In the last century 90 per cent of the World’s fish have disappeared and the hand lays squarely at the feet of human beings for how this travesty of the Commons has happened. Charles Clover’s book titled The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat is the result of several decades investigating and experiencing the various fishing grounds that feed us. He looks at where we fish, the historic evolution of our fisheries and how and why we’ve suffered specific fisheries collapses. It’s a scary world when you are more ethically fish conscientious buying a McDonald’s fish meal than a fancy restaurant meal.

As a young man I was drawn to commercial fishing in Bass Straight (long-tooth scallop dredging that quickly collapsed the industry) and several months working on a prawn trawler out of Townsville. It was obvious that a world without quota and devoid of some sort of communal responsibility had no long-term future. And if fisheries within the 200 mile limit were treated that way then what hope was there for the oceans that have since been blitzkrieged with industrial high-technology driven fisheries? The by-catch from trawling for prawns off the Great Barrier Reef meant that a good ton of fish in the net equaled a bucket of prawns, a few Moreton Bay bugs and the rest went back over the side dead.

So I really did find The End of the Line a compelling book that can only be recommended to humans who should be very worried about how we are going to consider feeding 9+ billion people by 2050 without fish. And it’s right now that we need to be discriminating on our plate to ensure that resource continues to exist… as for wild fish farming of carnivore species there have been more problems created than questions answered, so don’t hang your hat on that being a solution.

While reading this book a tweet ran down my Twitter stream from a usability professional in the Unites States – he wrote “I need more Sturgeons in my life”. He’s tweeted that before. So I replied with a link to Wikipedia for information about sturgeon… just so he’s aware that sturgeon are highly endangered. Unfortunately restaurants seem to be quite willing to provide their patrons with the almost forbidden fruit of endangered species. However, we would be appalled to read that Bengal tiger steaks and urangatan cutlets were served to the rich.

The End of the Line is an accompanying book to the documentary of the same name. It does look at the problem but more importantly it looks at the relatively simple solutions. Some major fisheries have collapsed and rebounded… but only through a long hard process with the involvement of all stakeholders (not just commercial & recreational fishermen). Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is to rope in the global fish plunder of the European Union. However, it’s fixable if we continue this turnaround rather than pretending it will go away. If we don’t chase that solution then the only thing to go away certainly will be the fish.

A refreshing part of Charles Clover’s book is also the positivity he has that it doesn’t need to be this way. We can still have our fish and eat them, too. If we do it the right way. If we stop strip-mining the oceans for economic short-term benefits over the interests of the fish and the people’s Commons. After all, the fish and the oceans do not belong to the fishermen… they belong to the people.

Genghis Khan got it. Admittedly, an estimated 40 million people died in his expansion to rule 22 per cent of the the world’s total land area… but he got it. If you ceded to the Khan and joined the Mongol Empire there was true multicultural citizenship under that rule of law. It was a very progressive idea at the time. Genghis Khan got it. He got that without ‘one rule of law for all men’ there is no law, only a pseudo-arbitrary system of checks and balances determined by connections, power and corruption.

We like to believe these are more law-conscious times than the rule of an infamous barbarian from the Asian Steppes. But when you look around at the written and broadcast news we’re bombarded with a constant sideshow of systemic corruption. If you watch any American thriller you would almost be convinced that corruption is not only expected in politics and policing but that it’s a desirable trait of the powerful. That the ends justify the means. And along that chain of thought it’s not too hard to see how renditioning and the Guantanamo Bay prison factor into our idea of Law.

Corruption is most often overt rather than covert and usually manifests in ways people have come to think of as ‘normal business’. So here is a litmus test of how to identify corruption. The ‘Green Light’.

Because any time you see ‘green lights’ thrown out in a society… where ‘one rule of law for all men’ is ceded… there is corruption. It’s not merely a flag that corruption exits; a ‘green light’ is corruption in it’s everyday most basic form.

