CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer by SEAN PARNELL

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer
SEAN PARNELL
HarperCollins, 2013, 328 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the local council denied planning permission for the Queensland National Party’s media director, Clive Palmer, to build a sixty-six townhouse development on peaceful rural land in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast in 1984, Palmer’s party and state government mate, Russ Hinze, helped the rich guy out by overturning the council decision.  Shortly after, Palmer made the second largest donation ever to the Nationals, writes Sean Parnell in Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, “directing $15,000 from his company that had purchased the property”.  Palmer well knew the utility of politics for personal business.

The lure of money governed the business family that Palmer was born into in 1954.  Anti-communist, conservative Catholics, they stamped their son with the same template.  At the University of Queensland in the early 1970s, Palmer took on the campus socialists and feminists, most vigorously through the Right To Life Association and its anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling’ front, and he became close to the Liberal and Country Parties and their state government headed by the authoritarian, anti-democratic Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Dropping out of university into a law firm, Palmer’s potential legal career came to a rapid halt when he complained to a Liberal politician of police verballing of suspects which he had uncovered.  An anonymous death threat soon after led to Palmer harbouring a lingering bitterness towards the police-protecting Liberals whilst remaining reliably conservative, and avaricious.

Palmer became a self-made real estate millionaire during Queensland’s interstate-migration-driven property boom on the Gold Coast where he bought cheap and sold dear, a strategy which was to deliver him billions during the mining boom, beginning with iron ore deposits in Western Australia followed by the promise of even richer returns from coal in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

If Palmer, a lavish donor to, and life member of, the National Party thought that he owned the new Queensland Liberal National Party government then he was disillusioned as he ran into a government speed-bump.  His new China-export coal project lost its Labor-ordained ‘significant project status’ when his claim to favoured state support for rail and port infrastructure was out-lobbied by Galilee Basin competitor, Gina Rinehart, and her coal export deal with India.

The taste of sour grapes infused Palmer’s deteriorating relationship with the conservative parties.  His opposition to the new state government’s public sector job cuts was a pretext (he had sacked a hundred workers at his Queensland nickel refinery) for a swipe at a government which had materially harmed his business interests.  Seen as destabilising or splitting the ruling conservative party, Palmer was jettisoned by the Nationals and went on to form his own, eponymous, conservative party.

Lest anyone think that this latest political venture is a merely a continuation of protecting Palmer’s profits and conspicuous consumption (high-end cars and boats and planes, racehorses, soccer clubs, Club Med Resorts, replica Titanics and robotic dinosaurs), Palmer presents a front of selfless generosity through philanthropy and gifts to his employees.

The climate change denialist doesn’t, however, bother with any green camouflage about global warming from his coal exporting, exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to pollution from his nickel refinery’s tailings dam, or the threat to the protected dunes and bush posed by a massive expansion to his luxury resort at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.

Whilst Palmer can only speak ill of environmentalists, he will hear nothing bad about his former National Party idols and mentors convicted of, or who narrowly dodged, corruption charges for misappropriating taxpayer funds and accepting bribes from developers.  These noble souls (Bjelke-Petersen, Hinze, et al) are, according to  Palmer, persecuted innocents, ‘brave and courageous’ all.  Legal prosecution, however, is a course of first resort for the highly litigious Palmer towards any person or entity which threatens his profits or reputation.

One outcome of Palmer’s legalistic aggression is that voices critical of Palmer are, for fear of being sued and bankrupted, under-represented in Parnell’s book.  The result is an overly benign portrait of Palmer, the celebrity miner-politician, in a book that is fascinated by the “colourful Queenslander’s” every new venture but which is short on analysis of Palmer’s political philosophy, ethical values and social policies, which, like Palmer, offer nothing to those not love-struck by money and power.

