Profound thought of the day: Risk is always opaque and catastrophe is more imminent than you think. I guess that’s the basis of the insurance industry.
Max and I had walked morning after morning since New Year, through sun, wind, calm and even an unseasonal fog that came in one morning from the Southern Ocean. Max was focused on fitness, going into election mode. It was never an easy thing to be a woman in politics. Aside from the culture of men, there was the looking good. Men had it so much easier in that regard. No daily make-up. No hair done. Well, minimal hair done. No polishing of nails or eyelash extensions. So few wardrobe decisions. So few shoe decisions. Very little waxing. Far less criticism of their visual imperfections.
We set a good pace, the two of us and, from 5.30, walked for the best part of an hour on the track along the river. We barely passed a dozen people. It was still the strangest part of being back in Hobart. Compared to New York, it was seriously lacking in population. Even with all the tourists, downtown Hobart after 8 pm was a quiet country village. On Sundays, you had to wonder if there hadn’t been a mass alien abduction.
At 5.30 am Max’s brain was already on. Apparently the water was getting warmer and scientists had discovered that a long stretch of kelp forests had died down the coast. Kelp forests seemed particularly vulnerable and Max was distressed.
‘The warmer water isn’t just bad for kelp,’ she said. ‘It has major ramifications. New South Wales is still recovering from Cyclone Pauline.’ Cyclone Pauline that had wreaked such havoc on the New South Wales coast last summer.
‘Why aren’t you a Green, Max?’ I asked.
‘Because they’ll never be in government. You know that.’
The newspaper had reported the arrival of a new poisonous jellyfish in the Derwent, a traveller from warmer waters. Several people had been hospitalised. There had also been a sewage leak from the out-of-date sewerage plant beside the city. Ten million litres straight into the Derwent River. Increased visitor numbers were blamed. Strangely, Hobartians weren’t making much of a fuss. Everyone seemed to have accepted the notion that effluent into the river was just fine. Even normal. It had happened before. Sandy Bay Beach and a string of other beaches down the Derwent had been deemed fit for secondary contact only. Meaning no swimming and every day it was over twenty-five degrees. The city was waiting for cool weather and a big rain. It had been dry since the thunderstorm on New Year’s Eve.
‘The closer we get to completion, the more I have this gnawing feeling,’ said Max.
‘You sure that’s not because election day follows?’ I asked. The official political party launches were yet to happen, but it was pre-election events morning, noon and night across the state. Between her and JC it was a Coleman blitz. Election signs were up in gardens bearing the trademark photos of people desperate for you to like them. Billboards were blazing messages of jobs and growth or education and health, depending on the party. Gilbert Farris had a big one at the main roundabout by the ABC, declaring Tasmania for Tasmanians. He was running as leader of a new party of the same name. They had candidates in every electorate.
The television was blaring ads, and every time I checked my social media there was a message supporting or denigrating my brother or my sister. JC was outspending Max ten to one again, it was clear.
‘Who’s funding him?’ I asked. ‘The gambling laws got stitched up last time …’
‘Ask him. Maybe this is the reward for getting the gambling laws through. The Liberals get funded through every election cycle until 2043. I’m still outraged. If I get elected, I’m going to do everything I can to undo that. A monopoly until 2043!’
‘It was Labor who first allowed the monopoly …’
‘I know, I know,’ said Max, shaking her head.
Tasmanians lost more than one hundred and fifty million dollars a year to pokie machines. On an island with a population of half a million, with thirty per cent of people living below the poverty line, the maths was steep. That was a lot of school lunches. And a lot of horses and art for the one family behind all the machines—who did not, of course, live in Tasmania.
‘You know, Max,’ I said, ‘for all the speculation about the bridge, I wonder whether it’s just that Tasmanians have been so unloved on the federal stage for so long that any investment, let alone a two-billion-dollar one, seems to smell. Frank Pringle said it when I first arrived and maybe he’s right. It’s like the kid who is so used to being punished, or shamed, that when something good comes along, they flinch and wait for the blow.’
Max frowned.