The ‘green light’ that Neddy Smith apparently received from Senior Sergeant Roger Rogerson in the 1970s to rob banks, deal drugs and commit murder was corruption. The ‘green light’ that a government gives to a developer to fast-track past due environmental processing is corruption. The ‘green light’ to persecute any individual (no matter what the reason or the provocation) is corruption.

Lawyers are in a special ethical situation worth mentioning. The first school of ethical thought is that a lawyer’s role is to defend their client (innocent or guilty) to the best of their ability and to test their client’s case against the Law. This may mean an occasional guilty person walks free but in the long-term the Law is made more robust. The second school of ethical thought is that a lawyer is also a citizen and every citizen has an ethical responsibility to report crime and to ensure that guilty people are removed from society.

Unfortunately this second school of ethical thought is what has permeated the Tasmanian legal system for generations… and I recently had a conversation with a lawyer who saw no problem with that stance. Except, I should point out, that if arbitrary committees and backroom power brokers decide who is guilty and innocent ‘in special cases’ before trials ever get before juries then in my opinion we do not have anything close to ‘one rule of law for all men’ – we have a ‘green light’.

I remember watching the late Richard Carleton on 60 Minutes reveal in 2003 how live sheep were crammed in unbearable heat to suffer a horror voyage to the Middle East. Thousands died at sea and were pushed overboard. Survivors were dehydrated and starved on the voyage standing in their own dung and urine. When they arrived the slaughter was in a traditional style that our Western perspective found abhorrant. Australians stood up and voiced outrage the very next day… and some of those issues were addressed by government (final paragraph on Page 2). Unfortunately, some of those issues have remained to haunt us even today with live animal exports to Indonesia. Note the corporate players in live exports are almost unaltered from a decade ago.

The 4 Corners episode about live animal exports to Indonesia (A Bloody Business) aired on Monday 30 May, 2011. In my humble opinion, 4 Corners has produced one of the great pieces of Australian Journalism to be aired this year. This is what Journalism should be about and what it potentially has to offer society – the revelation of a hidden truth that somebody wants to remain untold and, in the telling of that story, produces an affective response within society that leads to action and some level of social change.That, my friends, is Journalism with the big J. That’s where great editorial skill comes to the fore… it’s where journalistic institutions become necessary to protect the story being told from the big business and government ministers who definitely do not want the story told. So, in my view, whether you want to concede this point or not – the Indonesian slaughterhouse story was exceptionally good investigative Journalism.

There is a GetUp! petition available online addressed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig: “We call on you to immediately halt the live exports of Australian cattle to Indonesia and move towards an end to the live exports of Australian animals within 3 years.” I hope you consider adding your voice to the call to stop live animal exports from our country. The bottom line is our meat should be butchered in Australia by professionals in as humane an environment as possible. We should only sell into markets that accept our meat as it is supplied.

However, I see that there’s a world full of cross conversation happening around this issue as well. Again in my humble opinion, this is all pepper on the toilet roll when it comes to it’s core. Are our animals ‘Australian’ is as loaded a question as ‘do you believe in cruelty of overseas animals’. First – yes and no. Yes we have an ethical and moral (and I know the difference between those two terms) responsibility to the livestock we raise and sell for export; in that sense they are Australian. No, I don’t think they’re going to be swearing steers in as Australian citizens. It comes down to whether you see farm animals as living feeling creatures or as dumb commodities. Second – no. Animal cruelty is shocking and I obviously miss the inference that opposing the live export of Australian animals in any way equates to a yes on that question.

And yes there are a lot of issues in the Australian livestock industry – the contribution to employment and the Australian economy, the impact on global warming, the KG value per acre of our best farmland, the damage caused by hard-hooved beasts, water consumption per KG of meat, the environmental footprint of failing to produce food near it’s place of final consumption… the list goes on. You can argue backwards about all of these side issues, you can throw down your fork this afternoon and become a vegan, but that won’t change the issue. This conversation IS about the conditions of export of live animals reared on Australian properties that are being unnecessarily mistreated between sale and slaughter. We have a choice, as a nation, as to what stance we take about that process.

