Investigate AU edition, July 2005

INVESTIGATE

August 2005

John Howard

Philippines Terror War

Oil Crisis

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Australia’s new current affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

JULY 2005

IN

HOWARD’S WAY He’s got it all: a fourth term, unprecedented control of the Senate, and a backbench whose revolts still make the Libs look stronger than Labor. But is John Howard’s moment of triumph also the moment of his greatest vulnerability?

ALAN ANDERSON takes a behind-the-scenes look at the Liberals, the succession question, and the ALP

KEVIN RUDD: THE INTERVIEW

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With Labor languishing in the polls and foriegn policy questions looming larger than ever, what does the Shadow Foreign Minister think about the state of the world – and his party? Investigate editor JAMES MORROW sat down with Kevin Rudd to find out

EXCLUSIVE: ON TERROR’S FRONTLINE

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Who is keeping Australia safe from Islamic terrorists? A ragtag bunch of underpaid grunts fighting it out every day with violent extremists in the jungles of the southern Philippines. Journalist MATTHEW THOMPSON and photographer RENAE CARLSON went on patrol with the Filipino military who are, with help from the U.S. and the AFP, fighting the same al Qaida loyalists who orchestrated the Bali bombing – and are planning far worse here

WHERE HAS ALL THE OIL GONE? The price of petrol keeps skyrocketing, and the politicians say they are powerless to do anything about it. As CLARE SWINNEY reports, to hear a growing number of experts tell it, we may well be running out of petroleum. If you drive, you need to read this story

SUCCESS STORY: CLEAN DREAMS Dyson vacuums were invented in a Bath farmhouse and grew to become one of the fastest-growing brands in Australia. JAMES MORROW sat down with Ross Cameron, Dyson’s MD down under, to find out how the company got this far, and what they’re planning

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

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Chief Executive Officer Group Managing Editor Customer Services

Heidi Wishart Ian Wishart Debbie Marcroft

Editor

James Morrow

Advertising Director

Jamie Benjamin Kaye

Money Books Health Movies Science Sport

Peter Higgins Michael Morrissey Claire Morrow Shelly Horton Pat Sheil Jake Ryan

Contributing Writers Alan Anderson, Ann Coulter, Alan RM Jones, John Quiggin, Matt Hayden, Shaun Davies, Jeni Payne, Dan Donahoo, Ian Wishart, Ben Wyatt

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Focal Point Contributors Freeze Frame The Arena The Watcher Laura’s World Right Hook Left Hook Tough Questions First Draft

Doug Wood’s rescue says much about the Left The people behind the bylines The month that was James Morrow goes nuclear, part II Alan RM Jones on the ABC’s dirty little secret Laura Wilson exposes womens’ power crisis Ann Coulter looks hard at ‘Deep Throat’ Tim Dunlop says Howard has greatness at hand Ian Wishart on the death of a child Matt Hayden has a squiz at the Latham diaries

Contributing Photographers/Agencies KRT, ZUMA, FOTOPRESS, NEWSPIX, Nathan Wyatt, Ian Wishart, James Morrow Design & Layout Art Direction

Bozidar Jokanovic Heidi Wishart

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Money Peter Higgins can’t get no satisfaction Toybox High-tech goodies from the cutting edge Technology Susanne Quick says that the future is ‘meow’ Science Martha McKay looks under the nano-scope Health Claire Morrow on mental health Food Eli Jameson cracks eggs, doesn’t make omlette Travel Visit Borneo with Intrepid Travel Books Michael Morrissey on adventurers, and more Movies Shelly Horton is in love with ugly pommy crims Music After all these years, Van is still the man Sport Jake Ryan fights the State of Origin civil war Diary of a Cabbie Adrian Neylan hears of a life-changing night

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

Douglas Wood’s rescue reveals the Left’s moral bankruptcy

T

here’s a great little moment in the movie Flying High when the world news media picks up the story of the stricken airliner bound for disaster and a right-wing American television commentator intones, ‘They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash!’

The joke was a cute play on heartless conservatives, but ever since the kidnapping and rescue of Australian engineer Douglas Wood in Iraq several weeks ago, it’s also the exact same tune the Left in this country has been playing: ‘He his ticket. He Australians dropped their bought knew what he was getloyalty to their countryman ting into. We say, let him faster than you can say, ‘Russell get his head cut off!’ As a result of this din, many Crowe is actually a Kiwi’ Australians dropped their loyalty to their countryman faster than you can say, ‘Russell Crowe is actually a Kiwi, you know’.

Of course, Wood sealed his fate as soon as he was rescued by troops from the new Iraqi army and the Louisiana National Guard and boomed on worldwide television, ‘God Bless America!’ – and then went on to apologize to John Howard and George W. Bush for the calls he made under duress for Coalition troops to leave Iraq. Worse, he called his abductors (who executed two fellow guests during his stay) ‘arseholes’.

From that moment on, Australia’s elite commentariat had their knives drawn for Wood. Some demanded Woods give the $400,000 fee he took from the Ten network to tell his story to the Australian government in payment for his rescue. Others called him a carpetbagger and a war profiteer, a charge that could more readily be made against many Australian correspondents in Iraq who – unlike Wood – con6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

tinue to profit from turmoil, rather than stability and reconstruction, in Iraq.

Andrew Jaspan, editor of Melbourne’s Age, even went on radio to sniff, ‘The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language...is just insensitive’.

As one wag commented, Jaspan’s is the first case he’d seen of ‘Stockholm Syndrome-by-Proxy’.

But Wood’s dignity, courage, and refusal to send his captors a nice note and a basket of preserves as thanks for their hospitality smoked out some uglier impulses among the Left as well. It doesn’t take much of a student of politics and psychology to note that, especially for more radical types, the Left is in love with brutality. Don’t believe me? Go hang out around the student union offices of your local uni; count the number of posters and t-shirts celebrating everyone from Che Guevara to Lenin to Mao ‘Power Flows From the Barrel of a Gun’ Tse-Tung. Wood’s captors in Iraq, while not schooled in post-modernism or Derrida or Marx, represent this same sort of brutality, which seeks to rip down a society and build a utopia in its place – and damn the human cost.

That the ‘utopia’ the terrorists in Iraq are seeking (and which their compatriots are fighting to set up in our neighbourhood) is violently hostile to every basic human freedom and right cherished by the Left, has apparently not occurred to them.

Welcome home, Mr. Wood, wherever that is.

James Morrow

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 7

CONTRIBUTORS

CANNON FODDER Mentioned in dispatches

Adrian Neylan’s – a.k.a. Adrian the Cabbie – career began not behind the wheel, but with what he describes as an ‘extended sentence’ working in telecommunications as a draftsman and survey technician around rural New South Wales. A period of intermittent contract drafting and surveying followed – coupled with landscaping work. It wasn’t long before his back rose up in protest, leading to a temporary gig driving cabs – seven years ago!

History doesn’t relate whether it was the long stretches alone, or the interactions with passengers, or some combination of the two that caused it, but about the same time Adrian became a prolific writer of letters to the editor, leading to the birth of his weblog, ‘Man of Lettuce’ (www.cablog.com.au) in 2003.

Since then, Adrian has carved a niche for himself, having appeared on various national and international television and radio programs, and, of course, writing Investigate’s ‘Diary of a Cabbie’ column.

‘I started the year as an Investigate contributor and plan to end it by publishing a book of my taxi stories’, says Adrian. ‘So buy it, you cheap bastards!’

8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

One of Investigate’s veteran contributors, book reviewer Michael Morrissey has not missed an issue with his reviews in five-and-a-half years with our sister New Zealand publication. After chipping in for the past few months with reviews of Australian titles, this month Morrissey takes the helm as lead book reviewer.

The author, poet and university lecturer published his first collection of verse back in 1978, and has been prolific since then with more than a dozen works, most recently slotting in books like The Flamingo Anthology of New Zealand Short Stories and Heart of the Volcano around his reviewing committments to Investigate’s New Zealand and Australian editions.

‘Michael’s reviews are always a pleasure to edit’, notes editor James Morrow, ‘because essentially we don’t edit them. They’re great, they’re entertaining, and they’re a window to a range of fascinating subjects.’

Morrissey always reviews a diverse range of books, and this month is no different. On offer are his thoughts on everything from a biography of Attila the Hun to the memoirs of that rarest of beasts, the incredibly promiscuous, self-involved New Yorker.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 9

LETTERS

BACKCHAT LATEX ALLERGY Read your article, ‘Is Safe Sex Really Safe?’ (June, 2005) in the latest edition of Investigate – wow, that is some seriously scary stuff, and about 180 degrees different than what I was taught in school (which boiled down to ‘have as much fun as you want, just make sure your partner is always wearing a condom’).

I was so gobsmacked by the whole thing that I went on-line to do some more research, and it is truly chilling.

Thank God I’m in a long-term relationship!

Melissa Cooperman, Ultimo, NSW

BAD PUN, GOOD LETTER Just came across your magazine in Melbourne. I liked it! Well done on your condom article. There were no ‘holes’ in your story!

Jonathan E Doyle, M.Ed, Melbourne, VIC

LATE ENTRY Just read your piece on the Iraqi election (‘The Arena’, March, 2005) in which you write of anti-war groups ‘conveniently forgetting [Saddam’s] history of gassing Iranians and Kurds’.

And you are quite right. What is also conveniently forgotten is that the gas was supplied by Europe, and in the case of Iran, the satellite images of where to gas were supplied to Saddam by the USA. In the case of Hallabja, when the US Congress looked like it was going to take Saddam to task over the gassing of the Kurds, then Deputy Defence Secretary Rumsfeld was immediately despatched to meet with Saddam to let him know the view was not shared by the White House, and that he continued to enjoy US support in the war against Iran.

Rumsfeld may well be proud (as should be Australians, according to your article’s byline) in bringing democracy to Iraq. But surely the historical context 10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

of the situation should temper both the pride, and the tone of your article, don’t you think?

James Carleton, Lakemba NSW JAMES MORROW RESPONDS:

The culpability of the West in the rise of Saddam Hussein has been much chewed-over by various antiwar groups who would rather see a dictator in power than the United Nations be exposed for the impotent dictator’s club that it is. While the United States provided very limited assistance to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (Iran, at the time, being seen as the much greater threat), it has been European nations and Russia which, over the past decade and in blatant violation of the UN’s sanctions, provided Saddam Hussein with all manner of aid and weapons.

In any case, even if the West were responsible for the existence of Hussein’s evil dictatorship, wouldn’t it then make it doubly incumbent on those nations to right the wrong and end the tyrrany?

HEEL THE ROTTWEILER! Ian Wishart introduces an interesting twist on the progress of the papacy in ‘Why God needs a rottweiler’ (June, 2005). The visions of St Malachi have ben rather spot on so far and, with only one pope to go in his list, the plot thickens with regard to the identity and status of the final pope yet to come (if indeed he is to be the last one) and, more importantly, the end-time identity of the Holy Roman Church itself.

The reformers of the 16th century were quite convinced that the papal system was the harlot of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and that the pope (any or all of them) was the antichrist.

It therefore seems rather strange that the descendants of these reformers (who defended their understanding of Scripture to death at the hands of the papacy) should now be making overtures in the form

of ecumenism back to the Roman Church. Each Anzac Day we are drawn back to the phrase, ‘lest we forget’. It is time that Protestants draw back to the same phrase as regards the very real differences in faith and doctrine between Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity – differences sealed in the blood of martyrs and as fundamental today as they were 500 years ago.

Malachi may have made one error or perhaps he was creatively edited. The 112th prophesy says that ‘in the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Petrus Romanus, who will feed his flick amid many tribulation; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’ The Book of Revelation foretells the destruction of seven hills upon which sit the harlot of Babylon. Maybe the opening phrase of this 112th prophesy should have read, ‘In the final persecution by the Holy Roman Church…’ Either way, Malachi agrees with the Book of Revelation that seems to suggest Rome will be a seat of human power that exults itself against God and will be destroyed.

God doesn’t need or want a rottweiler to drive the faithful back to the old religion. He calls out a people who will follow His voice and obey His commandments. It’s a matter of personal biblical faith not institutional sacramental religion.

Tessa Beswick, Tauranga, NZ

SO DON’T EAT IT, THEN! In the latest edition of Investigate (‘Fit to be Fried’, June 2005), food columnist Eli Jameson writes about the joys of deep-frying artichoke hearts and slathering them with béarnaise sauche, and of filling zucchini flowers with cheese before battering and, yep, frying them.

The previous month (‘Homemade Prozac’, May 2005), Jameson took a bunch of nice root vegetables, roasted them, and then drowned them in cream, cheese and pasta.

No wonder Australia has an obesity crisis. It’s not because of McDonald’s, it’s because of food columnists like your Jameson who preach that home cooking is fine, so long as it is done restaurant-style, which means plenty of butter and cream. I’ve heard many chefs say in their defense that ‘fat equals flavour’, but the fact is, it also equals death.

Jameson should be concerned that his arteries don’t become as stuffed up with cheese as those zucchini flowers he’s so fond of.

There’s no meal so good that it’s worth dying for.

Patrick Reynolds, Via e-mail

ACADEMIC QUESTIONS It was good to see James Morrow (Back Chat, June) giving Prof.

Brian Martin a well-deserved serve. Anyone who has studied the nuclear issue with any kind of an open mind would know that Martin is telling outrageous lies, and it follows that he must surely know this. So what’s going on here? Morrow should put Martin through an in-depth interview and ask him to produce the evidence to back his conclusions. My guss is that Martin will ‘go to ground’.

Indeed, Martin is only one of a whole plethora of academics who are using their position of influence to push a political barrow. Only a few pages on in the same issue, we have Stephen Juan from Sydney University calling the Supernanny ‘a devil version of Mary Poppins’, when every parent knows that the Spockish ideas pursued by child psychiatrists simply do not work. We have gangs of out-of-control louts roaming the streets of every major city to prove it. In fact, the sorry mess that is much of modern education can be shown to have its roots in the academic world.

In the drug scene we have academic types throwing confusion into every attempt to formulate effective solutions by pursuing lines of argument which are totally at odds with those working on the coal face.

What I am saying here is that there is a wealth of highly controversial, entertaining and enlightening material to be had by putting these people under the microscope. Manna from heaven for a news magazine with a name like Investigate.

R.B. Dewar, Samson, WA

DULY CHASTENED For the love of God, please commit this to memory: ‘to beg the question’ means to dodge the question while appearing to answer it, often by use of a tautology. Begging the question is a favourite strategy of politicians.

It does not mean ‘to demand the question be asked.’

Having committed this blunder in your safe sex article, you now join the great gallery of Australian unwashed who believe ‘salubrious’ means rich and a ‘fait accompli’ is quite an accomplishment.

A steady diet of quality reading (and I don’t mean The Sydney Morning Herald) is the only cure for your malady. May I suggest you embark on one with all due haste.

Christopher Bonney, Via e-mail

FEELING QUEASY FAT AND HAPPY Just a quick note to say ‘thank you’ to Eli Jameson for his column, especially its latest installment (‘Fit to Be Fried’, June). It is nice to see someone in the media speaking about food without telling us that we need to be afraid of it.

With the exception of the kitschy ‘Two Fat Ladies’, whose cooking was fun but impractical (how many of us duck out to the shops for a brace of pheasants, much less come home to an Aga range to cook them on?), there are very few personalities in the food world any more who seem to value a classic and properly-prepared sauce.

Did you know that just the other day on a cable TV cooking show, I saw a woman make a hollandaise sauce in a blender? (I suppose she couldn’t help it; after all, she was American).

In any case, keep up the good work. Australia needs more men like Jameson to tell us that the proper container for olive oil is a four-litre tin, not an aerosol spray can, and that the modern quest for longevity at the expense of pleasure is a fool’s bargain.

L. Rowman, Via e-mail

Condoms don’t work, we’re due for a bird flu pandemic, hackers are going to ‘phish’ my personal data from my mobile phone, and obesity will kill us all if we’re not careful. Wow, what a cheery issue!

Brooke Gregory, Perth, WA JAMES MORROW RESPONDS:

If you think that’s cheery, wait until you read our story on peak oil!

DROP US A LINE Investigate welcomes letters from its readers. Send e-mail to australia@investigatemagazine.com, with the words “Letter to the editor” in the subject line, or snail mail PO Box 602, Bondi Junction, NSW 2022.

Letters may be edited for clarity, and all submissions become the property of Investigate Publishing Pty. Ltd. Unless expressly stated otherwise, all letters will be presumed to be for publication.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

FREEZE FRAME

LET FREEDOM RING! Or not, as the case may be

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hat a long, strange month it’s been, not just in Australia but all over the world.

In the United States, for example, almost every day’s news has brought news of a bizarre decision out of one of that nation’s courts – even the Supreme Court, which ruled that, essentially, local governments can force property owners to hand over their land if a developer makes the case that he could build something that would provide more tax revenue (er, make that ‘jobs’ and ‘community enrichment’). While we can only hope and pray that our local councils don’t try and push the logic, already there has been some blowback against the court. One libertarian entrepreneur has already petitioned the home town of one Justice to allow him to knock down the jurist’s house and replace it with ‘The Lost Liberty Hotel’ – complete with a copy of Atlas Shrugged in the bedside table of every room.

Of course, that wasn’t the nuttiest decision out of America: in a fit of jurisprudence not seen since the O.J. Simpson verdict, a California jury gave Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch its own personal Michelin rating by accepting the fallen star’s claim that all the ‘Jesus juice’, skin mags, and sleepovers with the boys were all just good, clean fun. ❖❖❖ Meanwhile in Europe, it’s been a similarly mixed 12, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

bag for liberty: on the one hand, vast numbers of Dutch and French voters said ‘nee’ and ‘non’, respectively, to the EU Constitution – a tedious, oppressive and essentially undemocratic document that would have burdened an already hard-up continent with another level of bureaucrats, officials, and unelected post-modern aristocrats. (Is it just us, or does it seem like Europe is heading towards a day when the only people who have jobs are government officials?)

But while the votes in France and Holland were cheering – and annoyed all the right people in the process, including one Melbourne academic who lamented that democracy is wasted on the voters – in Italy, freedom is taking another knock. In a case that echoes that of the Catch the Fire pastors who are facing jail in Victoria for, essentially, quoting the Koran, septuagenarian journalist Oriana Fallaci could be incarcerated for the crime of vilipendio – or vilification – for her latest book which asserts, among other things, that waves of unassimilated Muslim immigrants are threatening the free European way of life.

No one has asked the gentleman who brought the case against Fallaci, himself a Muslim who is also campaigning to remove crucifixes from Italian hospitals, if he sees the irony in his complaint. ❖❖❖ Finally, back home, freedom has taken a few knocks of its own. While the Howard Government’s new IR reforms may very well streamline hiring and firing in this country, we’ve been spared no end of academics and other ‘experts’ spouting warmed-over Marxism and doomsday scenarios. The latest installment of this has been a $7 million media campaign paid for by the ACTU – that is, working people’s dues – designed to hector people into becoming Howard haters over the new laws. Considering that ACTU members had no say over their dues being spent thus, the effort is a nice reminder that freedom isn’t free.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

THE ARENA

JAMES MORROW Sixty million Frenchmen – and even several Age readers – can’t be wrong

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good friend of mine recently acquired an antique Atomic brand coffee maker. You know the ones I’m talking about: they’re curvy, stylish and Italian, and have more class in their steam control nozzle than any modern $1,999 job that grinds the beans automatically and can be picked up at any big homewares store has in its entire plastic housing. He was telling me about the great history of the things (during World War II, for example, workers at the Atomic factory in Italy stamped the filter’s drip-holes in a Star of David pattern, in quiet protest the Nazis), and Australia, and the world, are on against we mused on how amazthe brink of serious energy short- ing it was that, back falls, yet one of the safest, cleanest, when the machine was invented, the word and even greenest electricity sup- ‘atomic’ was the advertisplies in the country is still only ing copywriter’s ace in hole. The boundless being talked about by most politi- the promise of the future, cians in sideways whispers the power of science to solve problems, the latest and greatest in technology and design – all were summed up by that one word: ‘atomic’.

Indeed, we were all supposed to be commuting back and forth to the moon in our atomic flying spacecars by now.

But in 2005, Holden’s not making any nuclear-powered Commodores, car makers still tout road-holding – rather than gravity-defying – ability as a selling point, and the word ‘atomic’ has long-since been hijacked to represent everything bad that the men (and they’re always men) in the white lab coats can come up with.

It is time for this to end. Australia, and the world, are on the brink of serious energy shortfalls, yet one 14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

of the safest, cleanest, and even greenest electricity supplies in the country is still only being talked about by most politicians in sideways whispers. Fortunately, since I broached this topic in this column two months ago, things have started to change. The Chicken Little propaganda that has, with the help of compliant journalists, teachers unions, and politicians, scared normally-unflappable Australians into thinking that nuclear power will see mushroom clouds rising over Sydney Harbour, is beginning to come undone.

Without mixing fairy tale metaphors too much, it is becoming ever more clear that the anti-nuclear emperor has no clothes.

It all started when NSW Premier Bob Carr released a trial balloon suggesting that, just maybe, it was time to build a nuclear power plant to help meet the electricity needs of Australia’s most populous state. Of course, the move was exactly the sort of cynical ploy that has made Bob the Builder the longest-serving premier in New South Wales history: what he really wanted, of course, was more coal-burning power plants, and the nuclear option, he figured, would scare voters into sticking with the lung-blackening devil they know.

And just in case people missed the nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say-no-more nature of Carr’s nuclear option, he underlined it by pointing out that while a swell idea in theory, state law forbade the opening of any nuclear waste dumps in NSW (while at the same time conveniently ignoring his legislative power to change such a rule).

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the furphy: an awful lot of Australians took a look at the idea and said, hey, maybe nuclear power isn’t such a bad idea after all.

The first sign that opinion had changed came from the letters pages of Melbourne’s Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, both left-wing echo chambers where correspondents routinely compete to out-radical each

SIGNS OF OLD TIMES: Nuclear power is finally being talked about seriously

other, and conservative voices are so rare that they deserve endangered species protection. (By way of illustration, the day after Peter Costello delivered his widely-praised budget speech earlier this year, the Herald was unable to find one single correspondent who thought that it was a good idea).

Yet on 15 June, for example, the Herald’s lead letter came from one Richard Paulin of North Ryde, who wrote, ‘Some questions for Professor Stuart White, resident anti-nuclear advocate. If nuclear power is so inefficient, why does France, which is 80 per cent nuclear, export $5 billion of electricity annually? If nuclear power waste is an insurmountable problem, why is that country not a nuclear wasteland? If nuclear power is so expensive, why does [sic] France’s steel manufacturers use electric arc furnaces, powered by electricity, rather than Australia’s coke-fired blast furnaces?

‘We need to be far more energy efficient’, Paulin continued. ‘But [Professor White] has done nothing to disprove the fact that nuclear power remains the single most efficient and sustainable energy source for the future.’

A few days earlier in the Age, columnist Terry Lane wrote that ‘Chernobyl frightens us away from nuclear power, but the Canadian province of Ontario, not unlike the state of Victoria, gets 40 per cent of its power from nuclear plants and, as far as I know, has not had a single nuclear accident…

If the likes of the letters editors at the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are any guide, there is a real shift in sentiment in the community, towards a position that accepts that electricity is needed to run our modern, technological society and that there are trade-offs with any form of electricity generation.

Australians recognize that green holy grails of endlessly-renewable power simply don’t exist, that wind farms are ugly and shred kookaburras, solar is impractical, and coal and oil are both dirty and everdwindling resources. Under this line of thinking, people recognize that nuclear power might not be perfect either, but that it is well worth discussing.

Indeed, the question of renewability and dependency is one which reverberates through this entire debate. While Australia’s coal resources are abundant, it is hardly a great way to generate power: even clean coal is still pretty dirty, and for all the talk about the potential danger of nuclear power, precious little is said about all those lives lost or shortened due to cancer, in mining accidents, and otherwise as a result of this form of power generation.

Petroleum, meanwhile, is a more complicated question, but there is a growing concern (see Clare Swinney’s feature story, ‘The Good Oil’, on p. 52 of this issue) that mankind may be a few decades away from having seriously depleted the planet’s easilyaccessible crude supplies. And while that may seem like a long way away, building infrastructure to cope with a changing energy use profile takes.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

THE WATCHER

ALAN RM JONES Media Watch pays homage to Phillip Adams

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ustralian perceptions of the media are incredibly poor. According to a Roy Morgan poll conducted last September for The Reader, only 18 percent of Australians believe the media is doing an unbiased job reporting on controversial issues; nearly 70 percent believe newspapers do not accurately and fairly report the news.

No Australian media organisation escaped a mention.

With such consumer discontent evident one might expect a program like ABC Television’s Media Watch to make the most of what appears to be a target-rich environment. Yet the vista – or at least one side of it – from Media Watch’s What animates Adams’ critics so studio appears sparse.

Such is the state of the much is not that he has borrowed state-owned broadcasta phrase or two now and then; it er’s optics.

While Fairfax (with is that he is seen to be habitually the exception of con‘paying homage’ ser vative columnist Miranda Devine) and the ABC itself never get hit with anything firmer than Paul Keating’s famous piece of wet lettuce, the socalled ‘Murdoch press’ and its conservative columnists remain the show’s perennial target. True, The Australian’s most conspicuous lefty, Phillip Adams, has felt the romaine and radicchio lash, but only just. And the attention he once received was only a convenient artifice to launch another attack on Media Watch’s favourite right wing target, columnist and now ABC board member Janet Albrechtsen.

Weblogger ‘Professor Bunyip’ (http://bunyip. blogspot.com), as he is known, imagined former Media Watch Host David Marr stitching the program up with Adams: ‘We’ll pretend that the item is about you, but what we’ll really present is another attack on 16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

Janet Jackboots.’ And, on that occasion, when Media Watch bothered to take any notice of the sins committed by a fellow traveler, the case was weakly presented and was indeed used to attack Albrechtsen (who now has a Media Watch hat-trick to her credit).

