News and Features

Tech, climate, post-soviet sphere

Federal government unveils New Vehicle Efficiency Standard

On Sunday the federal government released the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES), a proposal that would introduce limits on vehicle emissions averaged across automotive manufacturers’ fleets, beginning on January 1, 2025, but stepping up targets to eventually bring Australia into line with standards in the United States by 2028. The proposal distils 2700 submissions from the public, lobby groups and organisations. “This is required because almost every advanced economy has implemented a New

The companies monitoring staff using bossware

John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, says it is like the panopticon. “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware. It works in the same way.” Pane has a long history in senior privacy roles in the big banks, Australia Post and Deloitte. Over this time he has witnessed the evolution of the internet and with it workplace surveillance that has evolved into “bossware”. Pane emphasises that surveillance is nothing new. It began as soon as the in

WIRES’ unspent bushfire donations

During the Black Summer bushfires, images of injured and charred wildlife flashed across international news. Australia’s largest animal rescue service, WIRES, raised $91 million through its bushfire appeal. In the four years since, less than a quarter of that money has been spent. Critics complain the funds are not evenly distributed. Frontline volunteers say they are under-resourced and forced into onerous compliance procedures. In some instances, they are paying vet bills themselves. They say

The office returns: are the days of Australians working from home numbered?

“For me an office environment is quite overwhelming and quite difficult,” says Josh, looking out his kitchen window at the suburbs of western Sydney. He works for a major corporation that recently requested staff come back in to offices for half their working week. The in-person workplace is a complex place to navigate for Josh, who lives with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. “I didn’t realise how much of the energy drain was actually just from being in the office until I di

‘Do you know how many followers I have?’ Dodging influencers in Bali

Bali has many reputations. Kuta, once the centre of the tourist universe, is in decline having never recovered its pre-COVID glory when hordes of Bintang-singleted Aussies staggered through the Hard Rock Cafe foyer loaded with pirated DVDs. In the last few years, attention has shifted west to Canggu, into influencer territory, where every cafe, restaurant and bar is styled to be the perfect backdrop – the visually stunning but bland dragonfruit featuring frequently. At a beach club after a frie

Inside the town the CIA dubbed ‘the most secret place on Earth’

Historical places are often anticlimactic to visit. Expecting they will maintain their resonance indefinitely, you arrive to find the concrete and flaking paint strangely mute. This is why most have museums – to do the talking. Yet some places wear their history indelibly. One such place is Long Tieng. Known within the CIA as “the most secret place on Earth”, a slew of swashbuckling declassified Cold War tales emerged from when the site became Lima Site 20A. From this runway the US conducted its

Quitting the energy sector to fight climate change

James wasn’t long out of university when he started working as an engineer for energy giant Santos. He remembers feeling tremendous respect for the “high-stakes” work and technical prowess of his colleagues, but he also remembers his alarm over the climate crisis building, followed by the inescapable conviction that Santos’s core business was contributing to the problem. “I saw it all with a growing sense of real, deep cynicism,” he says, asking not to use his real name. James recalls becoming

The secret underground city the US tried to bomb out of existence

How long you’ve been in Laos will decide how you react to Viengxay’s landscape. To new arrivals, bungalows nestled between towering misty limestone peaks will constitute an achingly beautiful sight but to the acclimatised, this is just more Northern Laos. And that’s the point. Viengxay was a secret underground city used by the Lao Communist Party (Pathet Lao) between 1964-73, to provide shelter from Yankee bombs, allowing the upper echelons here to conduct a revolution and win a civil war. At it

The costs of becoming a digital nomad

I am speaking with Zackery Bertram from a sound-insulated booth in the co-living co-working space Alt_ChiangMai. Through the padded door is a sleek shared office of flatpack desks and chairs, empty for the weekend but for a few diligent digital nomads affixed to their screens. Outside is a sunny Saturday in Thailand’s second largest city, although seasonal burning in the surrounding mountains placed yesterday’s air quality among the world’s worst 10 cities, between Kathmandu and Krasnoyarsk. De

'Don't expect to live inside a brochure': The reality of my life as a digital nomad

Throughout my twenties I binged: working, saving hard while living in a dingy share house then cashing out for a big trip. From a career perspective it was reckless. While often I would be accepted back to the same job when I returned, I was too risky to promote. In my thirties I needed a more sustainable model. Once upon a time these were mythical creatures who had escaped the gravitational force of conventional employment: they lived a purely remote lifestyle, logging in from hotel rooms, c

