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Some good news: “In Australia, renewable energy is growing at a per capita rate ten times faster than the world average. Between 2018 and 2020, Australia will install more than 16 gigawatts of wind and solar, an average rate of 220 watts per person per year. This is nearly three times faster than the next fastest country, Germany. Australia is demonstrating to the world how rapidly an industrialised country with a fossil-fuel-dominated electricity system can transition towards low-carbon, renewable power generation. … Last was a record year for renewable energy installations, with 5.1 gigawatts (GW) accredited in 2018, far exceeding the previous record of 2.2GW in 2017. The increase was driven by the dramatic rise of large-scale solar farms… This year is on track to be another record year, with 6.5GW projected to be complete by the end of 2019. The increase is largely attributable to a significant increase in the number of wind farms approaching completion.” Maintaining this pace will require governments to invest in transmission infrastructure. (On the other side of the ledger, we need to stop digging up coal; it doesn’t matter whether we burn it ourselves or export it to be burned elsewhere, it should stay in the ground.)

Crikey’s Inq investigative reporting project has exposed the shocking degree to which the Coalition has stacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal with political hacks and Party mates: “66 of the 333 AAT decision-making members are former Liberal Party staffers, former Liberal or National politicians, party donors, members, unsuccessful Liberal candidates or Liberal government employees… 24 of those 66 appointees have no legal qualifications, including six of the AAT’s senior members… In contrast, when the Labor Party left office in 2013, only 16 members … had any sort of political connection.” And when the government’s own review criticised the practice, Christian Porter kept the report secret and continued to stack the tribunal: “Porter received Callinan’s recommendations in December last year, but it was seven months before the report was tabled in July this year. During that seven-month hiatus, in February this year (months away from an election the Coalition was expected to lose), Porter announced 86 new appointments or re-appointments to the AAT. Tellingly, 19 of these appointed members had close Liberal Party connections… Of these, Inq has determined at least eight have no law degree. All this was decided while the Callinan review was sitting, unreleased, inside the attorney-general’s office.”

Jeff Sparrow on the Climate Strike and what comes next: “In day-to-day life, there are few sections of society more powerless than schoolchildren. And yet, despite teachers and parents and politicians, they’ve spurred a movement that’s growing in almost every nation. If they can do that, what else could be possible? What might the rest of us do, if we all act together? Fairly obviously, the strike must be a beginning and not an end. This is not an issue where you can express your disapproval in a single rally and then go back to your daily life. … Will those businesses who encouraged their workers to strike support further stoppages? What about progressive politicians — will they back ongoing actions? How can we prevent protests falling back into tokenism? What kind of alliances might take the movement forward and what kind of deals will set it back? How does civil disobedience relate to the push for a Green New Deal? All of these and other questions must be debated – and the necessary debates will be polarising, fractious and, yes, ugly. Again, though, the climate strike shows the basis for the struggle we need.”

Tim Flannery is wrong to feel like his decades of climate campaigning have been a failure. As Guy Rundle explains, huge projects take significant time to bear fruit: “No one who really strives for meaningful achievement does so with a single lifetime as a frame. The fact or possibility of one’s actual children, or a more general notion of future generations, is essential to any sort of life that is projected, that involves projects, in which the meaning of work today is underwritten by the future result. In the shadow of the climate catastrophe, cast from future to present, it is clearly still possible to live a life of pure sensualist hedonism — anything from BASE jumping to sex, drugs and hip-hop — and that makes it clear that the need to respond to the climate/biosphere catastrophe has passed from being a merely moral-obligational demand, to being a moral-existential one. It’s either total abandon, or commitment to collective action. There is now no middle space to hide in. Cultures and societies which don’t respond to it — collectively, militantly, non-tokenistically — will simply have the bottom drop out of their world”. We must support the Global Climate Strike today, and build on it tomorrow. Only long-term, sustained organising will achieve what is required of us.

In a powerful, must-read essay for Meanjin, James Bradley balances Gramscian “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will” in confronting the climate crisis: “We must, [Gramsci] said, be ruthless in our intolerance of wishful thinking, yet we must never lose sight of the potential for change and human possibility. Perhaps we should begin with a similar abandonment of illusion and fantasies of control. Addicts sometimes talk about needing to hit rock bottom before you can really face up to what you are. … Rock bottom is the end of excuses. The final stripping away of illusion, the acceptance of reality. … Transforming our economies and ourselves so fundamentally might seem impossible, especially in such a terrifyingly short space of time. … Yet none of this will happen until we find the courage to let go of evasions and half-truths, and begin to speak openly and honestly about where we are and what lies ahead. This will not be easy. … Will it be enough? I don’t know. What I do know is that doing something — doing anything — is better than doing nothing. That action is the best antidote to despair. And that in the end we have no choice but to try.”

