencies, the onus is being placed on clubs to tighten up pre-match protocols.

Like Eskander’s complaint of ‘profiteering,’ this sounds suspiciously like industry protectionism.

The AFL and sports betting companies are working in tandem to lobby the likes of Arbib to ensure clubs don’t leak information about game tactics. Carlton coach Brett Ratten said he would immediately sack any employee leaking information.

Arbib and Bitar specialise in horrendously cutthroat political sackings. Heaven help the game if Ratten’s sad threat is realised and a player is sacked for telling his mates he’ll be playing forward on Saturday.

Dancing with the despots

10 May

By Aaron Flanagan

Imelda Marcos, wife of tyrannical billionaire Ferdinand Marcos, has a fondness for shoes that became a famous allegory outlining how despots are often cast as ghoulish matinee bogeymen.

And now Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and his Libyan counterpart Muammar Gaddafi, recently reported to have stashed $700 million in Swiss bank accounts, are similarly lampooned as a couple of murderous carnival jesters.

Yet it was ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, working for American investment bank JP Morgan Chase, who reconstituted Gaddafi from passenger-aircraft-exploding maniac terrorist to respectable businessman in order to help secure, among other things, oil drilling rights for multinational oil company BP.

In 2007, British company BP obtained a US$900 million deal to explore oil fields in Libya. In 2009 Libyan Lockerbie airline bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from his British prison after serving eight years of a life sentence for murder.

Corruption in a rudimentary sense is easy to recognise. It’s marble floors covered in fly-hovered piles of shit. It’s Gaddafi’s costume shop military uniforms and insistence on an all women praetorian guard, or Imelda Marcos’s immense shoe collection, or simply stuffing money into a Swiss safe.

But the twinning of corporate and political interests to broker deals is the insidious dimension to corruption. It facilitates legal control of resource wealth and distribution for massive long-term commercial and political gain.

Gaddafi said after the recent killing of his son during a NATO airstrike, ‘we are ready to negotiate. We are ready to sign a deal with your corporations,’ suggesting the stitching together of political and corporate diplomacy into the Frankenstein’s monster approach he’s practised before with Blair.

It’s this type of diplomacy, assiduously normalised as typical democratic business practise that threatens an emergence of plutocracy.

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister, Michael Somare, currently negotiating with various powerful and resource hungry states about the extraction of US$14 billion of LPG gas, is another currently being hung out to dry as a corrupt bogeyman.

Somare is currently embroiled in a criminal trial accused of fudging his taxes in order to hide payments made by shonky foreign owned companies.

Here again is a rudimentary example out in the open, exposed and held up to be indignantly japed at.

Simultaneously, the vast wealth of PNG’s mineral and resource deposits continues to be assigned a financial value by western markets.

And yet finance is a language unrecognisable to PNG’s indigenous cultures, resulting in tribal land lived in for millennia suddenly described in terms not understood by the people who live there.

‘PNG is famous for having about 700 distinct languages. With each language is a different culture. Hundreds of distinct cultures,’ Noel Walters, a mining community affairs manager with decades of experience managing cultural issues says. ‘The social obligations dealing with proper distribution of money from mining interests is complicated and very difficult to supervise’.

This complex and delicate issue is lost in the propeller-churned backwash of economic momentum. Money is wasted and corruption is fostered. Western media rounds on people like Somare suggesting criminality. State backed mining and resource companies shrink into the shadows denying culpability.

The Markham highway is the only route between the port town of Lae and the massive gold and LNG gas mining operations in the central Papua New Guinea highlands. Convoys of fuel and supplies must pass through numerous tribal lands as the road meanders upwards from the coast. Stick-ups are common.

PNG highlanders wait for a bus on the Markham highway. Photo: ©Aaron Flanagan

Lawrence Meeks, a gold buyer who routinely deals with highland Niuginians from remote jungle areas, often travels the Markham with a pistol down the back of his jeans.

‘In the boom-times,’ he says, ‘rural Niuginians would often have coffee jars crammed with nuggets. After doing business with me, they’d charter a helicopter ride back home rather than walk for a week through the jungle’.

A fortune would disappear via the most elaborate taxi ride imaginable.

During a stopover at a Mt. Hagen hotel halfway along the highway there’s furore at 3am in the corridors. Giant men with verdant shovel-shaped beards are chasing hookers down the hallway Benny Hill style.

Meeks idly mentions the next morning over breakfast there’s some sort of political summit going on dealing with the multi billion-dollar LNG pipeline project. He crams a final piece of fruit in his mouth and gets up from the table and stretches. He nods his head towards an immensely fat man he recognises wearing a pink business shirt with straining buttons.

‘That was the provincial minister,’ he says walking back out to his truck.

Ah yes. But who’s picking up the bill? The question goes unanswered.

HOME

All tubes, FIRE!

11 Feb

By Aaron Flanagan

As Melbourne troubadour Dave Graney sings, ‘fitness is wasted on the young,’ or maybe that’s drugs, ‘drugs are wasted on the young’.

Swimming training. It's not fun and games.

