THE PLACES FLED XIV

Caniston, NSW, Australia

The places fled included the seaside suburb where he had grown up, where the swish of cars down a long hill led to a flat scattering of shops near the beach, and where, from the seclusion of their home high on the hill, there seemed to be life. Or more likely fear. Where people went about their daily lives, and he watched and barely understood, as if an intelligence had been patched inside his physical self, just to watch. Their extended frames. Their certaintities. A few blocks from the main road was the school which, equally, loomed in his imagination as a place of uncertainty and discontent, of a certain sweeping, gnawing, magnificent malignence. As if the texture of the world had gone bad. And in all the high drama of the end times which they thought they were living through, he clasped a tiny fraility, and did not know. Everyone else seemed solid on the earth. He did not. He devoured science fiction as he devoured every other form of escape, and waited for the wheels to turn. For his time to come.

He had spent several days in what some might call a self indulgent funk, crying over spilt milk, although no amount of crying would bring back what he had lost. He was angry at what had happened, and angry at himself for letting it happen. And dwelled on things which weren't worth dwelling on, which would do no good. These things were gone now. Apparitions would flap back into the streets and villages from whence they came, and everything would move slowly. This was a time of had work and quiet suffering, until the old repetitive strain injuries reignited, and suddenly his shoulders and his arms and his body crunched over in a persistent pain he had almost forgotten.

When he first went to Thailand he barely touched a typewriter for six or more months, because of the pain. Because he was sick of words defining everything. And when he did, everything ignited in a terrible collapse. He wrote and wrote, trying to establish a new self, a new life away from Australia and work. But all those efforts to start up a new life fell over, for one reason or another. Perhaps most, he trusted people he should never have trusted. Believed people he should never have believed. But ultimately, there was no use blaming anyone but himself. And now, everything came home to roost. In quiet days and reignited pain. And moods, of longing and despair.

Feelings aren't facts, he kept telling himself, repeating an old therapeutic line popular 20 years before. Feelings aren't facts, but they might as well have been, the way they bludgeoned into him. And feelings were something he had never dealt with well. Never. "I never wanted to feel anything, because to feel anything was to be hurt," he used to say. But it didn't help, when the melancholy just kept battering in at him, and he mingled, briefly, with people who, in their happy, gossip filled circles, "I'm gunna bash him", would always regard him as an outsider. He was twice or three times their age, for starters, had been out to party before they were born. So there was nothing he could say or do that would ingratiate him as anything but an oddity, someone just passing through. He hadn't wanted to pass through Thailand. He had wanted to stay there, live there, put down roots, find meaningful work, make friends, but it was not to be. And so he came back to places once fled, to quiet houses and settled communities where he did not belong; and continued what had come to seem like an eternal vigil.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/national/laurie-oakes-looks-at-kevin-rudds-2013-campaign-in-remarkable-times/story-fncynjr2-1226747251019

Kevin Rudd called the election on Sunday, August 4, characteristically announcing it by email from his car as he left Government House.

"It's on," said the message.

In the evening he invited three key members of his staff - Bruce Hawker, Jim Murphy and Patrick Gorman - to dinner at the Lodge.

MORE EXTRACTS: THE REMARKABLE RISE OF TONY ABBOTT

Afterwards he produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky he'd bought that afternoon and poured each of them a small glass.

Kevin Rudd wanted to try and do everything “faster and faster’’ during the 2013 election campaign, a Julia Gillard supporter told political journalist Laurie Oakes. Source: News Limited

It was a ritual, Rudd explained, dating back to the 1998 election which brought him into parliament as the MP for the Brisbane seat of Griffith.

Fearing he could lose his voice during the campaign he went to the local liquor store with his campaign manager, Alister Jordan, and bought a bottle of Black Label because "we thought one slug would kill all the wogs in your throat".

He'd never liked Scotch until then, Rudd said.

Kevin Rudd ran a “frantic’’ and “frenzied’’ 2013 election campaign, a Julia Gillard supporter says. Source: News Limited

He and Jordan sipped a glass each evening, and the bottle lasted through to election day.

Since then he'd done the same in every campaign.

A couple of weeks in, as Rudd's poll ratings dropped, stories circulated about tension and disagreements between ALP electioneering HQ in Melbourne and the team on the PM's plane. Critics in the party started making comparisons between the shambolic campaign and the way they claimed Rudd ran the government in his first stint as prime minister, before Gillard replaced him.

A couple of weeks into the 2013 campaign, stories circulated about tension and disagreements between ALP electioneering HQ in Melbourne and the team on Kevin Rudd’s plane. Source: News Limited

"It's the campaign you would expect from Kevin under pressure," a Gillard supporter told me. "His reaction to acute political pressure has always been to get more frantic, more frenzied.

Call for more people, more resources. Try to do everything faster and faster. You can see that's the cycle we're in."

Out now: Laurie Oakes new book. Source: News Limited

Remarkable Times by Laurie Oaks is published on Tuesday 29 October by Hachette Australia

Be one of the first 100 to buyRemarkable Times for $32.99 including delivery and receive a copy signed by Laurie Oakes. Call 1300 306 107 from 10am Monday or post a cheque to Book Offers: P.O Box 14730 Melbourne Vic 8001. Please allow 14 days for delivery.

