the Banner Bright

Erica X Eisen argues We Need More Public Monuments to Animals: “Creating monuments to ordinary life and to animals … centers not the ‘great’ but the small, challenging viewers simultaneously to accommodate these usually unrecounted stories into their conceptions of history and to reconsider the preeminence of these so-called ‘great men of history.’ … I see discussions of memorializing animals as a way of opening up our thinking about memorials in general: what memorials do, who they’re for, why they exist, and what they look like. … Animal monuments of this type have the potential to open up the broader question of how we can pay artistic homage to things that are not human — to forests, to rivers, to languages that have died, to the darkness of the night sky prior to the invention of the light bulb. If monuments in the urban landscape represent nodes of memory, reflection, and action, then a repertoire of monuments that consists so heavily of battle commemorations and busts of politicians not only fails to live up to the radical potential of the genre — it also largely lacks any engagement with the space around it. … An urban landscape that actively remembers the trees and animals, the populations and species that have been part of its creation would pave the way for a more humane future for all forms of life.”

Killian Plastow: “The chief executives of Australia’s biggest companies have earned [sic] more money since the start of 2020 than the average worker will make all year. … And that comes despite a banking royal commission which claimed the scalps of numerous CEOs and prompted regulator APRA to consider tighter rules for pay cheques. On average, full-time workers in Australia earn $1633.80 a week, or roughly $84,950 a year. The chief executives of Australia’s largest 100 listed companies, however, received an average annual income of $5.66 million in the 2018 financial year, according to the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI). … Even after tax, someone earning that much each year would take home about $58,205.83 per week — 68.5 per cent of the average worker’s pre-tax annual income. … The median Australian income — exactly between the top and bottom 50 per cent of incomes — in 2018 was only $55,063 based on numbers given to The New Daily by Treasury. The high incomes paid to ASX100 chief executives and other senior business leaders work to drag the average up, masking the larger disparity between workers and their bosses.”

Ben Jenkins has written a seething commentary on the Morrison Government’s bushfire response: “It’s not just that they ignored warnings about this specific fire season, though they did; nor is it that they denied funding to the rural fire services when they begged for it, although they also did that. It’s that from the moment the country started to burn, the people who run it have done everything in their power to ignore the true scope of the catastrophe — even as the blaze spread, the air grew thick with smoke and people began to die. … But this isn’t about people, it’s about ideology, and to accept the unprecedented scale of the fires and act accordingly is to accept that the climate is changing and something needs to be done. That’s it. … And so warnings weren’t heeded, rescue efforts weren’t funded, Hawaiian jaunts weren’t called off, not through incompetence, but through sheer bloodymindedness. If you take one thing away from all of this, know that there are people in both the government and the media who would sooner see the country burn than confront the enormity of this problem.” Read the whole article for a disheartening summary of the government’s appalling behaviour so far — and remember, “There are two more months of summer left.”

Anthony Forsyth says Australian labour law is unbalanced in its treatment of emergency situations: “[T]here is no specific form of leave available to an employee whose house has been burnt down. They would have to rely on other forms of leave in these circumstances, such as annual leave or (if applicable) personal/carer’s leave. … In contrast, under the Fair Work Act, business owners have the right to stand down staff without pay where work must stop due to circumstances beyond the employer’s control — such as the impact of bushfires.” Volunteer firefighters aren’t much better off, with the Act only allowing unpaid leave for a “reasonable” time, to be negotiated with their boss at the time of the emergency. Union-negotiated EBAs often include stronger clauses, such as guaranteed paid leave, but this “patchwork” is increasingly inadequate as bushfire seasons intensify. Forsyth notes: “Some union leaders, such as Godfrey Moase of the United Workers Union, have therefore called for the Fair Work Act to be amended to ensure that all workers have the right to paid emergency services leave as part of the National Employment Standards. It seems like a necessary step that will ensure all in the community are bearing the increasingly heavy load presented by the bushfire season beginning earlier and lasting longer than in years past.”

Australia’s bipartisan commitment to carbon trickery has been called out in the international press: “The conventional view is the one Morrison put to the United Nations last September. ‘Australia is responsible for just 1.3% of global emissions,’ he told the General Assembly. … That statement relies on a rubbery definition of ‘responsible.’ While Australia’s domestic emissions are in line with Morrison’s figures, exports are another matter. This country is the world’s biggest net fossil fuel exporter after Russia and Saudi Arabia, vying with Indonesia as the No. 1 supplier of coal… It’s hard to explain to outsiders quite how little this features in the country’s domestic debate. Thanks to the magic of international carbon accounting, fossil fuel exports are conventionally counted toward destination countries, rather than the place where they were extracted. This methodological quirk is convenient for a country that doesn’t want to look like a climate pariah — but it’s helped to obscure the way Australia has been profiting from undermining global climate targets for a generation. As the residents of burned-out towns and owners of incinerated livestock will know, the warming that results is the same whether the carbon is burned in Australia, or overseas.” It’s like handing the arsonist a box of matches and then claiming the fire had nothing to do with you.