BIG COAL by Pearse, McKinght & Burton

BIG COAL: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit
GUY PEARSE, DAVID McKNIGHT, BOB BURTON
Newsouth Publishing, 2013, 257 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

You don’t have to look far to see why Australians are locked in an absurd and vicious circle of climate change, burning more coal to, for example, run more air-conditioners to cope with the more severe heatwaves from the global warming resulting from burning more coal.  The reason why Australia is hooked onto such coal-mad absurdities, say Pearse, McKnight and Burton in Big Coal, is because the economic and political power of Australia’s coal industry has pushed a more than willing political elite to support the mining and export of coal in a country which is the world’s 4^th largest producer, and 2^nd biggest exporter, of the largest single source of global greenhouse gases – coal.

The climate change cost of coal to Australia (devastating weather extremes, bushfires, droughts and floods) is the latest pricey instalment of the addiction to coal, following that fossil fuel’s grim history of lung-blackened, maimed and dead workers, and toxic landscapes and poisonous air in mining communities.

Whilst Australia’s coal-fired power stations produce one third of the country’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it is the $48 billion coal export industry which is Australia’s main contributor to global warming.  Whether burnt in Mumbai or Shanghai for electricity generation or steel-making, Australian coal is at the forefront of catastrophic climate change.

Unconcerned with planetary survival, whilst lavishly enriching themselves from the coal rush, are the mining nouveaux-riche, billionaires like Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest, who have mastered the art of picking undervalued coal reserves that can then be on-sold to multinational mining companies at many times their initial value, in turn rewarding the giant companies’ owners - the big banks and large institutional investors - with bloated profits.

Greasing the money-making wheels with $9 - $12 billion in subsidies are coal-friendly Australian governments.  State governments further assist with a genial mining lease approval process, compulsory purchase of prime agricultural land for mining, public funds on tap for private company rail and port infrastructure and obedience to coal industry lobbyists’ commands to hamstring renewable energy alternatives such as cutting household solar-panel feed-in tariffs and tightening the regulatory screws on wind farms.

In return for governmental services rendered are the royalties paid by the coal mining industry to state government coffers (plus occasional personal enrichment along the way for corrupt ministers).  These royalties, however, mask the long-term cost to the states of climate change - one major natural climate-change-related disaster can wipe out several years of royalties (cyclone Yasi cost the Queensland public purse $7 million in 2011).

The federal government also chimes in through winding back mandatory renewable energy targets, and the tried-and-failed market mechanisms of emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes with their generous and self-defeating industry compensation.  Where any sign of government resistance is met (through mining super-profits taxes, for example), the industry’s propaganda power and deep pockets are mobilised for poll-damaging “big budget advertising blitzes to turbo-charge their behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns”.

Corporate-government harmony is always maintained, however, in the public spruiking of the grossly exaggerated economic benefits of coal mining.  The coal industry’s 46,000 employees is a tiny percentage of a total labour force of over 11 million, whilst the industry’s self-portrait of itself as an altruistic job creator is undermined by its programs for driverless trucks and trains, and automated drilling rigs, loaders and shipping operations.  Sucking up valuable capital, infrastructure and government funds, as well as labour, the coal mining industry results in a structural distortion of the economy away from job-rich economic sectors towards an environmentally dead-end industry.

This is not, however, the message delivered by governments, which act as Big Coal’s public relations hacks.  State Premiers and Treasurers have been quick to dismiss as a ‘politically correct debate about climate change’ any concern that the bushfires, droughts and floods of recent years may be related to coal-burning in favour of stump-speeching the economic credentials of their state’s coal-fired power stations and coal export markets.

Close behind government on the image management is the coal industry.  For fiscal peanuts, coal corporations and peak mining bodies buy good-will and a permanent stake in the community through funding local, state and national groups.  Recipients of the don’t-mess-with-the-sponsor goodies include sports of all kinds, helicopter rescue, kindergartens, universities, hospitals, koala habitat restoration and many more.  Xstrata Coal is typical, providing $14 million to fifty community organisations in 2012, a barely visible half a per cent of its $2.2 billion profit.  Such cheap philanthropy is a common corporate strategy but the coal industry’s calculated benevolence is of grave concern because “no other industry in this country has ever threatened to cause harm on the same global scale – not asbestos, nor tobacco, not even uranium”.