Briefly, I also want you to consider my perspective as somebody with an MBA degree. Don’t fool yourself in any way shape or form… live animal export is an industry all about increasing Australia’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by letting a few fatcat big companies make a lot of cash through moving animals from here to there. It’s not about raising cattle to feed our nation. It’s not about humane treatment or animal husbandry. There is no RSPCA to stop cruelty in this process. The fundamental driver is cash for cows (or sheep or pigs). People breed more cows to feed that market and as long as the rich are getting richer and GDP is rising everybody in that system chugs along with a big fat greedy smile. Don’t get me started on the stupidity of throwing in subsidisation.

So in my view the 4 corners expose of the treatment of Australian live animals exported to Indonesia is about a brutal business model based on a cross-cultural demand we should refuse to fill. There is a market for white slaves but we don’t sell our orphans to fill the need… likewise, we should protect our livestock. And we shouldn’t care if the United States or Bolivia fill that market need in our absence… it’s a market we do not want to be involved in.

But mostly I want you to think about why this story was such good Journalism and what it takes to create Journalism of that calibre. Investigative Journalism does not occur out of a dingy bedroom without editorial or resources. It is hard fought and defended because somebody powerful and influential does not want you to be told that story.

Essential reading for understanding the problem of Australian men outside the workforce is a Staff Working Paper published by the Australian Productivity Commission in January, 2007 – Men Not at Work: An Analysis of Men Outside the Labour Force by Ralph Lattimore. In particular, I would encourage journalists to read Men Not at Work so their commentary moves from the general perception of unemployment toward a role of educating the public about the true meaning (and obfuscation) of the unemployment statistic.

Lattimore used a simple pie chart to contextualise the unemployment number provided by government. There are two categories:

1. Those who are participating in the labour force (employed + unemployed)
2. Those not participating in the labour force (pensioners, stay at home mums, retirees… neither employed nor unemployed)

The figures aren’t that different today so we’ll stick with Lattimore’s pie chart for the male demographic: (1) 68 per cent of men employed + 4 per cent of men unemployed – all participating in the labour force; and (2) 28 per cent of working age Australian men classified as ‘not in the labour force’. Number 1 is refered to as the ‘Participation Rate’ (grey and white in Lattimore’s pie chart).

Consider those figures for a minute. Not only is current unemployment at 5 per cent but there are also approximately 30 per cent of Australian men, Lattimore calls them the ‘invisible men’, who are not counted in the official ABS unemployment figure provided to the Australian public by the government of the day. In obfuscating the meaning of this statistic we are hiding a simple fact from ourselves about Australia – there are TWO Australias. Were we to be directly confronted by over 30 per cent unemployment in Australia I would hope there would be marching in the streets because it is an outrage. How can we be prospering in the global marketplace when a whole third of our nation is broiling in unproductive poverty?

A major component of those ‘not in the labour force’ were targeted with tough love in the Federal Budget delivered by Wayne Swan last night. There is a lot to be said for a bit of tough love, but that tough love speech was somewhat out of kilter towards the public perception that DSP (Disability Support Pension) recipients – a figure that has grown every year since the 1930s in Australia – is actually a part of the unemployment figure. You could give employment to every DSP recipient in Australia and it would not affect the unemployment figure simply because they are ‘not in the labour force’ to be counted as unemployed.

So the next point to understand is the ABS definition of employment.

Persons aged 15 years and over are considered employed if, during the week prior to answering the question, they worked for one hour or more for pay, profit, commission or payment in kind in a job, business, or on a farm. Australian Bureau of Statistics – Understanding Statistics

My point is that while governments tell us the figure of unemployment in Australia is a mere 4 or 5 per cent there is the inference in the common mind that employment in Australia must therefore be 95 or 96 per cent. The figure that should be put to the Australian people:

True Unemployment = the unemployed PLUS those ‘not in the labour force’.

Any other representation of the unemployment problem in Australia is a down right misdirection of every government we elect into office… True Unemployment is over 30 per cent in Australia.