   

WINDSCREENS

Clunes, NSW, Australia

There were the times, abridged, when the car had spun out of control on a six lane highway. He had hitch hiked half way across America, without incident you might say, when rain splattered across the highway. And shortly thereafter the driver, who had only just taken back control of the vehicle, didn't slow down. The car, doing great turns in the braking traffic, veered into the oncoming traffic. He wasn't going to die yet, but time had stopped, or slowed to increments. At the last minute the spinning car veered back the other way, crossing the highway and slamming into a ditch. Nobody stopped. They got out and stared at the mangled front. All hell was going to break loose in a single second, and they were surprised to be alive, or at least uninjured. He didn't remember now if there was steam from the radiator or not, although if it had been in the movies there would have been.

Random things came through windscreens, death most like. The world was heaving and he was lost in a minor outpost of consciousness; the dark storms just tunnels down a sink, a fractured lust. They could see everything and nothing. It was born of desperation, this desire to escape his pursuers. They distorted everything; turned everything into horror. If they had retreated, disengaged, he couldn't stand the tempest. No, he never had counselling for the torment they put him through. There could be no further explanation. They couldn't stand high in the mountain grove and pretend their DNA, their own strands of consciousness, would reach down into a generation they could not see. Events had overtaken torment; and he could do a perfectly good job of driving himself crazy. He didn't know what the next step was.

If he had missed the obvious, perhaps it was an obvious that was not meant to be. He didn't know. He had tried to establish a home, a base, so often, and they had all come crashing down. And now he had been nomadic for more than a year, and was fed up with it, too. He wanted his own place again, to interact with the world at his own discretion, as he saw fit, to be his own boss, master of his own destiny. Instead of being tossed by circumstance, and virulent spite. All else was pontless. Gravy at the bottom of a pan. Murk that couldn't even surface to a vivid dream. He buried his head more firmly. And waited for the wheels to turn.

As if all could be sensible, a deadened routine. If they wouldn't pursue him forever, for what? If they hadn't so determinedly wanted to kill him, for what? Time stretched out down too quiet streets, pointless, pointless. He could smell them, even as they were. A life lived in cars. A pointless gratitude. Another view across another sea. A barrel scraped bare. A terrible thing which had led nowhere. A car veering into oncoming traffic. He had always thought he would die through the windscreen of a car; and yet here he was. "How old are you?" one of the gang of bored youth shouted as he walked away, having just bummed a cigarette. "Three times your age," he answered back, and subsided into his old car, his mate ex-army. Shortly after the souped up cars cranked up, and shortly after the point was quiet. The tide was low; the night waves surfacing slow. "If you want to get rid of everyone just bum a cigarette," he observed; and they went back to watching the sea, unfulfilled.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/julia-gillard-and-kevin-rudd-demand-bigger-perks-for-former-prime-ministers/story-fni0cx12-1226766891140

KEVIN Rudd bombarded the incoming Abbott government with demands for taxpayer-funded assistance for two Brisbane offices, staff and other perks, even ringing the Prime Minister to discuss his arrangements.

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal former prime minister Julia Gillard, who is believed to have secured a six-figure cash advance to write her memoirs, also requested an office in Melbourne and Adelaide and also sought an extra staffer, citing John Howard's arrangements as a precedent. Her request for a second office was denied.

MILLION DOLLAR PMS

KEVIN RUDD $200,000 pension plus estimated $300,000-a-year office and travel costs

JULIA GILLARD $200,000 pension plus estimated $300,000-a-year office and travel costs

JOHN HOWARD $250,000 pension plus $300,000 a year in office and travel costs.

PAUL KEATING $140,000-a-year office, travel, phone costs + pension

BOB HAWKE $130,000-a-year in office, travel, phone costs + pension

MALCOLM FRASER $220,000-a-year office, travel, phone + pension

GOUGH WHITLAM $125,000-a-year office, travel, phone + pension*

Source: Department of Finance documents.

When in New York, the two ex-PMs have also requested airport pick-up from the Department of Foreign Affairs and VIP treatment at international airports allowing them to skip the customs queue. Recently, this prompted a senior DFAT official to joke they should ask the ex-PMs to share a cab.

Keeping Labor's ex-PMs happy with offices, cars, pensions and free flights has proved double trouble for the incoming government. Traditionally, the new PM finalises the arrangements in consultation with their predecessors.

Kevin Rudd has defended the arrangements confirming he is in the process of finalising staffing and office arrangements.

"As of Friday, Mr Rudd's office had not received confirmation from the Government about his staff entitlements for the period ahead. It is a matter for the Government of the day," a spokeswoman said.

"Mr Rudd has not been allocated any staff by the current government as a former PM beyond that currently provided to Former PMs Keating and Hawke.

"He is unaware of staffing arrangements for Mr. Howard. Nor of current arrangements for Ms. Gillard.

"Mr Rudd has not been allocated extra staff by the government for assistance in writing any memoir."

With taxpayer funded pensions for life worth an estimated $200,000 a year, Labor's ex-PMs will double the retirement costs of former Prime Minister John Howard who served for 11 years. Based on Mr Howard's annual office, travel and car costs of $300,000 a year, the cost of keeping two former Labor PMs is likely to cost taxpayers up to $1 million a year in pensions, travel, car and office costs.