‘Look at what has happened over the past ten years or so,’ I said. ‘South Australia got that huge deal to build submarines. Nobody protested there—well, other than the people who weren’t awarded the contract. Queensland got that nightmare coalmine. A fair few people protested but it still went ahead. Western Australia got some massive new highways and, other than a few environmentalists trying to save the spotted pardalote or whatever, no complaints. Victoria got more power stations. Residents got a bit upset because coal is such a backward step, but again, not enough to change anything. New South Wales got power stations too, and dams and the Murray–Darling Basin, which it’s managed to destroy almost entirely.’
‘And now we’re up in arms when it’s our turn,’ said Max. ‘The difference in all those instances is that those projects created a lot of long-term jobs. They used local subcontractors.’
‘Well, the bridge is doing that too.’
‘For a moment, but after that, what is it really doing?’
‘Ferrying tourists?’
‘Yes, ferrying tourists to an already overrun very popular local destination. When two billion dollars could have brought every single child out of poverty here in Tasmania. Funded every government school, built a new hospital … Tasmanians don’t want a six-lane architectural folly messing up the view. They want their kids to have smaller class sizes. They want their hips replaced and their catheters removed without having to wait two years for it to happen …’
I’d mapped it all out—the groups and sub-groups, the interested parties and the key players. They were all on the wall at Bruny. I’d built dossiers on everyone, too, and where I thought they fitted. Liberal Party, Labor Party, the Greens or the People’s Republic of China. Or agents of seemingly insignificant groups like the Hunting and Fishing Party, who, since the bombing, had been advocating for citizens being able to own assault rifles to protect themselves against terrorist threats. They were also running a candidate in every electorate. I felt like the NRA was just a hair’s breadth away in Australia. There had been a horrific massacre here in 1996. Thirty-five people died when a young man opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon. Since then Australia had banned guns. Unless you were a member of a gun club. But when I looked into it, I’d discovered that membership of gun clubs had soared since 1996. It was only a matter of time before those owners became a lobby group and then you had an armed minority edging their way into power. Mussolini’s brown shirts had been of that order. Hitler’s black shirts for that matter.
Democracy is a privilege. Madeleine Albright, ex-Secretary of State, once said democracy was the most stable form of government in the long run, but the most vulnerable in the short term. It’s easy to forget. Look at the US and the state of emergency when the president couldn’t get his way. That’s what autocrats do. In France there would have been a rebellion. But in America there were just more homeless trying to find a space under a bridge to sleep the night. At least in Australia voting is compulsory. The results might be no better, but everyone has to take responsibility.
Max looked at her watch. ‘I’m on the ABC after the seven o’clock news this morning. What does your day look like?’
Things had momentarily slowed for me. Tasmanians were on holidays. The public servants were at their shacks. JC and Stephanie had taken the girls to their holiday house at Spring Beach. Their last break before the election was officially called. Kids were doing what kids had been doing for sixty thousand years in Tasmania: mucking about in water. At the swimmable beaches beyond the Derwent, in pools, in their backyards under sprinklers. When we were kids, Dad used to set up a long sheet of plastic in the backyard. We’d rub detergent all over ourselves and slide down it at speed with the hose on. My sloping paddock at Bruny would be just the place for that, too. I wondered if I’d ever have grandkids there. Would Paul and Tavvy always be in America?
The Bruny Bridge was back on track. The damaged caisson had been re-sunk into the riverbed and the tower rebuilt. The damaged cables were being re-strung and the roadway was being replaced, coming in sections on the barges from the manufacturing plant night and day. No more ‘incidents’. Other than the odd minor injury, bridge life was going smoothly. Dan was looking weary when we intersected briefly at the cafe. He seemed preoccupied and he probably was. Or maybe it was because I’d been rather cool to him since New Year. I just figured it was best. There was no future there. Yes, maybe a fling, but then what? I was going back to New York in March. Did I really want to get involved with an ex-army tradie from Tasmania twelve years my junior?
To Max I said: ‘I’m having lunch with the Chinese.’
Max dropped me at JC’s and I watched her drive away in her Subaru all-wheel drive, the car of choice for Tasmanians. Back in my downstairs apartment, I made a berry smoothie and sat out by the pool to drink it while I considered my lunch date.