The soothing corporate syrup flows with added sugar-coating from the public relations barrel with reassurances that coal’s carbon can be rendered harmless through technical fixes.  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) still has its hymn-singing corporate zombies and political droids, despite decades of fanfare having been muted by commercial reality (carbon-scrubbers are expensive), time constraints (even if CCS works it would be deployed too late globally to avoid critical climate warming), practical hurdles (distant storage sites requiring a vast network of pipelines) and health risks (in high concentrations, CO2 is a toxic, potentially fatal, gas).

As CCS has been shown to be a mirage, however, so, too, is its ‘green’ cousin - carbon capture and recycling (CCR).  For algae, CO₂ acts as a growth steroid and feeding them in algal ponds adjacent to power stations and steel mills can turn the green weeds into bio-fuels, fertilisers, soil-enriching biochar and food for cattle and fish farms.  The process, however, depends on a non-renewable fossil fuel, releases the carbon when consumed, and only works in sunlight, therefore, at best soaking up only a half of its CO₂ food source.

The book’s authors have done a superb job in digging up the dirt on coal.  Ending the world’s addiction to this dangerous product starts here in Australia, in King Coal’s castle.

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT by Alan Fewster

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT: How an Australian Communist Ignited Ceylon’s Independence Struggle
ALAN FEWSTER (with a Foreword by Humphrey McQueen)
Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 173 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1937, Ceylon’s British Chief of Police reported that ‘it is clearly dangerous’ to allow the Australian Communist, Mark Bracegirdle, to remain in the country ‘stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British Government’.  Ceylon’s top cop found a willing listener in the colony’s Governor who authorised Bracegirdle’s deportation.

As Alan Fewster recounts in his account of the ‘Bracegirdle incident’, the deportation was technically bungled, setting off a political crisis in Ceylon and igniting “an altogether more systematic and aggressive attack on British rule”.

The English-born Bracegirdle had left  Australia for Ceylon in 1936, ostensibly to become an apprentice tea-planter.  The working conditions of the 600,000 imported, bonded Indian Tamil labourers appalled him – living in dismal barracks unfit for cattle, subject to fines and corporal punishment, bending their backs even if sick with malaria, and denied education - literacy ‘will give them ideas in life above their station’, said Bracegirdle’s superintendent, who soon sacked his ‘rather Communistic’ protégé for ‘fraternisation’ with the labourers. 

Joining Ceylon’s small communist party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Bracegirdle played a highly effective role, as a first-hand witness of, and defector from, the planter class.  This made him an ‘undesirable’ to Ceylon’s imperial authorities, too, but their attempted deportation of Bracegirdle overstepped the mark by demonstrating Britain’s absolute power over everyone, including the compliant indigenous elite (the Sinhalese aristocracy, rich land owners and others collaborating, for their own gain, in the administration of British governance) who had been granted limited authority via a restricted suffrage local parliament.

When this tame assembly of conservative nationalists and moderate reformists recognised that Britain’s colonial power could potentially be used not just against white communists but Ceylonese worthies like themselves, they protested with fist-waving, sarcasm and a resolution opposing Bracegirdle’s deportation.

The Supreme Court decision that Bracegirdle’s arrest was illegal capped a huge political humiliation for British rule and a significant propaganda, and membership, victory for the now-800 strong LSSP which went on to become the “dynamic new force” in Sri Lanka’s independence struggle.

Fewster, a former diplomat, is most focused on the ructions in the colonial governmental apparatus in Colombo and Whitehall whilst Bracegirdle the Marxist is more insubstantial, mainly because his motives and deeds (reported, inaccurately at best, by police spies) were sparsely recorded.

So, whilst Fewster is on sure, if rather dry, ground in the upper civil service strata, the rest of his political analysis is somewhat unconvincing speculation, namely that Bracegirdle did not come to Ceylon to radicalise the tea estate workers but, as a Stalinist agent, to pull the Trotskyist-leaning Ceylonese Marxist leadership into pro-Moscow orthodoxy.  That Bracegirdle actually succeeded in the former and failed in the latter suggests, rather, that loyalty to Moscow for the communists of the 1930s could nevertheless coexist with a genuine commitment to revolutionary activism.