Unable to work together in government, it has emerged the bitter Labor enemies found one thing they could agree on - some of the taxpayer-funded benefits traditionally available to ex-PMs only after they leave politics should be granted to Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd while they remained in parliament.

"Clearly, it was a cosy deal but it was the taxpayer that footed the bill,'' a senior Coalition source said.

When he quit as foreign minister in 2012, the gravy train continued with Mr Rudd securing an entitlement to more taxpayer funded travel and spousal travel than he would have secured as a normal backbencher.

Asked directly if any of her staffers would now be involved in preparing research material for her memoirs, a spokesman for Ms Gillard referred the question to departmental officials.

"Staff arrangements for Ms Gillard have been approved by Prime Minister Abbott,'' he said. "The guidelines for Ms Gillard are exactly the same as those applying to other prime ministers. Any queries should be directed to the relevant government ministers and departments." 

SCURRYING RATS

NSW, Australia

Bittersweat, symphony, by the Verve kept playing through his head. Old scums came scurrying through abandoned places. Chums, some of them, in the brief lumiscence of the night. Before all was gone. Humble yourself before God, came the dictate, and so he did, living quietly. It was too moronic, some of the things that had happened, and now he was just quiet. He missed the Vietnamese and their coffee in the morning, as if it was hard to establish a routine in such a place. He watched the handsome tradies in the morning, on their way to work. Sometimes lounging, sometimes flirting with a girl. All fit as. The old places, dying inside his brain, were vivid traces of past loyalties and betrayals. In his case, grossly misplaced loyalties. The cyclone had gone through his life and left it even worse than before. The pain was back. A shadow, but there were no shadows. Everything was too exposed.

So he just went through the motions and waited for the wheels to turn, as they always did. Collapsed and coaelescing. Ancient routines, ancient places which stretched back thousands of years. And then he went for his walks. They weren't evil, the people who said good morning as he passed, or made some form of acknowledgement as he walked past. Out with their dogs, or each other, or in lycra exercising. Nothing ever happened here. There was no danger. People struggled; and that was that. Cold, still, as summer crept slowly in upon them. The smoke that had pooled across the Illawara had disippated. A terrible thing, what happened, someone said. But more often it was just a chant: "I didn't know, I didn't know that about..."

He was born in terribe days, with the black clouds spilling over the escarpment. Yet here there was nothing but a gentle sound of birds; of people waking, of radios and televisions in surrounding houses. Yet most of them were quiet, too, as they went about their quiet, quiet lives. The houses contained and muffled every sound. An arch bitch, she curled up in the sky and screached: "I'm going to get you for that." And on the ground, in a spread of dark alleys, the rats scurried for cover. Their pert little faces and nasty teeth, their rodent like demeanour. They could do what they liked, have their temporary victories, but they would always be rats, thieves scurrying for cover in a web of lies. So he nodded at people on his morning walks along the edge of Lake Illawarra, as was expected. The bigger the city, the less they acknowledged you. Here they all said good morning.

So he had been robbed and thrown back to where he did not want to be. It was a shrug of a nothing in comparison to what else was happening. The pain kept cramping through his shoulders; but other things would happen soon enough. As if it all fell on to him. 2013, a difficult year, some said. Well yes, it was, and not just for him. All could be commandeered, wasted. But he wasn't going to surrender. Everything they ever did to persecute and intimidate him had backfired; as they exposed their own corruption. But he was not about to engage, not here, not now. He would live quiet, but not die quiet, not for now. The screaming of the light, the screaching of the dispossessed, the agony of thought, all would come forth. But not now, not now. With the light filtering through the trees, the water birds feeding at the edge of the lake, the water chopped by wind. And a nod, good morning, from a comfortable face.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-24/pilot-killed-in-bushfire-crash/5043838

The Rural Fire Service Commissioner has paid tribute to the pilot of a plane which crashed in rugged terrain while water-bombing a fire in southern New South Wales.

David Black, 43, died when his Dromader aircraft crashed while fighting a fire at Wirritin in Budawang National Park, 40 kilometres west of Ulladulla, around 10am on Thursday.

Reports say one of the plane's wings fell off before the aircraft plummeted to the ground.

RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons described the death of the pilot as a "huge tragedy".

"It's a tragedy for the fire-fighting community, of course, but first and foremost we're acutely aware that it's a tragedy for this young man's family," he said.

PHOTO: David Black died in the crash. (AAP Image/Facebook)

"He's a husband with young children and we are all acutely aware that there's a family suffering because their dad hasn't come home.

"We will give all the support we can to the family, and I'm sure they know that the people of New South Wales will be eternally grateful for his work in trying to suppress those fires."

Fires burned near the wreckage, and water-bombing aircraft were forced to fly sorties to keep the fires at bay as teams attempted to reach Mr Black's body.

Key bushfire links:

• Blog: Pilot confirmed dead as fires flare
• ABC Emergency: abc.net.au/news/emergency
• Rural Fire Service: rfs.nsw.gov.au
• Bureau of Meteorology: bom.gov.au

Late on Thursday afternoon local police superintendent Joe Cassar said high winds had made it too difficult to retrieve the body.

"We are continuing to try to get the helicopters in there but where we find ourselves at the moment is, it is far too dangerous to send any personnel down there to retrieve the pilot," he said.