Travelling a Chinese 'Belt and Road' railway through South-East Asia

Singapore to Luang Prabang by train became possible only in December 2021 as the world was peeking out from lockdown. Part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the Laos to China railway, one of three planned branches, the others through Myanmar and Vietnam, will one day converge on Bangkok. For passengers this closes a chain that more-or-less connects Singapore along four thousand kilometres of metre gauge track to the Chinese network. More-or-less because the purist will take exception to the

SEA’s electric vehicles v the state

The announcement, made last month, must have felt like deja vu. As part of its election commitments, the Andrews government promised it would revive the historic State Electricity Commission. Aligned with Labor’s “Just Transition” policies, the proposal involves vast renewable projects that will create 21st-century jobs for the economically depressed Latrobe Valley, a region struggling with its post-coal identity. The timing was uncanny, too. It was similarly close to the 2018 state election th

Nigel Farage, the pornographer and their weird Australian tour

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. The right-wing, anti-immigration politician who led the Brexit campaign in Britain is currently touring Australia. Nigel Farage has become increasingly irrelevant in British politics, so why is he commanding speaking fees and being given a hero's welcome by Sky News presenters and One Nation politicians? It could be a cynical money grabbing exercise, a play for political influence in Australia, or both. Today, journalist Kurt Johnson, on the

What is Nigel Farage doing in Australia?

As the crumpled suits from the day’s trade shows trundle out into a wet evening, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre prepares for An Entertaining Evening with Nigel Farage. In the foyer, a crowd of three distinct groups builds: most numerous are the white-haired retirees, dressed up for a night in town; then there are the keyboard trolls, all young males, dishevelled, eyes darting; finally, figures dressed like Fox News anchors, well-coiffed in chintzy glamour, shaking hands and kiss

Bulldozing trust: when the big build back tramples on communities and wildlife

It was shovels at the ready as Australia plotted recovery from the economic ravages wrought by the pandemic. Buildings, roads, ports, dams. But hasty decision making is leading to long-term regrets among some affected communities. Kurt Johnson hones in on one example. Demolition of office buildings and the clearing of 1253 trees has begun for a 418-home “family friendly community” in Sydney’s West Pennant Hills. A black wall more than two metres high has been erected right up to the kerb. It bl

The Shooters Party's fractured fight for the Murray–Darling

The first Helen Dalton knew about it was the empty seats. She saw them on the parliamentary feed and instantly knew the members of her own party had decided to abstain from a vote on water rights, which she had campaigned on since she was elected. “And I just thought, ‘No, I’m not going to play games with these people,’ ” the now-independent member for Murray says. “So that’s when I decided to leave the party.” Dalton entered the New South Wales upper house in 2019, as a member of the Shooters,

A loud slap for Putin's mates, but are Australian sanctions a paper tiger?

As Russia scales the heights of brutality in its war against Ukraine, sanctions against its wealthy freebooters are an easy step in international lawfare. But such idealism can founder against the wall of worldwide corporate (mis)governance, writes Kurt Johnson. On March 18 the Australian government added Viktor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Consolidated List of individuals facing targeted sanctions. That the federal government waited so long led

Sydney region’s last healthy koala population threatened by development

Greater Sydney’s only disease-free and growing koala population is under threat by the construction of a housing estate in its habitat without promised safeguards in place, scientists warn. Earthworks for the first of a two-stage 5000-home development between the Nepean and Georges rivers near Campbelltown, by Lendlease, began in January after being approved in 2019. The plans for the two-stage development, known as Figtree Hill and Mt Gilead, included koala underpasses and corridors of a speci

Fog of War: how Australian taxpayers enriched Putin's fracking mate

At long last, the Australian government has added one of Putin’s claque to the sanctions list, Origin’s fracking partner in the Beetaloo Basin. And dirty dealings in a dirty industry don’t end there. The case highlights the massive government outlay required for otherwise uneconomic projects, writes Kurt Johnson. It’s worth asking exactly why the Australian government dithered until today to sanction oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. This associate of Vladimir Putin, owner of world’s largest collecti

Ukraine neighbours try to carry on with ‘surreal’ lives

Over the border, the war is close enough for Tim Tiraspol to hear. Every day it begins “at 5am like clockwork” with bombs and Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns. He has been working for 15 years as a tour guide in the breakaway state of Transnistria, which despite having its own currency and passports, is considered by most countries as simply part of Moldova. Life has become “surreal like a Disney cartoon,” says Tiraspol who also works as local liaison for foreign journalists and takes his work nam
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Criticism