In a 1997 speech to the International Documentary Conference in Brisbane, Adams said paying homage was merely a posh term for plagiarism.

What animates Adams’ critics so much is not that he has borrowed a phrase or two now and then; it is that he is seen to be habitually ‘paying homage’. And even when Adams is caught out, he re-offends.

If you like to read the fortnightly New York Review of Books (NYROB), at A$6.00 a copy on the street in New York (far more in Oz), in addition to plenty of time, you have an expensive reading habit. So here’s a tip: affluent Adams reads the NYROB, too – though I expect his copy is paid for by the ABC Radio where he hosts Late Night. Fortunately, you can get theReader’s Digest version in his Australian column.

Evidently, the ABC gets just one copy of the NYROB and Adams permanently absconds with it as he leaves his Radio National studio to write his column, and the ABC, with its beggar budget of $750 million, apparently can’t afford a second copy for Media Watch. Just as well for Adams, lest it fall into Media Watch executive producer Peter McEvoy’s deft hands.

But something tells me it’s not lack of resources that keeps Media Watch from focusing on filching Phil; rather, it is the ABC’s institutional bias and lack of regard for journalistic standards and the ABC’s code of practice which is to blame. How else to explain the rubber glove and cavity search treatment reserved for conservative columnists like Albrechsen or Miranda Devine?

When shown the goods on Adams, McEvoy finds reasons to look the other way. On one occasion he defended Adams by lamely claiming he had ‘suffi-

ciently re-written’ the work (a 2003 NYROB piece) he was alleged to have lifted and that he had cited the work with the words ‘history tells us’.

When Adams is not technically committing plagiarism, even those who share his worldview should feel cheated. Adams is not overworked (he puts in four hours a week on air at the ABC in addition to his newspaper column). Yet his work product is either fundamentally dishonest (i.e., pilfered), or it looks as though it has been.

Here’s one example, provided by the aforementioned Bunyip, involving a piece by Michael Massing in the 29 May 2003 edition of the NYROB, followed by Adams, six weeks later in the Australian.

In this case, Adams lets on that he has read Massing’s piece, but he then either paraphrases or copies Massing verbatim: MASSING: The Coalition Media Center is managed by Jim Wilkinson, a fresh-faced, thirty-two-year-old Texan and a protégé of Bush’s adviser Karen Hughes. Wilkinson made his mark during the 2000 presidential election when he spoke on behalf of GOP activists protesting the Florida ballot recount. To run the media center in Doha, Wilkinson, a member of the naval reserve, appeared in the same beige fatigues as the career officers working under him.

ADAMS: The centre was managed by Jim Wilkinson, a 32-yearold Texan and protégé of the brothers Bush. When last seen, Wilkinson had been speaking on behalf of Republican activists protesting against the Florida ballot recount...In Doha, the Bush activist was repackaged as a member of the Naval Reserve, appearing in beige fatigues identical to the career officers working beneath him.

Adams goes on like this for paragraphs, until near then end when he finally puts quotes around a few of Massing’s words – leading readers to believe everything else Adams has written is his own:

MASSING: CNN International bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition -– a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and content of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see.

ADAMS: CNN’s international service was repackaged, bearing more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic – and domesticated – edition. Massing emphasises how market driven was the tone and content of the broadcast. ‘For the most part US news organisations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see,’ he says.

Adams’ column is, at the very least, an abject embarrassment to The Australian. That is, unless you subscribe to the Adams school of conspiracy. In which case, Rupert Murdoch has taken a page out of Karl Rove’s play book and instructed The Australian’s editors to keep Adams right where he is in order to discredit the left.

And what of Media Watch? Professional review is one thing, but there is something odious about a state-owned broadcaster sitting in judgment of private news broadcasters and newspapers. Sure, the ABC is not the same thing as the government swinging the billy club. But the ABC is a state habitat, populated overwhelmingly by leftists and funded by taxpayers, and Media Watch uses its resources to advance elite left-wing biases in a shrill, predictable and boring way which no commercial broadcaster would dare do.

Media Watch’s supporters would say that’s precisely why stateowned broadcasting is necessary. Well, no, actually. The ABC enjoys its budget, free of commercial constraints, not so it can fill the airwaves with ‘soft lefty’ attitudes masquerading as upholding professional standards. It is required to be fair. Entertaining would be okay, too.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST At the time of this writing, The Australian published another Adams piece, which looks … well, over to you Media Watch. On 4 May, retired U.S. Army Colonel David Hackworth died. Hackworth, who became a trenchant Pentagon critic, lived for a time in Australia, where he apparently befriended Adams. Six weeks after Last Post was played for his buddy ‘Hack’, Adams finally got around to eulogizing him. That was a cinch, because Hackworth’s obit writers at the Toledo (Ohio) Blade had done Adams’ homework for him...

Toledo Blade, 7 May 2005 As a 15-year-old orphan in Southern California, Mr. Hackworth joined the Army at the end of World War II, surviving four battle wounds in Korea. His heroics earned him a Silver Star, a battlefield commission to second lieutenant, and his own commando unit.

Colonel Hackworth, then a major, was promoted out of Vietnam in June, 1966 – 11 months before the unit’s first documented war crime. From May to November, 1967, some soldiers turned their rifles on hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children in what became the longest-known string of war crimes by a battle unit in Vietnam.During his fourth tour of duty in Vietnam, he spoke out against the war in June, 1971, prompting an Army investigation of his background.

He and his supporters portrayed the probe as retaliation against a whistleblower, but investigators uncovered widespread rule-breaking, including operating a gambling house and a brothel for his troops.

He defended both, arguing that it kept his soldiers disease-free, and the profits helped buy supplies for his men and local schoolchildren.

However, investigators concluded that the colonel enlisted his men in a black-market currency scheme that netted him tens of thousands of dollars. He would admit only that the men smuggled $100,000 of his poker winnings out of the country.

The Secretary of the Army allowed the colonel to retire to Australia, where he made millions in a restaurant business and duck farm.

Phillip Adams, The Australian, 18 June 2005 Born and orphaned in 1930, Hack was raised by a grandmother whose bedtime stories were about the family’s military history, going back to the American Revolutionary War. Faking ID papers, Hackworth joined the army in 1946, aged 15. He served in Korea and by Vietnam was regarded as one of the United States’ most brilliant commanding officers.

During his fourth tour of duty he went public with criticisms of the Pentagon. The army tried to discredit him, threatening him with a court martial for operating a gambling house and brothel for his men. Hack’s defence? The brothel had saved his men from disease, while profits from the little casino were used to buy supplies for the troops and local schoolkids.

Nonetheless, there was evidence of smuggling $200,000 out of the country.

To avoid scandal, the Secretary of the Army allowed Hack to retire to Australia where he continued his winning ways, making millions out of a restaurant and, of all things, a duck farm…

With Desert Storm, Hack once more became a Pentagon critic.

Describing the war as ‘a raging atrocity’, David fought for ‘the young soldiers that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf ’…

It seemed that a unit called Tiger Force, established in 1965, had committed escalating atrocities – including turning their guns on more than 100 unarmed civilians…

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON Big boys should stop crying

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any of my male friends, colleagues and contemporaries are of the opinion that the women’s movement has gone too far. An opinion shared, it seems, by a majority of males.

The gist of it is, men are not free to be men any more. The male spirit has been gradually eroded away by the disapproval of women and replaced with a neutered, domesticated, femme-friendly New Age model of manliness. Real men feel ripped off, as if they have to apologize for simply being blokes.

These frustrating emotions are behind men’s revival movements such as Australia’s Promise Keepers who claim much of problems relate If the advancement of women society’s to the displacement of to a level of a 20% share in men. Restore the male to power causes a crisis amongst his position of leadership and authority and men, then it is obvious that you will reassert his sense male status has relied heavily of pride and responsibilCrime will fall as a reon women remaining in ity. sult, says this theory. the background If men’s roles are not restored, crime, violence, war, and a host of other horrors will continue to rise.

The responsibility for this horrible scenario rests squarely on the shoulders of those feminists who upset the order of things by breaking out of their traditional role and stealing men’s thunder.

An astonishing piece of blackmail really. Essentially, if women don’t give men what they want, men will wreck the planet and blame women. So what do men want? I have asked this question of my disgruntled friends and I can only describe the response as elusive.

Men only know that they feel vaguely threatened and 18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

undermined in subtle ways, but they don’t know how to fix it. Some comments I’ve heard cited by challenged men are: women’s wants never end, you give them some ground and they want more. Women have gone way beyond 50/50; they are at about 70/30 now and won’t stop until they have it all. Men are sexual beings; sex is a physical requirement and if women continue to deny men then rapes will logically increase. Divorce courts favour women by giving them automatic rights to children and to half the husband’s assets regardless of whether she helped earn them.

Some of these examples of discrimination, such as the parental-rights issue, do appear real. But there are glaring omissions in this summary of women’s power and territory. I have my own way of assessing gender equality and it is quite a simple formula. Power is associated with voice. Who gets heard, who gets published, written about, who stars in movies, who gets radio airplay, who runs businesses, who leads countries.

Applying this formula shows women at best account for 20% of who gets heard, seen, reported on, and who holds power. All it takes is one day of observing to come to this conclusion. Listen to the radio, read the paper, watch TV news and check out what’s on at the box office. Roughly 80% of all that is newsworthy, all radio singers, all movie top-billers, all movers and shakers are male.

How this equates with women having gone too far in the minds of men is a little scary. Women have a long way to go before they are anywhere near equal to the actual wealth, earning power and overall status of men, and yet men feel robbed.

The hue and cry over boy’s second-rate performance in schools is a fine example. No complaints were heard when girls came second, as it was expected of them. Now that girls have caught up, there is a feverish scramble to overhaul education. Why don’t boys simply do what girls did: try harder?

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

RIGHT HOOK

ANN COULTER

Gagging on ‘Deep Throat’

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y only regret is that Mark Felt did not rat out Nixon because he was ticked off about rapprochement with China or détente with the Soviets.

Rather, Felt leaked details of the Watergate investigation to the Washington Post only because he had lost a job promotion. This will come as small consolation to the Cambodians and Vietnamese slaughtered as a direct result of Nixon’s fall. Oh, well. At least we got a good movie and Jimmy Carter out of it.

Still, it must pain liberals to be praising an FBI man who ordered illegal searches of their old pals in the Weather Underground Of course, Felt wasn’t in the early ’70s. For those searches, Felt was Deep Throat. There was no later prosecuted by the Deep Throat Carter administration.

Ironically, only because of Watergate, which Felt helped instigate, could a nitwit like Jimmy Carter ever become president – a perch from which Carter pardoned draft dodgers and prosecuted Mark Felt. No wonder Felt kept denying he was ‘Deep Throat.’

Also ironic is that Felt’s free-love, flower-girl daughter was estranged from her father for decades on account of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage. A single mum, she is now broke – because of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage.

Of course Felt wasn’t Deep Throat. There was no Deep Throat. Now we know.

As most people had generally assumed, the shadowy figure who made his first appearance in a late draft of All the President’s Men was a composite of several sources – among them, apparently, Mark Felt.

And now the jig is up.

20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

The fictional Deep Throat knew things Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn’t work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn’t even work at the FBI anymore.

Woodward claimed he signaled Deep Throat by moving a red flag in a flowerpot to the back of his balcony and that Deep Throat signaled him by drawing the hands of a clock in Woodward’s New York Times.

But in his 1993 book, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Adrian Havill did something it had occurred to no one else to do: He looked at Woodward’s old apartment, and found that Woodward had a sixth-floor interior apartment that could not be seen from the street.

In another scene in All the President’s Men, Woodward’s sidekick, Carl Bernstein, goes to a porno theater to avoid a subpoena – and the movie Deep Throat happens to be the featured film! Havill points out that Washington, D.C., had recently cracked down on porno theaters and Deep Throat was not playing in any theater in Washington at the time.

Woodward and Bernstein’s former literary agent, David Obst, has always said Deep Throat was a fictional device added to later drafts of All the President’s Men to spice it up (kind of like everything in a Michael Moore film).

Obst scoffs at the notion that the No. 2 man at the FBI would have time to be skulking around parking lots spying for red flags on a reporter’s balcony. ‘There’s not a chance one person was Deep Throat’, he told The New York Times.

So it’s not really that amazing that the identity of Deep Throat managed to stay secret for so long.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

LEFT HOOK

TIM DUNLOP

Now’s your chance, Mr. Howard: Go, Johnny, go!

A

ustralian politics is entering unfamiliar territory in that, for thefirst time in a quarter of a century, the government of the day now controls both Houses of Parliament. Having spent the duration of the Howard Government arguing against their agenda, I guess their Senate majority is a cue for me to redouble my efforts and do what I can to critique and resist what already seems to be a bad bunch of policy options.

But I realise that this moment actually offers me a chance to give John Howard a piece of gratuitous, though sincere, advice. Believe me, my inclination is not to do him any favours, but maybe I’m just homesick enough – I’m about Like no prime minister in to head back to Oz after three years in the United recent history, Mr. Howard is States – to see what on the verge of greatness maybe we should all see more clearly, namely, that sometimes politics offers us opportunities.

People argue that history is bearing down on Mr. Howard and that he shouldn’t waste the opportunity of his Senate majority in the way he himself believes Malcolm Fraser did after 1975. I’d like to suggest another historical possibility.

The fact is, like no prime minister in recent history, Mr. Howard is on the verge of greatness.

Indeed, he is in the rare position of being able to implement change that would not only honour the liberalism that underpins his party philosophy but that would end some of the most divisive and intractable debates since the Dismissal. Plus, it would undermine his opponents such that there would be virtually no challenge his government couldn’t undertake.

In short, the prime minister would so reek with political credibility that all would wilt before him.

22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

The first step would be to offer an apology to Aboriginal people for past injustices. Think about it. He would in one stroke provide the basis for the sort of symbolic recognition that he himself admits is needed, without for one second undermining his insistence on ‘practical reconciliation’. His opponents would be blindsided and could offer nothing but praise.

Second, he could embrace the Georgiou reforms on immigration and asylum seekers and end the utterly illiberal policy of indefinite detention, freeing children and their families, without at all undermining his government’s basically sound stance on border protection.

Once again, his opponents would be floored.

Finally – and admittedly, most difficultly – he could ignore the special interest calls for a ‘more flexible’ workforce and publicly recognize that a worker is not just another factor of production, but that work itself is the basis from which people find a sense of personal identity and through which our society builds a stable and prosperous nation. He could level the playing field without at all damaging the economy.

Having thus transformed the political landscape, he could even do what so few political leaders get to do: retire gracefully at the top of his game.

It should be obvious that any one of these options would be personally difficult for the prime minister – though far from politically impossible – and that any attempt to do all of them would require an almost transcendent sense of duty and will power.

But that’s what greatness demands. A willingness to defy expectations. If he chose to grasp the moment, Mr Howard could seal his place in history as the most audacious leader of the modern period.

Probably of any period.

Johnny B. Great.

Tim Dunlop is a homeward-bound writer and author of Australia’s most widely-read left-leaning blog, www.roadtosurfdom.com

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART The death of a child

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suspect many people remember this song: ‘Would you know my name, if I saw you in Heaven? Would you be the same, if I saw you in Heaven? I must be strong, and carry on, because I know I don’t belong, here in Heaven…’ When rocker Eric Clapton wrote those words, he was thinking not of the potential success of a hit record, he was writing from the heart. On March 20, 1991, just a week after my own son was born, Eric Clapton lost his four year old son Conor in a tragic, heart-rending accident. It happened on the 53rd storey of a New York apartment building.

Conor, like all boys his age, was full of energy. Unfortunately a cleaner had just finished wiping a large floor to ceiling window and left it open to dry. Conor was running and, before his Medical and psychiatric stud- mother could grab him, simply fell out the winies have repeatedly found that dow, plunging 49 stories a spiritual belief makes people to the rooftop of an adjacent four storey building. cope with life better than those There are so many ‘ifonly’ elements to this sad who don’t have one event, and Clapton took nine months off to grieve. As commentators noted, when he returned to performing his music was much more powerful and more reflective.

The other week, someone I know lost a child in an equally tragic accident in Auckland. Again, the ‘what-ifs’ and pain swirl in an endless cyclone of recriminations wishes by the parents that they could turn back time and do something – anything – differently.

Death comes to all of us, yet it is incredibly hard to deal with. The pain, the trauma and the emotional loss from an event like these is like a jagged blade in the heart, and the wounds take a long time to heal. So if religion is supposed to answer these “meaning of life” questions, if religion is supposed to help us deal 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

with the ultimate question, how do the various religions stack up when it comes to death?

If you don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, I suspect coping with death is hardest for you. And indeed, medical and psychiatric studies have repeatedly found that a spiritual belief makes people cope with life better than those who don’t have one. For a non-believer who loses a child, there is no hope, just an aching hole in the heart where their baby used to be.

For Buddhists, Hindus or follower of New Age docrines, life is a cycle of reincarnation, and the grieving parent at least is comforted by the idea that their child will return as someone else’s child. The downside to this is the loss of personal identity. In the Eastern faiths, you become one with the universe, recycled and then spat back down to Earth again where past identities and memories of those you loved are lost to you - a meaningless, cosmic Groundhog Day. It is Christianity, I suggest, that offers the only tangible hope for non-Christians and Christians alike.

The central theme of Christianity is triumph over death.

Death entered the world through the fall from Eden.

Now imagine that sequence in reverse, where a kind of supernatural Earth (Eden) is poisoned,, in a massive universe-wide dimension shift that kicks humanity and the world it occupies out of the heavenly dimension into a dimension where death and decay exist. This was the first separation of humanity from God. Jesus Christ came back to Earth to offer an invitation back for those who believed. In regard to children, it is widely believed from Christ’s comments that children who die are accepted into Heaven by God’s grace. For a grieving parent, Christian or not, God’s grace is equally available by invitation. Only Christianity and the example of Jesus’ resurrection, offers the hope of seeing a dead child alive again.

And yes, Eric, little Conor will know your name, if choose to join him, there in Heaven.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

FIRST DRAFT

MATT HAYDEN

We sneak a peek at the Senate's new workplace agreements...

STANDARD CONTRACT (“SENATOR”) Terms and Conditions of Employment Howard Holdings Pty Ltd 1. POSITION: You are employed as a full-time Management-Staff Liaison Officer (“Senator”). As described in the Company Charter (“Constitution”) of Howard Holdings Pty Ltd, your continued employment is subject to ongoing review by employee-shareholders (“citizens”). These reviews (“elections”) occur at regular three year intervals in all branches (“cities and towns”) of the corporation (“Australia”).

The exact date of the next review will be chosen by the Chief Executive Officer (“Prime Minister”) after consultation between the Management (“House of Representatives”) and Board of Directors (Messrs Murdoch, Packer, Stokes, et al.).

2. TERMS AND CONDITIONS: It is your duty to faithfully and diligently facilitate the implementation of Management decisions (“policies”) made in the collective pecuniary interest of all 20,342,715 Howard Holdings employee-shareholders.

Pursuant to this, on occasion, you may: • Make minor adjustments to these decisions in response to employee-shareholder input (“public opinion”).

• Politely express reservations about the nature of these decisions in response to your own personal code of business ethics (“conscience”). Under exceptional circumstances these may take the form of signed petitions (“private member’s bills”) against certain aspects of company practice*.

However: • Excessively zealous collective expressions of discontent regarding any aspect of the company’s performance in the global marketplace (“rebellions”), and/or surreptitious dissemination of company records (“leaks”) – particularly those aiding and abetting known anti-corporatist forces (“ABC”, “Fairfax”,”Greens”) – may, at Management’s sole discretion, be seen as breaches of these Terms and Conditions. As such they attract severe penalties, up to and including dismissal (“disendorsement”).

Also: • Extra prudence must be applied while performing any of your duties related to the recruitment of overseas personnel (“immigration”) and the nature of the processing thereof (“border control issues”).

And finally: • Any and all of the above Terms and Conditions may be subject to change by Management at any time without notice. * N.B.: While some junior Management staff (Georgiou, Moylan, et al.) have recently invoked this particular clause – and have not been penalised as of this writing – Management-Staff Liaison Officers are still strongly advised not to follow suit.

26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

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28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

HOWARD’S WAY He’s won a four th term, faced do wn a revolt from backbenchers, and has historic control of the Senate. So what next for the Prime Minister? ALAN ANDERSON provides an inside account of the power struggles within the Liberal party, the outlook f or succession, and Labor’s last best hope .

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

W

ith the Opposition languishing ‘party of ideas’ may encompass calls for tax reform or in the polls, the new Senate under school vouchers, it was a contrived explanation of his Coalition control and the issue of surrender to the mandatory detention rebels. the Liberal leadership at least tem- Howard’s line has only passed media muster because porarily quiescent, one would the press gallery were so keen to see immigration policy imagine John Howard to be at the peak of his power. watered down.

The days of a meek and compliant backbench are Yet the past few weeks have seen him locked in tense negotiations with four of his own backbenchers, cul- gone. ‘There are two ends of the spectrum’, another minating in a partial repudiation of the policy with Minister explained. ‘On one hand you have people which he is most closely associated in the public mind. like Georgiou, who know that they’re never going to As we eagerly anticipate the Government’s legislative get a position on the front bench. What has he got to agenda, how far will Howard really be able to push lose? He figures he might as well do what he believes.

‘At the other end of the spectrum you have young, things in a fourth term?

The revolt led by backbencher Petro Georgiou ambitious backbenchers. If you’re in your thirties against mandatory detention has been an unsettling and on the backbench, you want to make a name experience for the Government. With big ticket items for yourself. You see there’s a logjam on the front bench at the moment, and you don’t like industrial relations and Telstra on expect promotion any time soon. So the agenda, together with smaller but YET WHILE you’re thinking long-term, beyond this equally controversial reforms like volGovernment’. untary student unionism, Howard will HOWARD’S In other words, the Coalition’s policy not want policies that should form his PORTRAYAL debates are partly a symptom of its suclegacy to be watered down by nervous OF THE cess. Howard has an abundance of talbackbenchers.

LIBERALS AS ent in the Parliament, much of it quite Howard’s response has been to porTHE ‘PARTY experienced, but there are only so many tray the revolt as a strength rather than OF IDEAS’ ministries to go around. a weakness. His welcoming of fresh The two major themes championed ideas from the backbench carried a disMAY by the party’s backbench this year have turbing touch of Chairman Mao’s ENCOMPASS been tax reform and softening of manexhortation to ‘let a hundred flowers CALLS FOR datory detention. They represent two bloom’, although one hopes his TAX different models of backbench activmotivation is less sinister.

REFORM ism, at least one of which poses a direct Certainly, Liberal MPs identify the OR SCHOOL challenge to Howard’s authority. party’s capacity to generate ideas as a The so-called tax ‘ginger group’, led key advantage over Labor. ‘We are winVOUCHERS, by Fifield and Victorian Liberal MP ning because we are about ideas’, one IT WAS A Sophie Panopoulos, was careful to give South Australian Liberal MP told CONTRIVED credit to the Government for past tax Investigate. ‘They are more interested EXPLANAcuts while lobbying for more. They in factional politics.’

TION OF HIS portrayed their cause as consistent with This is more than rhetoric. Two new SURRENDER the direction of government policy, policy journals, The Party Room, edited and their form of contribution is by former federal director Andrew TO THE doubtless what Howard has in mind Robb MP and tax crusader Senator MANDATORY when calling for debate. But to be fairto Mitch Fifield, and Looking Forward, DETENTION Petro Georgiou and his mandatory edited by South Australian Liberal MP REBELS detention rebels, consistency with Dr Andrew Southcott, have sprung up government policy would not have in the last few months. Freed of the discipline of staring down the barrel of electoral been a credible claim for their group to make. Asked oblivion, Coalition MPs have greeted Labor’s decline to comment on where the line is drawn between with an eagerness to conduct their own policy debates healthy debate and white-anting, one Liberal Senator saw the policy itself as the main distinction. ‘The difin public.

The Coalition is providing its own opposition, ference is about whether you are agitating to advance while an impotent Labor Party is relegated to the role Liberal values, or to overturn them; whether you’re of spectator. There is every reason to believe that this trying to get us to go forward or to reverse’.

Yet there is a distinction of process as well as subis not a passing phase. Labor was sidelined before Coalition control of the Senate; deprived of its upper stance. Sophie Panopolous invited controversy when house veto it can only become less relevant. Policy is labelling Georgiou’s group ‘political terrorists’, yet there in fashion this season, and there is no doubt that it is no question that their campaign was conducted is making the Liberal Party look like the natural party using the threat of private member’s Bills and an embarrassing split in Government ranks. If not terof government.

Yet while Howard’s portrayal of the Liberals as the rorism, it was at least blackmail, and it worked.

30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

Media commentators, seeking to excuse Howard’s capitulation on a policy they detest, suggest that it sprang from his belief that ‘disunity is death’. But if disunity is death, has Howard not encouraged it?

The Coalition party room was solidly behind Howard on this issue. Had he wanted to stand firm, there is no question that Georgiou and his three colleagues would have been isolated and defeated.

Instead, Howard spent nine hours negotiating with the group, delivering substantial concessions that undermine the mandatory detention regime for any asylum-seeker accompanied by his family. To extend the Panopoulos analogy, Howard broke the rules and negotiated with terrorists.

One Victorian Liberal backbencher sees the rationale for Howard’s move as being specific to the issue. ‘The Palmer Inquiry was going to criticise the [Immigration] Department and recommend reforms. Howard was

just moving first, so that when the report came out he would already have fixed the problems’.

Another explanation is that Howard was driven by memories of the dissipation of Malcolm Fraser’s authority in the face of regular defections. Yet the broader precedent has been set. ‘It will certainly encourage others to think they can get away with breaking ranks’, according to the Victorian. The incident has cast doubt over whether Howard be able to rein in the excesses of this phenomenon.