The average Australian reading these figures should now pull out their fingers and start counting – on Lattimore’s pie chart only 68 per cent of Australians had at least 1 hour of paid work in the referenced week. That means far less than 68 per cent of Australians are working at a level the average person’s perception would equate to ‘real employment’. So we should also be provided a Real Employment figure.

Real Employment = people 15 years and older who made enough money to pay their rent, food and survive modestly and contribute to the Australian Tax coffers. Anything less is a downright misdirection.

The problem is that within the 68 per cent employment statistic are people no reasonable Australian would consider ‘employed’. The problem of ‘underemployment’ is that a vast number of Australians worked more than 1 hour in the reference week BUT they wanted to work more… no opportunities exist for them to earn more. Many underemployed people hold down numerous base wage casual or part-time jobs that also skew the statistic – if I hire five people to do 8 hours per week the statisticians report that five jobs were created NOT one 40 hour per week job performed by five people who all receive Centrelink benefits.

The facts on DSP are a massive concern to Australia: Lattimore reported that over 420,000 men over 16 years of age were on DSP in 2005; around half of all men between 25-64 who were inactive received DSP; the budgetary cost at that time for males and females on DSP was a whopping $8 billion while the NewStart only cost $4.6 billion; the number of DSP recipients was rising as the unemployment statistic fell; and “Simulations suggest possible forgone economic output of male inactivity over the next 45 years of cumulatively around $2150 billion (in non-discounted form).”

All I can suggest is that everbody, especially the journalists, read Men Not at Work and employ simple finger counting. It’s easy to point at DSP recipients who generally progress along a certain path… 1 year Unemployment then 1 year Long Term Unemployment… before being disappeared off the ABS unemployment statistic by moving them ‘outside the labour force’ onto the DSP. Where, you should be aware, the ‘invisible men’ will remain for an average of 7 and a half years and have four times more chance of dying than of gaining full time employment. All the while, associated with poverty, mental illness and lack of opportunity that binds them to a cycle of increasing long-term cost to the community.

Wayne Swan is correct in that Australia has a participation problem. However, I would say that successive Australian Governments, the OECD and the United States are all hiding behind a world reality that vastly more people are unemployed and underemployed AND vastly fewer people are really employed in the common sense of the word. The Australian people, at the least, deserve to have a proper conversation about this tough love on our society’s most vulnerable.

The first step in that process is to propagate throughout our society an understanding of the ABS unemployment statistic.

In the early 1990s I ran into Jamie McCrossen on the lawns outside the Risdon Prison psychiatric wing during a fire drill. To all intensive purposes he had disappeared from the general population in the same way Stalin had disappeared everybody he disagreed with from the public record. McCrossen had entered the system in his late teens nearly 10 years earlier, at that stage, and so I offered him a cigarette. He told me where he’d been.

Jamie McCrossen had spent around 3 years of solitary confinement in the isolated S Wing within the Risdon Prison Hospital. The guards slipped McCrossen’s meals under the door. His room had a toilet, a sink, a plastic covered foam mattress on the floor and a psychiatric blanket (a sheet sewn to a woollen blanket to prevent suicide). Most often, McCrossen had no clothes. He told me he would regularly be beaten during the night because he’d rub shit around the walls.

I asked why he did that. “Why rub shit around the walls when you know you’re going to get a beating?”

He said “because I’m lonely and it’s my only human contact.”

McCrossen told me about the abuses, the weeks and months he’d spend strapped to a hospital bed wearing a nappy – to stop him wiping his shit on the walls in a cry for human contact… and to keep him quiet. The beatings. The humiliation. The tears in the darkness as they attempted to send him crazy; a result that post-justifies the prison’s original mistreatment.

So reading an article by David Killick in The Mercury about an old friend of mine, Adrian Pickett – Inmate’s prison cell hell – chilled my spine. Justice Helen Wood, in the Supreme Court of Tasmania, has agreed that Adrian has endured nearly five years in Risdon Prison’s notorious Tamar Unit spending 23 hours per day alone in his cell, eating sub-grade food in meagre quantities and enduring arbitrary punishments on a daily basis that are intended solely to humiliate and degrade him as a human being. To break him. To break a wild human being the authorities were afraid of or couldn’t control.