Books

China’s ‘counter-historians’ challenging the Communist Party

POLITICS Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future Ian Johnson Allen Lane, $55 In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. My final stop was a visit to Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. A long stream of mourners filed through to view the Great Helmsman, wrapped in the hammer and sickle. Many lay yellow roses, which, lest the pile ti

Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places

Mining is a dirty business but one we all need. Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places by Christopher Pollon explains just how dirty and how necessary. The book concentrates on mines throughout the global south, in Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia and Chile. It’s as bad as you expect. In some pristine location, prospectors discover a rare element coveted by the increasingly complex electronics manufacturing sector. Immediately a foreign opera

Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space

The title of British philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new book – Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space – offers a more urgent question than you might think. The race is already on for the moon’s platinum, lithium and titanium, as well as for control of the ice that can be processed into fuel for onward leaps to Mars and beyond. In addition to the ex-Cold War powers, India, China, Japan and the European Union all have space programs. Private companies are also locked i

The Shortest History of Economics

How did everything become so unfair? As a child I had a keen sense for the rigged. During family games of Monopoly, frustration mounted until some unlucky roll condemned me to jail and I would flip the board. I have now curbed my Godzilla tantrums but today’s real estate ads are enough to summon the same storm clouds. Andrew Leigh’s excellent The Shortest History of Economics explains this was the point of Monopoly. Writer Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game to educate players about 19th-c

Tyson Yunkaporta’s book bristles with revelation

“There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don’t try to control it and scale it.” says Tyson Yunkaporta in Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. Tyson Yunkaporta worries that Indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and exploited. To prove this point he posits a thought experiment: what if snake scales, the most efficient form of propulsion in the natural world, could be mechanised into a perpetual-motion machine? The surplus energy would need to b

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2023

Cartoonists are the court jesters of the news section. While journalists are constrained by fact, cartoonists speak truth. Consider Glen Le Lievre’s frame of the ghosts of robo-debt at the foot of Scott Morrison’s bed, captioned with “I don’t accept the premise of your question” – a brutal reference to the former prime minister’s shameless lack of accountability in the face of the scandal’s suicides. How would this be conveyed in print without a defamation suit? To flip through editor Russ Radc

How AI forces us to look inwards at our own minds

“At the heart of artificial intelligence is a fundamental deceit,” claims AI doyen Toby Walsh, in Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, his fourth book on the subject. The con starts at the name. AI is not true intelligence. It does not arrive at conclusions (or outputs) through understanding or reason. Instead, these are predictive machines, reared on vast data sets, which simulate coherence based on the probability that one word or pixel will follow another. The difference is cr

Divided Isles

After 36 years of recognising Taiwanese sovereignty, the Solomon Islands’ switch to China was so rapid Taiwanese diplomats barely had time to lower their flag. In Divided Isles: Solomon Islands and the China Switch, Edward Acton Cavanough follows this change, from its causes to its aftermath. Cavanough notes it was inevitable that the Solomons would recognise their largest trading partner – Australia itself joined that fold in 1971. Yet this switch has had global implications, not least in Austr

Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived

“Imagine an enormous predatory shark weighing 60,000 kilograms,” begins Tim Flannery, summoning Otodus megalodon, a leviathan almost 20m long with the landing weight of an Airbus A320. Nicknamed “Big Meg”, this shark inspires Flannery’s latest book, a collaboration with his daughter, scientist and writer Emma Flannery. Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived begins with 17-year-old Tim spending a summer scouring beaches for fossils for the Museum of Victor

Will a win for Donald Trump in 2024 threaten Australia?

Like me perhaps you are still coming to terms with the Trump presidency. After four years of ubiquitous coverage and surging cortisol, I began thinking he was Australia’s president. I’m not ready for four more years of fairy floss hair, barking recriminations and the impossible slipperiness of fact. Yet it might be time to start preparing for that eventuality. First, one conjoined question needs posing: What did it all mean and what would another round mean for Australia? Answering is the eminen

Never mind the progress, what about the profit?