Mr Fitzsimmons says Mr Black was making a real difference to his community and the community of New South Wales.

"At the end of the day, we talk about firefighting necessarily so, but there is such a big human dimension," he said.

"There is a family that is not going to welcome home their dad and their husband, and they have got a lifetime of hurt, a lifetime ahead of them to mourn the loss of their father who was doing some extraordinary work."

AT RISK

Oak Flats, NSW, Australia

Stir crazy, frustrated, trapped in a cage, these were the humble days when all of longing was compressed into a single stream, and as always he felt a desperate yearning, for nothing, for everything. He slept a lot, in his life almost invariably a sign of depression, and walked through so many streets, as if there was an answer when there was none. All of it could be seen at once. All could be managed. All could be walked through. There wasn't any way out of this. His shoulders ached. Still haunted, still desperate for something else, he kept walking and walking and all the streams came through in the darkest times; splashing like lava on a blackened shore. He culdn't find his way out. He culdn't see who was standing there. He couldn't stay asleep, unconscious forever. And so all that had happened, it just curdled into a pointless dream.

He should have used this time to be away. He should have seen things coming when he didn't. He should have fled long before they had time to pursue him. He should have heard them, when there was nothing to be heard. There were pontless dramas. The cafe he liked in the morning, with the Vietnamese, was shut for a fortnight. The time he should have chosen to be away he had misunderstood, and so was trapped in bleak rituals. He had never wanted to be here. He had never wanted to come back. So when he chose his humble, uneventful little days, doing this and that and quiet things, he bowed down before God. The endless talk of Satan droned on through the elderly woman's house, God, God. A God with an American accent. Devotees spread in isolated dollops across the planet surface; patient, ancient, crucified.

He was irritated now by the silowness of things; just wanted to be free. Instead he thrashed on the surface and beneath the waves; all astern, the wash frothing. They would come and convince him there was something greater to do. As if every mistake made brought a brighter light. Instead of a restless night. Instead of salvation and furniture; a balance that he did not have. A crushing recluse, a silence, a retreat. Where no man could find him, where anger had been surpassed. He was coming to the realisation... Well, there had been too many. Yes, squirrels ran along branches in the morning light, still, sometimes, but he wasn't writing for echoes, he was waiting for the wheels to turn. And instead, getting up and going to work everyday. As if the glorious maxims, the flashy displays, the quet pain, had vanished into a grimier, more pointless purpose.

Where were the flashes of beauty, of inspiration, of a soaring, liquid desire which took in the entire universe. It wasn't here, in these quiet streets, in abandoned routines. They could laugh as much as they wanted to. They had paid their own price. Yes, he knew that. All was well; and then again, not well. Because his own dislocation, lack of a base, a home, still ate at him. He needed to be his own person, and now was not. Trapped in a place he did not want to be.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/northern-beaches/a-baby-whale-has-died-after-being-entangled-in-a-shark-net-at-mona-vale-beach/story-fngr8hax-1226744269050

A BABY whale has died after being caught in a shark net off Mona Vale this morning.

The calf's mother and four other adult whales remain in the vicinity.

The baby humpback is understood to have become entangled in the net in the early hours of the morning and was spotted from the shore about 6am.

After authorities were contacted, staff from the National Parks and Wildlife and from ORRCA rushed to the scene to try to disentangle the calf.

ORRCA volunteer Shona Lorigan estimated that the calf was no older than three months, and about 6-7m long.

THE PLACES FLED: BOXES

Clunes, NSW, Australia

The Places Fled included, perhaps most specifically, boxes full of the past.

Each was a crystalline shard cloaked in emotional baggage.

He needed to work through them, even just to store them away before hitting the road again, and yet he keep veering off at angles, any angle.

The last thing he had ever wanted was to feel anything. 

The detritus was the result of a perfect storm in his own life; years of physical pain, routine psychic storms, hundreds of kilometres walked through sleepless nights, a job disintegrated, kids grown and flown, a medication that had kept him stable for years withdrawn, or withdrawn from, an identity that had served him in a shrugging sense for decades lost with the job, a little farm, unimposing, but a retreat, a cellar, vanished in the wind, all washed up against thieving Thai sex workers, sick vicious Thai and Russian bar owners, or mafia as they liked to think of themselves, the indemically corrupt police of Thailand and their cohorts in the Thai Tourist Police, mounting pursuit after pursuit against someone who had already felt depressed, lost, disorientated. But the thugs and thieves, running their pedophile gangs and tourist scams built on an exploitative, feudalistic system, did not like anyone or anything that could expose their game. And so they mounted their own vicious propaganda campaign, dancing in the street jeering his name, dancing, if they could have done, on his grave.

Who they were, why fate had chosen him, that was for the authorities to know and you to guess.

First went the old reporter's pads, stray lines from hundreds upon hundreds of stories. Under the house, perhaps not to emerge in his lifetime.

Then went the old Family Court papers. Even now they sent a sick thud through him, staring at the pointless legalistic garbage the country's most dysfunctional and dishonest court put so many separated parents through.

Another saga, another morally, and yes legally, corrupt jurisdiction he would have known nothing about, and have never believed, if he hadn't experienced it himself. If they hadn't decided to do him over, as they did over everyone who came within their orbit.