The State of Tasmania and those charged with administering prisoners’ sentences have a duty of care and legal obligations including the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” as well as the United Nations Charter on the Humane Treatment of Prisoners as signed by the Australian Government. There are also a number of criminal offences that must come under Tasmanian legal jurisdiction – serious assaults and torture of the prisoner (and any prisoner).

The result is that Adrian Pickett, a young man who has spent all but a year at best outside Risdon Prison since he was 16 years old (now in his mid 30s), has suffered “permanent psychiatric harm, including anxiety, depression, disorientation and paranoia” with the costs of this torture being reflected back onto the Tasmanian taxpayer. You do not make hardened and dangerous criminals by giving them a DVD player, television and a doona… that only makes somebody softer. You do make hardened and dangerous criminals by extended use of violence and torture within the administration of prisons.

Let us not forget that prisoners’ punishments are handed out by courts and the sole role of prisons is to secure our prisoners, not to inflict any mental or physical punishments (recognised as tortures by international convention).

Therefore I have a bold suggestion for the Tasmanian government and the population at large. The only way to STOP endemic mistreatment and prevent future torture of prisoners in Tasmania is to arrest and take before the courts the high ranking prison officials who signed off on this treatment every day of that five years. If Pickett had been raped then they would be in the Supreme Court dock… why then are those officials who purposefully breached their duty of care not being charged by the Tasmanian Police for assault and torture?

Unless we make people accountable there will be no motivation for these abhorrant conditions to cease. And make no bones about that declaration – torture should not exist in the Tasmanian prison system. We don’t torture animals; we don’t torture people.

Adrian Pickett should also be removed from the Tamar Unit and returned to the general prison population immediately. He should be given the social and psychological assistance that he needs to rejoin society. He should be rehabilitated and we should not begrudge him that avenue to reclaim his life.

The use of torture within our prison system devalues and degrades every Tasmanian. It is definately not Justice.

Fracking: Drill down 8000 feet all over the countryside and pump vast quantities of fresh water mixed with over 500 chemicals to fracture the underlying rock and release gas deposits. No, I mean VAST quantities of fresh water (in a world suffering rising water shortages) and I mean a soup of 500 chemicals (including a large number of serious carcinogens and other killers). Half that soup rises to the surface and the other half becomes a part of your countries long-term geological water supply.

The second insidious part of that business model is that contaminated victims have to prove the harm was caused by the fracking AND they have to fight it in court AND the corporation, if found at fault, simply pays out the last man standing. And where are the environmental regulators on all of this? They’re gagged by governments who pass special laws that allow these large energy companies immunity to our existing environmental safeguards. Where does it ever make sense to give multinational corporations immunity to pollute without being monitored?

A rational person would think the President of the United States of America would watch this documentary and hit a red fucking button and the world would stop on it’s what-the-fuck axis. But no… apparently Power comes in an idiot suit and Presidents are less powerful than corporate lobby groups. And now this insidious cluster-fuck of environmental ass-pumping has arrived in Australia. To the echo of ‘almost silence’. The only sad faces bleeting on our doorstep are the farmers who stand to lose their businesses to the corporate onslaught.

I don’t want to get into a synopsis here… if you watch Gasland you’ll see how water faucets can be ignited, how animals and land are contaminated and how devastating these greedy industrialists are being with the world’s future. It’s all about short-term cash. It’s also about chasing the fallacy that everything in the world is an economic problem – the High Lord Economics is as flawed as the sacrifice of virgins to a Sun God we now know to be an insentient ball of gas on the horizon.

So this makes me mad. This is exactly why I went through the MBA program – to understand globalisation, corporations and the true enemy of life on this planet. And at some point we’re all going to have to stand up and say ‘Stop the fuck here, bastards.’ If they aren’t fracking our water into poison or chugging the rainforests for cheap hardwoods then they’re scooping the oceans with their lucky dip mentality.