TECHNOLOGY Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? Richard King Monash, $32.99 The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth Guillaume Pitron Scribe, $35 Faith in technology is a volatile stock. In under a decade we’ve sunk from the Arab Spring boomtimes, when legacy media credited social media with overthrowing dictators, to our present cynical nadir. Two withering critiques of tech’s central promises could drive the price even lower. The first, a rebuke on tec

Taxtopia: How I discovered the injustices, scams and guilty secrets of the tax evasion game

It’s worse than you think. Whenever there’s a Pandora/Panama/Paradise Papers drop, our most cynical suspicions are exceeded. The world is divided between ordinary schmucks paying tax and the ultra-wealthy, who will do anything not to. But how do they do it? Taxtopia by The Rebel Accountant promises to expose the mechanics of tax avoidance and help us schmucks save some money. The author’s anonymity is to avoid legal repercussions. Given how candidly he describes his extensive career in Britain

‘Time is money’: How can you avoid burnout when we’re all on the clock?

During lockdown time lost its shape. While beards sprouted beneath masks and seasons changed with more swagger against the diminished traffic, the weeks ran together. In response, I engineered a schedule that in sheer cruelty would have made Mark Wahlberg’s 3am starts reasonable. A cacophony of pre-dawn alarms from devices kept beyond reach, push-ups, cold showers, meditation and a creative writing regimen all before the day’s paid labour began. Then one day I could not get up. In Jenny Odell’s

Misunderstood hero: This magical book will help you see mushrooms anew

If we ever get out of this environmental mess, it won’t be thanks to ego-driven men with projects and messiah complexes visible from space. It will be the quiet oddballs on their hands and knees rooting around in the underbrush that help us slow down and see the ancient wisdom around our feet. People such as Alison Pouliot, author of Underground Lovers: Encounters with Fungi, her third book on mushrooms. This is one of a slew of recent books looking to set the record straight on mushrooms. Fungi

When a great journalist turns her scrupulous eye on herself

I began reading Janet Malcolm as did many a budding non-fiction writer with The Journalist and the Murderer. It was an affront to my cherished ideal that contributing to the record was inherently noble. To Malcolm, the journalist is half traitor, half parasite. They seduce their subject, leech their story then publish it as their own. What about when the author is the subject? “If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call me

This ‘heroic’ book offers some hope for our future

The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam. Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis has a special role to play. Gergis is one of hundreds of scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessmen

Provocative essays that belong next to those of Clive James

In the introduction to his new essay collection, Provocations, Jeff Sparrow states he feels “tremendously isolated” as a socialist writer in a country as anti-intellectual as we. Like most Australian greats, Sparrow rejects the “persona of ocker larrikinism” that mainstream writers adopt to avoid accusations of elitism. He also admits that he reads and the breadth of references he cites is difficult to find elsewhere in Australian writing. By page three, we have heard from Aurelius, Orwell, Ned

Challenging essays that divert from the ideological rails

In the introduction to his new essay collection, Provocations, Jeff Sparrow states he feels “tremendously isolated” as a socialist writer in a country as anti-intellectual as we. Like most Australian greats, Sparrow rejects the “persona of ocker larrikinism” that mainstream writers adopt to avoid accusations of elitism. He also admits that he reads and the breadth of references he cites is difficult to find elsewhere in Australian writing. By page three, we have heard from Aurelius, Orwell, Ned

Of Marsupials and Men

Any history of Australian wildlife at a time of catastrophic decline is important. Too often the plight of these creatures is obscured by the very statistics used to represent them, such as the three billion impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires. Each generation normalises their experiences of wildlife but between generations the drop has been precipitous. Alistair Paton’s Of Marsupials and Men recounts the history of European colonists and the native fauna they struggled to comprehend. It begins w

‘At first, I was cautious’: Can a short book answer the world’s biggest questions?

Remember the “why” game? Most children discover it during their intensive questioning phase. They ask “why is something as it is?” You answer only to be instantly asked “why?” again. That’s basically it. After a few rounds it has veered into an existential nightmare for you, while the child has long-since stopped listening and is there only to ride the sadistic thrill at your facial rictus as you plumb the void for meaning. To maximise your chances of survival, come armed with something such as
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Out Now: The Red Wake (Random House)

Kurt Johnson's extensive journey through contemporary Russia and its old satellites is a vivid portrait of how the ghost of that order still haunts the present. But it is also underpinned by a strong family tale, his grandparents having fled communist Czechoslovakia, part of the story taking place in the family's substantial old summer house with the Kafka-esque name, the Castle. He visits the last existing gulag and the ex-KGB headquarters in Moscow. The writing ... has an evocative immediacy, is historically informed and nuanced, ideologically alert and alive to Western narratives and Russian revisionist nostalgia.

Steven Carroll, The Age