Of course, the one force that could reverse this trend is the federal Labor Party. Were it not for the absence of effective opposition from the benches opposite, Coalition parliamentarians might be more circumspect in airing internal policy debates than they have been in recent months.

What are the chances of a Labor revival bolstering discipline in the Coalition ranks? The prospect of a July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 31

Labor leadership change, unthinkable before the THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

the courage to confront its latte set of academics, teachBudget, is starting to look like a real possibility. ers and lawyers and reconcile the conflict between what Returning to Beazley seemed a safe option at the time, Beazley’s father memorably called ‘the cream of the but the Labor caucus must be wondering whether working class’ and ‘the dregs of the middle class’. they have made their third mistake in a row.

Increasingly, Labor looks like it is just sitting back and Yet Coalition MPs see Beazley more as a symptom praying for a recession. than a cause of the Labor disease. For one thing, a This may well be Labor’s only chance. Asked to change in leadership will not alter the high ‘hack fac- explain the Coalition’s electoral dominance, three Libtor’ that is so apparent from a perusal of Labor CVs, eral parliamentarians independently came up with the or the resultant intellectual vacuum. same phrase: ‘strong economic management’.

‘It’s about personnel’, was the Minister’s explanaIt is interesting that Costello’s mantra is now echtion of Labor’s woes, but it was not just a reference to oed even by MPs more traditionally associated with the leadership. ‘Labor’s benches are full of trade Howard, given that it relegates Howard’s personal union reps and former staffers. None of them have appeal to being a subsidiary cause of success. Yet it is had any real world experience, and they’re not repre- a tribute to the Howard-Costello partnership that the sentative of the community. Our party room looks Government has acquired a confident identity beyond more like Australia’. the personality of its leader, in stark ‘They just don’t have any ideas’, contrast to the personality cults of adds the South Australian MP. ‘They state Labor administrations.

BEAZLEY’S seem to be getting all their policy from This ongoing dominance leaves HAM-FISTED one or two sources: tax policy from Howard with great responsibilities, and EFFORTS TO one think-tank conference; health with the challenge of managing a restpolicy from Catholic health groups. It’s less backbench. He is the trustee of years BLOCK because their MPs are basically just unof intellectual and political effort by libCOSTELLO’S ion and party hacks. They aren’t comerals and conservatives, which have TAX CUTS ing up with anything themselves’. finally delivered the opportunity for SUGGEST Equally damaging is the fact that serious reform. There are two tasks by THAT LABOR Labor continues to break the primary which Howard will be judged.

STILL rule of politics: look after your base.

The first task is to maintain the This is perhaps Howard’s most imreform momentum. Kevin Andrews’ BELIEVES IT portant political legacy. Since 1996, ambitious industrial relations reforms CAN REGAIN ‘Howard’s battlers’ have continued to exceed the meagre expectations created ITS TRADIupset the traditional political balance. by his ambiguous post-election proTIONAL Won over by Howard’s rejection of the nouncements. If implemented in their SUPPORT culturally elitist Keating agenda, a few current form, they will be a fitting capBASE… battlers went home to Labor over the stone to Howard’s career-long strugGST in 1998, before being cemented gle to liberate Australia from its antiINCREASback into the Coalition’s corner by the quated IR system.

INGLY, LABOR border protection debate in 2001.

Peter Costello’s last budget also LOOKS LIKE exceeded expectations, although purIT IS JUST n 2004, the focus returned to ists will continue to call for a more SITTING domestic issues, with a tradiradical flattening of the income tax BACK AND tional class warfare campaign system. Liberals have good reason to under Labor’s pie-eating be satisfied with their Government’s PRAYING FOR Aussie bloke, Mark Latham. fourth term performance thus far.

A RECESSION Yet in spite of scare campaigns on But Howard has yet to negotiate health, a polarising debate over private passage of his industrial relations laws, schooling and a barrage of self-serving stories about which have offended federalists and face a possible Latham’s Green Valley upbringing, the battlers voted defection by Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce. The Liberal in greater numbers than ever. This, together sale of Telstra also faces hurdles, with some Nationwith the abject failure of Labor’s anti-Costello cam- als likely to complain so long as one farmer has paign, suggests that Howard’s battlers have become mobile reception problems when trying to call the the Coalition’s battlers, increasingly wedded to its sheep in his back paddock. aspirational economic message as well as its culturally On a smaller scale, there are also rumblings of disconservative one. sent over voluntary student unionism, raising the fear Is this reversible? Beazley’s ham-fisted efforts to that the policy will be watered down into insignifiblock Costello’s tax cuts suggest that Labor still cance as it was under Jeff Kennett in Victoria. believes it can regain its traditional support base. Yet Securing passage of these reforms will be a test of it is questionable whether Labor can ever win back its Howard’s authority, not to mention his negotiating socially conservative core demographic until it finds skills. This once-in-a-generation opportunity must not

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be squandered. Howard has acquired a large reserve of political capital over the past ten years. This is the time to spend it.

Yet there will be a temptation to do the opposite.

Fear of a possible leadership battle in the coming year could cause Howard to question whether he should keep his powder dry; whether a ‘steady as she goes’ approach and the appeasement of dissenters is a more prudent course to maintain poll numbers and party room support in the short term. It can only be hoped that the surrender on mandatory detention was not a sign of such an approach.

This brings us to Howard’s second great task. Even he must appreciate that the end of his career is approaching. If Howard fights the 2007 election, it will be as a 69-year-old. And even if he fights and wins, what about 2010 and 2013? No one believes Howard will be around for those elections.

One senior Liberal told Investigate, ‘Our newer MPs are looking at the long term. They know the best chance they have of a long career is if the leadership transition is timed right and goes smoothly’.

The Liberal Party’s future does not end with Howard’s career; nor does Australia’s. Howard owes it to his supporters to devise a credible succession plan that bequeaths to his successor a legacy that does not die with Howard’s leadership. His aim should

not be one more victory, but many, through a long period of conservative dominance of which he is merely the founder. At the recent Liberal Federal Council meeting, blatant promotion of Alexander Downer, a strong contender for the Deputy’s position under Costello, suggested that succession planning is very much on Howard’s mind.

Thus we have arrived at a crossroads in Howard’s career, which will determine whether he is a politician or a statesman. Howard the survivor can spend his final years in office ducking and weaving to dodge the inevitable final blow. But he is enough of a student of history to know that Australian Prime Ministers are remembered more by their leaving of office than by their holding of it.

Accordingly, Howard should use the authority that four election successes have conferred upon him to advance the Liberals’ ideological cause, applying the bold template of his industrial relations reforms to other areas and creating a policy agenda that will extend beyond his reign. If Howard departs office voluntarily, with his Prime Ministership not a finished book but the opening chapters of a work in progress, he will have earned an exalted place beside Menzies in the Liberal pantheon.

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THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

NEW

RUDD

ORDER

Iraq, the United Nations, and the threat of terrorism in our region: What is Ho ward doing wr ong? How would Labor do things differently? Investigate editor JAMES MORROW recently sat down with Shadow Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd to find out INVESTIGATE: Do you think Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, the fact of the matter is Saddam’s gone, but to state the bleeding obvious we didn’t support the war. The fact of the matter is that that advice was not accepted by the Australian government, the Australian government fought in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, and in fact succeeded in removing him. Therefore we are, as people interested in and committed to universal human rights, happy that he’s gone.

But what one is concerned about is the stability of the country, and the regime which replaces him. What we’re uncertain about is how all this will shake down in the years ahead, particularly once there is an eventual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

INVESTIGATE: On the subject of the US’s eventual withdrawal, where do you stand on the question of keeping Australian troops in Iraq? After all, Mark Latham promised to have the troops home by Christmas, but Howard has committed another 450 troops.

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RUDD: We think that [increasing the deployment] was an inappropriate decision for a number of reasons, one of which is the prime minister’s election commitment, to the Australian people in black and white, which was that there would be no substantial increases. Prior to the election from memory we had in country something in the vicinity of 300 troops if you add another 500, it’s basically a breach of undertaking.

INVESTIGATE: So what’s Labor’s plan?

RUDD: When I visited Iraq and spoke with Ambassador Bremmer, one of the things he impressed upon me was the problem of the porousness of Iraq’s borders, and of insurgents and jihadists coming across from Syria and Saudi Arabia and Iran and [the need] to do what was necessary to enhance the systems, procedures and personnel tasked with providing Iraq’s border security. We can provide a very effective training package for that as well as effective packages to assist Iraqis on the humanitarian front.

INVESTIGATE: In that vein, did you see Syria

recently nabbed 113 people trying to make it into Iraq from Syria?

RUDD: I have not seen that particular report, but those figures would not surprise me. I stood in Bremer’s office in Saddam’s palace and examined a very large map of Iraq and its contiguous land borders with Iran, Syria and Saudi. These are borders that probably in the best of times were never properly policed. Now that we’re in the worst of times, in terms of Iraq, to paraphrase [CIA Director] Porter Goss, it has become something of a magnet for training jihadists from around the world.

It strikes us that the best thing to do is help the Iraqis build better border control and better border security systems. That’s something we’re not bad at.

INVESTIGATE: To bring the United Nations into the conversation for a moment, you opposed going into Iraq; does Australia always need the UN’s mandate to use force, or is there a danger that that limits our options?

RUDD: We take the UN charter seriously, and the reason we take the UN charter seriously is that, prima

facie, it is better to have an international rules-based order than to have no international rules-based order.

And to state the bleeding obvious, of course it’s inefficient. The bottom line is it was put together by a committee of nations in 1945. But critics of the UN don’t argue what sort of rules-based order, if any, should replace it. Are they arguing for the pre-‘45 world order, the pre-1919 world order, what sort of world order are they arguing for creating? Back to Westphalia, back to pre-Westphalia?

If you’re going to take the classic neo-conservative critique of the UN multilateral order, then think in the great tradition of Burkean conservatism, you should argue for something to replace that which you would tear apart. I don’t hear a coherent program along those lines other than occasional bursts of unilateralism when you judge it absolutely necessary. A lot of capabilities are divided within the strength of the UN charter: Article 42, which provides for collective action through the Security Council (that’s how we managed to achieve our outcomes in East Timor).

You’ve also got Article 51, which provides for an opJuly 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 35

portunity to defend yourself against attacks, and Kofi Annan has argued for a further examination of that given the advances in weaponry in recent times. Then you’ve got doctrines of humanitarian intervention, which are much more controversial provisions.

INVESTIGATE: How does that all fit in, then, with the crisis in Darfur?

RUDD: The challenge at stake with Darfur is the question of whether it is a failure of the UN or the member states of the UN. INVESTIGATE: Then isn’t the problem with the UN that it is only as good as it’s member states?

RUDD: Most cooperative endeavours are.

INVESTIGATE: Sure, if you’ve got an organisation with lots of different states that are not democracies and a few that are, don’t you wind up getting pulled down to the lowest common denominator, because those dictatorships keep one from being able to act?

RUDD: If you look back to the Commission on Human Rights, which is the subject of such comprehensive reform proposals by Kofi Annan’s reform panel, that is the inherent problem of having a democracy of states, states which irrespective of their internal political composition all having equal say in the general assembly.

But again, the critics of the UN system fail to argue the alternative. I don’t hear that. I don’t even hear that from the neo-conservative critics. Would it be the death of Westphalia? Would the sovereignty of individual states go out the door? If so, what replaces it?

I just think that reforming the current system is the most practical way to go. I put in these stark terms and your readers will be familiar with Churchill’s great critique of democracy, and I think the same is true with the United Nations.

So it’s not about some belief in chanting the UN mantra for the sake of chanting the UN mantra. No, it’s not ideological, it’s practical. And contrast that with the various international systems of the pre-1945 period.

And in this country which tends to be pro-American, and I have a career record of being pro-American myself, support for the UN tends to poll over 60 percent.

INVESTIGATE: On the issue of pro- and antiAmericanism, what did you make of that report from the Lowy institute which said that more Australians were more afraid of the United States than Osama bin Laden?

RUDD: I was actually in China when that poll came out so, so I haven’t gotten into it, but in terms of the responses in the poll that supported the US alliance, I think the figure was 38 per cent, and for America itself it was 58 per cent. That I think is an interesting insight into the way Australians think. Australians, since 1941 when [Labor] ran the country, we had an alliance with the United States for the first time, which was under an Australian Labor government, and we took a lot of criticism from those who accused us of departing from the mother country. We have been consistent supporters of a military alliance with America, and that has not changed and that will not change.

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“It strikes us that the best thing to do is help the Iraqis build better border control and better border security systems. That’s something we’re not bad at”

However, support of the US military alliance does not mean that you have to subsume every tenet of Australian foreign policy to American foreign policy.

There are going to be areas of difference. There have been in the past, and you know what? There will be in the future. This is not the sort of thing where you just go and tick every box.

INVESTIGATE: Back to the whole concept of multilateral alliances and structures, what do you say to the criticism that if we were in the ASEAN treaty a few years back, we wouldn’t have ben able to liberate East Timor because we would have had to respect the sovereignty of Indonesia?

RUDD: I think it’s an intellectually incoherent argument, the reason being that in the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation refers to Article 42 of the UN charter, which in turn provides for collective action by states.

It was only when the UN mandated action in East Timor that the Indonesians withdrew and we entered uncontested under the terms of the relevant UN resolultions.

To use the ancient Latin phrase, that argument is complete bullshit.

INVESTIGATE: Where do you see China fitting in to geopolitics these days, especially with the Taiwan issue?

RUDD: I think the central foreign policy challenge for Australia in the next quarter-century is China. I don’t think the Howard government necessarily grasps that. If you look at the Prime Minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute recently, he described us Asia as constituting the stadium of international affairs for the century ahead. Well, that’s terrific that the Prime Minister has discovered a pre-existing reality which is staring the nation in the face for the previous quartercentury. Anyway, leaving that to one side, the core component of that is China. Why? China is the dynamic, and it is an unfolding story of rapid economic growth. Back in 1984 it has an economy slightly smaller than Canada and slightly larger than that of Australia. Now, depending on the measure, you’re talking about an economy that’s the fourth-largest in the world and getting larger.

INVESTIGATE: There’s a lot of economic growth there, but not much political freedom…

RUDD: The open question is, is China going in the direction of a democracy? Anyone making bold predictions on that I think has an excess of courage and a possible deficit of wisdom. It is a very difficult question to predict. To answer to the question how China will evolve politically, well, frankly it is impossible to predict.

On the question of China’s foreign policy behaviour, China now in terms of diplomatic and foreign policy activity in the region is much more activist than it has been in the past. China in the 1980s did not have much of a view of what was going on in the region. Now it has an acute view.

On the question of Taiwan, it is one of continuing core sensitivities, not just in terms of peace and prosperity across the Taiwan straits, but peace between China and the United States, peace between China and Japan, peace within the wider region. This is the core question within the core question.

INVESTIGATE: So if China makes a play for Taiwan, and the US ends up on the side of China, where does that leave Australia?

RUDD: The answer I will give is that it is not productive for the government or the alternative government of this country to speculate on how our alliance relationship with the United States will apply given future strategic circumstances.

INVESTIGATE: But how do you feel about Taiwanese independence in the meantime?

RUDD: We’re long term supporters since 1972.

Remember, Labor Party history isn’t bad on China is not a bad one. The conservatives pretended China didn’t exist for 23 years, and you know, we thought that was kind of stupid.

Our treaty with China remains unchanged, and we don’t budge from that. Now what is involved domestically within Taiwan, in terms of a liberal democratic principle of management, that we of course support, and I have long been on the record supporting that. I studied in Taiwan as a student, and I’ve seen Taiwan change over the years, but that doesn’t alter our view of the One China policy.

INVESTIGATE: Moving elsewhere in the region, regarding the insurgency in the Philippines, we’ve got a story on the al Qaida-linked Islamic problem. Should Australia be doing more?

RUDD: The connections with the wider al Qaida networks in the southern Philippines has been the subject of some study, and I’m of the view that there are connections. Based on advice I’ve seen it’s quite clear to me that there are connections. That leads to Labor’s fundamental premise in its policy on counterterrorism in the region, that is, beyond rhetorical flourish by a government with an eye on opinion polls in this country, as opposed to doing the hard yards of actually tackling terrorism on the ground, we argue that to be effective in the war against terrorism, what you need is a comprehensive, regional counterterrorism strategy which covers each dimension of the problem.

That means, for example, effective intelligence

“At present what we’ve got is a bit of money here, a bit of money there; fund that capability-building unit in Jakarta; who knows what the one in Kuala Lumpur is doing; what about the one in Bangkok?” coordination across all south-east Asian states, police cooperation across all south-east Asian states, and on top of that it means dealing with some of the underlying social and economic factors which make it easier for terrorist organisations to recruit. That is the sort of strategy we need. At present what we’ve got is a bit of money here, a bit of money there; fund that capability-building unit in Jakarta; who knows what the one in Kuala Lumpur is doing; what about the one in Bangkok?

As a starting premise, what we argue for is a comprehensive region-wide audit of our counterterrorism capabilities if you’re serious the enterprise, that’s where you start. Then the second thing you do is identify capability gaps, and you agree on a strategy across the region in order to clear the gaps. This is not happening. You have a bit here and bit there, usually in response to an event, and that is a classical conservative party misunderstanding of a fundamental national security challenge.

INVESTIGATE: It sounds like you’re talking civilian operations – but what about on the military side. If we had knowledge of someone with a suitcase nuclear weapon somewhere bound for Australia, does Australia have the right to go stop it?

RUDD: That’s a fantastic hypothetical…

INVESTIGATE: Perhaps, but so was 9/11 before it happened.

RUDD: Look: the only way Australia, a country with twenty million people and limited national security resources of our own, both military and nonmilitary, could do so is collaboratively, with the states of the region.

I mean, John Howard by talking about unilateral action is alienating regional states and the diplomatic support necessary to actually engender the cooperative relationships which are necessary to stop terrorists on the ground. This is a mindless piece of politics and hairy-chestedness.

Ask yourself this question: if you’ve got a problem with terrorists in south-east Asia, can you concede that Australia could in any way act other than collaboratively with the local state involved?

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ON TERROR’S FRONTLINE Last March, Investigate brought you the story of al-Qai’da’s Pacific hideaway in the Philippines. In this exclusive dispatch from deep in the island jungles of our northern neighbour, journalist MATTHEW THOMPSON and photographer RENAE CARLSON report that the war against the Islamic terrorists who have us in their sights is being hindered by fake treaties, political opportunism, and bad intelligence.

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July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

T

he War on Terror is a circle of wars.

It has hot zones like the Philippines, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, all sharing the experience of war, but each with its own logic, reason, and radius of impact.

The war also has cooler areas, cities across the world where sleeper cells wait for contact from their superiors in the mechanics of terror – master bomb-makers and logistics experts.

These areas are battlegrounds of intelligence rather than arms. If the intelligence fails, jetliners ram city buildings, shrapnel sprays through shopping centres and churches, and the logistics men retreat to their sanctuaries.

The jihadist’s great crimes of the past year include scattering train carriages in Madrid; transforming a Russian school into an abattoir; demolishing a Hilton hotel in Egypt; and sinking a Philippine passenger ship as it sailed from Manila. Several hundred civilians were deliberately targeted and killed in these attacks alone, and more than one thousand injured.

Today nearly three years have passed since the night Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) breathed fire across Bali’s nightlife, burning and blasting more than 200 to death, including 88 Australians, and wounding many times that number.

Yet there has still been no atrocity here on our own soil, even if one of JI’s bombing crew at Bali, Ali Gufron (a.k.a. Mukhlis), told interviewers the attack was ‘a curse from God that [Australians] be afraid of their own shadow’.

These curses have been strongly encouraged by JI’s allies, al-Qa’ida. A month after the Bali atrocities, bin Laden said ‘we warned Australia before not to join in in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali.’

The pain and loss from Bali was overwhelming, but consider the trauma if al-Qa’ida or its regional allies carry out the threat to send ‘cars of death’ into Australia, perhaps to Melbourne’s Lygon Street, Campbell Parade at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, or into the heart of Fremantle. Gone would be the sanctuary, the division between Australia’s relative orderliness and the turmoil of her neighbours. Whether or not the Spirit of Tasmania gets sunk en route to Hobart, a P&O cruise is bombed at sea, or a pair of vans explode at opposite ends of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, depends to a considerable degree on how tough the Philippine military is on the Australia-hating terrorists who infest their south. Is it safe for the likes of the Bali-bombers to come and go, and to hold courses in bomb-making, or are these people being relentlessly and ruthlessly hunted?

If Australians want to know who to support in the War on Terror, they should look north to a bunch of ill-equipped, underpaid, malaria-wracked young men in uniform, who cope with violent death, corruption, and political incompetence in a struggle to shut down 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

terror camps and hold their nation together. While Australian troops are serving a world away in the deserts and alleyways of Iraq, just a few hours flying time from here, Filipino grunts are locked in a hot war with our enemies. ❖❖❖ Australia’s sworn enemy in the region, JI, is one of the most aggressive and entrenched terrorist organisations in the world, with the U.S. State Department estimating that its membership numbers in the thousands. Like all paramilitary groups, JI depends on experienced cadres to discipline and train recruits. Many of JI’s veterans cut their teeth in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and later joined armed conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1990s. These cadres have much to teach potential terrorists about how to protect themselves against intelligence and military operations, and offer expertise in the delicate arts of bomb manufacturing and detonation.

JI is like an Islamic Ku Klux Klan on speed. They are violent bigots who hate race-mixing and multiculturalism, even if they will exploit the West’s pluralism to further their aims, and who are fighting to bring large portions of South-East Asia under the sway of their own intolerant brand of Islam – a brand similar to that of their former benefactors, the Taliban.

And while much is made of poverty and lack of educational opportunities as ‘root causes’ of terrorism, many of JI’s luminaries lack these excuses. One of the senior Bali-bombers, Dr Azahari Husin, is a scientific author who studied engineering in the UK and lectured at university in Malaysia, yet still managed to fit in explosives training in Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Experts like Dr Azahari and his accomplice, Dul Matin – believed to have built the larger of Bali’s two bombs – have a habit of becoming known, so to avoid arrest they spend much of their time beyond the reach of the law. Since the mid-1990s, JI’s best and brightest have chosen to kick back in the picturesque mountains, swamps and jungles of the southern Philippines, within large regions controlled by Muslim rebels. There, JI has joined forces with elements of South-East Asia’s toughest guerrilla army, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (or MILF), and its most extreme, the head-lopping, bomb-planting, antiChristian marauders of the Abu Sayyaf Group.

As Investigate revealed last March, members of the Australian Federal Police are in the Philippines, helping local authorities with counter-terrorism measures. The United States is more heavily involved, running the controversial ‘intel-fusion’ program which sees American military operatives stationed in terrorist hot zones to provide local armed forces with target information gathered via high-tech means such as state-of-the-art communication intercepts. This has caused a backlash from the shrill anti-American lobby in the Philippines, who paint the U.S. as greedy puppet- masters every chance they get. However, there are also concerns within the military about the intelligence’s accuracy. A general

JEMMAH ISLAMIYAH IS LIKE AN ISLAMIC KU KLUX KLAN ON SPEED. THEY ARE VIOLENT BIGOTS WHO HATE RACEMIXING AND MULTICULTURALISM, EVEN IF THEY WILL EXPLOIT THE WEST’S PLURALISM TO FURTHER THEIR AIMS, AND WHO ARE FIGHTING TO BRING LARGE PORTIONS OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA UNDER THE SWAY OF THEIR OWN INTOLERANT BRAND OF ISLAM spearheading the war in central Mindanao’s terrorist heartland told me that the information is better for ‘storytelling’ than for war, because it is often out of date. He said that relying on the U.S. advice has led to botched raids, needless deaths, and could undermine the chances for peace in Mindanao.

But, in the ever-shifting alliances and deals in the war on terrorism, it turns out that the military is also getting help from the dominant faction of JI’s Philippine patrons, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The MILF is increasingly split between those who are open to a peace deal that will deliver land rights for their tribes, and the extremist commanders who will not abandon what they see as a religious war, and who embrace JI, the Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qa’ida.

This means that in some areas the military is get-

ting tip-offs from the MILF which enable them to launch strikes on terrorist suspects inside rebel-held areas. A pro-peace MILF spokesman even told me that his organisation gave the police the information they needed in 2003 to trap and kill one of JI’s most formidable bombers, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. This is a remarkable betrayal, given that al-Ghozi, an esteemed Afghan veteran, had been very close to the MILF, establishing the JI training camp within their territory in the mountains of Mindanao and conducting joint JI-MILF terrorist attacks.

Yet in other areas the military seems to get nothing from the MILF and sits in idle observance of the current ceasefire, even with strong suspicions about terrorist recruitment and training taking place a stone’s throw from the frontline troops.

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THE MOUNTAINS At a machine gun nest on a high ridge in the malarial mountains, the world divides between the known and the unknown.

Behind lies a beautiful and fertile valley, its lowlands lined by forested peaks as it widens toward the warm waters of the Moro Gulf. Ruins from the valley’s previous inhabitants dot the climb to this outpost. Back down to the left I can see the bombed-out remains of a large reinforced concrete building we hiked through. My hiking companions pointed out the proliferation of doors – most rooms had multiple entries and exits – and as fighting men, they saw meaning in this. The soldiers also showed me tunnels leading back into the mountain. They showed me cramped 42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

chambers with barred ventilation holes high on the walls and hooks hanging from the ceiling. Torture, they said. This is what they do to their own. This side of the ridge hosted the Bali bombers of JI when they practised the art of terrorist bombings, and it has since been picked over by the government forces that captured it four years ago.

Now all attention is directed north of the ridge into lands still controlled by thousands of Islamic rebels.

We crouch behind sandbags and gaze ahead into the vast volcanic wilderness of the Mount Kararao region, watching mists and low cloud drift across the jungle.

The reconnaissance company’s young commander, Lieutenant Jeriko Roman P. Sasing, tells me that worrying sounds often echo from the mountains. ‘We

hear them playing with their bombs; their terror explosions’, says Sasing, whose few dozen men are charged with guarding this rugged frontier.