Then he opened a file, labelled it State Library. 

He had sold material to them before. Maybe they would bite again.

The first was a letter from the deceased Sydney poet and writer Vicki Viidikas dated 27 March 1990 and written in her own hand writing.

He had known Vicki seemingly forever, an impossible junky, a difficult person  who had always been pressing her books of poetry on him, autographing them as if it was an event. Reading lyrical sreams to him in the midle of the night, because one thing about Vicki, she never stopped talking. Not even with a fit in her arm.

Her work had recently been the subject of re-evaluation with the publication of a selection of her work. She had died 14 years before, in 1998, a few years after he had joined The Australian newspaper. She had followed her own true love into bank robbing and serial scams, and her death followed months of chaos and the death of a number of her friends in the chaotic milieu of Kings Cross, one of the only urban hearts in anotherwise suburban land. One of the last times he had seen her, they walked through the streets of the Cross together, and they had stopped every few metres to talk to knotted little groups of dishevelled "patrons", the recent death of one of their own the subject of every conversation. 

The death of her addiction buddy had impacted badly on Vicki.

And then came her own; surprising nobody.

The 1990 letter had come from a property near Alstonville, a hamlet on the north coast of NSW. 

She hoped that her luggage, which she had left at my place, was safe and had not been robbed or lost. As the stable one, I was often enough the subject of such convenience by various of those plunging past into the depths. 

Although she had been strung out to the max and needed a bit of rest and respite, Vicki complained of how boring her "holiday" was, of getting to sleep at midnight. "This is my penance for dangerous indulgence."

And in an unstated D.H. Lawrence reference she talked of a snake, for we had all, our generation, in those school houses of the 1950s, grown up with the words of Lawrence's The Snake:

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough beforeme.. 


Vicki, too, wrote:  "and found a snake in the carport, staring back with green eyes, it went off after I left to catch a bush rat (whole) I heard it shrieking down by the laundry, before the snake disappeared with its fat stomach. These are rural matters!"

The next was a diatribe from a a Sydney eccentric Sandor Berger, protesting over an article I wrote about him in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1989. 

Sandor photocopied the article into a corner of an A3 page and then filled the rest of it, in his own handwriting, with his response, beginning: "I have read the article you sneaked in on me urgently,without my consent. Yu (sic) must have been really desperate for a story if you couldn't find anybody or anything else to write about in the way you did and with such urgency that you couldn't wait for my own Press Release.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the SMH article, dated 14 November 1989. 

"For many years the notices have appeared on telegraph poles around Sydney: "Pschiatry is Evil, It Must Be Banned!!" But now the author, Sandor Berger, is getting older, and the notices appear only within a few hundred metres of the dilapidated boarding house in Darlinghurst where he lives.

"Sydney is full of eccentrics. What makes Sandor Berger, 64, extraordinary is the series of manuscripts he had published himself and lodged with the Mitchell Library over the past 35 years.

"These include an erotic musical called Springtime in May, several works of poetry and two angry volumes written when he was in Long Bay Jail during the Sixties."

I was known for a time as the paper's inner-city expert and had come across the story because I knew Jeffrey Wegener, who lived in the same rundown Darlinghurst boarding house as Sandor.

But Jeffrey's shambolic flat on the second floor was positively sumptuous in contrast to Sandor's digs at the rear of the first floor.

We tried hard to get a photograph of him, but with newspaper deadlines being what they were, never succeeded. My primary communication with Sandor was shouting at him through his closed door.

As the article recorded: "Mr Berger refused to be interviewed by the Herald yesterday. He would not come out of his room, saying that he would communicate by letter early next year.

"I am not suitable for a hard interview," he said. "I could not cover a fraction of it. It will take preparation. I am an entirely preoccupied person."

http://mumbrella.com.au/online-news-market-sees-new-challenger-new-daily-189284

Australia’s online media landscape today sees the launch of The New Daily, a general news website funded by Australia’s major superannuation funds.

The New Daily will be run by former Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie, who is the website’s editorial director and former online editor of The Age Daniel Sankay, who had been rumoured to joining an Australian version of The Huffington Post.

“The important thing about The New Daily is that this is a digital only product,” said Guthrie, “most other sites out there have been something else before they were digital.” 

“When we started we sat down and thought what do you need on an online news website, we felt video was important and that the site should be able to move and speak.”

The New Daily will have an editorial staff of 15 full time staff and is owned equally by super funds AustralianSuper, Cbus and Industry SuperHoldings who have invested in The New Daily’s parent company Motion Publishing.

“What we are is a digital first news publication that it is based on a model which was launched in Adelaide for inDaily and it is backed by the industry superannuation funds,” said Paul Hamra, publisher of The New Daily.

“It is a general news website and given the super funds have 5.5m members and represent all Australians and so our site is very much a mass site.”

In addition to the editorial content provided by the editorial staff and contributors The New Daily will have access to ABC videos and copy which it will use on the website.

“We have reached an agreement with the ABC that they will provide video for us,” said Guthrie, “These are predominately 90 second videos across news, business, sport and weather.”

“We have bought those from the ABC because we think if users are time poor, particularly in the morning they might just go straight to those videos,” he said, while declining to comment on the fee paid for licencing ABC content.