May Chen and I saw each other every week at the Friday bridge meeting. JC or Frank, or both, Mick Feltham, Chen, the government PR people … it was the weekly update and incubation chamber for good-news stories all the way. Last Friday, May Chen had invited me to lunch. She had texted me an address on the waterfront in Battery Point, a little heritage suburb right beside the city.
Were the Chinese involved in Australian politics? Their main focus appeared to be infrastructure and economics in Africa, in the Middle East, in the Pacific and southern Europe. No different to any emerging power historically.
There were also many different sorts of Chinese. Mainland Chinese, Hong King Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, Cambodian Chinese, Filipino Chinese, Thai Chinese, Vietnamese Chinese, Australian Chinese, American Chinese. There were a lot of them. A pretty significant part of Australia’s population was Chinese. Didn’t they deserve representation? And, ultimately, was it any different to a whole lot of Anglo-Saxons taking over the world two hundred years ago?
With the US in protectionist mode, the likelihood of global warfare was escalating. The Chinese and the Russians had been in a standoff in the South China Sea since the US had withdrawn. In the last two thousand years, we’d had the rise of the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans, the Spanish, the British, the Germans, the Japanese and the US. Now it was China’s turn. I was interested to see what they would make of the task.
There was logic in Australia allying with China. If China ceased the flow of students to Australia, or the flow of tourists, it was going to hurt big time. Australia was vulnerable. A great continent sitting pretty in the southern hemisphere with all its land, its mineral riches, so few people, so little forward thinking, and no sovereign wealth fund. Despite one hundred and fifty years and more of pulling resources up out of the ground, Australia was vulnerable to the vagaries of world economics. It could have been robust. Could have shaved a profit off everything dug up and sold and put it into a fund, like the Oil Fund in Norway. That would have made Australia a major player investing internationally. Could have protected Australia from every market fluctuation. But that golden opportunity was gone. Instead, Australian governments stumbled about looking for quick ways to make money, and some of those decisions looked very flimsy. Was the Bruny Bridge another one?
I’m trained to analyse variables. Across the world, populist leaders have risen up on the discontent of the disenfranchised. Some of those leaders were left, some right, and some supposedly centrist. Lots of them were building their platform on religious doctrine. Voters were increasingly incensed at the world’s failure to deliver the better life they were promised. And women were always the first casualties of extremism and war. The women most affected by domestic violence in the US came from Christian homes. The women most violated in the Middle East and Africa lived in Muslim homes. A hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell wondered why women, once they got the vote, voted for men at all.
People were always frightened of losing out, of having what was theirs taken away; they were resentful at being overrun, of never getting ahead. If someone in Tasmania could sell the family farm, then so be it. It was a free country. Everyone for himself and herself.
Australian foreign land ownership rules let most anyone buy anything. That wasn’t the case in smarter countries. But Australia’s best farming and grazing land had been sold off with not a thought to food and water security for Australians over the coming generations. Energy security too. In Western Australia they’d just privatised their grid and given forty-nine per cent ownership to a Chinese consortium which, when a journalist looked into it, was basically funded by the Chinese government. That’s globalisation.
As for the Chinese, they were buying up assets wherever they found them: Greece, Turkey, Africa, South America, the Pacific and now Tasmania. The Belt and Road Initiative was about buying cooperation by way of Chinese investment in ports, rail, bridges, roads, oil and gas pipelines. It still felt like Bruny was a very out of the way place for China to want to connect to, but maybe it was the Antarctic thing …
The bombing of the Bruny Bridge had been the impetus for the passing of the foreign labour laws. The Chinese got to sell us more steel. Now there were Chinese workers arriving by the plane load in mining areas in remote parts of Australia through summer. There was talk of bringing in foreign teachers, too, because there was a shortage now in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney. But this wasn’t really about a skills shortage. It was about the cost of labour. The corporate sector didn’t want to reduce profits and increase wages. The government didn’t want to increase taxes. People weren’t paid for the wealth they helped generate. They were paid whatever amount they were desperate enough to accept. The lack of long-term planning by government after government was biting Australia hard. Everything felt like a kneejerk reaction. I’d watched that in the US after Obama. Kneejerk politics got dangerous fast.
Australia was educating Chinese students at a vast rate. It left the whole education sector vulnerable to any shift in policy from Beijing, but nobody seemed to think it was a problem. I’d met with the vice-chancellor of the Tasmanian university, and we’d chatted at social functions too. He was well-meaning. Academics always think they’re well-meaning. But the real world chews up altruists and feeds them to the narrow-minded. One word from the Eternal Fragrant President and a billion-dollar river of students flowing to Australia could be diverted to India, the Middle East, or simply back to China again.
The Chinese Communist Party espoused very different values and loyalties to those held by the everyday Australian. But who was the everyday Australian now? Was it the second-generation Australian born of Indian parents? A fifth-generation Queensland farmer? Was it an outer suburban couple in Melbourne both working full-time with their three kids at state schools? The single mother juggling work and uni to get a better qualification? The indigenous grandmother in Alice. Or a gay couple in Sydney with their European car and annual skiing holiday? There was no everyday Australian, no matter what politicians told us.
‘What are Australian values, now?’ I’d asked Max.
‘Jeepers,’ she’d said. ‘Kindness? I’m not so sure. Europe has done integration of immigrants so much better than us. At least until recently.’
I agreed. In the seventies, Australia had been the nation of the fair go—an idea embraced from the prime minister down. One wins, we all win. Me, Max and JC had grown up in that era. There was free university too. A whole lot of very smart kids from poorer homes got educated. But it was bled dry, that national heart. And the person who drained that goodwill was a little man called John Howard, a tracksuit-wearing conservative prime minister who, over the eleven years of his leadership, persuaded an optimistic nation to become pessimistic. How did he do that? With fear. And the greatest fear facing Australia? Refugees. Not the droughts, floods and fires predicted by climate change scientists. Nor the loss of food production that would flow from that. Refugees.
Millions of refugees running from impossible landscapes, from cities bombed to dust, from terrible regimes, from the fear of never being able to offer their children a better life. Or simply because they could no longer grow food in a place where it hadn’t rained in ten years. Millions of refugees were wanting to come live next door to you, if you believed the John Howards, and the Murdoch press. What a legacy Rupert Murdoch had left in his wake. Dumbing down the national conversation in the US, the UK and Australia to three-word headlines and shock-jock opinion. Intelligent commentary and reporting had withered on the vine, save for a few notable exceptions. The political left splintered into a hundred self-interest groups. The right sprouted a whole lot of hatred. And big business kept getting bigger.
I thought about the Chinese and Antarctica. What no-one knew was how difficult it might be to stop the Chinese if they did begin mineral exploration down there without consent. We hadn’t stopped the Japanese and their whaling, despite diplomatic pressure. Mining in the subcontinent was way more problematic. I wanted to believe it wouldn’t come to hostilities. I am, despite everything, a great believer in diplomacy.
Mind you, nothing had stopped the Chinese marching into Tibet. The world had let that happen because it was China. So there were going to be things to negotiate.
People worried about the Russians because of their intervention in western elections, but Russia wasn’t a consideration. Australia’s exports to the US were a tad behind Russia’s, but the new US tariffs were killers, worse for Russia than Australia, and toughest of all on China. Current US foreign policy was like the bully who climbs a tower and lobs rocks at everyone below, and then wonders why he’s unpopular. At some point, that tower is going to get stormed.
Standing with China was the wiser move for Australia. Whether people liked it or not, they were the emerging power. A thousand years ago a Viking was a king in England. A whole lot of Christians were off on crusades, running amok fighting the Turks in the Middle East. The Muslims were in their Golden Age. The Holy Roman Empire was Europe’s most powerful state. Jewish people were being persecuted and black people were slaves. There were incredible kingdoms in Cambodia, China and Japan. A lot can change over millennia. And some things don’t.
What came to light over the next few weeks, I could never have predicted, sitting there on that benign Monday morning drinking my smoothie and considering the current global picture. It completely blindsided me. And it blindsided Tasmanians too. But not JC. Oh, no. My little brother, at that moment up at his cliff-top beach house reading the morning paper, my brother the traitor, knew about it all along.