But the really crap part about all of these HUGE issues is that the corporations (a) have people willing to work for them to achieve these goals, and (b) know that by dividing and conquering and using the law against us then they win by the default of centralised power. How does the average community fight against hundreds of millions of dollars to sweet talk and cajole our politicians? Power corrupts.

And with Australia being swept up in this insanity where are the Australian Greens? We have voted these bastards in with numbers they’ve never seen before in national politics and for the life of me I can’t see any more than a small mention of gas fracking hitting their agendas. OK let me ask Australia this: ‘If the Murray Darling Basin were contaminated, what are our fallbacks?’

At a time when a douchebag like Donald ‘Squirrel Top’ Trump is trying to make his way into the United States Presidency why can’t we collectively see that chasing the bottom and buying into the religion of the High Lord Economics is a bizarrely insane strategy. For fuck sake, what’s the point of gas fracking to push up employment numbers and improve GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the short-term if we’re going to be shot-duck third-world economies in as little as ten-to-fifteen years.

People think I’m joking when I compare the High Lord Economics with a Peruvian Sun God. Watch Gasland… watch the virgin get sacrificed and think about those parallels. Every civilisation falls and one of the underlying reasons is their inherent belief it can’t happen. Without fresh water and healthy land we even risk joining the mass extinction.

The bottom line of this issue is that Nick McKim wants to reform the current prison system… while the prison officers’ union representatives claim the proposed reforms will endanger prison officers’ safety. That greater subject can lay fallow – is McKim a hypocrite or not?

A Whistleblower versus a Plain Old Thief

The first point to make is that Nigel Burch was a classic whistleblower who only stood to lose by revealing corruption in the Deputy Premier. I should add that the then Premier, Paul Lennon, and his successor, David Bartlett, are both under investigation by Tasmania’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Integrity Commission. In the classic spirit of whistleblowing, the information was released by Nigel Burch for the wider good of our society (by a person who knew that it would hurt nobody more than himself for revealing it). It was solely through ethical outrage – a key point of whistleblowing.

That should give you a good idea of what whistleblowing legislation is designed to protect – people revealing information for the greater public good.

Enter the disgruntled Tasmanian prison officers in pursuit of their stouche with government over danger in the workplace and McKim’s prison reforms. An as yet unidentified individual or individuals removed private and personal prisoner records and placed them in the public domain to serve their own ends… to prove a union case for a pay rise… a pay rise they stand to benefit from… in the hope of never being revealed.

The first example, Burch, is the whistleblower. The second example, an unnamed prison officer (or officers) have removed private information for personal gain. That is theft by anybody’s definition. It also impinges on the Tasmanian Government’s duty of care of those human beings being held in custody at the Risdon Prison Complex. We should never overlook our responsibility to those human beings nor our internationally recognised obligations to them regardless of their offences. As we wouldn’t condone torturing a rapist we should also abstain from defrocking them beyond the law without natural justice. These men and women are prisoners; these prisoners are men and women.

The Contents of a Prisoner’s File

My experience with the Tasmanian prison system is extensive and my file at one point was over six inches in height. The State Ombudsman, after my complaint about it’s size and how it was being used, ordered that file to be significantly culled by Prison management somewhere around 1994 because most of what entered that file was biased and editorial in nature – random prison officer commentary, parts of private letters out of context… anything anybody who disliked me thought could be useful as a weapon to bring me harm.

That’s the rub… prison files aren’t court records. Prison files contain anything any officer chooses to write about the inmate uncontested… the inmate cannot be notified of these comments because it would endanger the prison officer performing their duties. There is also a rule stating no prison officer can tell a lie or they will be immediately dismissed – so to be charged internally on any defaulter’s court has to result in a finding that the inmate is guilty of the offence. Or the officer has lied. If the officer has lied then the officer must be dismissed.

There is a contingency on more serious charges for a Justice of the Peace to sit on the defaulters court with the power to extent a prisoner’s sentence by several months. This is both rare (once in my knowledge of 15 years at Risdon) and without the rigour of Court Justice.