Guthrie said the wake of Fairfax and News Corp Australia implementing paywalls there were opportunities for new entrants who came to the market with digital mindsets.

“I set up The Age’s website in 1996 and I relaunched the Herald Sun’s website in 2007 and I can tell you those websites were created with a print mindset,” said Guthrie.

“That still exists within News and Fairfax that they approach digital with a print mindset but what we have done is say we don’t have to worry about that what is a digital news site and what should it look like.”

He argues metered paywalls, introduced by both publishers earlier this year, were frustrating readers.

“What we have seen in our research that there is an increasing frustration with these porous paywalls which lock you out after 15 or 30 articles,” said Guthrie. “Providing good quality journalism for free, and the super funds have made it clear they will never charge for journalism is a significant selling point for the website.”

Among the launch contributors to The New Daily are former editor of Vogue Kristy Clements, former cricketer Rodney Hogg and TV identity Steve Vizard reviewing television.

The New Daily will launch with a marketing push to  members of the super funds who own the site.

“The good thing we have is that we are able to market to members of super funds, we are in the middle of an email campaign introducing them to the site,  that began on Monday night and will go for the next week,” said Hamra.

“We have the power to market to a really big section of the community.”

Hamra and Guthrie are also joined on the board of Motion Publishing by Private Media’s Eric Beecher.

Nic Christensen 

November 13th, 2013 at 12:12 pm

MOVING ON

NSW, Australia

And then, they sat out on the headlands and watched time pool out to see, watched it pool in the carpark, cranked the music right up. They couldn't have been here if they hadn't been there. Sometimes he went straight back into an irritable old routine. There was so much to do. Sometimes, frightened of the future, he felt overwhelmed. At others, one foot passed in front of another. They were the good guys the ones who gathered for coffee. The beachside suburbs, with their sleeping houses, had barely altered since the 1960s. The same lads gathered and strutted and hung, talked rubbish, saw one day end and another begin. Time coalesced around him, as if he could feel its drapes. There wasn't a sad song, there was no song. Themes ran dry, rivers ran on empty. Curdled, he had forgotten more than he had ever learnt. We, too, were captured, sitting there, looking out to sea.

Spooked, he followed their performance, always just out of reach. Out of sight, but not out of mind. The fear that he had known dissipated into another terror. Come right up, take a bow. How hard were these people to throw off? So, constantly concerned that the sheets would be thrown off, that once again he would have to wade through treacles of ridicule, he remained unknown, even to himself. Just another old man passing through. Someone who, perhaps, should never have been. The ocean, infinity, if that's what it represented, moved in a kind of eternal pattern, waves breaking on the shore. There was nothing to say. Every lad hanging by their car had one impulse, and never spoke. All was gladness and good tidings, or a dank, liquid fear. Or nostalgia for a time that was, and would never be again. Not for him; only for others. There was no way back.

He could not see a solution to this wavering dark. Except to get up and go on as before. One step in front of another, as they insisted. All full moons and crazy laughter. All a river on which he could not fly. All a circumstance that would never come again. There was no way to replay a sense of newness, to do things for the first time, not the last, to step off the cliff and land safely. The salt in the air seemed to give it an extra layer of density. All causual, menopausal, monsoonal. Flashes of other places; and then here, amidst the brooding houses. It wouldn't, couldn't, go on forever. Deeply restless, he turned, as if to confront them, but there was no one there. Phantasms locked away, telling him to move on. That was all. And so, eventually, barefoot, humble in the market place, he knelt down in the carpark and prayed. Let me be free.

They watched as other idle groups gathered and roamed. They all knew everybody. There was nothing else to  do, go to someone's house, or hang. Make comments about the girls. Hey bitch. But it was all harmless, and free. No one could walk past without comment. He's a right c... A whale splashed out to sea, its tail lit by moonlight. The music cranked. He would never be in love again. So these idol moments, beads of eternity strung along a shore, were all that he could hope for, ever on the outside, barely looking in. He was yet to embrace his destiny; the next part of the journey. Arise, be blessed. Gaze on cathedrals which took hundreds of years to build. Travel constantly, from one blessed hotel room to the next. Making routines for weeks, or months, and then gone again. There was only the work, a constant thread. It would have to do for continuity. For a stable life form. For an entity beyond mere longings. For the documenter of an age. For a being in crisis. For an intense moment which was gone barely before it formed. "The tracks of my tears," a corny song, blared briefly before an appalled young man quickly changed the channel.

The whale splashed out to sea again, on its annual migration back down to the ice.  He said nothing. He didn't want anyone to know who he really was. Or how lost it was possible to feel.

THE BIGGER STORY:

FOR 14 long hours over the weekend, Tony Abbott was just one of 1392 anonymous, sooty-faced firefighters battling to keep the relentless NSW bushfires at bay.

His favoured white-shirt-blue-tie combo was swapped for yellow overalls as Australia's 28th prime minister joined his Davidson RFS brigade on a back-burning operation in Bilpin, near the Blue Mountains, for a night shift that began at 6pm Saturday and finished at 8am yesterday.

If not for a couple of photos circulating on Twitter, it's a fair chance that Mr Abbott's weekend exploits would have gone unnoticed.

His office did not issue a statement until the blurry image of the PM giving the thumbs-up from behind the wheel of a fire truck appeared on the social media site.