Kate Galloway argues that increased bushfire risk is an aspect of land degradation that our colonial property law fails to adequately address: “Through both primary production and our metropolises, the land comprising our nation is put to use in a patchwork of ways caught within a variety of legal constructs that segregate one portion from the next. They separate the soil from its vegetation and minerals, the water from the land, and the animals from their habitat. And humans act as lord over this domain in the belief that their human-derived rights amount to control over nature. The fires though, know no boundaries. … Our GDP might look OK, but what is the point when our land is dying and our lives are at risk. In the aftermath of the fires, it is therefore not enough to replace what has been destroyed. In the face of likely increases in the frequency and ferocity of fire seasons, the rebuilding effort must engage with a new way of comprehending our land beyond discrete, bounded parcels. And we must reconfigure our own relationship with land as other than one of dominion. This requires us to unravel the legacy of colonial land laws and to adopt a more mature standpoint as environmental stewards at the very least, or more ambitiously, a standpoint that centres the environment itself.”

Mark Ogge of The Australia Institute is calling for a National Climate Disaster Fund, to be funded by a levy on fossil fuel producers: “The frequency and intensity of natural disasters such as bushfires and floods will keep increasing while we keep pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Australia urgently needs a dedicated, independently administered fund to cope with the ever increasing costs of these disasters. A $1 per tonne levy would have virtually no effect on energy prices or coal jobs, but would be a huge help to everyone being affected by the damage these activities are causing. This policy would help communities to prepare for and recover from natural disasters, but it would also be great for creating jobs and boosting the economy.” The TAI report notes the “an appropriate contribution from the companies making the single largest contribution of any activity in Australia to global warming… While Australia’s fossil fuel resources are owned by Australians, they are extracted and exported mostly by large global coal and oil and gas companies. These companies make virtually no contribution to paying the costs of increasing climate related disasters that are a direct consequence of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Rebecca Solnit writes a letter to a young climate activist: “I have seen change that was unimaginable until it happened and then became so ordinary-seeming a part of everyday life that people forgot there was a struggle, forgot there was a transformation, forgot how we got here, forgot that we are living in the once-unimaginable. I believe that there are many unimaginables in this moment that will become, must become ordinary, including the end of the era of fossil fuel. … We need to understand the worst-case scenarios and the suffering and loss happening now, so we know what we’re trying to prevent. But we need to imagine the best case scenarios, so we can reach for them too. And we need to imagine our own power in the present to choose the one over the other. And then we need to act. I believe that resistance, that standing on principle, that engaging with the trouble, is good for the soul, a way to connect, a way to be powerful. And get results.”

Frank Bongiorno: “Morrison’s political authority has fallen away more quickly than anyone could have imagined even a fortnight ago, and is unlikely ever to be quite the same again. The giant-killer and performer of miracles of May 2019 is no more. Instead, we have a prime minister whose inability to respond to the bushfire crisis has resulted in widespread national loathing, international ridicule and sharp questions about his capacity for national leadership. The background to his political nightmare is the Coalition’s failure over its more than six years in office to develop a credible climate change policy to replace the Gillard-era scheme, its enduring marriage to the fossil fuel industry, and its hospitality to climate change denialists and their fellow-travellers in its own ranks. But Morrison’s crisis of leadership is also the result of the hollow nature of his leadership style. Fundamentally, he has never established himself as an adult leader capable of dealing with serious things, a dawning realisation expressed by the Twitter hashtag #scottyfrommarketing. It seems likely to stick.”

As Australia burns and the Prime Minister pretends nothing unusual is happening, I must borrow from James Connolly’s 1916 New Year’s message: “We should in this issue wish all our readers a ‘Happy New Year’. We do so wish them. But such a wish rings better when it is accompanied by a belief that the wish may be realised, and at the present moment the signs of a Happy New Year are none too plentiful. … A happy new year! Ah, well! Our readers are, we hope, rebels in heart, and hence may rebel even at our own picture of the future. If that is so let us remind them that opportunities are for those who seize them, and that the coming year may be as bright as we choose to make it.”