Gordon Legal has announced it will launch a class action against the Robodebt program. Dr Kate Galloway of Bond University Law School provides a succinct explanation of how this extortion scheme works: “The program, operating since mid-2016, matches Centrelink data with data from the Tax Office to reveal ‘inconsistencies’ between income declared to Centrelink with that declared for tax. However, Centrelink is paid fortnightly, and tax is declared as an annual sum. The program therefore averages annual taxable income to compare against Centrelink payments. The effect is that even if you earned nothing for six months while correctly collecting Newstart, the amount you earned in the next six months is averaged over the entire period to make it look as though you were collecting Newstart payments to which you were not entitled. The department automatically generates letters demanding that the former social security recipient prove the calculation to be incorrect. As these calculations span back as far as nine years, it is usually all but impossible to prove the calculation wrong. A debt notice then issues, followed by pursuit of debt collectors, and ultimately tax returns are garnisheed putting alleged debtors in a position where they just cannot win. … The robodebt system… operates … by manufacturing a debt, using unconscionable, and likely unlawful, means to do so.”

Josh Freedman argues that The Great British Bake Off is quietly radical — perhaps a little bit socialist: “The structure of the Bake Off is clearly one of competition. There are judges, time limits, elimination, and, of course, winners. Yet it conspicuously lacks many of the elements we normally associate with competition. The [weekly] title of ‘star baker’ carries no practical value. Star bakers do not get immunity from elimination in the next round, or money, or brownie points from the judges. … For their hard work, [overall] winners receive no money. They don’t get a guaranteed book deal or television show. All they win is a decorative cake stand — and a pretty underwhelming one at that. Yet when contestants reflect on their experience on the show, emotion overwhelms them. They talk about baking the way runners talk about finishing a marathon or setting a new personal best. They are satisfied not because they have pushed others aside and risen to the top, but simply because they are proud of what they have baked.”

Victoria Police are accused of sabotaging the inquest into the death of Tanya Day, by sending an underprepared witness to frustrate the coroner’s efforts: “‘This witness was asked at my direction to come to court,’ [coroner Caitlin] English said, interrupting a painful cross-examination from Peter Morrissey SC who was trying, at the instruction of Day’s family, to get some responses from police to the failures that led to their mother’s death. ‘Unfortunately she’s not able to cover quite a lot of the territory that I was hoping for.’ Morrissey was indignant. ‘The witness has been put here specifically because she doesn’t know,’ he said. Earlier he said the witness, superintendent Sussan Thomas, had been appointed as a ‘decoy’. It was not Thomas’s fault, he said. Thomas, who was in charge of the Aboriginal and youth portfolios in Victoria Police’s priority communities division, had been dumped in it. … The first coronial directions hearing was heard [on 6 December 2018]. Lawyers for Ms Day’s family had been requesting Victoria Police nominate a senior person to give evidence on policies, procedures and training for six months. The inquest itself began three weeks ago. Yet Thomas was only notified two days before the inquest was scheduled to conclude. Her 14-page statement was only received at 9.51am on Friday, the final day.”

Queensland building contractor Enco continues to block the CFMEU’s legitimate access to its sites. Union safety inspectors had arrived to investigate tip-offs about safety, which the company claimed was not possible on the racist grounds that its employees are too stupid to “manage their own safety” because “the Islander culture does not have self-preservation”. Despite a manager’s assertion that “The CFMEU are never coming on this site, it’s that simple”, the inspection eventually went ahead: “After union officials gained entry to Enco, Queensland government workplace inspectors issued eight enforcement notices, which require the business to make safety improvements, and issued one $3,600 fine for a failure to maintain a complete register of chemicals.” The dispute has been ongoing for months — trumped-up charges of trespass were thrown out because “police have taken the side of the business owner from the outset”, gave evidence that was “demonstrably untrue”, and ignored the union’s right of entry. The police were ordered to pay the union $85,000 in costs [$], which are “understood to be the largest awarded against the Queensland Police Force in the Magistrate’s Court”.

Godfrey Moase develops a series of quantum physics analogies to understand the nature of Australian working life; for example, Schrödinger’s worker: “Subatomic particles are capable of existing in multiple states at once. Likewise, people now find themselves simultaneously in multiple states, and they experience daily life as the sum of these states. … On more than one occasion in my union work, I have listened to what it is like to work in labour hire. These arrangements mean being an employee of the host employer when it suits them, and not their employee when it does not. A labour-hire worker might be regarded as an employee for the purposes of taking direction and getting the job done, but not an employee when it comes to what pay and workplace rights go with the job. The daily reality is commonly getting paid less — between $5 to $10 per hour — for the same work in the same workplace as directly engaged workers. Even a direct casual worker exists simultaneously as employee/non-employee: at work today when required, and gone tomorrow when not. The same pattern repeats through other forms of insecure work, from individual contracting to the gig economy. Insecure work, therefore, can be viewed as any engagement in which a worker experiences the sum total of being both an employee and a non-employee at the same time — it is the superposition principle extended to the employment relationship itself.”