Sasing’s men are perched on the border of lands under the control of the MILF. The Government has been unable to defeat the MILF despite three decades of fighting, so it has offered the rebels a ceasefire while the two sides discuss how much sovereignty the Republic of the Philippines is willing to cede.

The MILF fields about 12,000 full-time, uniformed fighters armed with automatic rifles, heavy machineguns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and intimate knowledge of Mindanao’s rugged terrain. It can also call on tens of thousands of irregu-

lars from the region’s farming men. More than a halfmillion people turned up to a MILF forum in May. Full-scale fighting with the military breaks out every couple of years, but more often than not the ceasefire (signed in 1997) maintains the conflict as an armed stand-off punctuated by skirmishes which kill a mere dozen or so. About 120,000 people have been killed since the modern Muslim rebellions kicked off in the early 1970s. Having the ceasefire-protected time and space to be ‘playing with their bombs’ has been terrific for the MILF’s civilian-targeting units and their Indonesian friends from JI, who moved their training from Afghanistan to rebel territory in Mindanao in the mid-1990s.

The leaders of another al-Qa’ida affiliate, the Abu Sayyaf Group, hide in MILF areas and have merged their terror operations with JI. Together, Mindanao’s bomb crews have killed hundreds and wounded thousands in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past few years. Including, of course, the 88 Australians at Bali three Octobers ago.

Disturbingly, reports have lately emerged from captured terrorists that the jihadist groups have been training together to strike shipping in the Asia-Pacific region, a threat that should be taken seriously after the Abu Sayyaf ’s sinking last year of a passenger ship leaving Manila Bay. The bombing of the Superferry 14 killed an estimated 130 people and stands as the deadliest-ever maritime terrorist attack.

Yet as accomplished as they are, Sasing, who walks everywhere with an M16 slung over his back and whose eyes never stop moving, doesn’t much care for his neighbours. Not only are they noisy, they’re also pushy.

‘We had to withdraw from there’, he says, pointing about 100 metres up the ridge to a thickly-forested summit sporting an abandoned system of trenches and lookouts. ‘It was too dangerous. The enemy was harassing us’, says Sasing, using the military euphemism for being shot at. The MILF know these outposts well; they built them – the trenches, the sleeping huts.

‘Could they be sitting there watching us?’ I ask.

‘Yes, possibly.’

‘Do you patrol forward of here to see what they’re doing?’

‘No, that would be a breach of the ceasefire. Also, they have laid landmines and it is too dangerous’, Sasing says.

Ropes run along the perimeter of the outpost, and at likely jump-in points the soldiers have strung bottles of rum, each empty except for a bullet suspended inside to rattle if the ropes are bumped.

‘Sometimes deer sound them. The men up here hunt deer when they can, because all food and water has to be carried in and it can be very basic. But the enemy know this, and once when a soldier heard a deer call and went forward to hunt it, it was the enemy making the call’, says Sasing, cupping his hand over his mouth and simulating the animal sound. ‘They captured the soldier and cut off both his heads, above

ONE SENIOR ARMY OFFICER TELLS ME THAT THE CEASEFIRE EVEN PREVENTS THE MILITARY FROM BUILDING FENCES AROUND MILF AREAS IN THE HOPE OF HINDERING THE GUERRILLA’S TROOP MOVEMENTS AND ARMS SHIPMENTS

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

and below, then put them together and dumped him in a sack. No one here wants to be taken alive’, he says.

Sasing’s enlisted men receive about A$8.20 per day for their work. If the situation erupts, such as it might if they weren’t ordered to withdraw when harassed, then their combat bonus would be another 20 Australian cents per day. Their equipment is antiquated – this outpost’s main weapon is a World War II machinegun – and many soldiers are sick.

‘I have about 12 men in hospital with malaria’, laments Sasing, as the rains come in. They used to receive anti-malarial pills, but ‘now there are shortages, so we rely on mosquito repellent’, he says.

I ask how frustrating it is for he and his men, all aged in their twenties, to camp for months and months on the edge of enemy territory, within which terrorists freely practise their trade, watching each other succumb to malaria.

‘We can only do what we are ordered to. The military is just a tool of politics. You know, on clear nights we see spotlights from [the MILF’s] Camp Sultan’, says Sasing, pointing across the jungle to a mountain obscured by clouds.

The enemy are close. The first contingent of guerrillas is one kilometre away – ‘just there’, says Sasing, 44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

jabbing a finger down the hill - and another six bases have been identified in the region. The most notorious of their bases is Jabal Quba, where JI moved much of its training after the valley behind us, formerly known as Camp Abu Bakar, fell to the Government in 2001. About 100 soldiers died on the road into Abu Bakar, yet now Government troops are restrained by the ceasefire, reduced to watching as fresh MILF forces move into the area each month and others leave in a rebel troop rotation.

Sasing leads me back down the ridge, slipping and sliding on trails now turned to mud. ‘It rains every day,’ he says, picking up his thongs and walking barefoot.

Once again we pass the ruined complex of the late founder of the MILF, Salamat Hashim, where an Islamic crescent moon rises from the broken roof.

Soldiers have graffitoed the building with lists of battles and military campaigns; one artist’s work depicts a particularly acrobatic sexual feat.

Sasing is careful about what he says, but other senior military sources report their bitter frustration with the peace process. One senior army officer tells me that the ceasefire even prevents the military from building fences around MILF areas in the hope of hinder-

ing guerrilla troop movements and arms shipments, and that they likewise cannot conduct reconnaissance flights over the Mount Kararao region to see what JI, the Abu Sayyaf and their MILF hosts are up to.

These restraints remain despite a backdrop of continuing terrorist attacks. Bombers have hit the CBD of Manila and locations in two other major cities, Davao and General Santos City, as recently as Valentine’s Day, killing about a dozen and injuring almost 150.

The triple bombing followed the military’s airstrike on suspected JI and ASG leaders in Mindanao’s vast marshlands.

Romero is intimately familiar with Abu Bakar, and he tells me over fried fish and fruits that the threat grows worse the longer the ceasefire continues. The MILF is recruiting and rearming under cover of the peace talks, and weapons shipments have been reported landing on the coast, most likely from Malaysia. He tells me that there may well be a peace deal struck sometime in the next year, but it will let the MILF keep its weapons and leave large areas under its de facto control, just like the 1996 agreement signed with another Muslim guerrilla army – the Moro National Liberation Front – elements of which continue to attack Government forces.

All of which is ideal for the terrorists and kidnappers working out of MILF areas, he says.

‘There are JI about four or five kilometres from [Government occupied] Abu Bakar. The boundaries are imaginary, but if we cross, we will be charged with violating the ceasefire … and we will be fired at’, Romero says.

The guerrillas and the terrorists learn much from each other, with JI agents absorbing the skills of insurgency on Mindanao’s frontlines. In turn, members of the MILF’s special operations group ‘are taught

by JIs to make IEDs [improvised explosive devices]’, he says.

W

hile the troops sweat it out with malaria, World War II-era guns and 20 cent-per-day combat bonuses, the enemy is cashed up. Romero says that the MILF pocket percentages of ransoms from Mindanao’s thriving kidnapping trade; that they and their terrorist allies receive money from international Islamic charities; that they seize ‘revolutionary taxes’ from farming communities; that they have their fingers in the zakat, or Islamic donations given at mosques; that they run illegal logging operations. The overtly terrorist groups, the Indonesian JI and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, also receive large payments from foreign backers, all of which makes it easy for the jihadists to pay locals to shut up when the military comes around asking questions.

And without local sources of intelligence, the military has very little to go on indeed. ‘We are facing a faceless JI – they look the same [as Filipinos]; they have learned our dialects – so unless someone tells us, we

don’t know what they are doing,’ Romero says. The Government has more than 50,000 troops in Mindanao, yet even so, ‘we have sacrificed some areas’, says Romero, telling me a story later corroborated by Australian and US sources.

He takes my map and points out substantial stretches of the Mindanao coast and hinterland where the military has only a token presence. ‘It’s practically a free-zone for them [JI and the Abu Sayyaf], but if we move troops from Abu Bakar, then they will take it over again’, Romero says.

The US is providing satellite imagery, communication intercepts and other ‘technical intelligence’, but as long as local civilians who could potentially supply up to date ‘human intelligence’ are more likely to encounter terrorists and rebels than Government forces, the freezones will remain, Romero says.

‘They are getting stronger.’

THE SWAMPS ‘If the rain continues water will cover all of this,’ says Lieutenant Rhoel C. Tremedal of the Philippine light infantry, gesturing across the lush fields we glimpse between fruit trees. The scattering of homes our patrol passes are built on stilts, and their occupants watch blankly as we walk along the riverbank.

Tremedal and his men are stationed on the edge of Mindanao’s vast marshlands, their base a checkpoint on one of the tributaries of the Rio Grande. They have a sandbagged machinegun nest from which to order passing boats to pull in for inspection, but no one is stationed on the other side of the river, nor do any soldiers take to the water for river patrols.

‘We would be too vulnerable to ambush’, says Tremedal, one of the Philippines’ many bright young men who is spending his twenties clutching a gun, sleeping rough, and surrounded by farmers who commonly stash automatic rifles wrapped in greased-rags near their houses and whose sympathies often lie with the Islamic rebellion.

The rains make everything more dangerous in the marshlands, Tremedal says. When the water level rises from rain either in the marshes or in the surrounding mountains, boats can move swiftly in almost any direction, giving the enemy extraordinary mobility. By contrast, Tremedal’s troops will be struggling to secure what they can while their bunkers fill with water.

‘We will make necessary precautions – we will protect any Government facilities in the area’, he says.

With roads becoming impassable and the waterways too dangerous because of the known presence in the marshlands of the MILF, JI, the Abu Sayyaf and bandits, ‘we will just move by foot’, says Tremedal, whose handful of men operate in a municipality with a population of about 80,000.

The entire marshlands cover about 500,000 square kilometres and contain about 500,000 people, almost all of them Muslims, who have never been conquered – not during more than 300 years of Spanish colonisation, not in the half-century of U.S. rule, not during

THE ABU SAYYAF HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO KIDNAP DOCTORS TO TREAT THEIR WOUNDED, AND IN ONE INFAMOUS INCIDENT STORMED A HOSPITAL IN A CHRISTIAN TOWN OF BASILAN, TAKING AWAY MEDICAL STAFF, SOME OF WHOM WERE RAPED, MUTILATED AND MURDERED

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45

the days of the Japanese invasion, and not by their own Government in the post-WWII years of Philippine independence.

T

remedal calls the patrol to a halt when the banana and palm trees thin out and we find ourselves entering a large open plain bordered a few kilometres away by thick forest and steep hills. The infantrymen fan out and study the horizon.

‘We should not go any further’, Tremedal says.

While small-group terrorist training and operations continue in the mountains and elsewhere, central Mindanao’s huge swamp is known as the main hideout for JI and the Abu Sayyaf ’s top commanders.

The coastal ‘free-zone’ on its western flank allows for easy entry and exit; the terrain is excellent for hiding in and is an attacker’s nightmare.

Back in the 6th Infantry Division’s operational base for the region, outside Cotabato City, the general who 46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

plans raids and airstrikes on marshland stilt houses suspected to be occupied by terrorists, Brigadier General Horacio T. Lactao, talks me through his difficulties.

‘The ground appears from the air as if it’s a hard surface, but it’s just water lilies. If you step on it, you go under. Even the bombs are not so good – the bombs sink because it’s this high with liquid mud’, says Lactao, holding his hand at his waist. ‘And the water is above a person’s head, so even if a bomb hits 10 metres away it will not damage the structure. The rivers are their mode of movement, and a lot of routes are unknown to us.’

Lactao is one of the Philippine military’s hardened journeymen – one of those officers who have not gone bureaucratic despite decades of active service; who are instead still sweating it out in the shacks and trucks of the hot zone. Lactao asks if I mind if he has a cigarette, then leans in with smoke curling from his mouth while an enlisted man paints small pieces of wood to add to a three-dimensional map of the marshlands. The general ashes, drifts his hand across the diorama, and tells me, ‘this area has been in constant armed conflict since early times. This part of the [Philippine] islands has never been subjugated because of its social structure. It was governed by Muslim warrior kings [called] Datus.’

‘The Spanish, when they conquered one Datu kingdom, they would be surprised that another would rise up. Each of these had their own domain. There’s a natural defence system here. Now that Datuism’s not being practised anymore, there emerged another group – the MNLF, and then the MILF. Then the Abu Sayyaf. Whoever has provided the guns is the one who commands’, Lactao says.

The Government will always be at a disadvantage to militant Islamic groups in central Mindanao, an intensely religious region, Lactao says.

‘Our laws are not consistent with the Koran – which one will they follow? Not ours. The Koran provides them with their standard. When you interview the Abu Sayyaf, they say the Constitution is just provided by man’, he says.

Terrorists such as those who blew the Australians to hell at Bali fit straight into this system, using their explosives expertise, money and reverence for Allah to win over the large number of Islamic clerics commanding MILF units in the marshlands. Jemmah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have fused operations in the marshlands and move together, Lactao says.

‘The terrorists contact the MILF’s Ustadz [military commanders who are also clerics], then move to them for protection. The MILF units of the fundamentalist leaders then form the outer ring of security around the terrorists, and because of the ceasefire we must avoid [military] contact with the MILF.’ The military has been cultivating informants in the marshlands, and Lactao says that a picture has emerged of how some of the most wanted men in the world move around. There is a group of about 37 JI explosives and logistics experts who have attached them-

selves to Khaddafy Janjalani, the Abu Sayyaf leader who has earned the blessing of al-Qa’ida through his ruthlessness, and enjoys a cult of personality throughout the world of jihad. Janjalani and his JI team, sometimes including Bali bomber Dul Matin, are surrounded by an inner security team of up to one hundred Abu Sayyaf fighters from the southwestern islands of Basilan and Sulu. Then that group will be surrounded by another ring of gunmen supplied by MILF commanders religiously disposed towards international jihad.

Janjalani, who has a US$5 million bounty on his head for his multitudinous outrages, always keeps his face covered, sometimes dresses as a fully-covered Muslim woman, and wears a bomb vest so that he can blow himself to atoms if cornered, Lactao tells me. ‘Then we will not have his body and someone else can become Janjalani, because that is the name that brings in large finances from foreign sources. For every bombing that [the Abu Sayyaf] conduct, they will receive US$200,000. In this way they made large amounts of money from the Superferry bombing and the Valentine’s Day bombings.’

Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have targeted U.S. citizens and interests, and in an attempt to eradicate these groups, the U.S. has stationed military intelligence personnel throughout Mindanao in what is known as ‘intelfusion’. The Americans are not universally welcome, especially with the mayor of Cotabato City, a former MNLF guerrilla named Muslimin Sema.

Sema refuses to acknowledge his region has a terrorism problem, despite multiple arrests, exposed JI safe houses, testimonies from detained militants in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the still-unsolved 2003 car-bombing of the airport.

The U.S. has plans to fund highway construction near Cotabato City, but the project is suspended due to a perceived lack of action on terrorism. Sema is pissed off about this and has plastered the city with signs and banners calling American diplomats ‘agents of Satan’, proclaiming that ‘Arabs are charitable’, and denouncing the U.S. as ‘the world’s number one terrorist’. Sema knows that the US is providing counter-terrorism intelligence assistance, so signs around town also read: ‘Reject the terroristic policies of the U.S. in Mindanao’, and ‘U.S. presence here in Cotabato get out’.

All of which make working in and around this gunned-up frontier town an uneasy experience for a Western journalist. The first assumption of everyone I speak to is that I am American military, and it is hard not to be a little edgy when walking the streets or driving through the city outskirts, the roads hazy from countless barrels of burning coconut husks.

Paranoia comes easily when I am told by one of the least drama-prone, most understated intelligence sources I know to ‘stay in your room at night’, and ‘do not overdo your luck.’ Pour another San Miguel and pass the ammunition.

Lactao smiles when I ask about the value of the high-tech intelligence he receives on terrorist positions

and movements from the Americans based in central Mindanao. ‘It is only good if it comes in time. If it comes late, it is just good for storytelling. Sometimes they will be sending it way after the people have left.

The Americans are learning much from us – some of them don’t have any experience’, he says, tapping out another cigarette to smoke.

The general stares at me. ‘Let me tell you about some recent operations targeting Janjalani and JI, who we know are in constant contact. On January 27 we conducted airstrikes against seven targets [houses] stretching over a kilometre along the river. We believe some were wounded, but not the main personalities.

Now they learn their lessons, and the leaders will be sleeping outside in a hammock or sleeping bag or a banca [small boat] 50 to 100 metres away from the structure. They let their men sleep in the house.’

The terrorists struck back a fortnight later with the Valentine’s Day bombings – blasts in Manila and two of Mindanao’s cities, Davao and General Santos City.

Twelve dead and almost 150 wounded. Several other devices were discovered before they could be detonated.

Lactao then tells me that as Janjalani and the JIs kept moving through the marsh in April, the military correctly anticipated that the MILF commander who had been protecting the terrorists would sign them over to another guerrilla commander well known as a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. The vow of protection is binding, and ‘if anything happens there will be an investigation within the MILF and within the al-Qa’ida organisation’, Lactao says.

Y

et the military also faces heavy political fallout when it launches a strike or raid and hits the MILF instead of JI or the Abu Sayyaf. ‘It could disturb the peace process. We have to be dead sure that we are striking the right place at the right time. If they are in this house, we can only hit this house. The people in the marsh area are very religious; they look at the ASG [Abu Sayyaf Group] as international mujahadeen. If we hit the wrong house and kill innocent civilians, then it helps the enemy’, Lactao says.

The MILF is comprised of semi-autonomous units, with each commander operating like the Datu warlords that gave the Spanish such grief centuries ago. More secular elements currently have the most sway politically, and are using all their power to convince the organisation’s independent-minded commanders to stick to the peace negotiations with the Government. Getting into shootouts with the mainstream of the MILF could set off full-scale war again, of the sort last seen in 2003. ‘We must be 100 per cent sure of our information. It should be very precise because we are constrained by the peace agreements’, Lactao says.

It was in this climate that word came in April that the terrorists were staying on a particular hill inside the marshlands. About 120 special forces in plain

OUR LAWS ARE NOT CONSISTENT WITH THE KORAN – WHICH ONE WILL THEY FOLLOW? NOT OURS. THE KORAN PROVIDES THEM WITH THEIR STANDARD. WHEN YOU INTERVIEW THE ABU SAYYAF, THEY SAY THE CONSTITUTION IS JUST PROVIDED BY MAN’, THE GENERAL SAYS

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 47

clothes were dispatched from Davao in nondescript vehicles to a small town on the edge of the marsh area where they assembled for the assault. There the surprise was lost, however, after a civilian spotter textmessaged the enemy with a warning about Government troops massing. ‘Filipinos are fond of texting’, Lactao says.

Yet, Lactao says that the attack may still have succeeded, but for ‘some errors in the system’. The intelligence provided by the U.S. was out of date, and caused the Philippine airborne and land units to attack one kilometre to the side of the terrorists, starting a firefight with the MILF in violation of the ceasefire.

‘Intelligence must be real-time’, Lactao says.

Three soldiers were hit before they pulled out, including one man shot in the face, and on the other side, several MILF guerrillas were killed and a dozen or so wounded. To calm the situation, the Government flew the dead and wounded rebels to hospital.

The April incident was a lost opportunity to kill or capture scores of South East Asia’s most skilled and 48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

ruthless terrorists; men in close contact with al-Qa’ida.

Nevertheless, Lactao says that the combination of informers selling out the jihadists and the sudden violence their information brings is having an effect on his prey: ‘They are getting paranoid and that’s why they are asking for shabu [methamphetamine].’

Yet the US can quite reasonably argue that without the millions of dollars worth of training and equipment it gives the Philippines each year, the country would be taking even more of a hammering from the terrorists.

Until the US ran the Balikatan (‘shoulder-to-shoulder’) joint military and development exercise across Janjalani’s home island of Basilan in 2002, the Abu Sayyaf were running rings around the armed forces, sacking Christian towns and conducting mass-hostage takings at schools, hospitals and even Malaysian resorts. (When French and Germans were taken, the European response was worse than useless – funneling a US$25 million ransom through Libya with which the Abu Sayyaf bought more weapons, faster speed-

boats, and launched a new wave of violence.) A private security consultant based in Manila told me that the US and Philippines need each other. The Philippines needs the US to keep badgering it about JI, the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qa’ida. The US needs the Philippines to learn how messy life is. One matter the U.S. State Department will not stop pushing is the need for the Philippines to enact counter-terrorism legislation, which would enable security forces to detain suspected foreign terrorists. Lactao says that without that power, the military can only watch as suspected al-Qa’ida operatives roam Mindanao.

‘We monitored a meeting where one of these Middle Eastern men was trying to convince everyone to sign on with the cause. He said that the Muslim community is the next superpower, and he praised the head of al-Qa’ida.’ Yet most suspects can only be detained for six hours, or 72 if the offence is grave, and there are strict limitations on intelligence gathering.

‘We are not allowed to tap anyone’s phones, and we couldn’t detain anyone for interrogation purposes’, he says.

With Mindanao hotly contested ground in the war on terror, the island has more than its fair share of international undesirables, but when suspects have discovered they are under surveillance, they have complained to their embassies, with the military personnel involved castigated, Lactao says.

‘According to our reports, some of these Middle Eastern men are recruiting children as young as twelve to use later’, says Lactao, stubbing out his cigarette and smiling.

S

till, a few undesirables are moved on or arrested. Two Middle Eastern men suspected of involvement with alQa’ida arrived in the Philippines in March this year – around the time when police seized hundreds of kilograms of explosives at a Manila house, apparently ready for use in the bombing of Easter celebrations. Philippine security officials speculated that al-Qa’ida was sending in specialists to coordinate the terror campaign. A Saudi Arabian national, Abdullah Nassar al-Arifi, was deported soon after arriving at Manila’s airport due to his listing on terrorism databases, while a Palestinian, Fawas Ajjur, was arrested in Mindanao. Ajjur was allegedly identified by Abu Sayyaf prisoners as their former explosives instructor on the blood-soaked island of Jolo (pronounced HO-lo), in the Sulu archipelago.

THE JUNGLE ‘Don’t misinterpret this as flippant. We are sad because today we have killed people’, says Colonel Orlando E. De Leon of the Philippine Marines.

I am in a Philippines Marine base on the island of Jolo, eating raw goat and drinking ice-cold San Miguel beer as an officer croons another karaoke epic of lost love.

‘This is our way of coping with what we do,’ De Leon says.

Today the Marines shot and killed about ten Abu Sayyaf fighters in an attack on a terrorist camp just four kilometres from my military lodgings. The operation began at around 10 o’clock last night when a local informant slipped the Marines a tip about the jungle camp and said that the 30 or so ‘Abus’, as the troops call their enemy, were holding a kidnap victim.

By midnight a group of sixty Marines began to creep into positions around the camp, with everyone in place by dawn, and a ring of reinforcements waited back should the Abu Sayyaf launch a successful counterattack.

The commanding officer, Colonel Juancho Sabban, tells me that they let the terrorists relax. ‘Dawn came, so they thought they were OK. They were boiling water for coffee, which gave them away – smoke. Then we attack’, he says, declining an offer of the microphone: ‘No, my men sing for me.’

The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas returned fire, taking about 45 minutes to shoot themselves out of the trap, dragging the kidnap victim with them but leaving behind several dead, including two commanders apparently involved in the raid on Malaysia.

Relatives of the slain took some of the bodies away to prepare and bury before sunset, in accordance with Muslim custom, which causes some confusion about the number of dead. The unclaimed corpses ranged in age from teenagers to the near-elderly, and the Marines truss them on poles to carry out of the jungle. ‘Their relatives are probably afraid,’ Sabban says.

‘There were blood trails, so we know they suffered wounded’, he adds, signalling one of his privates to replenish the beer. One the Government side, only two men were hit, suffering minor gunshot wounds to the hand and foot.

The Abu Sayyaf have been known to kidnap doctors to treat their wounded, and in one infamous incident stormed a hospital in the Christian town of Basilan, taking away medical staff, some of whom were raped, mutilated and murdered.

Sabban says that they will keep an eye on doctors after this encounter, but it is more likely that the Abu Sayyaf will pack their wounds with herbs according to traditions followed for centuries by the Sulu island people, known as Tausugs. Other military and intelligence sources tell me that the Abu Sayyaf take their wounded to nearby parts of Malaysia, where they share more kinship ties than they do with the bulk of the Philippines.

Jolo is a strange place. Its volcanic peaks, freshwater crater lakes and unspoilt beaches are overwhelmingly beautiful – a traveller’s dream. Even from that icon of war in the tropics, the Huey helicopter with a gunner at each door, the island looks too exquisite and too small to be a battleground.

However, Jolo’s jungles and coconut palm forests are thick with killers and outlaws. An estimated 500 heavily armed Abu Sayyaf fighters roam the island in

I JOIN A PATROL DOWN THE INLAND SIDE OF HILL 300. THE RED DIRT STICKS IN LARGE CLUMPS TO MY BOOTS, WEIGHING THEM DOWN. TABANAO TELLS ME THAT THE EVER-RESOURCEFUL ABU SAYYAF RIDE HORSES THROUGH THESE AREAS, MOVING THEIR SUPPLIES MUCH FASTER THAN THE TROOPS CAN IN MANY PARTS. ‘WE DON’T HAVE HORSES’, HE SAYS

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 49

teams, hiding in camouflaged bunkers or visiting their families after conducting terrorist attacks elsewhere in the archipelago; stowing hostages while waiting for ransoms, and hitting the military with improvised explosive devices and snipings.

Parked near the karaoke hut is a shot-up battered truck, the legacy of a nearby ambush a few days ago which killed three Marines.

Yet the Abu Sayyaf are not the only game in town.