Any prison officer can write onto any prisoner’s file unproved and overheard commentary, psychiatric assessment (for example, psychopath… and even on the insistence of the States most senior forensic psychiatrist that the unqualified term be removed, the word psychopath has remained on that file).

So, prison files aren’t legally proven facts or standing documents meant for anybody beyond prison management or the parole board. Prison files are the equivalent of your quarterly performance management reports accumulated into one central location and across every job you’ve ever endured. The prison file also contains personal information about relationships, visitors, family details, addresses and phone numbers. Whatever the prison gleans about an inmate goes into that file. Anybody can edit that file. Anybody can contribute to that file.

Performance Management does not belong in the Public Domain

When the Tasmanian Liberals Elise Archer compares Burch’s whistleblowing to the release of these documents into the public domain she dramatically proves to be lacking in an understanding of whistleblowing. How would you feel if every performance management by that prick in your last job… the prick who hated your guts for no other reason than you existed… how would you feel if those performance management reports were public?

Nick McKim is entirely correct as the Corrections Minister to demand the thief (or thieves) of those documents be identified and prosecuted. This, by definition, is not an act of whistleblowing to be protected – this is an act of a union membership stealing internal and harmful files to prove a union case against their employer for a raise in pay and conditions. No more and no less. In other words… a revelation for potential personal and group gain.

The line has been crossed in this instance.

Prisons are a dangerous environment. However, I’m aware of the process of becoming a Tasmanian prison officer – the applicants try very hard to be employed there and wait a long time through interview, physical testing and training. From my memory I recall it being 9 to 12 months from application to hitting the yards. The danger of the situation should not be a surprise to anybody applying to manage our most dangerous, volatile and manipulative citizens. By the same token, it is not our right and not the prison officers’ collective right to drag those personal unsubstantiated collections of garbage into the public domain.

The moment society condones this action then nurses may just as well steal patient records to prove that some patients abuse them verbally and place those records into the public domain. Call centre workers… airlines… all that private information about you would be open to public scrutiny whether you did say those things or they just wrote them into their files through being offended.

Nick McKim has not been a hypocrite in this instance… however, Elise Archer has definately shown Tasmanian voters her ignorance about the nature, rationale and spirit of whistleblowing.

Demographics are probably considered one of the most unsexy subjects known to mankind… but The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future by Fred Pearce takes a second look at old school demographics. Pearce, if you haven’t read any of his previous work, is a well respected British environmental journalist with a slew of exemplary research under his belt. In this book, released in early 2010, he tracks back to explore where the numbers are really leading the global population statistic. And those numbers are not in the direction of continual world growth.

With the often maligned baby boomer generation leading their way into retirement in 2011 there has to be a time when the unsustainable older boomer bubble starts to die in their sleep. At the same time nearly every country in the world is in population decline with the average global woman now producing 2.6 babies – in less than a decade, if trends persist, global population will be below replacement levels. And by 2040 we are looking at a global population that, for the first time since the Black Death, will be shrinking. The trends point to an older overall population well into the future with a greater influence from women.

That’s an interesting point – how will the world be different without the traditional patriarchal societies? Could this possibly be a future with less confrontation fueled by testosterone? And how will the shrinking populations of Europe and the United States, for example, affect the migration of labour around the world?

From the Catholic Church’s pre-occupation with abortion due to the need to replace those men lost to the labour force after the Black Death in Europe, to Malthusian ideas of letting the weak fall aside for the good of humanity, to the long history of eugenics, and the spirited battle to retard population growth that has brought about an even greater effect than its engineers may have imagined… you simply need to think a little about the long term ramifications of Mao’s infamous one child policy… Pearce’s book is chocked full of well researched information and sustained argument.

The argument is that population isn’t the giant negative we’ve been brought to believe. It brings its own truth to the changing demographic landscape of the world. If you get a chance, read another Fred Pearce book – Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking down the Sources of my Stuff. Both are absolute page turners.