Ian Thorpe, while hardly beyond his youth at 28, is set to join the recent clamour of older athletes yearning for a return to their halcyon days.

Thorpe unleashed a brazen press conference to announce his return that only just stopped short of bringing on dancing girls. He was bronzed and quaffed, and behind him was a wall festooned with corporate logos. He said much about his comeback, of his love for the sport and admiration for colleague and friend Geoff Huegill. But undoubtedly most electrifying was mentioning his intent to train in Abu Dhabi. ‘Abu Dhabi?’ Yes, Abu Dhabi.

He’s a peerless athlete, breaking his first world record competing as a boy among men at 16. An Adonis-like specimen of athletic prowess, his quadriceps shudder and shift like tectonic plates with every step. His expanded rib-cage is the size of a small family hatch-back and he’s possessed of an aware smile that is both charming and predatory.

Despite this undoubted physical talent, the challenge for him will be mighty. ‘Dennis Cottrell (current 1500m world record holder, Grant Hackett’s coach) has about ten Chinese guys doing amazing things at the moment,’ Australian swim team coach Glenn Baker said when asked his opinion on what would constitute a successful comeback. ‘There’s going to be some fierce rivalry for him, those guys are hungry. There’s a massive pack of them training here, together, on the Gold Coast. Sun Yang, in particular, is a phenomenal swimmer’.

Shark toothed, six foot seven Chinese superstar, Sun Yang, an Asian embodiment of Rocky Balboa nemesis Ivan Drago, went close to erasing Grant Hackett’s 1500 World record at last years Asian Games. Hackett’s record is considered one of the best in the books. Forget Thorpe Vs Michael Phelps. Any decent marketing man would be better served promoting a Yang Vs Phelps showdown: Yang, the unknown no-frills Chinese powerhouse, quietly banging out hour after hour of hideously painful, grueling mileage Vs Phelps, bona-fide American Gold medal superstar. ‘Yang is just awesome. His stroke and work ethic is pretty incredible. His finishing speed is probably just as strong as Thorpie in his prime,’ Baker said.

Yang came home in an eye-watering final 100m split of 54 seconds during his Asian games swim. 54 seconds. Stop for a while to consider that. A decent Australian national standard swimmer doing upwards of 50km training a week would do about 54 seconds in a straight 100 race – with a dive. Yang came home in 54 seconds at the end of a 1500m swim, without diving.

‘Yang can do a 51 second 100m freestyle, push, at the end of a hard training set,’ Baker said, ‘he’s got speed to burn even after a massive training load’.

It’s not just a growing pack of Chinese that have chosen to pitch camp at the Gold Coast and train under perfect Australian conditions and mentorship. The English have an elite division permanently ensconced  and Korean 2008 Olympic 400m gold medal winning wunderkind, Park Tae-Hwan, is up the road in Brisbane with Stephanie Rice’s coach, Michael Bohl.

‘Swimming’s a tough, tough sport to train for. He’s got a lot of very painful work to do. There’s no doubt he can do it, but I think he’d make it easier on himself if he trained with a good, familiar squad,’ Baker said of Thorpe’s intention to train in Abu Dhabi. ‘I think the journalists and camera crews will soon get sick of getting up at 4:30am Monday to Friday to film him. He’d have plenty of peace and quiet to get on with it’.

To have the best chance against Phelps, Ryan Lochte and the Europeans, many learned observers have said Thorpe would do best joining a crack training program here in Australia. For him to get in and train side by side with Yang or Park and feel the Australian sun beating down on his broad and now heavily burdened shoulders.

At least he’d be here among us, his most ardent supporters.

HOME

Melbourne Wikileaks Rally

10 Dec

Free Assange. A popular sentiment

Behold the leek

delicious simmered and blended with potatoes!

leeks leeks wikileaks

A baton for change or mere vegetable?

They were hoping it was Wikisugarlumps

Boil up your legumes

passive aggressive notes writ large

 

HOME

Off with his HEAD!

7 Dec

By Aaron Flanagan

Eighteenth century French republican Maximillien Robespierre and digital revolutionary Julian Assange share a similar disgruntlement with a perceived arrogant application of power by the ruling class.

But rather than separating head from aristocrat, Assange chooses to use the digital zeitgeist to separate government from any illusion of righteous propriety over truth.

Mme Guillotine an antecedent of the internet?

Internet inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, recently said thisabout his creation:

If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact—not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come.

Damn you Wikileaks! (apologies to Herge)

History is littered with instances of individuals being held in contempt for having the temerity to question the procedures of power. John Lennon, a humble musician – well humble is probably wrong – but mere musician all the same, was tailed by the CIA for his activism. It seems ludicrous now, but back in Nixon’s time he stirred the paranoid yanks into a right old lather. We all know now how history judges Nixon and Lennon.

Similarly today, a not-so-humble website designer is being pointed at with stiff quivering arm and accused of lurching the world towards doom.

All hyperbole aside, what we’ve learnt from the revelations so far is: That envoy conversation is akin to a Steven Segal movie script. That certain key militarily strategic areas are important to America. That war itself is a bastard. And that some politician’s egos are like a shrill bleating whine.

HOME

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: