What’s in the movies isn’t always true or pretty, but sometimes it is true and ugly. And you come out kind of reeling with the relief that you don’t have to live in that narrative. So it was with Gomorrah, a fictionalised documentary about the Naples Comorrah mafia.
It would be hard to find a more striking contrast to the stylish, proud Italy of designer clothes and furniture, or the lush decadence of Caravaggio long ago. The Italy of the mafia has no beautiful people, no sense of a good or caring or even competent society. No wonder Roberto Saviano, who wrote the book the film is based on, is watching his back. Knives and bullets are never far away for the hapless residents, and escaping from the tentacles of corruption is not easy.
At the other side of the Atlantic, Notorious is a film about a rap star, Biggie Small, his life and death. I knew the rap culture had some crime, but not to the extent shown in this movie. I’ve remarked before that everything I need to know I learn at the movies, and now I have seen enough of the Mafia and rap culture to keep well away from both.
Emerging stereotypes populate both films: the infiltration of Chinese into new business arenas, and the old-new/west coast- east coast rivalries in the US. Well that second one is not new, but its manifestation in rap gangs probably is more recent. Thirty years ago there was research about Black English Vernacular, and rap culture has helped to entrench it. The dialect in the Mafia movie and the semi-gangsta rap language were equally out of my range, my native tongue not helping much with the BEV.
Always good to come home, and even the chill of a Canberra winter is welcome after an evening in someone else’s nightmare world. The pleasing almost-spring scenes on the remaining streets in the Parliamentary Triangle that haven’t been given over to apartments reflect the bucolic public service culture. Lucky us! Our government works pretty well, most of the time.

Or so I am able to convince myself, until reality jolts again. Front page, Canberra Times, today: lotsa big trees will be chopped down on City Hill to make way for the development. More shops, of course, forget the design of Canberra, and they haven’t worked out how to calm the traffic around that small but precious treed hill. Another chip at the historic centre of the capital, which is almost now old enough to be a feature. The Melbourne and Sydney Buildings will look seedy next to shiny windows – I imagine Moscow has similar conflicts, and that they are resolved more like in Gomorrah than in Barton.
What isn’t valued gets lost, be it trees or heritage or good government. But there is hope, as the Libs and the Greens in the ACT have agreed to ‘work together’ on an issue. I suppose the ordinances controlling the display of advertising material in front of shops is pretty important, but I can’t help thinking it’s not quite what I would have liked from a party with the balance of power. Go Greens! But forward, please. It’s so hard to get worked up about ACT politics, as no one seems to take on the bigger issues of planning with vision. But at least no pollies here have water boards or guns.

The release of Malcolm Turnbull’s “Greener, Cheaper, Smarter ETS” puts the seal on his demise. You can explain Utegate away as a bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime accident, but the idea that you fight the government’s ETS by producing one of your own, is complete incompetence.
Apart from anything else, with his credibility, undeservedly, in tatters over a faked email, who is going to believe him when he says his ETS is better than Rudd’s?
It shows that Turnbull just doesn’t “get” politics, and neither, it appears do many of his colleagues. The result is that they may be wedged and forced into a double dissolution election that, while it won’t deliver Rudd control of the Senate, will decimate the Coalition.
The Coalition has a perfectly simple line available to it on the ETS. It is that it will do nothing to slow global warming because unless the rest of the world signs on to similar schemes all it will do is shift Australian emissions to countries without an ETS, and with them, Australian jobs.
This would mesh with growing community concerns that Kevin Rudd doesn’t deliver while avoiding the wedge of whether man-made CO2 emissions are a significant problem. Both the Greens and the coal mining unions could run with this, as could Wilson Tuckey and Greg Hunt.
The ETS is, like the GST, a tax on everything, and like the GST before its implementation, and for sometime after, most people don’t like it. There is also a broad political coalition arrayed against it. It should be easy to beat.
What’s more it is bad policy.
No matter what you think about global warming, the worst way to tackle it is via a complicated artificial market-based mechanism where rights to pollute will be traded using arcane financial instruments, much like, until recently, we’ve been trading mortgages, and we know where that led.
Turnbull undoubtedly needs an alternative policy, and for this there are two options.
He can propose a carbon tax which will replace existing taxes in the system so as to be fiscally neutral. As a tax on virtually everything, it has the many of the same problems of the ETS and is not something you would cheerfully take to an election.
Or he can point out that no matter how high the cost of CO2 emissions, there are no alternative technologies available at the moment to replace hydrocarbon fuels, and that the most sensible use of public monies would be to encourage development of those technologies.
Of course, if the rest of the world comes on board with an ETS, then we will have little choice but to go along with one, but until they do, there is nothing for Australia, and nothing for the Opposition, in supporting an ETS.

John Pilger has been awarded this year’s Sydney Peace Prize. John is a frequent contributor to On Line Opinion via material that we republish from his website, often at his suggestion.
The media release of the announcement says:

Examples of his work include an account of the British and American governments’ secret ‘mass kidnappings’ of a whole population of the Chagos Islands in the Indian ocean to make way for an American military base. His 1979 film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia depicted the horrors of the Pol Pot regime and the plight of the Khmer people. In 1994, Death of a Nation, shot under cover in East Timor, galvanized world wide support for the East Timorese people. His re-making of the film Palestine is Still the Issue reminds the world of a continuing occupation and cruel injustice.

Sydney Peace Foundation Director Professor Stuart Rees comments, “The jury was impressed by John’s courage as well as by his skills and creativity. His commitment to uncovering human rights abuses shines through his numerous books, films and articles. His work inspires all those who value peace with justice.”