There are also about 1200 wayward guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front who have resumed their rebellion in violation of the MNLF’s 1996 peace treaty with the Government. Then there are the plentiful but less-organised kidnap-for-ransom-groups (KFRGs), and any number of heavily-armed criminals of opportunity.

Oh, and then there’s the reported intrusion of al-Qa’ida.

All on an island with a population of about 500,000, about one-eighth that of Sydney.

Jolo has been divided into two sectors for security purposes, with the Marines working one half and the army the other. When enemy forces launch large-scale attacks, as happens often enough, these two branches of the armed forces fight together.

50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

The day after the raw goat, I board a Huey helicopter which flies me to Hill 300, which the army is occupying after recent fighting with both the Abu Sayyaf and renegade elements of the MNLF. Chinese tombs of travellers who died here a thousand years ago sit atop the hill. The graves have become a Muslim holy site, and the trees here are covered with fluttering plastic rubbish bags which have been tied to the branches as a nod of religious respect from the locals, who would otherwise just throw their trash on the ground.

One of the Abu Sayyaf commanders, an Islamic mystic known as Dr Abu Pula, conducted rituals here before the army captured the hill. His men would also hang about asking pilgrims to pay a fee before they could bring their children close for a blessing.

The officer who assumed command of the offensive after two of his superiors were cut down, Major Feliciano Tabanao, tells me locals are happy to have free entry to the site even if Hill 300 is occupied by Government troops, many of whom are Catholic.

Yet as we listen to the pinging of insects and take in the view down to the stilt houses on the shores and out to the smaller islands of the Sulu Sea, Tabanao

tells me that in the last couple of weeks soldiers have been killed and wounded from ambushes and improvised explosive devices.

‘This area is a known lair of the ASG. There are about sixty or seventy of them around here – highly mobile – and we have reports that they are laying landmines. Right now I cannot guarantee your safety’, says Tabanao, who seems very tired. He talks about the dead of this mission - his colleagues and an 11year-old child caught in the crossfire.

I join a patrol down the inland side of Hill 300.

The red dirt sticks in large clumps to my boots, weighing them down. Tabanao tells me that the everresourceful Abu Sayyaf ride horses through these areas, moving their supplies much faster than the troops can in many parts.

‘We don’t have horses’, he says.

Eventually we come to an empty village of battered houses built over formi-dable bunkers – large excavated areas covered by a double layer of coconut palm logs. An abandoned schoolhouse still has Arabic lessons chalked on its blackboards, and Tabanao points out a large kite leaning against a wall. ‘They use the

kites as signals to warn of our movements,’ he says.

One of the pilots with us says that the kites are also used as a defence against helicopters. During Government attacks, guerrillas send up kites on heavy nylon strings which get tangled in the rotors.

The soldiers are careful to contain any sign of the religious tension many of them must feel serving somewhere like Jolo, but I spot a local word for ‘pig’ written on the schoolhouse door, an obvious slight to Muslim sensibilities.

As we wait back on Hill 300 for the Hueys to return, Tabanao tells me that although the military is making life hard for the Abu Sayyaf on Jolo, the enemy is very skilled and getting more so. The improvised explosive devices that are claiming troops are growing more sophisticated. ‘We have reports of foreigners training locals in IEDs, and reports that a handful [of locals] went to Cotabato for explosives training’, Tabanao says.

Also, while the military does not have control over the seaways, ‘the leaders of ASG can get in and out easily – they come by boat’, he says.

Concern is growing about seaborne attacks by JI and Abu Sayyaf, particularly since a man arrested for July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 51

allegedly planting Manila’s Valentine’s Day bomb said that the terror groups had earlier sent him to scuba training in preparation for strikes.

The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas of Jolo and Basilan know the water better than most; many of them grew up in the offshore stilt houses where small boats are the only way to get around. The sea is their highway, one general tells me, and with their famous quadrupleoutboard motor 1,000 horsepower speedboats, the terrorists can easily travel at about 40 knots.

De Leon of the Marines looks pained when I ask him about this one afternoon at a base of the Marine Battalion landing Team on Jolo’s Quezon Beach, a glorious strip of sand and crystal clear water.

‘They are faster than us. How can we compete? We can only do 15 knots,’ says De Leon, walking us over to a row of very modest little outboards with 60 horsepower engines. ‘The ASG can outrun us on water.

They can get away and hide their boats in the mangroves, with leaves on top so we cannot see them.

They can cross the ocean at high speed, as they did in their attack on Dos Palmos [a resort on a distant island]. We need good, fast boats for amphibious assaults. It is what we are trained to do’, he says.

DEBRIEF The Philippines lost about a million people in the World War II. Manila was destroyed. Since then the Filipinos have endured multiple civil wars, natural disasters, dictatorship, massive corruption, widespread 52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

violent crime, and a democracy that has failed in the eyes of a growing proportion of the population.

Against that sort of backdrop, Filipinos could be forgiven for being slow to take counter-terrorism as seriously as do many Western countries. Yet slowly the authorities have realised that their calamitous financial state is unlikely to pick up should potential investors feel they run a serious risk of face bombings, sabotage, and kidnapping if they set up shop.

Even substantial portions of the MILF seem to have realised that without peace and security, the people they claim to represent will stay poor and impoverished. Part of the MILF’s realisation is waking up to what bad friends they’ve been keeping.

The rebel’s spokesman, Eid Kabalu, admits that JI has ties to some parts of the MILF, coming clean after years of issuing blunt denials and far-fetched assertions that the Indonesians just hung around the training camps without anybody noticing.

‘Honest-to-goodness, yes, there are some elements within the MILF who were able to establish a link with this group, but now we are trying to address this issue’, says Kabalu, from his home in Cotabato City.

The new consciousness in the MILF’s progressive faction, led by Chairman Al Haj Murad, even extends to wanting in on the anti-JI attacks. The military couldn’t do it properly on their own, Kabalu says. ‘You will notice that [in Lactao’s April assault] instead of hitting their target they hit us, our men on the ground.’

Despite April’s stuff-up, the MILF has since vali-

dated the Government’s hit list and is helping work out a battle plan, Kabalu says. What’s more, Kabalu talks openly of his organisation’s hand in betraying one of the world’s most accomplished and well-connected terrorists, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, who helped establish JI’s training at Camp Abu Bakar after the shift from Afghanistan.

‘There are some MILF elements who co-ordinated with the authorities [and] that is why he was effectively pinned down’, says Kabalu about al-Ghozi’s shooting death a few months after the bomber made fools of the Government by escaping from jail the day of Prime Minister John Howard’s visit to Manila for the signing of a joint memorandum of understanding on terrorism.

The MILF’s assistance is acknowledged by the commander of the armed forces in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, General Alberto Fernando Braganza.

‘There has been information provided by them that [has] triggered our operational activities’, says General Braganza, who is approaching retirement in September and seems a little less fired up than after his instalment last year.

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erhaps frustration is taking its toll. Last November Braganza proudly told me there had been no major terrorist incidents for two years (which was true if you squint hard and overlook the 170 combined dead from blasts at Davao and the Superferry sinking). Mindanao is a very peaceful place, he told me then. Yet several bombs have struck since November, and now Braganza admits that although the military has neutralised some terrorists, including 10 to 15 JI members, ‘there have been persistent reports of training activities in the central Mindanao area … [and] it’s expected that they also have their bases in the urban centres as part of their support system.’

Furthermore, the interception of the Palestinian in Mindanao ‘is a clear indication of the involvement of al-Qa’ida here,’ says Braganza, whose recognition of the problem seems to have won respect from U.S. officials more used to a culture of denial.

‘Braganza’s kicking some serious ass’, says a U.S. official who pulled his hair out last year over the Government taking months (during which a national election came and went) to admit that the Superferry 14 was bombed, just as the Abu Sayyaf had detailed in public statements.

Politicians have raised hell over U.S. claims that the Philippine borders are wide open to terrorists, but Braganza says frankly, they don’t have enough boats to secure Mindanao’s borders – which an Australian official described to me as ‘non-existent’. Nor is Braganza pretending that a peace deal with the MILF will solve everything. Some terrorist groups will dissolve, but ‘we expect that there will still be some that will remain, like the Abu Sayyaf Group and the JI network,’ he says.

Braganza advocates a combination of military

action with a drive to bring law, development and education to regions where generations have grown up inside a guerrilla war. US and Australian aid projects are greatly appreciated, he says.

However, the military is just a tool of politics, as the reconnaissance lieutenant said on the mountains above Abu Bakar, and Mindanao’s politics is hard core. Plans for a joint U.S.-Filipino military and development sweep across Jolo, like that which cleaned up Basilan three years ago, were shelved after fierce opposition from local politicians.

Yet, as Braganza says, almost all of Jolo’s mayors live across the Basilan Strait in Zamboanga City, which has a large military presence as the armed forces headquarters for Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.

‘They have their residences here; their children go to school here; they have properties here’, Braganza says.

As many observers see it, plenty of the region’s politicians are doing well out of the situation, so why would they want to change it?

Braganza will be gone in a few months, and his replacement will face all the difficulties of fighting cashed-up and determined enemies while the Philippine economy continues to deteriorate. Local politicians, on the other hand, often stay in power for a decade or more in the Philippines, and are often succeeded by close relatives.

So to get the views of someone who will still be making decisions when Braganza packs up, I visit a mayor – and a mayor who does live in his seat of power. Soud B. Tan is the mayor of the notorious Jolo City, where Philippine security analysts say I am almost certain to be snatched if I don’t move with substantial firepower. ‘You won’t make it three blocks’, one tells me. ‘Men will produce guns and force you into a jeepney, a car, anything. No one will interfere.’ Duly protected, I drop by Tan’s mayoral compound to hear his take on matters.

Of all the many guns I’ve seen in the Philippines, Tan’s bodyguards are packing some of the snazziest – gleaming little room sprayers in tip-top condition.

With his guards stationed out the front, in the hallway, and in the office where we talk, Tan sets me straight on the negative impressions people have of his town.

‘I can tell you that Jolo is a peaceful place to live … it’s a very peaceful place. Jolo’s only a little bit congested with people coming in’, says Tan. Yes, they are coming in, so if anyone feels like helping stop them – for all our sakes – and has a littleused fast boat or two, I know some guys who could really do with them. Anyone?

An imperfect but proactive approach is surely better than doing too little, for the jihadists will exploit any lull in the counter-terrorism campaign. If they are using all their wits and resources just to stay alive, then their potential targets – including us – are safer. If they have the time and space to recruit, train and plan, then disaster is on its way.

EVEN SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS OF THE MILF SEEM TO HAVE REALISED THAT WITHOUT PEACE AND SECURITY, THE PEOPLE THEY CLAIM TO REPRESENT WILL STAY POOR AND IMPOVERISHED. PART OF THE MILF’S REALISATION IS WAKING UP TO WHAT BAD FRIENDS THEY’VE BEEN KEEPING

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THE GOOD OIL 54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

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Are we heading for a world with less petrol, or is there enough black gold in the ground to keep us driving 4WDs for five hundred years? CLARE SWINNEY looks at ‘peak oil’, the latest cry of ecological doomsayers and wonders if this time, the sky really is falling

ydney, 2019. Centrepoint Tower basks in the glow of the sun’s last rays of the day before it slips below the distant and hazy ranges of the Blue Mountains. The motorways though, are almost empty, as they have been for most of the previous 18 months – ever since petrol hit the latest in an ongoing series of highs – $8 per litre. These days, the traffic is mostly buses and trucks, commuters having long ago given up on runs into the CBD each day in preference for telecommuting from their home computers. The ambitious and expensive network of tunnels built under the city are now largely falling into disuse by everyone except for squatters; it’s too expensive to keep it all roadworthy for the few remaining paying coustomers. And in the CBD, luxury high-rise ghettoes are crammed with people trying to escape nowisolated suburbs.

Such a scenario may sound outlandish, and perhaps it is, but according to a growing number of energy analysts Australians are in danger of living the dream-turned-nightmare. Oil, they say, is running out.

The ubiquitous black gold that lubricates our daily lives and makes the economy hum is getting harder and costlier to extract from the ground. On this much virtually everyone, even the skeptics, agrees.

What they don’t agree on is when it’ll happen.

‘In the next three years’, argues author and researcher James Howard Kunstler in a recent interview with Grist magazine in the US, ‘we are going to be feeling the pain. Our lives are going to be noticeably beginning to be disrupted. In the next ten years, you will see the beginning of a major collapse of suburbia’.

Australia is a country heavily reliant on oil. Our strength as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers hinges on not just fuel oil for transport, but oil by-products as fertilizers.

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“According to Lomborg, there are vast reserves of oil in tar sands and shale, and while it is more expensive to extract, these sources could also keep the well from running dry for many, many years – 5,000, to be exact” According to Kunstler, rising fuel costs will force city-dwellers to grow their own food literally in household backyards and farms on the back doorstep. Many people, he says, will find their lifestyles change to accommodate a necessary grow-your-own component.

Prices for lifestyle blocks and large city sections will soar, while prices of apartments will plummet.

Although Kunstler was speaking to an American audience, there are those in Australia, like the Green Party, who are convinced by his message, and throw the threat of falling oil supplies into an already-confused local debate over environmental policy and where the country – and world is hidden. For while on the one hand, environmentalists worry that the world is running out of oil (though they never mention that such a scenario would also go a long way towards cut greenhouse gas emissions), on the other, scientists such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, disagree. According to Lomborg, there are vast reserves of oil in tar sands and shale, and while it is more expensive to extract, these sources could also keep the well from running dry for many, many years – 5,000, to be exact.

It’s not hard to understand why the skeptics would be, well, skeptical. After all, back in the 1970s environmentalists were predicting that today civilization would be beating back glaciers and that nations would be going to war over food. And there’s currently huge debate over whether rising temperatures are the result of man’s planet-destroying hubris which needs urgently to be put in check, or simply caused by natural long-term fluctuations in the climate. After all, if meteorologists can’t predict whether Saturday’s trip to the beach will be a wash-out, what makes them think they can project the temperature, five, ten, or fifty years down the track?

So is this matter of peak oil really much ado about nothing and another tactic by the Greens to garner inner-city votes and reduce vehicle emissions? Or is it the skeptics who are misinformed?

New Zealand-based geologist Alan Hart, who has worked on the frontline of the oil industry for 30 years, believes the ramifications of this ‘final’ oil crisis will be very serious indeed and our media has fundamentally failed to alert people to the realities of what lies ahead. Born in Texas in 1951, he graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with advanced degrees in petroleum geology in 1974 and 1979, and has worked for several oil companies, including the 56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

7th largest US petroleum company, ARCO. Since 2002, he has been on the board of directors of Canadian company, TAG Oil, which is concentrating on exploration efforts in New Zealand.

‘These journalists and radio hosts are entitled to their opinions and can denigrate spokespersons like myself all they want, but I personally know that peak oil will arrive in two or five or ten years. From that point on, the world as we know it will be changed unless the global community meets it head on and begins its preparations now.’

The act of taking oil from the ground is called producing it. Since the start of oil production in the nineteenth century, the world has produced about half of its ultimately recoverable oil resource. At the halfway point, the world will achieve what is referred to as its production peak – more oil will be produced in a year near the halfway point than ever before – or thereafter. This is what is referred to as peak oil.

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here are varied opinions regarding when peak oil will occur. Dr Colin Campbell, a petro-geologist who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on predicting oil trends, calculates that it will occur in 2006. Dr Campbell, who was conferred with a PhD from Oxford University and has worked as a geologist, manager, and consultant for a variety of oil companies, is currently the convener and editor of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre in London. He told the Guardian in late-April 2005 that about 944 billion barrels of oil have thus far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields or reserves, and that a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as ‘yet-to-find’ – that’s the oil geologists expect to be discovered. He said if this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year – with unpredictable and perhaps drastic consequences for the world.

Optimists focus on the figures and assume that just because the production peak has arrived doesn’t mean that oil is under imminent threat. But Campbell and James Howard Kunstler argue the petro-optimists are missing the point.

‘We don’t have to run out of oil or natural gas to have severe problems’, says Kunstler. ‘All you have to do is head down the arc of depletion on the downside of world peak production.’

In other words, as production decreases yet demand continues to increase, oil prices become problematic for the world long before the wells actually dry up.

The peak oil debate has recently heated up especially across the Tasman, where Energy Minister Trevor Mallard told Investigate the Government stands by its view that peak oil will occur sometime between 2021 and 2067, with ‘probability highest around 2037’, statistics that come from the United States Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

‘I stress that other estimates abound’, concedes Mallard, ‘and that I’m not claiming that this is the

right one, but it’s in our view the best estimate we have to work to for now’.

But critics say politicians like Mallard have no choice but to play it cool, lest the healthy economic outlook be exposed as a fraud. The man who just purchased a new 4WD on hire purchase would think the bottom had dropped out of his world and the young couple who’d just built their dream home an hour’s drive from their work places, where there was no alternative but to drive, would be gutted. It’s far simpler, say petro-pessimists, for the Minister to use smoke and mirrors to provide an illusion of a rosy future, which allow for the continuance of current trends over the coming years, rather than to tell it like it is. It’s like booking us to go First Class on the Titanic and moving all the furniture towards the end that will sink first.

It is significant that peak oil is getting much more coverage in the international media than it is in Australia’s daily press. But this will change. Ordinary people are learning about the theory, thanks largely to word of mouth and the internet. One who ascribes to this view is Kiwi builder Robert Atack. For six years now, this 47-year-old has been a modern Jeremiah informing people about the impending oil crisis. He, like some experts in world energy studies, believes it will have a catastrophic impact on humanity, an impact which could be lessened if we start our preparations now.

Atack has plunged $9,000 of his own cash into the issue, printing and distributing leaflets, CDs, DVDs, videos and books, which carry information from experts of Dr Colin Campbell’s ilk, to members of the public and parliament.

‘During the last term of government I had 10,000 copies of The Oil Crash And You printed and sent

about 5 copies each to every MP. And I’ve sent a lot of e-mails – and I think probably most of the current government have had something sent to them’, offers Atack.

‘Trevor Mallard’s been in denial. Any official reply I’ve seen from his office since he became Minister of Energy is just the regurgitated rubbish Pete Hodgson’s secretary sent out, who became Mallard’s when he took over the job of Minister of Energy.’

Beyond the rhetoric, there is evidence that the oil industry really is in dire straits. According to oil geologist Hart it is an industry virtually working at full capacity now. It’s being pushed to its limits. He can tell by the number of oil tankers traveling around the world, the number of seismic vessels gathering seismic data for oil companies, as well as from the number of oilrigs in use.

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t present, the world can produce about 84 million barrels of oil a day at the most.

Over 82 million barrels per day are being used at present and there’s an increasing demand for more. The world economy grew by 5.1% in 2004 – the fastest in nearly three decades. Among the leaders were China, (with around 1.3 billion inhabitants), expanding at 9.5%, Argentina at 9% and India at 7.3%, (around 1.1 billion people). Projections for the fourth quarter of 2005 indicate that 86 to 87 million barrels of oil a day will be required and this won’t be met. Although the biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Texaco, and BP talk about there being ‘plenty of oil’ and being able to produce more, their production figures are actually going down every year, a problem compounded by a lack of refineries that create supply bottlenecks and push the price of petrol north.

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‘Some people oil” is nothing but The virus think entersthat the “peak body through the mouth While the oil industry can function wella matter at the of hours. of a greedy industry tryingby to unsafe talk up the oil and Commultipliesevidence in the intestine.

It oil spreads rapidly water moment, it won’t in the imminent future. but this especially is not so, in says Hart: ‘Why conditions would the andfor hand-to-mouth overcrowded pounding the oil availability problems is that the price’, contact, industry so high that they drive away where sanitation is poormanipulate and faecal prices contamination prevalent.

Housepast 20 years the industry has failed to attract enough the very that arefrom required to to keep them in flies alsooilcontribute, bycustomers transferring virus faeces food.

Todnew personnel. Faced with the choice of studying business? Thetransmit last thingpolio the oil companies want to see dlers not yet toilet-trained readily even in hygienic geology or the glamour of IT during the dotcom a chaotic global are event [peak oil] that destroys their environments. symptoms fever, fatigue, headache, vomitboom of the nineties, many students chose IT. The isInitial cultivated base. If there was anystiffness the neck and painconsumer in the limbs. grim period of mergers and downsizing ing, in the oil incarefully thing the producers – especiallyparalysis OPEC and petroleum One in 200 infections leads to irreversible (usually in the business added to the perception that the oil busicompanies could5%dototo slow price juggernaut, legs). Among paralysed, 10% diethe when their breathing ness was a beast in its death throes. As perhaps it is. those believe me they’d be doing it now, not tomorrow.’ muscles become immobilized. managing editor of the Oil & Gas International Jourit’saffects the plight of his ownfive four children The tragedy is,Hart poliosays mainly children under years of age nal, Dev George, puts it, ‘It seems as though every motivates himbetoprevented. inform thePolio public aboutgiven peak there cure, it can only vaccine, major petroleum industry conference theseand days hasis nothat he life. can educate them on the multiple times,oil, canbecause protect awhile child for at least one session devoted to bemoaning the critical impending without the efforts is generally causedoil bycrisis, poor sanitation, socooperative kids in underdevelshortage of new blood, the lack of young ‘Polio profesthemost rest as ofrisk’, the community and nation, entire oped countriesofare says Horton, adding thattheir currently, sionals – engineers and geologists and geoscientists livelihood by the coming dilemma. coalition against polioisisthreatened facing a crucial time in the program. as well as business and industry generalists the – entering Peter Ballance,informerly Associate Professor In 2004, thereDr was a cessation the immunization program of in the industry.’

Auckland University, innumsedidue toGeology political at circumstances.

It led to aspecialised blow-out in Hart says this spells doom for the oilNigeria, business, mentary and to oilspread geology and holds a Doctorate bers locally threatened to neighbouring Sudan. of because the ability to successfully locate and drill for and Science the University of London.

‘Polio is passed on from so easily.

Only 1% will catch it,He butcontends the rest oil is highly dependent upon having an employee base are carriers.’ that the threat of peak oil should be taken seriously. with extensive work experience.

‘It’s a physical fact.

One which weofmay reach this chilyear was to the poignant plight third world ‘In 1985, the average age for a memberItof thethis exposure or inJenny 10 year’s time’, he warns. dren that to save all year for working holidays as part American Association of Petroleum Geologists wasinspired In lucky regardItohave whether skeptical boss! cientists such as Bjorn of Polio a supportive I never want to 38. The average age last year was 53. This shows thatPlus. ‘It’s Lomborg correct claiming thatflaccid therelegs. is plenty of children In are India I sawin children with Someat this critical time when the industry reallysee needs ex- suffering. oil, DrIt’s Ballance admits terrible that ‘people who of saythe there’s it’s atoo much. an awesome, reminder disperienced employees, they won’t be there. Ittimes is really of oil in one the sense of ease. No childplenty deserves to are liveright like that.

If sense, we canbut doinsomething to dreadful situation we face’, offers Hart despondently. plentywe?’ of the ideal oil, they’re wrong. Much of that help, why wouldn’t oil willteam’, be in tar sands, oil deep-sea As part so-called ‘STOP consisting ofshales, 36 people from he American Association of Petroleum Ge-of a remaining locationsmedical and Arctic locations. of that’s very 22 countries, professionals andAll Rotary volunteers, ologists has been providing videos and including environmentally to extract.’ makes aexpensive differenceand in countries that aredamaging desperately in need, encouraging its 31,000 membersJenny to speak The cost of oil is not the real issue. The availability most recently Pakistan. in public forums about the possibility of oil is.broken It is currently cheap because we’re103 extracting ‘Pakistan transmission.

There were cases in future oil shortages for the past 15 years. hasofnever easyThere’s fields awhose technical infrastructure therefrom are 46. new government now and it’s Hart began making presentations to various2003 civicand andnowfuel put in place and paid forhard decades When those initiative, working very withago. immunisation business groups down under several yearssupporting ago in an thewas fields campaigns six empty, weeks.’ sooner rather than later, prices will rise. attempt to alert the public to the coming end to cheap every It is commonly suggested that technological oil, but finds it difficult to disseminate the message advances will play a role in finding meaningful quantibecause the public is chiefly ‘unbelieving.’

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ties of more oil. Unfortunately, according to Hart, while technology has and will continue to enhance the oil industry’s ability to locate significant new accumulations of petroleum, it cannot compensate for the huge amounts of cheap oil we are chewing our way through.

‘Anyone who believes that technology will “save the day” like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster is not facing up to reality. Technology alone cannot replace the amounts of cheap oil [less than US$10/ barrel to produce] we are currently consuming on a global scale. It’s going to take a conservation effort too’, he asserts. Wishful thinking, whilst correct to a point, still ignores the reality that markets rely on plenty of advance warning and new discoveries, not magic wands, and that if another chemical existed that could replace oil as a fuel, or in plastics or any of the other myriad uses for oil, we ought to know about it by now. And we don’t. And on a worst case scenario those ‘markets’ may only have another five years to find the mystery new elixir, test it and produce it.

Yes, solar power can help reduce some of the dependence on oil, but currently we use oil to create solar generation capacity. The power and telephone lines into our homes are manufactured from oil. Computers are dependent on oil. Many pharmaceutical and health products require oil. For the markets to truly ‘take care of it’, planning has to begin immediately, argue petro-pessimists.

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ome still refuse to face the possibility of a world with less oil, however, like those who believe Thomas Gold’s theory that oil is abiotic, or non-organic in origin. This theory, which holds a growing number of followers, suggests that oil is being produced within the mantle of the earth, from where it continually moves upward, to provide an unlimited supply. Dr Ballance says that there is no substance to Gold’s theory.

‘It’s one of the many myths on which people build hopes’, he says.

Although the oil industry has repeatedly proven that oil is biotic, meaning that it is derived from the degeneration of organic plant and animal remains from which the carbon molecules have been converted to complex hydrocarbon molecules through pressure and time, the Gold theory has retained many believers for a number of reasons.