No definitive answers are presented in the book on Bracegirdle’s ‘ulterior motive’ but what is clear is that he continued his left wing enterprise until his death in 1999, including smuggling refugees from Nazi Berlin through fake marriages to young Jewish women.  From Sri Lanka to Germany, Bracegirdle lived and breathed true internationalism and solidarity.

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING by Chase Madar

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
CHASE MADAR
Verso, 2013, 181 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The issue in the trial of Bradley Manning, the source of tens of thousands of US military and state secrets leaked to Wikileaks, is, in some eyes, simple.  ‘He broke the law’, lectured President Obama, conveniently overlooking, as Chase Madar comments in his book on Manning, the routine violation, when it suits the political upper crust, of the principle that ‘rules are rules’.

“Washington leaks intentionally as a communication medium between elite officials and their preferred journalists”, much of it top secret, a classification higher than anything Manning released, says Madar.  Laws (against aggressive wars, torture or “mass illegal wiretapping”, for example) are also not laws when broken by the powerful (the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the federal domestic security bureaucracy).

The perpetrators of these criminal infractions are not arrested and held in abusive solitary confinement for years, facing show trials, life imprisonment or possible execution, like Manning, but “receive solicitous treatment in the media and Sunday morning network gabfests”.

It was the official secrecy surrounding the political elite’s habitual criminality that prompted Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, to blow the whistle on what his government “has done – and is doing – all over the world”, documented in war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and in State Department cables which explain through ‘non-PR-versions of world events and crises’, as Manning put it, ‘how the first world exploits the third … from an internal perspective’.

Manning’s intent was “historically informed and political”, says Madar, aimed at, in Manning’s words, ‘worldwide discussion, debates and reforms’ concerning transparency in government.  Manning’s detractors, and even some of his more liberal sympathisers, have, however, done their best to ignore his clearly stated political motive, focusing instead on Manning’s sexual preference, gender identity, a ‘troubled’ psychology and, as a gay, “alienated and brutalised by the Army’s macho culture”, his military dysfunction.

It is tempting, though trite, says Madar, to see Manning’s political dissent as a result of mental health problems.  As Madar argues in response, the numerous gay soldiers in the US military, and its plentiful mentally ill soldiers (“the leading cause of death among active-duty US troops over the past four years has been … suicide”) are not psychologically predisposed to “declassify public records”. Stereotyping information rebels as being a bit weird deliberately devalues their moral conscience and political courage. 

As Manning himself has noted, the red herrings of his personal psychology matter only in the sense that ‘I’m way way way too easy to marginalise’.  His status as a gay, soon-to-be-transgender atheist, says Madar, “unsuits Manning thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government” by allowing the powerful to pathologise rather than politicise him.

Where the real sickness lies, says Madar, is with Washington’s self-interested and paranoid “over-classification of government documents”.  The National Security Agency has just got around to declassifying military documents from 1809, the CIA still keeps documents from World War 1 classified whilst the Department of Defence has finally declassified the Pentagon Papers (which document the secret history of the Vietnam War) a hardly-more-sprightly four decades after they became publicly available in book form.

This government mania for document secrecy, plus censorship of former officials, will continue to “distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and foreign policy”, says Madar, whilst a “national panic about leaks”, sauced with “chauvinistic nationalism”, is meant to discourage potential leakers from letting in any sunshine on what the American government gets up to in its citizens’ names.

This anti-leak deterrent has been exercised most energetically by President Obama, who came to office as the “whistleblower’s friend” promising a government Age of Aquarius but whose Department of Justice has launched more prosecutions against leakers, including Manning, than all previous presidencies combined.

Completed just before Manning’s trial verdict which carries up to 135 years jail, Madar’s book is a highly useful, thoroughly spirited contribution to the campaign to free Bradley Manning, the next stage in the task of liberating truth from its jail of government secrecy.