David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One came onto my radar as a must read when he spoke at the National Press Club in August 2009. He has a PhD in political anthropology and is an expert on guerilla warfare…

He has served in every theatre of the ‘War on Terror’ since 9/11 as special advisor for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, senior counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, and chief counterterrorism strategist for the US State Department. He is a former Australian army officer with combat experience in South-East Asia and the Middle East.The Accidental Guerrilla (dustcover)

In other words, if you want an informative post-9/11 rundown of why we’re involved in fighting specific insurgencies throughout the world then this is the book that goes a long way to explaining things. Kilcullen drills down to tribal and ethnic allegiances to explain the roots to the multifaceted difficulties we face in these theatres of operation… but also how to undermine the minority of internationally motivated fighters who recruit and incite local (accidental) guerillas to fight alongside them. The majority of fighters in any situation are these local fighters who have no international agenda – their agendas are entirely local and specific to their situation.

I won’t lie to you… I found the first half of this book heavy and painstakingly drawn. This is not a light read for the faint-hearted. However, this is a read for the discerning voter in those democracies who don’t understand how we got into this situation… let alone why we can’t ethically extract ourselves and leave the enemy to sort out whatever civil wars that are bubbling within the cauldron.

In the beginning of the book it mentions something that resonated with me… just as we look back at the post World War 2 conflicts of the world and see them as wars against colonisation… we’ll look back at the wars of this era and see them as wars against globalisation. Another point he brings to the fore is also the changing demographic, and therefore political, world in which we live.

The Accidental Guerrilla is a book for people interested in the strategic overview of our military misadventures into the Muslim world… a world I admit that had not been properly defined for me by the politicians I helped to elect. The final facet of this book that makes it important to read is its emphasis on the normalcy of Islam… and the abnormalcy of international terrorism. However, as I already said, this was a long read. I’m neither a soldior nor a political scientist. But I’m more than glad to have taken the information on board as an Australian citizen.

My friend Christopher, a Congolese refugee in the MBA program who spent seven years in the refugee camps, took me to Congo Week – Breaking the Silence – at the University of Tasmania. We watched a film about the systemic violent rape and murder being perpetrated in the 12 year long war in Congo.

Before I go on with this post, watch Rape of a Nation by Marcus Bleasdale on MediaStorm (11 minutes that will make you a better technologist).

Here are some quick facts. Approximately six million people have died in the Congo war and the death toll is rising – half of these are children below 5 years of age. That equates to about 45,000 people dead every month in a country of 60 million.

Why Congo? This is not a war about politics, it’s a war about minerals. Diamonds, gold, coltan, cobalt, magnesium, tin and other minerals. This is a war with numerous parties selling their wares to the rest of the world and using that money to finance their continued murder, torture, rape and slavery. Yes, six million dead. The war in Congo has killed the most people of any war since World War 2. And the driver of that war is us… the global consumer… because we want cheaper, better technology products.

Let me tell you about the mineral commonly called coltan. You mine coltan and sell it to someone who refines that into tantulum. Amazing stuff, tantulum is highly corrosion resistant and has a melting point of 3017 Celcius (boiling point of 5458 Celcius). This tantulum’s main use, among other things, is to create tantulum capacitors for use in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, stereos, automotive electronics and computers. But its also used for creating alloys with high melting points like you need for jet engine components and missile parts – as well as for body implants. To our technologically driven society tantulum is highly desired and expensive.

There is enough interesting content for you to find more about this subject yourselves. Suffice it to say the mobile phone in our pocket drips blood every time we send an SMS. If you want to ask yourself about the losers in globalisation look at Congo – they have abundant resources and should be very rich and secure. Instead, our demand for cheaper and better technology fuels the war of greed over minerals in Congo.

All I’m saying is that you need to ask yourself at which point your desire to upgrade your iPhone unnecessarily (or at all) makes you complicit in those deaths. Its a big question. Because now you know these facts you’re linked to those people and those murders and rapes. Go investigate… the rest is up to you.

[The image below is from Marcus Bleasdale's Rape of a Nation - linked to in the content of this article.]