There are genuine accounts of oil wells refilling, and drilling at levels deeper than 10,000 metres, which some say is evidence that has supported Gold’s theory.

Ballance counters that the reason the wells have been refilling is not because oil is being magically produced deep within the earth, but simply because oil moves through permeable rocks in response to a pressure gradient. It can continue to move after a well has ceased to provide economic quantities of oil. Thus, it’s to be expected that old wells will in some cases refill with oil, but in no where near the quantities that will make any difference to a world that uses over 82 million barrels a day.

“We don’t have to run out of oil or natural gas to have severe problems’, says Kunstler. ‘All you have to do is head down the arc of depletion on the downside of world peak production” Likewise, the drilling beyond 10,000 metres does not lend support for the abiotic theory, either because when hydrocarbons are subjected to the temperatures and pressure that exist below 9,000 metres, they are generally destroyed says Hart.

Former industrial chemist Kevin Moore, who has an Honours degree in chemistry from Auckland University, has studied the abiotic theory and says its proponents are asking us to accept a process that defies the laws of chemistry. ‘Until the proponents of abiotic oil present a plausible theory, and they’ve presented none to my knowledge, it’s just junk science’.

The deepest bore to date was drilled by Russians in the Kola Peninsula to 12,262-metres from 1970 to 1994 and cost more than US$250 million. However, it was not drilled in order to search for oil or natural gas, but to study the nature of the earth’s crust. ‘While there’s no ultra-deep oil except in a couple of unusual fields, there is ultra-deep gas in many places. No matter where people get their information from, they can be assured that petroleum is not generated in the mantle. And if Russia, which passed peak production in the late-1980’s, has all of this deep oil, why isn’t it selling it on the world market?’, questions Hart.

According to peak oil advocates, Australia should be doing a thorough analysis of each sector of the economy to understand how vulnerable it is to oil prices and shortages and what can be done. For example, can our food be grown closer to where it is eaten?

How do we maintain soil fertility without nitrogenbased fertilizers – which are made from fossil fuels?

Can we invest now in expensive infrastructure that will be hard to afford when oil is expensive – like rail, wind turbines and solar technologies, to say nothing of nuclear power, which is once again on the agenda.

Australia is competing against the world for a limited amount of liquid energy. As long as oil demand outstrips the industry’s ability to supply oil, the prices will continue to rise. When global oil production does peak, and it soon will, the disparity between demand and supply will continue to grow and the situation will so worsen. It’s not a case of if, but when. While one can hope and pray that gigantic new sources of petroleum will be found tomorrow, if the majority of people working in the petroleum industry are correct, this won’t happen and continuing our gasguzzling ways is only going to add to an already critical situation.

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How do you take a radical idea and turn it into a market leader? JAMES MORROW talks to Ross Cameron, Managing Director of Dyson Appliances’ South-East Asian operations about how he took a vacuum cleaner developed in a Bath, U.K., coachhouse and turned it into one of the fastest-growing brands in Australia – and in the process

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or almost eighty years, the first three words most people came up with when asked what they thought of when they thought about vacuum cleaners were ‘big’, ‘loud’, and ‘ugly’. But in the past decade that has changed radically, thanks to the work of British inventor James Dyson and his Australian counterpart Ross Cameron – two men who have not only turned the prosaic market floor cleaners upside down, but in the process introduced a new word to the language – ‘Dyson’ (as in ‘I have to Dyson the carpet’, or, just as common, ‘sucks like a Dyson’).

Today Dyson is the number one vacuum cleaner brand in Australia in terms of both volume and value, the result of a remarkable story that brings together radical thinking, a will to win, and a lot of dirty floors.

The story of how Dyson came to be a brand-leader not just in Australia but in Britain and the United States is a classic tale of an inventor working through prototype after prototype in a lab; of highs and lows with business backers; and lots of old-fashioned door-to-door (or rather, store-to-store) salesmanship. In 1979, British designer James Dyson – who had already invented a series of marine and gardening products – realized the common flaw of all vacuum cleaners, namely, the bag, and like all true revolutionaries, decided to do something about it. He sold his shares in one of his previous inventions for GBP10,000, and spent the next five years making 5,000 prototypes before coming up with his unique Dual Cyclone Technology in 1984.

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But despite the genius of the technology, not everyone was interested. For one thing, big multinationals were reluctant to back a product that could, if it succeeded, do to the vacuum cleaner bag market (worth GBP100 million a year in Britain alone at the time) what digital cameras have done to makers of 35mm film.

Fast forward to 1989, and enter James Cameron.

Cameron, who at the time was working for S.C. Johnson Wax as part of their global team trying to develop equipment that would go along with the firm’s already-existing chemicals lines, recalls the first time he heard about Dyson’s product as a real eureka moment in his life. ‘I said to myself, wow, there’s the answer! I have an engineering background myself, and knew we had to do this’. So Cameron set about convincing his company to buy the commercial rights to Dual Cyclone Technology, and sat down with Dyson to make a viable vacuum cleaner for the marketplace.

‘So we had the backing of S.C. Johnson and James had a little coach house in Bath, in the U.K., and we had a couple of engineers. He would be designing, and we would be getting prototypes made, and finally we had the design sorted out’, says Cameron.

‘We were also meeting up regularly with the global marketing people from S.C. Johnson to make sure there were going to be buyers for this thing, and got them to spend $3 million on tooling. We got the machine produced in Italy, launched it in 1990, and did very well with it across Europe.’

Soon, though, the other shoe would drop – in the form of a corporate edict from on high that said vacuums were not part of the company’s core business, and therefore, the Dyson operation was shut down. Of course, it’s pretty hard to keep a good idea from eventually forcing its way to market, and that’s just what happened as Dyson and Cameron teamed up to take on the world. James Dyson started selling vacuums in the U.K. in 1993, and as soon as a barrel vacuum was developed in 1995 – about eighty percent of the floor cleaner market down under is for barrel vacs, as opposed to upright models – Cameron flew down to start breaking in to the local market. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that’s easier said than done – and as Cameron quickly discovered, his first problem was getting into a retail market he didn’t know about with a product no one had ever seen before.

His solution? Hit the streets.

‘I took it out to the stores, and was pretty persistent. A lot of people told me what I could do with my vacuum cleaner!’, laughs Cameron as he remembers some of the less-than-diplomatic receptions he was accorded by store managers. ‘But I wanted to win. I believed in the technology, and I made a decision that this was going to go, and I know it was just a matter of getting in the door and showing retailers the technology’.

This faith in the product – and the fact that the product was so unique (as opposed to other manufacturers who had for years been essentially repackaging old technology in new housings) – is what sustained Cameron,

who notes that that sort of passion is necessary for anyone trying to get a business off the ground.

‘I suppose I was a bit naïve, but I’m bloodyminded, and I just wanted it to work.’

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ventually, though, Dyson’s break came, and David Jones placed an order for 120 vacuum cleaners in May of 1996. They sold just 24 through the following month, a number which Cameron still remembers vividly to this day.

But better luck came in the form of a deal with Myer’s: ‘They said they’d put it on sale and placed an order for 170, and we’ve never looked back’.

But while this was the break Cameron was looking for, he realised that managing growth was going to be tricky, and that continued success – predicated as it was, at the time, on so much word-of-mouth advertising – depended on more than just being able to get more product to market. So Cameron and his team spent virtually every night of the week going out into the stores and training staff in how the Dyson worked. ‘We would take the thing out, pour fine powder on the ground and let them see how it separated it out, and even let them take them home to try them out’, says Cameron, who never moved the product out to market without also giving this sort of support to retailers. ‘They realized it was different, but it was damn hard doing all that training’.

From there, Dyson’s Australian operation grew at ‘a ridiculous rate’, with giant retailers like Harvey Norman and Retravision quick to sign on. All of which led to another problem that Cameron never imagined: many of his employees at the time did not want to work for such a high-growth company, having joined up thinking that they were going to spend their days at a staid little operation without too many demands being made of them.

‘In one year I lost 70 per cent of my staff – they couldn’t handle the pace. That was the year our sales doubled. They said they wanted to work for a little company and have a little job – and I knew they couldn’t meet our expectations’, says Cameron, adding that he went through a great deal of soul-searching about his hiring processes. And, as Cameron discovered, getting the right team on board was key as the company was tipped for major growth.

‘One of the things I said was that I didn’t need a lot of little Ross Camerons around’, he says, describing his hiring philosophy. ‘The important thing is to find people who have a vision, and who’ve got passion – the most important thing is that they have that.’

Cameron adds that this quest for strong, diverse people leads to a much stronger team, especially when there’s conflict over an issue.

‘I’m a hard taskmaster, but my people push back. If they defend an issue, I’m very likely to accept what they’re trying to say – I want strong people around me’.

i July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 63

LIFESTYLE

MONEY

GET UP, STAND UP Customer service is an ugly joke in Australia.

Here’s what you need to know to not give up the fight

W Peter Higgins

hen I was a young lad, there was corner and 5pm to take a delivery or let in an installer. Pershopkeeper on our street that looked haps somewhat surprisingly, loyalty seems to count after our family. His name was Mr Cooley. for next to nothing in the corporate customer service He would see me (or my mother) and provide our stakes. Regular readers of this column will know of family with the groceries, tell us about new products, the plight of a Mr J who had been corresponding order in specialised needs for us and simply update us with the National Australia Bank to try and get some on gossip. He provided exemplary customer service answers to some very reasonable questions about a and treated everyone as an individual and as if each problem with a credit card transaction. After more person was his only customer. In today’s jargon, that’s than three months of e-mailing back and forth, each called ‘one-to-one marketing’. one sending Mr J’s complaint up to a higher level of Back in the 1990s, ‘one-to-one’ was all the rage. management, he finally got a note stating, ‘I have no Very few people understood it, but most organisa- details as to what your enquiry is about. Should you tions and associations wanted to do it, somehow. have any further queries do not hesitate to contact us’.

And there are still a number of companies who claim Looks like Mr J, a long-time and loyal customer of that is happening today, but overall, I do not believe the NAB, was escalated right out of the bank. that Australians are currently getting good customer A similar thing has happened to another gentleservice. What’s worse is the concept of one-to-one man, one Mr P, who has been a long-term, card-carrymarketing is now all ing ‘preferred cusbut extinct. tomer’ with AVIS Car Corner stores used to Rental. On a recent trip A customer who is handled do one-to-one marketto the United Kingcorrectly will become the biggest ing consistently – they dom he hired a car for advocate instead of the biggest had no choice. Undertwo weeks, and dutistanding the uniquefully filled it with petdetractor of an organisation, proness of each customer rol and cleaned out the viding the sort of priceless viral was what kept them in inside before returning business. They knew the car. The AVIS emmarketing no money can buy. the difference between ployee who received his customers who had a car at Birmingham Airlarge or a small family. Those who worked longer port even remarked what good condition the car was than others. Those that ate more meat than others in, stating, ‘I wish they were all returned like this one’. and so on. Sadly, large companies seem not to want, They jointly went over the outside and inside of the or perhaps are not equipped, to practice these car and gave it a very clean bill of health. philosophes of customer service.

So imagine the surprise that Mr P received when he Over the past six months I have been keeping a log received his credit card statement and found that the of bad customer service stories that have come across rental was about $500 more than the agreed price – my desktop; they include everything from run-ins with with no explanation why it was so much over the bureaucratic overseas call centres to companies that contractual amount. And, you guessed it: the monies require someone be home sometime between 9am had already been deducted automatically.

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Mr P quickly rang and wrote to AVIS Australia. His complaint was escalated from Australia to the USA, then to New Zealand, on to the UK, back to NZ, and back to Australia. Three weeks later he found out that there had been some sort of damage to the car. Now this was a real surprise. Mr P knew that the car was in showroom condition and asked what the damage actually was, and could it have possibly happened after he returned the car. Again: Australia to the USA, then to New Zealand, on to the UK, back to NZ, back to Australia, and then off the planet. Six months later and he still doesn’t have an answer. It is still unresolved! Needless to say, he doesn’t like the way AVIS prefer their customers.

Why is this so?

If a customer goes to the effort of making a complaint it is because they care. They are committed and involved with that organisation. They are loyal and they are probably the company’s most valued customers. So why lose them? A customer who is handled correctly will become the biggest advocate instead of the biggest detractor of an organisation, providing the sort of priceless viral marketing no money can buy. We all respond viscously if we believe our loyalty is being abused. I believe that currently our loyalty with many organisations is misplaced – it is not reciprocated and the customer is not rewarded. And, marketers please note: reward points do not automatically buy loyalty.

I am an adjunct lecturer at Sydney University and I teach my students that the gap between reality and expectation equals anger. The bigger the gap the more anger there is. Organisations cannot promise something that they cannot deliver. It sounds simple, but it is rarely practiced. Why? Richard Batterley is a thirty-year veteran in what is now called rela-

tionship marketing. He is the chairman of Relationship Alliance, a Sydney-based firm which helps companies build stronger relationships with their customers. I asked him what should companies be doing to better service their customers?

‘It is important that all big organisations have customer feedback loops’, says Batterley. Instead, he says, ‘most large organisations have procedures in place to block you and your complaint.’

‘Bad customer service affects the brand and reduces integrity, and destroys brand essence. This has serious financial implications. Yet the easiest way for big organisations to behave is to ignore complaints’, explains Batterley.

Interestingly, Batterley had his own recent run in with bureaucracy.

When ringing Telstra he asked to be put through to their complaints department. The call centre said they could not do that because the Privacy Act required him to give his full name and the number he was calling from before he could be transferred. He said that he would be more than happy to give his details to the complaints department but not the call centre, but he was still not put through. He researched this and according to him, there is nothing in the Privacy Act that prevents someone from being transferred to a complaints department. It seems that customers of all sorts are being managed out of existence.

What can they do?

Even if it takes more effort – and maybe causes a short-term hit on the bottom line – it is to the benefit of an organisation if they provide stellar customer service. If one organisation does it better than another then they will grow at the expense of their competitors. They will reduce churn, increase retention, and attract new customers.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 65

So what do companies need to do? ✗ Practice active listening. Reading from a script and a page of a standard-operating-procedure manual is the worst type of customer service there is, yet most organisations do exactly this to their customers. ✗ Say sorry. This means the most to most people. But this is only true if it is a real apology and not a scripted, condescending, patronising way of getting someone off the phone. ✗ Understand what is being said and be empathetic. ✗ Respond in an understanding manner which treats the customer as a human being and a loyal person with whom they have a relationship. ✗ The simple question a service person needs to ask is: “Would I treat my mother/father/son/daughter/brother/sister/wife/husband like this?” ✗ And a radical suggestion: If a small amount of money is in question, say anything up to $200, just give it back to the customer.

This will strengthen a loyal relationship beyond belief. It turns a negative into a positive and, really, in the greater scheme of things, for most large companies it is a fraction of a fraction of a decimal point somewhere in an annual report.

What can we customers do? ✗ Firstly, you must complain to the organisation. Even if they block you, at least you have started the process. Don’t be apathetic and just take it, you will feel better if you take control. ✗ Don’t pay the bill. Yes, this is fraught with danger and could get you on the list of a debt collector or in court. Strangely though, many accounts departments provide better customer service in this instance than front line customer service staff. But I would not recommend this action unless you have an agreement from the organisation that they will not act on you not paying. ✗ Write to the ombudsman. In the case of banks and telecommunications companies, there is a specific ombudsman that investigates these complaints. It is time consuming but is usually fully investigated.

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✗ Tell the media. This is becoming increasingly more popular and unfortunately in many instances the only way that customers can get noticed. Be warned though, some companies close up tighter than Scrooge’s wallet if the press is involved. ✗ Take your business elsewhere. This will make you feel better but most large organisations don’t really care. ✗ Send them a bill and be prepared to follow it through. If you believe you have given an undue amount of your time and your own service to an organisation then send them a formal invoice requesting that you be paid. It may not work, but I have heard of people getting positive responses to this sort of action. ✗ The action I have had the most luck with is to write to the CEO or even Chairman. Mark your letter (not email) private and confidential. Be factual, honest, objective, and admit if you have made a mistake yourself, but explain to him how the poor service of his organisation has displaced your loyalty and damaged their good name.

But it’s a big company...

In the 1976 milestone movie “Network”, evening news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in his Oscar-winning performance, felt the same way that many of us are feeling now about how we are being treated by large organisations. His response?

‘You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, Goddammit! My life has value!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’

Have we seen the death of customer service? Being a glass half full kind of person I am hoping that large organisations learn how we want, and need, to be treated. But as Howard Beale said, we have to get out of our chairs. We cannot let good old Australian apathy get in the way of what we deserve. Be as mad as hell and let organisations know that you are not going to take this any more. Perhaps they could learn from the corner shopkeeper. The spirit of Mr Cooley must live on as a benefit to all of us. See you around the traps.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 67

LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

READ, WRITE, WATCH Giving a flair to all things visual

F

lat, versatile and digital – these are characteristics that distinguish the new Loewe LCD product line Xelos. Xelos represents exclusive design and state-of-the-art LCD technology with an attractive price-performance ratio.

With a wide variety of models, the new Xelos line offers the perfect solution for every taste. The large format Xelos A 37 and Xelos A 32 featuring high-resolution LCD display in 16:9 widescreen format deliver brilliant screen images thanks to new DigitalPlus technology.

The result is an unbeatable home cinema experience.

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D

enon's DVD3910 DVD Audio/Video & Super Audio CD Player features HDMI Interface with Multi Channel Audio/ DVI Digital Video Output, Newly-developed DENON Pixel Image Correction, for more natural contour correction and Dual Discrete Video Circuit. It also sports a huge number of outputs, full compatibility with just about every disc on the market, and stunning AV performance. RRP $1999, available in Premium Silver, Black, Silver and Gold.

F

ountain pens aren’t just for graduation day anymore.

Waterman’s new ‘Exception’ line of stylish and functional lacquered fountain pens with hand-crafted nibs (roller balls also available) come in a wide range of prices and styles, from $520 for an Exception Slim – featuring 18 karat gold, silver and palladium trims – to $1,100 for the ‘Night and Day Gold’, which boasts 23.3 karat gold plating, a rich black lacquer finish, and a solid 18 karat gold nib.

Signing for the cheque never felt so good.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 69

LIFESTYLE

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY

IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD From cough syrups to eyeglasses for cows, Martha McKay takes a peek into a very tiny future

A

t the nanotechnology show in New York City phones, tiny sensors and video displays could one recently, companies touted the state-of-the- day give us a communications ‘wallpaper’. art, from quantum dots to microscopes powEven the ability to have ‘several microphones erful enough to see atoms. inside a phone would be a tremendous (sound qualAnd then there were two guys from Cleveland ity) improvement’, he said. hawking cough syrup.

Out at the New Jersey Nanotechnology ConsorIf you follow the nanotechnology industry closely, tium, university researchers have 60 to 80 nano-based this sort of thing isn’t surprising. projects under way.

But if you don’t, such seemingly humdrum techThey include building a stress gauge to strap on the nology on display alongside the advances at the fourth back of a fruit fly. The tiny device will enable scientists annual NanoBusiness conference might seem unusual. to tell if the drosophila is asleep (they don’t have Spend time with nano-experts and one thing eyelids, in case you wondered). Researchers, who becomes clear: nanotechnology is more commonplace study fruit flies because they are well-suited to than you might think – from nano-engineered eye- genetic studies, want to be able to test whether their glass coatings used on one in five pairs of eyeglasses, modifications to the fruit fly’s sleeping patterns work. to sunscreens and stain-resistant fabrics.

They are also looking into ways to build an electronic One of the most hyped areas of technology since nose that can smell, a real-time DNA analyzer, and the Internet, nanotechnowhat they call a ‘rubber mirlogy is the study and engiror’, which would map the Researchers are building a neering of really small imperfections of your eye things – particles and and allow the creation of stress gauge to strap on the gizmos from 1 to 100 perfect corrective lenses. back of a fruit fly nanometres, or a billionth ‘We could fit a cow with of a metre, in size to be speglasses’, says David Bishop, cific. The paper you are reading this on is about 100,000 vice president of nanotech-nology research at the labs. nanometres thick.

But along with purely scientific uses for nanoAs you might expect, there are hundreds of ways devices, many companies hope to turn a profit – the of using nano-sized particles and devices, with new motivation behind Cleveland-based Five Star Techideas popping up all the time. nologies and its cough formula. Nano-emulsions and The U.S. government will pour an estimated $1.3 dispersions made using a patented technique called billion into nano-based R&D with a particular controlled-flow cavitation make the cough syrup emphasis on such areas as cancer research. Here in adhere to the throat better.

Australia, governments are putting up $100 million Gerry Weimann, Five Star’s CEO, doesn’t think for domestic nanotechnology research this year. consumers really care about the ‘nano’ aspect of the Jeffrey M. Jaffe, president of research and advanced syrup, which is made by another company called technologies for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, told Improvita Health Products. conferees how telecommunications networks could ‘Most people are just looking for a good experience be transformed by nano-sized devices. Tiny power – not a lot of people wonder about the technology supplies working together with nano-sized micro- behind it’, says Weimann.

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July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 71

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

COPY CATS Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick

I

t’s just another brown brick building in a subur- ments for and against cloning mutate and evolve ban American business park. But Suite J at the along with the research advances.

Waunakee Business Center in Wisconsin is about That debate is now moving to the backyard. to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero.

In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial the birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the as a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as world in December – is opening its doors in this Julie, paid $50,000 to have her beloved – but dead – small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The com- kitty cloned. While some say she was swindled, pany’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by Hawthorne believes she was given an incredible, if year’s end, a dog will be born here. expensive, gift.

In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth ‘Our product is based on love’, Hawthorne said. was announced to the world, research into animal clonDavid Magnus, director of Stanford University’s ing has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He decade ago. said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone’s product endangered species. anything but ‘loving’.

They’ve created cloned Also, he and other Who and what are the clones? cows from frozen critics said consumers steaks and cloned mice are being duped: The Are they healthy animals or defrom cancer cells. animals they think formed monsters? How many aniThey’ve talked about they are getting – their mals are sacrificed in the pursuit of resurrecting extinct original pets – cannot creatures such as be reproduced. one healthy clone? And, in the end, woolly mammoths And finally, they what will it lead to? and Tasmanian tigers. think Genetic Savings And with the news on & Clone’s product is Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been grossly frivolous in light of the number of animals discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not in shelters who need homes. seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, ‘Everything about this is objectionable’, Magnus creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven said. this research, cloning remains uncomfortable – even But Autumn Fiester, a bioethicist at the University freakish – for many people. of Pennsylvania, said there isn’t evidence to show Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy ani- that animals are suffering – at least any more than mals or deformed monsters? How many animals are commercially bred dogs or cats. sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in She added that the claim that pet owners are being the end, what will it lead to? duped is condescending. As for the frivolous arguAs ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations ment, she says, ‘Then you’re arguing against buying for animal cloning – improving the food supply, fight- any luxury good.’ Among those involved in cloning, ing disease, saving endangered animals – the argu- she is in the minority.

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Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology – a Worcester, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technology – called it ‘troubling.’

Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet cloning ‘ridiculous’ and ‘preposterous.’

Somatic cell nuclear transfer – the shop name for cloning – is conceptually a pretty easy process.

A cell – such as a skin cell – is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell that’s had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail.

‘What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm’, said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.

If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.

While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.

Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones – i.e., those which survive beyond birth – can run as low as one-in1,000 to as many as 15 percent.

Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues, some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.

The mystery is in the egg. ‘There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram’ and start anew so that it’s read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said.

But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive.

There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg’s nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell in a form known as mitochondrial DNA. No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo, but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development.

Then there’s the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father.

But only one of these copies is active at any one time.

In a clone, ‘the normal battle between mom and dad’ is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and ‘a messed up placenta.’

The hurdles don’t end here.

When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles

with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it’s carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion.

Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency.

‘Our losses are well under 50 percent’, he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.

Magnus and others question these claims; scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.

Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.

These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint, but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.

This means that a consumer who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original. That, said Magnus, is ‘a rip-off.’

Finally, critics of pet cloning said there’s the issue of the millions of animals who don’t have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters.

Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne’s business is minimizing the plight of these animals.

They charge that the money Hawthorne’s clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter.

That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say.

Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless.

‘Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?’ Fiester said.

He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.

In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.

If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with – animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original – the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.

His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets and make them live longer and healthier.

‘Our clones will be better than normal,’ he said. ‘Clones are going to become the preferred pets.’

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 73

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

CRAZY ENOUGH TO WORK? Bad movies and worse ideas contribute to our misunderstanding of mental illness

T

Claire Morrow

he infamous Australian stockbroker Rene The movie Me, Myself and Irene was about a ‘schizoRivkin was convicted of insider trading in phrenic’ who had two personalities. More like Jekyll 2003. Now my understanding of insider trad- and Hyde, really. I asked around and apparently a lot ing is that you know something other people don’t of people believe that schizophrenia is something and use it to make money on the stock market. Dan- that gives a person a split personality where normal gerous criminals such as Martha Stewart have been self is intermittently replaced with a Jim Carey characjailed for this heinous crime, as was Rivkin, who was ter who thinks he’s Jesus. Kinda fun-sounding, algiven nine months periodic detention. He fell to pieces most. Another film, Girl, Interrupted, features Winona in prison and was hospitalised. There was little sym- Ryder as a young woman with ‘borderline personality pathy for him at the time, perhaps because he didn’t disorder’ (and the tagline, ‘sometimes the only way to suffer from something nice and straightforward, like stay sane is to go a little crazy’) who suffers psychoepilepsy or a stroke. Of course he did have that logical distress and in the end receives enlightenment. benign brain tumour, but since it only affected his It could happen to anyone, right? Well, no. Personalmental health and not, say, his ability to walk, no one ity disorders are pervasive, life-long, and serious. Meetcared. That and bipolar disorder. ‘The big baby’, peo- ing Angelina Jolie does not provide any insight for ple thought, ‘trying to get out of his prison term by the patient, and for their poor families, it probably saying he was unbalanced. makes things worse.