While many Twitter followers praised his volunteering spirit, others questioned the wisdom of the nation's leader putting himself in the line of fire.

But for Mr Abbott, it was just another day as a volunteer firey with his local brigade, something he has been doing since 2001.

Prior to the election, Mr Abbott, a keen cyclist, runner, surf lifesaver and firefighting volunteer, vowed to continue his community activities should he assume the prime ministership.

Last month, his NSW Rural Fire Service brigade captain Trent Dowling told The Australian the Prime Minister was just another volunteer when he was on firefighting duties.

"It is the whole thing the brigade and the service is built on," Mr Dowling said. "It doesn't matter what you do outside, whether you are a plumber, a student, unemployed or, in this case, the Prime Minister. The rule that we have at our station is once you pull that uniform on, everyone is in the same boat.

"Anyone who bags him for pulling on the uniform and thinks it is a picture opportunity, I would suggest they do the course and join the brigade and come and see what we do."

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- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/bushfires/tony-abbott-puts-himself-in-line-of-fire/story-fngw0i02-1226743492769#sthash.fPb3IyZl.dpuf

THE BUTTERFLY

Death of the Worker's Paradise

The final planks of The Butterfly of Dark Love were drifting into place, and he was in no hurry to complete the job. As any journalist could tell you, fear of the unknown, or the unpublished, was far more effective than a problem which could be solved. Or worked around. Or denied. But when they didn't know what you were doing, didn't know how vividly their dishonesty and treachery would be portrayed, that's when they went through the exquisite torments of the guilty. Let them rot. Or as he was once fond of saying, let them hang them selves.

There was a proxy of the Thai Tourist Police, our little barrel chested Commando, not just participating in the somewhat esoteric crime of intellectual property theft, but of bullying and harassing a foreign visitor and threatening to destroy their business with vexatious claims. Caught cold. There wasn't much use having a Tourist Police if they couldn't be relied upon to protect tourists, rather than to bully, harass and intimidate them. 

While the Thai Police peddled ice at the Monkey Club and argued between themselves which gang was going to take the fall for the latest pseudo-enquiry the Tourist Police were meant to be above the local garbage. They clearly weren't.

That they had done nothing to stop the fraud they must have known was being perpetrated under their nose indicated how far they had drifted from their original purpose. How truly pointless they were. Recently caught in media glare for an ATM skimming scam which surprised Michael not in the least, there was nothing to be done but watch them circling endlessly towards carrion flesh, besmirched of soul, dishonest of heart.

Luckily for him, the fraud and the threats now lay fully exposed, but it was dismal, cold comfort. He would have rather none of it had happened in the first place. And so for one long, obliquely disturbed afternoon, with time running backwards and pre-cognition in overdrive, he sat on a verandah in a backyard where he had been previously, looking down the South Coast towards Bass Point, the inlets, Illawara Lake. It wasn't surprising he had been in these strategically located properties before, but he couldn't remember the exact circumstance, or exact story. A local politician caught with an under-age prostitute on the Port Kembla strip. He remembered interviewing the older working girls, mums most of them, who hadn't liked the compeititon and didn't like the attention, but were decent enough. Or just another in the line of the endless stupid property stories. Or sometimes equally stupid one night stands. He didn't know now where any of the flow came from; and just sat there, eternally on the periphery of other people's lives. 

He couldn't wait to be back on the road again, back inside himself.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Le Monde Diplomatique

Amazon's warehouses are run like colonial enterprises - the staff are treated with contempt, paid badly, disciplined brutally, and set in competition against each other, often as temporary workers or on short-term contracts.

Irmgard Schulz of Ver.di, Germany's united service union, told a weekly meeting of Amazon employees in Bad Hersfeld, Germany: "In Japan, Amazon has taken on goats to graze in the grounds of one of their warehouses. It has issued them with the same ID passes we wear around our necks − complete with names, photos and barcodes." Schulz was summing up the philosophy of the online multinational which enables customers to purchase everything from a scrubbing brush to the works of Marcel Proust with one click, and have it delivered within 48 hours.
Worldwide, Amazon employs 100,000 people in 89 warehouses, with a total area of nearly seven million square metres. In less than 20 years, Amazon has fought its way to the forefront of the digital economy, alongside Apple, Google and Facebook. Since its flotation on the stock market in 1997, its turnover has increased by a factor of 420 to reach $62bn in 2012. Its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is profiled by journalists with even more flattery since he spent around 1 % his personal fortune ($250m) this August to buy the Washington Post; his financial success is more mainstream newsworthy thanAmazon's labour conditions, although there have been several in-depth US local paper investigations into brutal and medically unsafe warehouse working conditions. (Amazon was not willing to give an interview for this article.)
Amazon chose Germany as its European bridgehead. It has eight distribution centres there and is building a ninth. In the town of Bad Hersfeld, the local authorities have subsidised Amazon's start-up costs by more than €7m ($9.5m), and named a roadAmazon Strasse (1). As we drove down that road, Sonia Rudolf, a former Amazon employee, pointed to the warehouse, a huge expanse of grey sheet metal behind barbed wire fences. "On the third floor of FRA-1 (2), there are no windows, no openings, no air conditioning. In summer the temperature can reach more than 40ºC and people are often taken ill. One day - I'll always remember this - when I was working as a picker, I came across a girl lying on the floor throwing up. Her face was blue. I really thought she was going to die. Because we didn't have a stretcher, the manager told us to go and get a wooden pallet so we could carry her to the ambulance."
Multiple similar or worse cases have been reported in the US (3). In France, cold affected employees in the Montélimar warehouse in 2011; they had to work in parkas, gloves and hats until a dozen of them went on strike and got the heating turned on. The griefs of underpaid workers don't register on theAmazon share price; Bezos is the 19th wealthiest person on the planet (4).
Amazon is different because it allows other traders to offer their products for sale, in direct competition with its own merchandise, on its site through its Marketplace scheme. This increases turnover and the "long tail" effect - whereby a lot of small orders for low-demand products with low warehousing costs aggregate to big business - which lies at the heart of its success. This system, which works well for the customer, draws booksellers into the promotion of the giant, which ultimately cannibalises their sales and destroys their businesses.
The French Booksellers' Association estimates that, on a like-for-like comparison of turnover, a local bookseller employs 18 times more people than Amazon. In 2012 alone, the American Booksellers' Association reckoned that 42,000 American retailing jobs had been destroyed by Amazon, and that every $10m of Amazon turnover represents 33 lost jobs in local bookselling.

