On The Rooftops Where We Live
This, then, was their moment, caught here in our own journeyman past; confounded by the present, yearning, so quietly now, for a return to commonsense. We were yours for the taking. We fell across our own entrails. He was here in the same part of Sydney where he had been half a century before. Fifty two years before, in 1968, he had celebrated his 16th birthday with a wild drunken night and a furor into the dawn, and his friend to see him across the line. He came from a dull suburb. It was all very shocking. He loved it.
This, then, was how he escaped his father. Made his first acquaintance with galactics. Poured concern over a beaten flesh. Tried to heal a wounded soul. Made no attempt to protect himself in a suicidal elegance; as the rivers of images flowed through him and he gathered power. Angry, they moved across their own waters. He ploughed through the great rivers, landed here in this time and place, carefully calibrated, could feel a thousand plugs tethering him to circumstance, could hear the cries of derision, "murderer, murderer", after he rebuffed a young man's advances and Tim drank himself to death; dropping cold in the front bar of the Rex Hotel.
So that all the indecencies of youth just sloughed away in a single death. Murderer. Murderer. He died of a broken heart. Now old, now concealed in a man who's disheveled face he barely recognised, caught between the times when everything worked and nothing worked, when their own submission gave way to a crawling routine, when he remained surprised by the subservience and compliance of the people, when all else failed, when he could feel the straps and the gates planking out further and further, enveloping millions of people. He was comfortable with none of them. A nation was a nation no more.
He remained, in New South Wales, in a fools paradise.
Masks on public transport, although there were no cases. Scanning QR codes where ever you went, tracing apps which did all their work for them, pinned here to Earth, reaching up to laugh at you because we are vital now, alive, vigorous, coffee and breakfast in the past, the same mad woman yelling over and over again, "Leave me alone, leave me alone".
A cry he could hear them tracking. A voice that could surround the Earth. A blessing that came walking across the waters, to you, to you, and the embrace of a missing loved one, the abnegation of a messy past, the embrace of a new sugar daddy, a semblance of peace in the calmness of a storm, and here, here, he found the things that he wanted and the understanding he had always tried to grasp, through the lattice, through the infrastructure that still lingered in these places of his youth, to old connections where no one lived, to an entertainment district that had been totally destroyed.
They still worshiped the witch, or a witch.
He could see the destruction everywhere. The hidden bodies. A highway that ran through the heart of everything, a people untroubled by anything, even their own futures.
He could stumble up to caring. He could wave a divine right of kings, stalk above the surface, be taller than he was, grasp for meaning in the same way he had done half a century before, flashback after flashback as he walked the same streets, past the same locations, caught the same steps, mirrored his own requests.
Fool's gold. Those streets were empty. The people overlaid those who had gone before, and were of no consequence in his life. A person amongst persons. A people amongst people. These had changed their entire nature, bore little or no resemblance to those people he had known before, carried not his heart or his disgrace, knew none of his stories and he none of theirs, watched as women walked their prams and gay men swept urgently towards the gym, he of the highbrow and there in the low.
A dog stopped. its owner doodled. We would walk again.
HEADLINES
Facebook will restore news content for Australian users this week after the Morrison government agreed to make amendments to its proposed media bargaining laws.
But while Aussies get the news back in their feeds, the power still sits squarely with Facebook and Rupert Murdoch, experts say.
The backflip comes after Facebook blocked all news on its platform in Australia last week – including government pages and health and emergency services – in response to proposed legislation that would force tech giants to negotiate a fair payment with news publishers for sharing their content.
The historic ban rocked Australia and the world, serving as a warning to other governments considering enforcing similar rules on the company.
But on Tuesday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher announced a deal had been made just as the legislation was being debated in the Senate.
“Facebook has re-friended Australia,” Mr Frydenberg told reporters as he announced the amendments.
But what does this mean in practice? And who’s got the better end of the deal?
The winners
The biggest winners are Facebook and major news outlets like News Limited and Channel Nine, say digital media experts.
“It’s Facebook’s win for the most part,” said Axel Bruns, a digital media researcher at Queensland University of Technology.
“It’s watering down the news media bargaining code in the way that it’s been designed. It essentially means that Facebook can’t easily be forced into any kind of arbitration it doesn’t want.”
In other words, as long as Facebook has signed commercials deals with some “significant players” like Channel Nine, News Limited or the ABC, it will not be included in the code.
#BREAKING: In a positive development this afternoon, Seven West Media has announced a commercial partnership with Facebook to provide news content across their metro & regional media platforms. @PaulFletcherMP
— Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) February 23, 2021
“It’s going to be very difficult for anyone to do anything with the code,” said Dr Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University.
“It’s a bit like a gun that sits in the Treasurer’s desk that he decides not to use.”
It’s also up to Facebook to decide if it pays one news outlet more than another.
“It’s a shift of balance from the stick to the carrot for Facebook,” Professor Bruns said.
Reminding Australia of its powerful position on Tuesday, Facebook’s head of news partnerships Campbell Brown said the company “will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation”.
This means Facebook can suddenly remove news for Australian users again in the future if it doesn’t get its way.
Major news outlets
“The biggest winner is News Limited,” Dr Leaver told TND.
“That’s because they got what they wanted, which was finding a mechanism to get some money out of social media companies, which they’ve never managed to do before.”
It is no secret that Australia’s newspaper ownership is already among the most concentrated in the world.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia owns nearly two-thirds of the country’s daily newspapers, including the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and The Australian.
And it appears the company is going to come out on top again.
“As far as I’m aware, they’re the only ones to strike a global deal,” Dr Leaver said.
Professor Bruns said the bargaining agreement would provide some cash flow to large commercial operators like Channel Nine or News Corp Australia.
“It’ll be like royalties in the music industry – money always ends up going mainly to the big labels,” he said.
“It will benefit some of the major players, like Nine and News Corp and maybe the ABC but that’s about it.”
The losers
Regional newspapers, independent news outlets and the Australian public won’t get much out of the deal.
The main benefit is that Facebook will start allowing news content back on its platform again, but it won’t do much to boost media diversity.
That’s because large media companies will likely snap up all the commercial deals with platforms.
“Facebook has never had much sense of its social responsibilities,” Professor Bruns said.
“The major news organisations are very much in it for themselves to supplement funding, given their underlying business model has basically failed.
“And the government, none of what it’s done… is designed to support small news outlets to grow diversity in the Australian media landscape, or in any way provide more support to struggling news business in the regions.”
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Business leaders and welfare advocates have blasted the Morrison government’s decision to establish a hotline for employers to dob in unemployed Australians who refuse job offers, calling the measure out of touch with small business owners who believe “most unemployed people are not dole bludgers”.
Unions have been even more critical of what they see as the “dangerous” hotline, warning it could force women into accepting jobs from employers who treat them poorly or who make “sleazy propositions” to them during an interview.
In revealing a $50-a-fortnight rise to the base rate of jobseeker on Tuesday, the government also announced it would launch “an employer reporting line” to “refer jobseekers who are not genuine about their job search or decline the offer of a job”.
Explaining the government’s reasoning behind the measure, the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said “you often hear, though, employers saying, ‘Joe applied for a job. He was qualified for the job ... and they said no”.