Pull your socks up Rene, you Mental illness affects a lot It takes a hero to stand big faker. Get over it and do of people, but the statistics your time.’ Rivkin was diare different depending up and shine the light on vorced from his wife and comwhom you ask: 1 in 4, 1 in 10, the proverbial black dog mitted suicide at his mother’s 1 in 25. In the end, what difhome earlier this year. He was ference does it make? We’re survived by five adult children. still talking about a lot of people. And yet we still Great attitude towards the mentally ill, huh? can’t decide whether mental illness is a big deal or not.

About a month ago I saw one of the local mums People seem to talk a lot more about it (Rivkin was in the playground. New babe in arms, looking drowsy, very upfront about it), but as a community we don’t and could this supermum be her pre-pregnancy seem to do much to help. Do we even know much weight? ‘You’ve got it going on’, I commented. I about mental illness? Mostly it seems to depend on waited for the inevitable litany: ‘oh no, I had terrible which campaign the health department is running at morning sickness, I actually lost weight…” Well, I the time. should have known her better; she has integrity. I Aside from the really esoteric out-there stuff (rare have never known her not to be straight up and she specific psychoses about shrinking genitals, Munwas. ‘No, it’s crap. I’m depressed.’ chausen syndrome, and so forth), when people talk Give the woman a medal: it takes a hero to stand about mental illness they seem to mean either the up and shine the light on the proverbial black dog. It psychotic illnesses where the patient sees, hears or really stood out for me because of the rarity of both believes things that the rest of us do not (yes, it’s insight in a person with a mental illness, and the raw complex, and there are many other symptoms) or honesty she displayed. affective disorders (disorders of mood). Aside from

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the obvious symptoms, mental illnesses have many other symptoms, such as disordered thinking, sleep disturbance and so forth.

They are not fun, nor are they easy to deal with. They can either be managed and lived with in one way or the other (for most people), or they can spiral out of control, ruining the lives of everyone they touch. The homeless guy ranting on the street corner? How do you think his mum feels?

Maybe the term “mental illness” is too broad. It describes everyone from the person who gets mildly depressed and then mildly manic, also known as cyclothymic disorder (which can even at times be an advantage in life) to the person who is totally divorced from reality. Rivkin was desperately seeking help and understanding. The illness that gave him an energetic business edge also gave him week after week of abject misery. His family was shattered, over and over again. And Rene got the best medical care that money can buy. What do you think you get if you can’t afford private treatment?

You get a prescription. And that’s about it, unless you happen to be competent, live in an area where mental health services are accessible, and be referred by someone who knows what help is available.

Private psychiatrists charge fees. Psychiatrists in public services have time to treat people in crisis, and that’s about it.

We know that early intervention works. But unless you (or a family member) have the insight and the cash to front up to the appropriate specialist(s) seeking and paying for help, you are unlikely to get help until you show up in an emergency room with a gut full of booze and grandma’s sleeping pills. People with severe mental illness don’t advocate well for themselves. The ranting homeless are sleeping under the letters to the editor, not writing them.

Perhaps part of our problem is that mental illness is a new frontier. For the longest time, we have acknowledged the existence of mental illness, but effective treatment and recovery is a new thing.

The first effective treatment for a mental illness was lithium carbonate, accidently discovered by an Australian doctor in 1948, to be a highly effective treatment for mania. This was back in the days when you could just test any old theory out on your hospitalized patients.

The occasional person died from lithium toxicity, of course, but suddenly we had a medication that specifically treated mania. This assisted in refining the distinction between psychotic mania and other forms of psychosis. It also allowed very sick people to quickly get better and be treated as outpatients.

Iproniazid, the first modern antidepressant, was originally developed to treat tuberculosis in the early 1950’s. In addition to treating tuberculosis, iproniazid was observed to elevate mood and in many patients. The first tricyclic antidepressant – no longer used due to toxic side effects – was likewise discovered accidentally in the search for a treatment for schizophrenia. The first modern selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (Prozac) was released in 1987. There are now a whole new generation of treatments for depression. There are now anti-psychotic medications that do not belong to the “major tranquilizer” group, because they are not majorly tranquillizing.

Our understanding of these drugs gave us insight into how mental illnesses might work, and not the other way around. As medical treatments to treat chemical imbalances in the brain get more refined, our knowledge of mental illness increases. Go on, write me.

Perhaps the odd person goes nuts and kills their family entirely due to taking Prozac. It’s very, very rare, if it happens at all. But certainly a significant number of people destroy their own lives and families (literally and figuratively) as a result of their untreated – or perhaps untreatable – mental illness.

We don’t do well at handling mental illness (in ourselves or others). Should, but don’t. The last sixty or less years have been a sharp learning curve. Sorry, Rene, you deserved better.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 75

LIFESTYLE

FOOD & DRINK

YOLKING AROUND Eggs aren’t just for breakfast anymore, says Eli Jameson.

Just make sure they’re fresh

I

had a friend, many years ago, who was terrified of in trucks and on shelves, even many good cooks I eggs. He wasn’t plagued by dreams that involved know just don’t care enough to bother. Which is a giant eggs coming out of the sky, or having to shame, given that it is so easy, and the results potenstand up naked and give a speech to the annual con- tially fantastic. Nothing showcases a really good egg vention of the Egg Marketing Board. Instead, it was like poaching. All one needs to do is heat a pan of the mere sight of an egg outside of its shell that water – about an inch or so deep – with a slug of absolutely horrified him. One of his more darkly good white wine vinegar to the just-bubbling point, hilarious monologues involved his horror at going slide the eggs in one by one, and wait a few minutes out to a pizza restaurant in Paris once with a large before pulling them out again with a slotted spoon. group of relatives and an even larger hangover the day Which brings us to the first problem with eggs, no after his sister’s wedding, and having a pie with a quiv- matter how they are prepared: most of the eggs found ering fried egg cracked into the middle of it placed in on supermarket shelves are not truly fresh, and are front of him by a smirking garçon. laid by chickens fed in an insipid diet that leaves their Oddly, though, ‘hidden’ eggs didn’t bother him. product as tasteless as the factory tomatoes over in Sauces made with eggs, meatloaves bound by eggs, the produce section. This means they won’t poach French toast soaked in eggs properly – instead, they’ll – all of that was fine by him, run all over the pan (don’t You can’t get good eggs so long as he wasn’t around ask me to explain the scito see the preparation. ence, just trust me on this). from chooks whose nerves Which shows that even if Worse, they’ll be tasteless. are being jangled up by a he had a few screws loose Although there are many Wagner fetishist in the food department (it instances where an ‘organic’ would take a Freudian half label is just a marketing con a decade to work out how his mother gave him this to separate greenies from their money – more on this particular phobia), he at least had pretty good taste. in a subsequent column – when it comes to eggs, Needless to say, I’ve never known this terror. every input counts. If your farmer is playing music to Poached on toast with a sprinkling of Maldon sea his hens, make sure it’s calm and relaxing stuff. You salt; fried in butter and drizzled with hot sauce can’t get good eggs from chooks whose nerves are (Tabasco is great, but my new favourite is a Mexican being jangled up by a Wagner fetishist. brand called Tapatío); or gently scrambled with lots I get my eggs from my local farmers’ market, where of cream, chives, and smoked salmon, I just don’t they sell free-range eggs from Chanteclair Farms, outthink it’s possible to go wrong with eggs. Unless, of side Sydney. These eggs, which can also be found in course, one overcooks them. some supermarkets, are always fresh, and the hens But it is this first preparation, poaching, that seems have been fed a special diet that makes their yolks rich, to cause many home chefs the most grief. Raised to golden and creamy – as well as high in Omega-3, which believe that poaching an egg involves some sort of fights cholesterol and helps mute the chant of complicated French alchemy involving whirlpools and ‘remember, thou art mortal’ that tends to play in the vinegar, and until recently unable to get anything fresher back of one’s head when one eats as many of the than supermarket eggs that have spent days or weeks things as I do.

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BEST-EVER BEANS AND EGGS When the mercury is low and the bank balance lower (or even if it’s not), this is a great, cheap plate of comfort food that elevates its humble ingredients to far more than the sum of its parts.

You’ll need: • 1 800g tin of Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce • 1-2 brown onions • 3-4 tablespoons brown sugar • 50 grams butter • Balsamic, red wine, or sherry vinegar • White wine vinegar • Dijon mustard • 4 slices bread (I like Helga’s Light Rye) • Salt & pepper • 4 eggs 1. First, caramelize the onions. Slice the onions into thin halfmoons, and put them into a wide pan over very low heat with the butter, and just let them sit there, stirring them occasionally. The more time you can devote to this, the better: you want them to slowly sweeten with just the barest of heat. About ten minutes in, throw some brown sugar in – this will really up the sweetness factor.

After about twenty minutes, turn up the heat to medium and throw in the balsamic (or red wine or sherry) vinegar until it reduces, and then add the beans, stirring in Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper.

2. Meanwhile, get another pan out to poach the eggs. Put in an

inch or so of water, add the white wine vinegar (this helps hold the eggs together), and heat to the barely-boiling. One by one, crack the eggs into a cup or small bowl and slide them into the water.

3. Toast the bread, and cut it into quarters. Assemble by putting half the beans on each of two plates, arranging the toast quarters (using the French and calling them croutons would be too pretentious in this case, even for me) around the beans, and putting two poached eggs on top of each. Season with a bit more salt and pepper, and serve.

Serves two.

‘SPECIAL’ EGGS, ITALIAN STYLE I first saw the great American-Italian chef Mario Battali make a variation of this in the U.S. many years ago; since then, I’ve discovered that poaching eggs in some other sort of sauce is a staple dish in many cultures. The Persians, in fact, do a remarkably similar version of this; they call it gojay farangi; in our house, what my three-year-old calls ‘special eggs’ is an unbreakable Saturday tradition.

You’ll need: • Olive oil • 1 good-sized brown onion • 2-3 (or more) cloves garlic • ½ birds eye or bullet chili, chopped (optional) • 2 x 400g tins peeled Italian plum tomatoes • Dried mint • 4 slices of thick, crusty Italian bread • 4 eggs 1. Make a simple red sauce. Dice the onions, slice the garlic, and throw it in a hot pan of olive oil with the optional chili. Feel free to throw in a slug of the previous night’s wine at this point if there is any left over; red sauces are a very personal thing. Add the tomatoes (make sure they’re imported from Italy; if you want to buy local, avoid Aussie tins and make the sauce with fresh tomatoes instead), breaking them up with a wooden spoon. Add some dried mint, which is my personal touch, and let simmer, uncovered

2. Once the sauce has cooked down a bit, use a spoon or a ladle to make a depression in the sauce, then crack an egg into the well, repeating until all the eggs are in. Cover and let simmer.

3. Meanwhile, toast the bread – I like to rub the slices with olive oil and a smashed clove of garlic, but that’s not 100 per cent necessary – under the grill. By the time the bread is ready, the eggs should be coming pretty close to done as well. Plate them up by putting two pieces of bread on each plate, then topping with an egg and red sauce.

Serves two.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 77

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL Sponsored by IN TREPID TRAVEL

MONKEY BUSINESS Close encounters with orangutans, birds, and the largest flower in the world all await in Borneo, writes Georgia Tasker

T

HE DANUM VALLEY CONSERVATION toy). An impressive bird list includes hornbills, storks AREA, SABAH, Borneo – Just after daybreak, and kingfishers. Huge numbers of orchids, palms, we climb the 30-metre-high canopy walk in a ferns and that bizarre parasitic flower, the rafflesia, are lowland rain forest, watching for birds. Moving in a waiting to be seen. bouncy gait along the suspension bridge, we are disTemperatures in places approach 40 degrees, and cussing the orchids on the trees when suddenly a humidity is 95 percent. We encounter leeches, rats in a blurred flurry of orange hair in a wild fluttering and ceiling (one dropped onto one of us at 3 a.m.) and a bending of leaves and branches is so startling that at cave tour that leads us on a grimy boardwalk above first we don’t know what’s going on. tons of bat guano alive with uncountable roaches Then we realize we have awakened a mother and poisonous centipedes. orangutan and her son in their nest a few feet below Oil palm plantations, land clearing and timber harus, and they are scrambling for cover. vesting are destroying forests in Borneo (70 to 85 per The youngster is 3-to-5 years old, still without the cent of the forests had been felled in the last 30 years), dark face and cheek pads of an adult. His hair is wispy and we decided to see this incredible biological richand thin on his round head, and his eyes are brown ness before it disappears. and serious, but ever Mount Kinabalu, so often he offers the the highest in SouthFinally, we are allowed to hold a briefest smile. While east Asia at nearly hatchling, feel the power of those his mother stays hid13,500 feet, is our first den, he perches on a stop. For orchid lovtiny flippers, enclose it in our branch to watch us ers, it is Mecca. Some cupped palms before releasing it watching him. After a 1,000 species have few minutes, he picks been found on and up a vine and twirls it like a lasso. around these slopes, including the imperiled lady-slipWe have traveled halfway around the world to per, Paphiopedilum rothschildianum, which was discovexperience this moment, which never can be guaran- ered in the 19th century. That orchid’s location was teed. But here we were, 30 metres up on a tree plat- falsified by early collectors to keep the source secret form in the largest virgin rain forest on the island, and the price up. Somehow it was lost until 1970, thrilled to be watching an orangutan in the wild. when the slipper was rediscovered in Mount Kinabalu Asia’s only great ape tops the list of wildlife and National Park, now a World Heritage Site. plants that brought us here. Male orangutans can reach On the way to the park, our guide Adrian Chan 140 kilograms, twice the size of females, but this leads us to a species of rafflesia, the largest flower in youngster probably weighs around 35. He will stay the world. The flower’s 17 species grow only between with his mother until he’s seven, after which he 500 and 600 metres on Borneo, Sumatra, Java and the will become what his Malay name means: a man of Philippines. It is primo sight for plant lovers. the forest.

This one is orange, rubbery and decorated with raised Bornean forests are home to Asian elephants, leop- spots. It parasitizes a specific vine. Both vine and ards, sun bears, orangs, even the world’s smallest squir- flower are clinging to a ravine behind a residential house rel (when scampering up a tree, it looks like a windup in a village just off the main road. Forty-four of 83

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Photography: K. BRUCE known flowering sites on Borneo are on private property, and landowners protect the habitat while earning money from tourists eager to see flowers that may reach three feet across.

Named for Sir Stamford Raffles, British founder of Singapore, our rafflesia has been open for five days and is disintegrating slightly at the edges. Its notorious rotting-meat smell has dissipated, however, so we can look into the center bowl, where a disc with fingerlike projections glows in an eerie light. Around it on the ground are flower buds ranging in size from golf balls to volleyballs. Each bud takes 10 months to develop and open.

Mount Kinabalu, where the spirits of the Dusun and Kadazan peoples are believed to reside, was sculpted by glaciers, left naked on top and punctured by a gully a mile deep. We set out the next day before sunup for bird-watching on its slopes, then tour the park’s orchid garden after breakfast. Scores of orchids and carnivorous pitcher plants, such as the Nepenthes rajah, with liter-size burgundy traps that digest scores of insects, are displayed in the mountainous setting. We see only one orchid along a hiking trail, however, a jewel orchid, collected more for its velvety, striped leaves than its tall spike of small flowers.

From Kota Kinabalu, known locally as KK, we fly to the city of Sandakan, on the northeast coast, and board an outboard to Selingan (Turtle) Island to overnight and watch sea turtles nest. A turtle hatchery was set up here in 1966. Every night, rangers patrol the beaches, quietly searching for green and hawksbill turtles that

come ashore to lay eggs. They collect the eggs, count them, tag the mothers and move eggs to hand-dug sandy holes protected with wire cylinders.

Within swimming distance of the Philippines, Selingan is a desertlike research station so hot at midday that we retreat to our monastic room to catnap and read. Powerful black monitor lizards and rats stalk the dry forests and steal turtle eggs. Some of the rats have taken up residence in the ceiling of our room, which has a closet, small chest, twin beds and a sink. In late afternoon, it’s cool enough to snorkel, so we venture into the Sulu Sea. After dinner, we sweat and wait for a signal that a turtle has nested.

In a warm rain, we watch a three-foot green turtle squeeze out 124 eggs. She is untagged, so this is her first brood. Each of us in a group of a dozen visitors holds a small, leathery egg, then we gently place them in their new sand pit where, in two months’ time, hatchlings will fight their way to the surface.

Finally, we are allowed to hold a hatchling, feel the power of those tiny flippers, enclose it in our cupped palms before releasing it.

It is after the release of the hatchlings that sleep is undone by the falling rat. My friend’s scream jolts me awake, and I see her sitting bolt upright in her bed. The rat had fallen, probably from the window curtains, and landed, plop!, on her face. She lies awake until dawn.

From the island, we boat back to Sandakan, spend a couple of hours at the Sepilok rehabilitation center for orangutans, then board July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 79

another boat on the Kinabatangan River. We disembark at the Sukau Rainforest Lodge, tucked snugly in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary. The next two days, we go everywhere by longboat, and it seems the height of eco-luxury to be guided (even in rain) up and down the longest river in Sabah looking for wildlife.

We gaze and peer and find purple herons, a Brahminy kite, a serpent eagle, darters, imperial pigeons, swifts, kingfishers, whitecrested and black hornbills, sunbirds, and our prize, a rare and seldom-seen Storm’s stork.

From our skiff, we watch a large proboscis monkey with his wives and babies occupy an enormous tree at dawn and dusk along the river.

At the lodge, built on stilts in Malaysian style, ceiling fans and hot water run on solar power. A small library is in the main building, as is the dining room and a lounge with sofas. Over the river is a sun deck for candlelight dining or morning coffee. We wear sarongs to dinner, and leave shoes at the door.

After rain, these lowland forests are full of leeches. They attach to

the ends of leaves and perform leechy belly dances trying to sense the heat of a passing mammal or even bird. We leave our little boat and confront them on our single hike in this forest. Thin as matchsticks before finding you, they inject an anesthesia at the sucking spot, and drop off when full. A rule of thumb is this: the lead hiker’s body heat alerts the leech, the second hiker gets the leech, the third hiker is free to pass untouched.

My friend, second in line, gets a leech on her arm, but cavalierly insists I take a picture of it. Didn’t feel a thing, she says, plucking it off. Later, though, she feels a tickle and a short engorged leech on her stomach, and she doesn’t wait for a photograph. She gets the guide to pull it off. Now. Yet, in this remote and wild place, where friendships over dinner are easily struck and nature is at her fecund best, our lives seem graced indeed.

Our last stop in Borneo is Danum Valley, where we arrive by car.

We stay at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, with enormous open-air

FROM OUR SKIFF, WE WATCH A LARGE PROBOSCIS MONKEY WITH HIS WIVES AND BABIES OCCUPY AN ENORMOUS TREE AT DAWN AND DUSK ALONG THE RIVER

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Photography: SARAWAK TOURISM BOARD

LANDOWNERS PROTECT THE HABITAT WHILE EARNING MONEY FROM TOURISTS EAGER TO SEE FLOWERS THAT MAY REACH THREE FEET ACROSs lounge, dining room and bar on the second floor overlooking the Danum River. It is here that we see the orangutans, watch rhinoceros hornbills play tag in the morning, admire a metre-at-the-shoulder bearded pig, and climb a 1,000-metre-high hill to see red-throated barbets. On the way up, our guide shows us the way his tribe buries its dead: in caskets made of tree trunks that are hoisted by ropes to ledges of limestone cliffs. We scale a tree-limb ladder and find human remains.

We drive back to KK, and spend one day getting to our next stop: Miri, a tiny coastal town. At Miri, we pare down baggage to 40 pounds, and hop into a small plane to Mulu in Sarawak, where a swamp and four caves are waiting.

I’m not overwhelmed with the idea of caves. On our drive from Sukau to Danum Valley, we visited the Gomantong Cave and it had been an unexpected horror. This is the most famous cave in Sabah.

Three kinds of swiftlets nest here, but only those in the highest reaches build their nests of pure saliva. These are the delicacies made by the Chinese into bird’s-nest soup. A single nest may sell for $4,000 U.S. The government regulates harvesting now, but four times a year men are strapped to 100-foot ladders and raised up to remove the nests, once babies have fledged.

They’ve been doing that for 400 years. Not once has the floor of swiftlet and bat guano been cleared out, and the smell is ungodly.

Little wonder the roaches are more plentiful than stars. The narrow boardwalk and handrail were slippery with guano, the roaches and giant centipedes were on the walls and the floor, and stretching my Tshirt to my nose, I was so appalled, my toes curled. Outside, all I could do was shudder. But at least, I told myself, I had seen it and now understood why those bird’s nests were so dreadfully expensive.

Mulu’s caves, however, are more rewarding. Three of four are lighted to show beautiful formations; the fourth, Deer Cave, is the world’s largest cave passage and home to millions of bats. The caves make up the world’s largest-known cave system, yet only about a third of the passages have been explored in the mountains that now are in a national park.

Perhaps the best part is the nightly emergence of the bats, which come out in waves of hundreds and stay in formation until they reach a certain altitude to disperse for nightly insect-eating. We watch a doughnut-shaped group stay perfectly in formation until it disappears.

Then we head back to the five-star Royal Mulu Resort, where dinner’s a buffet, and the rooms are air-conditioned.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

INTREPID BORNEO

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Throughout the year, Intrepid Travel operates a number of fantastic adventures that will have you exploring Malaysian Borneo, either with a small group of like-minded travellers or independently on an arranged itinerary.

BEST TIME OF YEAR TO TRAVEL? Borneo has a typical tropical climate - generally hot and humid throughout the year. Temperatures stay in the high 20’s most of the year dropping back to the low 20’s at night. As in most tropical areas the rain falls in short heavy bursts with sunshine following. In theory, the wet season runs from November through to February, but in reality you can expect some rain at any time of the year. Sabah is famed for being below the monsoon belt and is known as the ‘Land Below the Wind’ RELIGION: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Animist & other spiritual & tribal beliefs LANGUAGE: Bahasa Malaysian, Chinese & many other tribal languages and dialects CURRENCY: Ringgit (MYR) VISAS: A 3-month visa is free on entry into Malaysia. (Please note: If you are planning on sidestepping to Brunei, you may need to obtain a visa prior to arrival.)

ELECTRICITY: 220 - 240V, 50hz AC

SABAH – LAND BENEATH THE WIND 13 days ex Kota Kinabalu Trip Style: Intrepid Original Highlights: Kota Kinabalu, Mt Kinabalu climb, orangutans, Turtle Island, Malay homestay, jungle camp, Sandakan Brief: Sabah, the land beneath the wind, is simply breathtaking. Join Intrepid as we meet orangutans and sea turtles on a trip that will have you lazing on beaches, soaking in hot springs, exploring tribal villages and climbing the mighty Mt Kinabalu.

Departure: Departs every Sunday Price: AU$860, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person A TASTE OF SABAH 6 days ex Kota Kinabalu Trip Style: Intrepid Independent Highlights: Mt Kinabalu climb, orangutans, Turtle Island, Sandakan Brief: A fantastic introduction to natural Borneo, from the giant turtles to the awesome peak of Mt Kinabalu. Sabah is filled with rare and exotic wildlife and this trip takes in the very best.

Departure: Departs daily Price: from AU$890 per person (seasonal pricing applies) For more information on travelling in Borneo with Intrepid Travel, please visit www.intrepidtravel.com, free call 1300 360 887, or come and see us at 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

Photography: JEN BIRD

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Photography: EWEN BELL

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

GREAT MAN THEORIES Curl up this winter with these tales of occupation, exploration, and depredation

ATTILA

By John Man

Michael Morrisssey

Bantam Press, $39.95, ISBN: 13579108642 Of all would-be world conquerors, Attila the Hun (406-453 AD), self-declared Scourge of God had the worst reputation. And his ferocious Hungarian hordes – reputed to be descended from the Xiongnu – were the subject of some very bad early PR: ‘They were squat, with thick necks, so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals ... there was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness ... they knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire ... eating their food raw ... once they put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off until it rotted ... their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk ... stunted, foul and puny ... pinholes rather than eyes’.

You get the idea.

If the Huns swept all before them, due to their mobility, horsemanship and rapid-firing archery, the victims were determined to have the last say. Since the Huns had no written language, it is others who have described their culture – and their appearance. John Man, while not exactly an apologist, balances up the evaluation by telling us of the Huns’ metal work, cooking, religion and even, at times, their comely women. Above all, he vividly details the formidable power of their archery: 2000 arrows could hit 200 of the enemy in 10 seconds, a rate equivalent to ten machine guns as they wheeled in whirlwind fashion, even firing back over the shoulder (the parting or Parthian shot.) The trick is to hold a bunch of arrows in your bow hand and fire when the galloping horse – which you control with your knees – is off the ground.

Priscus, Attila’s principal historian, describes him as ‘excellent in council, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those who received his protection’. Not to be outdone, Man adds, ‘I think he had a sudden smile

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that could melt rocks.’ At least this item of whimsy is prefaced by the words ‘I think’. Man’s book is well written and a good read, but suffers from certain disturbing oddities in its approach. There is, as suggested above, a tendency to novelise history and to add in embellishments or dialogue that are blatantly of Man’s own imagination, not historical fact. Surely this sort of thing is better left to historical novelists – or is the writing of history undergoing a quiet revolution?

Man dismisses or challenges traditional accounts of the time. Pope Leo’s miraculous turn-around of the Hun hordes was the result of a bribe not a miracle;

the great defeat of Attila by Aetius was a stalemate followed by a strategic withdrawal; the 11,000 Ursuline virgins were really 11 – an ‘M’ which stood for martyrs was mistakenly interpreted as ‘1,000’. Then he adds one of his own – he muses that had Attila played his cards right, Britain would have fallen to the Hun and Chaucer and Shakespeare would have written in Hunnish!

The book also has an odd structure. Attila is briefly mentioned in the first few pages, then disappears for over 100 pages. This long lead time is used to describe theories of origins of the Huns and the political situation that preceded their dramatic arrival on the stage of history. Fair enough, perhaps, though a trifle imbalanced. There is a detailed account of Lajos Kassai – a contemporary – who has remastered the art of mounted archery. Fascinating stuff to be sure, but why place it before outlining Attila’s military feats? Surely it would have been more appropriate as an appendix instead of as a ‘flash forward’ in the historical backdrop to the saga of the Huns’ brief domination of central Europe? Once you get used to Man’s time machine approach to history this is an enjoyable and informative read – I learnt, for example, that the habit of referring to First World War German soldiers as ‘Huns’ was derived from a 1902 poem by Rudyard Kipling.

THE FINAL SOLUTION

By Michael Chabon Fourth Estate, $24.95, ISBN: 0007196024 I throughly enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a romp through the golden age of American comics, but this short novel by Michael Chabon is a much lesser work. A note on the copyright page notes that this book was published in an earlier form in the Paris Review in 2003. So it is a backdated, then updated, work written prior to the rambunctious Kavalier & Clay work. It’s cruel thing to say but The Final Solution would have been better left in the prestigious pages of the Paris Review, otherwise noted for its definitive interviews with world-famous writers.

The basic plot is – depending how one chooses to look at it – either preposterously whimsical or intriguingly colourful. An 89year-old Sherlock Homes (only ever identified as ‘the old man’) encounters a mute nine-year-old boy with an African grey parrot that spouts numbers in German. The numbers are subsequently speculated to be a top-secret Nazi code.

I have no quarrel with resurrecting the

world’s greatest detective and surely one of the most well-known characters in literature.

After all, Conan Doyle (though admittedly under publisher and public duress) did the same after he had killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Other crime fighters like Bulldog Drummond and James Bond have been revisited by subsequent admiring author-fans.

Chabon has successfully rendered the high Victorian prose and elegant speech of Doyle, plus the surprise villains and implausible plot but there is something slight and flimsy about the work as whole. Now and then, Chabon writes a dazzling sentence that hints at the stylistic splendours manifest in Kavalier & Clay. Even the fanciful plot fizzles in a way that would have dismayed the plot-conscious Conan Doyle. I look forward to new novels by Chabon that are not rewrites of minor material.

regarded as the greatest single feat of navigation of all time. Magellan was also the first to cross the vastness of the Pacific Ocean in a single journey – 7000 miles of uncharted water. The mediaeval map-makers of Europe did not know of its existence – hence their estimate of the circomference of the earth was about 18,000 miles instead of the true figure, 24,900.

It should be made clear that educated people of Magellan’s time did not believe the earth to be flat. The whole expedition was predicated on the globularity of the planet – in particular, the possibility of approaching the Spice Islands from a westerly instead of an easterly direction. The motive behind the expedition was to grab the spice-rich islands off the Portuguese who had a passion for secrecy and had been harvesting them for some time.

Apart from any few remaining doubters of a round planet, the men may have feared that they would boil alive at the equator, meet a variety of monsters (including the wondrous Socolopendra with a face of flames) or sail near a magnetic island that could pull nails out of ships. They did meet sharks, whales and flying fish, but ultimately the greatest dangers they encountered were those of scurvy and mutiny. Bergreen notes that Magellan and his officers did not get scurvy while many of the men succumbed.

The explanation, unknown at the time, was because the Captain and his officers were eating preserved quince which had enough vitamin C to keep them healthy. It is humbling to think that without a few regular helpings of preserved fruit the expedition might never have succeeded at all. Magellan

OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

By Laurence Bergreen HarperCollins, $24.95, ISBN: 0007118317 Great as was Columbus’s voyage to America, it was exceeded in length, duration and endurance by the globe-encircling expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan 27 years later in 1519. Indeed, as Laurence Bergreen notes in this excellent biography, Magellan’s voyage was fifteen times longer and encompassed far greater hardship and adventure as well as more spectacular feats of navigation. The discovery and navigation of the 300-milelong straits that now bear his name is July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 85

and others thought the cause of scurvy was ‘bad air’.

All in all, there were four mutinies.

Magellan, a man of his time, didn’t treat the ringleaders lightly – they had to endure strappado, a thoroughly nasty form of torture involving weights tied to the feet and being hoisted and violently dropped.

Bergreen doesn’t spare us the details. In reading about Alexander the Great, Captain James Cook and Magellan, a strange similarity becomes evident: all came to be treated as gods, and when they came to half-believe it themselves, they became arrogant and cruel.

Some three years later, one ship out of an original five and 18 battered survivors from an initial crew of 260 arrived back in Spain to tell the tale of the greatest sea voyage of all time. Without Antonio Pigafetta, the ship’s chronicler (also a lucky consumer of preserved quince), we would know almost nothing of these extraordinary events.

This is a grand tale, perhaps the grandest in all sea-faring history, and it is thrillingly told by Bergreen. This will be the definitive biography of Magellan for quite some time.

THE MERMAID CHAIR

By Sue Monk Kidd Review, $36.99, ISBN: 0755307623 Many satisfying novels have been written about what is cynically called the eternal triangle – the situation where one partner strays from the marital bond and has an affair with a third party – but regrettably this is not one of them. In today’s up-tempo world, it’s risky to set in motion a plot of this kind – attractive married woman and rookery-mind-

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ing monk about to take his final vows meet and are overwhelmingly attracted – and not have anything happen between them until more than half through the novel. They ‘make love’ twice at my count and their dialogue is unlikely to set the world on fire: ‘I can’t believe how beautiful you are’; ‘I’ve wanted you from the beginning.’

It’s hard to get interested in the jilted psychiatrist husband who does a good turn in angry jealousy but otherwise is fairly ineffective as a character. Two women sidekicks also fail to rouse interest. Then there’s the dog, Max (yawn). I’ve tried to warn writers about allowing in dogs as characters in serious novels but to no avail.

There is also a saint-demented mother who keeps lopping off digits and apparently is intent on severing all ten – though thankfully the narrative only takes us up to two. (How do you chop all ten anyway? The way I figure it is, it’s got to be damn difficult to finish the job after you’re chopped off eight of them).

It’s a convention with this type of story that the sudden rush of blood to the head (and other parts) isn’t always the strongest foundation for new lasting relationships.

Whatever, Graham Greene did this sort of thing infinitely better a generation ago. Ms Kidd also needs to work on her style: ‘He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don’t think he knew what to feel any more than what to say.’ I rest my case.

MAGICAL THINKING

By Augusten Burroughs Hodder, $29.95, ISBN: 0733619002 Most of us want to be thought of as nice people but Burroughs has made outrageous capital of the opposite tactic. By his own confession (though can we always believe him?) he is cruel to mice and children, hates babies and is promiscuous as an alley cat. By way of self-deprecation, he tells us he has an undesirably skinny ass, is domestically grossly untidy, and once had sex with an undertaker. And in case you’re wondering, yes, there was a body only 20 feet away.

Depending on the location of your funny bone, there is black humour to be extracted from these real life tales.

Burroughs’ accounts of his frequent meeting of partners through ads, picking them up willy-nilly, affirms the stereotype of the extremely promiscuous homosexual. With paradoxical humour, Burroughs reports there was one fellow with whom he was sleeping but not having sex with – ‘I told him how it’s really difficult for me to have sex with somebody unless I know them very

well and am extremely comfortable with them. This sounded better than the truth which is I can’t have sex with somebody unless they’re a stranger and I’m drunk’.

The sexual high jinks (or low jinks) quickly pall and it’s easier to feel more sympathetic to Burroughs at his missing out on being in a TV ad as a child and – after goggling at a sumptuous Vanderbilt mansion – informing his parents that they had kidnapped him and in reality he is a Vanderbilt who wants to go back to where he rightfully belongs.

‘You’re monsters. I hate you I hate I hate you’, he screams at his parents. Confirming the impression he was a difficult child and maybe a worse adult, Burroughs cheerfully lists his flaws as a ‘wide, deep cruel streak’ plus ‘fear of intimacy, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, social anxiety disorder and mania’. (And don’t forget that skinny ass.)

Looked at from the outside, all of Burroughs’ weirdness belong to a tradition of potentially harmful eccentricity and selfendangering lifestyle which we can readily identify as a sub-set of American behaviours most frequently associated with the inhabitants of California or New York (Burroughs is a Manhattanite). Burroughs’ rollicking lucid style make for an easy read though it leaves the reader jaded after several very samesounding chapters about casual sex. The reader, whether bemused or shocked, must be wondering if Burroughs is a nice guy pretending to be an asshole, an asshole who somehow wants us still to like him, or a guy who just can’t help himself – or a combination of all three?

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 87

LIFESTYLE

AT THE MOVIES

MOB RULES Also: DreamWorks’ latest fails to excite, and don’t expect a rush of copycat oyster farming flicks any time soon

Layer Cake Released: July 14, 2005 Rated: MA

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B Shelly Horton

oy, is the cast of Layer Cake ugly! But that’s the joy of British gangster films – forget Hollywood glamour, in these flicks the mobsters aren’t pretty or even all that smart. Instead they all have bad teeth and wear horrible parachute-cloth tracksuits.

Layer Cake is a great name for the film because the viewer is taken through several character stories in rapid succession. Don’t go to this movie tired or you’ll never keep up.

Daniel Craig plays the lead role as the most attractive gangster (which is not saying much; he is still horribly pock-marked). He’s so successful as a toplevel drug dealer that no-one knows his name – and neither does the audience. He’s planning to pull off one last deal before early retirement. No surprise when it all goes terribly pear-shaped.

To offload a shipment of ecstasy, our main man has to deal with crooks further up the drug food chain than he’s used to. Enter Jimmy Price, played by Kenneth Cranham, an unattractive dealer in every sense of the word. Of course, that leads to dealing with an even more unattractive mobster even further up the food chain, Eddie Temple, played by Michael Gambon (it’s hard to believe he played the loveable Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter). Oddly enough, they don’t want one of their best dealers simply retiring.

Go figure.

(There is one notable exception on the ugly front, the gorgeous Sienna Miller – who’s more famous for being engaged to Jude Law than for her acting – has a small part as the hero’s love interest. Her role is tiny but then so is her lingerie. One for the fellas.)

Add to that a drug deal gone wrong in Holland and

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a pissed-off Slavic hitman and the viewer is left with a lot of action that turns out to be smart, funny and ugly.

Just the way it should be.

Madagascar Released: June 16, 2005 Rated: PG

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henever I hear DreamWorks has a new animated movie, I hope for a Shrek. I always forget that DreamWorks also made the disappointing A Shark’s Tale. Madagascar falls into the second category. It’s not a multi-leveled family film that adults can get a kick out of too. This one is for the kiddies.

The animation is reliably impressive and the story has a lesson, so as a film for ankle-biters it’s fine. It’s the tale of a group of animals from the New York Zoo. Alex the Lion (voiced by Ben Stiller) is living it large on steak and adoration from his fans. His friends include Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) who wants to break free, Melman the hypochondriac Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the streetwise Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith).

Marty leads a break-out of the zoo in search of adventure and they all get caught and sent to Africa.

But on the way they get shipwrecked in Madagascar.

They have no idea how to act in the wild. It’s like Survivor for accountants. They stumble across a colony of lemurs ruled by the amusing King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his right-paw-man Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer). Insert musical number here.

Trouble is brewing (or should that be stomachs are grumbling?) because Alex the Lion misses his daily steak fix. He’s a meat-eater. He starts seeing Marty the Zebra as food. Alex even tries to take a bite out of Marty’s butt. I can only assume forcing the kiddies to

DOWN ON THE FARM: ‘Aren’t oysters great, honey?’

‘Forget mollusks, I want Manolos!’ confront the dynamics of the food chain is the reason for the PG rating.

There’s a great running-gag involving a pack of plotting penguins that act like elite special forces soldiers and a funny re-enactment of an American Beauty scene. But that’s it for the grown ups. So if you are a non-breeder who has to take someone else’s bin-lids to the movies, Madagascar is non-offensive and slightly amusing. But that’s it.

They can’t all be Shrek.

Oyster Farmer Released: June 30, 2005 Rated: M

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rom the very first shot you can tell Oyster Farmer is using the scenery as another character in the film. It shows the Hawkesbury River as a stunning yet isolated place to live. And the people who live and work on her banks have to cope with its ebbs and flows.

Oyster Farmer is a gentle movie about a young guy (played by Alex O’Lachlan) who escapes a pain-filled life by working with an eccentric community of, you guessed it, oyster farmers. His love interest

(played by Diana Glenn) is a local who grew up in the area but longs for the trappings of city life – like fabulous shoes.

Both have secrets. And yet both are drawn together. There’s stealing, lying and jumping to conclusions. O’Lachlan is handsome in a typically Aussie way and brings the right amount of depth to his character Jack to show just how uncomfortable he is in his own skin.

Glenn captures a naivety you’d expect from someone brought up in those conditions. Both play true Aussies without falling into parody.

The standout role is Brownie (played by David Field). He’s a weather-beaten farmer battling a temperamental crop of oysters.

Field is best known for his performance as Bob Hawke in A Night We Called It A Day, but I think this is some of his finest acting yet.

His estranged wife (played by Kerry Armstrong) is sexy and strong but ultimately under-utilised.

The trouble with the film is that the story line meanders along like the Hawkesbury River. There isn’t enough drama. Too much is left unsaid; each sub-plot needs more guts. Yes, Oyster Farmer feels like a film about real people, but as we all know, real life can be a tad boring.

I wouldn’t recommend rushing to the cinema to see it, but if you’re looking for a rainy night DVD selection it would be a comfortable choice. Perhaps with a half-dozen Sydney Rocks on the side.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 89

LIFESTYLE

MUSIC

VAN’S STILL THE MAN The grumpy Irishman brawls with mediocrity – and wins – while Nash and Stigers show where jazz is headed

Van Morrison ‘Magic Time’, Geffen

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fter four decades of peerless soul music, Van Morrison has nothing left to prove. No wonder he complains that ‘you gotta fight every day to keep mediocrity at bay’ on ‘Magic Time’: Even when he coasts, his deeply embedded mastery of blues, jazz, Celtic and R&B styles ensures a consistently high baseline.

‘Magic Time’ holds few surprises, and Morrison knows this: ‘You can call it nostalgia, I don’t mind’, he sings in the title track. With three covers of jazz standards, two songs (‘Gypsy in My Soul’ and ‘The Lion This Time’) that allude to his 1972 classic ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’, and several doses of Celtic mysticism and misanthropy, he’s revisiting styles and themes that have long preoccupied him.

But it’s hard to complain when Morrison sings gently rolling ballads as beautifully as he does ‘Celtic New Year’ and ‘Stranded’, or swinging blues as locked-in as ‘Evening Train’ and ‘I’m Confessin’’.

Reviewed by Steve Klinge

Ted Nash and Odeon ‘La Espada de la Noche’, Palmetto

✯✯✯ azz was born in a cradle of many cultures, and the music’s future is likely to be full of cultural excursions to new realms. Ted Nash pulls off such a fusion. He uses a primarily tango vibe to create a kind of film-noir jazz that’s engaging and probably even better live than on disc.

The son of trombonist Dick Nash and nephew of swing saxophonist Ted Nash, this saxophonist has recently made a career swinging with the backwardlooking Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the forward-careening Jazz Composers Collective.

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His band here is anchored by Clark Gayton on tuba, trombone and baritone horn. Violinist Nathalie Bonin and accordionist Bill Schimmel enhance the tango feeling, while drummer Matt Wilson is a jazz cat with Latin moves.

The session makes for good bullfighting music.

The quintet covers two Latin jazz standards, ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and ‘Tico Tico’, with tango high in its consciousness. But elements of klezmer and traditional New Orleans jazz creep in, forming a worldly stew.

Reviewed by Karl Stark

Curtis Stigers ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’, Concord

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ow many singers make a rock recording that sells nearly two million copies and walk away to be a jazz vocalist? Curtis Stigers, whose self-titled hit came in 1991, is one.

Stigers is not, surprisingly, a high-voltage artist. He’s an expressive character who looks for some heart in a song and often plumbs it. The Idaho, U.S.A., native shows an independent-cuss view of songs, expanding the usual suspects here to include ditties by Randy Newman, Sting and Tom Waits.

He shows an affinity for country on Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy’ and gets folksy and direct on the title track, a poignant Newman original.

Waits’ ‘In Between Love’ carries the emotional oomph of an old Tin Pan Alley standard, and Willie Dixon’s ‘My Babe’ gives Stigers soulful credentials.

Keyboardist Larry Goldings is a big collaborator here, creating the sympathetic backing with a revolving cast that includes bassist Ben Allison and drummer Matt Wilson.

Reviewed by Karl Stark

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 91

LIFESTYLE

THE SPORTING LIFE

TANGLED UP IN BLUE At State of Origin time, when the going gets tough, the tough throw chips

A Jake Ryan

s I write this, Queensland and New South room did our best to join in the chant, our calls were Wales are in the midst of another tilt at State drowned out by a room full of Blues screaming NEW of Origin glory. Being a born-and-bred SOUTH WALES! NEW SOUTH WALES! I knew this was going to be a long game, and a long Queenslander, it’s my duty (even though I play AFL) to jump on the bandwagon, pull out the old Ma- night – especially if we got done. The game started and roons jumper and walk around town screaming except for an amazing defensive effort by the Blues’ QUEENSLANDER! at the top of my lungs, Billy Nathan Hindmarsh, Queensland dominated to go in Moore-style. This would be considered perfectly nor- at half time up 17-nil. My brother Mitch, myself, and mal behaviour were I still living in Queensland and four of our mates had a front row table, and every walking down Cavill Avenue, but it’s a little bizarre to point found us on our feet hugging, handing out be doing it here in Perth, where no one knows – or high-fives and shrieking QUEENSLANDER!, all the even worse, cares – about the Australian civil war known while giving thumbs up to the other Maroons in the as Origin. That is of course, except for the loyal band room we had never met. We now had a common bond of Eastern State orphans that all gather at the Pad- as we awaited the second half.

Then disaster struck. New dington Ale House in Mt. South Wales dominated, and Hawthorn for the three with every try they clawed Wednesday night games.

When the chips and half back, more and more Blues Neil Randall, who owns a beer were thrown on were happy to tell the six the Ale House (and is also me, well, I’ll admit I was a Queensland spruikers at the president of my footy club), front all about it. When the has the game beamed in live little upset and angry chips and half a beer were from ABC Asia, since Nine thrown on me, well, I’ll addoes not show the game live and we don’t get the replay till 1.30am. Every mit I was a little upset and angry. I would have told Queenslander and New South Welshman in Perth is the offender to take it out the front, but I was at my at the bar, and the atmosphere in the place is just as mate’s pub. And, oh yeah, he was six-foot-three if he great as it was sitting on Can Hill at Lang Park ten years was an inch.

The Blues hit the front, and I thought the pub was ago. The only problem is that of the 200-odd people there, over 170 of them are dressed in blue. But that going to come crashing down. By this time I was does not stop us underdog Queenslanders. As the under the table and about to start crying as the barrage TV shows images of the former Origin warriors all of abuse became unbearable. Then out of nowhere present clap in respect. Whether it is Wally Lewis div- Bowen got a fluke field goal off a NSW deflection ing for the line, Peter Stirling with hair, Garry Larson and we were back in it. My mates and I emerged from laying another bone-jarring tackle, or Freddy Fittler under the table and started carrying on again: QUEENSLANDER, QUEENSLANDER. We were showing nothing but class the crowd responds.

But on a recent night, when they showed Billy Moore going to a golden point. A couple of tense sets of six walking down the tunnel bellowing QUEENS- later, a missed Darren Lockyer field goal, and then all LANDER! QUEENSLANDER!, things changed of a sudden, a gift from God. QUEENSLANDER, QUEENSLANDER. very quickly. While us Maroons strewn around the

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Bowen, that feisty Cowboys half, intercepted and scored the match winner. We exploded from our seats and begin crying those sweet tears of victory. We began the chant again – QUEENSLANDER, QUEENSLANDER – as we hugged and high-fived. Then all of a sudden all the Queenslanders in the room converged on us. I was giving high-fives to blokes I’ve never met, and kissing girls I had no idea who they were, but they were in Maroon and that’s all that mattered to me. It was a great night. It was an amazing game, we won, and I got the number of a girl from Brisbane who just moved over here. (She’s not too shabby, either.) We were booed out of the pub, but I was pumping my fists and pointing at the New South Welshman on the way out the door.

Something tells me I might be safer watching the replay at 1.30am at home…perhaps with the girl from Brisbane. ❖❖❖ I also would like to say congratulations and how proud I am of the three Aussie boys who went down in their title fights this month.

Paul Briggs, Kostya Tszyu, and Anthony ‘The Man’ Mundine were all graceful and gallant in defeat, and being a big fight fan I was immensely impressed by their behaviour. Paul Briggs is a friend of mine, and a personal hero as well. He will become a world champ in the next twelve months, no doubt about it, and will become the first man ever to win a world title in both kickboxing and boxing.

For those who don’t know about it, Briggs has had an amazing life. He has been both a world champion and done some pretty ordinary things as well, but he has always admitted his mistakes, got back on track and turned it all around. I first met him when we both did the full Monty for my old radio station, Sea FM, raising money for charity. He is a personally gentle man who is also absolutely barbaric in the ring. He has a beautiful family and a new daughter and he will have

a new belt to add to his collection very soon. Keep your eye on him.

Kostya, too, is a legend. He is arguably the greatest Australian boxer of all time. I always loved his style. He was like a tank early in his career, coming in front-on and just laying bombs on everyone.

But the way he knocked out Zab Judah was truly amazing. To me that is the moment that defined his career. Judah was talking it up terribly, which made his fall even bigger. Kostya ended Judah’s career, and he has never been the same fighter since. To me Kostya has nothing to prove. Ricky Hatton was solid and tough and deserved the victory, and more importantly, he was humble and respectful in victory, saying that if he could become half the champ Kostya was, he would have had a great career. And he’s dead right. I would hate to see Kostya come back and fight if he is not right. So many champs have done that, lost and tarnished their career as a result. Kostya is a champ, a legend and a great Australian.

Last but not least, The Man. Truthfully, I didn’t think he would last three rounds against Mikkel Kessler. After all, Kessler is big and tough and hits hard. Mundine was quick, sharp and looked good. I hope there is a rematch. He talks the talk, and he walked the walk.

Being in Perth you hear a lot about Danny Green, and I believe these two will fight very soon, and it will be for a belt. One of them will definitely become world champion in the next twelve months.

I think if Green went to the WBC, he would beat Kessler, and wouldn’t that be a dream to see The Green Machine and The Man go head to head for a belt. Mundine is has proven himself as a world-class fighter, and here’s hoping he keeps challenging worthy opponents in the future instead of playing with has-beens and never-weres, because he is an amazing athlete and has now gained plenty of respect.

Go you Aussies.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 93

LIFESTYLE

DIARY OF A CABBIE

THAT’S MY BOY When a night out goes horribly wrong, it can leave scars that might never heal

O Adrian Neylan

n a recent Friday night I carried a fifty-some- Sydney. By his own admission he’d made many misthing fella from the North Shore down to takes over the years. And despite his age he insisted Sutherland. After a day on the grog at a con- how, much to his embarrassment, he often felt the vention junket he was wasted. Yet not so wasted he same hopes and vitality as that of his son. So much couldn’t relate a chilling tale involving his son. It was so he couldn’t wait for the arrival of the first granda tale I readily identified with, as his ‘boy’ was around child. A sentiment we both shared, and had a good the same age as mine. laugh at our encroaching dotage. It was a warm My passenger recounted how several years ago his exchange on which we parted. then 18-year-old son was in the City on a night out One week later, I came across an item in the Daily with some mates. Late in the evening, one of his Telegraph entitled, ‘Leave people to their peril’: friends became involved in a scuffle outside a Hungry Citizens are under no obligation to rescue strangers in Jack’s. On moving to help his mate, my passenger’s peril, a court had ruled in dismissing an appeal by a man son was stabbed some ten times around the body. In stabbed after he sought sanctuary in a fast-food restaurant. an instant he was bleeding profusely, his life literally Eron Broughton was out in Sydney’s CBD early in 1998 draining down the gutter. News of what happened when he and three friends were threatened by a knife-wielding came at 4:30 am, when the local police knocked on the gang...they sought refuge in a Hungry Jack’s restaurant, door after fruitless attempts by the hospital to contact asking a security guard to call police. him and his wife.

But the guard pushed them Despite losing litres of back into the street where Mr The assailant was appreblood, the boy recovered.

Broughton was stabbed 10 What a guy. The assailant times. He sought damages in hended, charged, convicted, was apprehended, charthe District Court in 2003, jailed for a few years, then ged, convicted, jailed for claiming the guard’s negligent a few years, then released or reckless actions led to his released – only to knife some– only to knife someone injuries...The then 24-yearone else and return to jail else and return to jail. old lost his claim after Judge What a waste.

James Black found the chain In relating this tale, my passenger had obliquely did not owe Mr Broughton a duty of care. voiced his concern over his son’s ongoing fight for Mr Broughton appealed the verdict but it was dismissed justice. The boy was still in court, seven years later, yesterday by the Court of Appeal. pursuing a matter of principle relating to the attack.

This boy’s personal struggle brought to mind someAfter advising the boy to finally put the saga behind thing I heard recently. A terminally ill patient had comhim and get on with life, the kid emphatically mented to his mentor, ‘Sometimes it’s best to simply responded, ‘Dad, the physical scars may have healed, give up’. I interpreted this to mean that in life, you but in my head it feels so raw I’ll never get over it’. My must pick your battles. passenger looked across at me and shaking his head This advice seemed especially pertinent to my dissaid quietly, ‘It’s killing me to imagine what he feels’. traught passenger and his son’s long road to recovery.

My passenger had been a knockabout bloke most For them, those grandkids can’t come soon enough. of his life, growing up in the tough inner-west of Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

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July05_AU_Inside back cover.p65

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