Out-of-town retail factories

The jobs that have vanished are different from those created in distribution centres. The old, long-term jobs needed qualifications and had variety; they were located in town centres and involved human interaction. Amazon jobs are in out-of-town retail factories, where the round-the-clock dispatch of packages is carried out by an unqualified workforce, hired solely because they are still cheaper than robots. (But since its purchase of the robotics company Kiva Systems in 2012 for $775m, Amazonhas been getting ready for a robot roll-out: Kiva's squat machines are 30cm high and can slide under a shelf to pick up a load with a maximum weight of 1,300kg.)
The objective is to reduce the time between a customer's order and its dispatch to just 20 minutes, since Bezos has long wanted to deliver any product on the same day that it is ordered. Since the outset, Amazon has invested enormous sums in its servers and has increased its ability to use algorithms to improve its logistical effectiveness and retailing opportunities. Amazon keeps offering new products to customers thanks to complex analysis of their personal data and buying habits: data is also rented to third parties through the Amazon Web Service business (5).
Irrespective of their location, Amazon's distribution centres have similar architecture and working practices. They are near motorway junctions in areas where the unemployment rate is above the national average and assiduously surveilled by security firms. The giant metal boxes sometimes extend over more than 100,000 square metres, nearly 14 football pitches. Trucks come and go constantly: every three minutes Amazon fills an articulated lorry with packages. In the US, the company sold 300 items every second during the 2012 Christmas season.
The vast selection of products on offer to Amazon's 152 million customers is housed on endless metal shelves. Employees must work in silence. They are all considered potential thieves and searched by security guards: they go through a security check at the end of their shift and before breaks, so their free time is reduced by long queues. Amazon refuses to allow employees to clock in before security checks, so workers in its warehouses in Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington State in the US have brought lawsuits to claim payment for unpaid waiting time, which they estimate at 40 minutes a week.

Radical systems

Amazon's stock management is a computer-controlled "chaotic storage" system: items are stored on the shelves in random order. Chaotic storage is more flexible than conventional methods: there is no need to reserve space for each product to accommodate fluctuations in supply and demand. Each shelving unit has several levels, and each level several bins; in these, the works of Antonio Gramsci might wait besides a packet of men's underpants, a teddy bear and barbecue sauce.
In the Goods In department, workers known as reachers unload pallets from trucks and log the goods. Then stowers put the goods wherever they can on the shelves, in locations that only WiFi-enabled bar-code scanners can identify. To cope with the miles of shelves, state-of-the-art technology guides, controls and measures the productivity of workers as they carry out exhausting and repetitive tasks. In the "production" department, pickers guided by scanners go up and down the aisles with trolleys. They walk more than 20km per shift; that is the official figure from the temp agencies, but the unions say it is too low.
As soon as an item is picked, a countdown is activated on the scanner, and the employee has to set off in search of the next item. The picker's route is determined by computer to maximise efficiency. When their trolleys are full, the pickers take them to the packers. Parcels are put on huge computer-controlled conveyor belts that weigh the boxes bearing Amazon's trademark smile, attach address labels, then sort them according to delivery method.
"There's a smile on the parcel, but we're not smiling," said Jens Brumma, 38, who has been a stower since 2003. For the first seven years he alternated between unemployment and temp work at Amazon, but since 2010 he has had a succession of short-term contracts; the management won't give him permanency. Like every other Amazon employee in the world, his contract forbids him from talking about his work to his family, friends or journalists. "We're obliged to keep quiet but it's not to protect industrial secrets. We don't have access to those. It's to keep us from talking about how dreadful our working conditions are."
In the busiest period of each year, Quarter Four (Q4), night shift teams are put together and every distribution centre has to take on many temporary workers for Christmas orders. "At this time," said Heiner Reimann, a specialist sent by Ver.di in 2010 to set up union activities, "the number of workers for the two warehouses rises suddenly from 3,000 to over 8,000. Temp workers from all over Europe come to Bad Hersfeld and live in terrible conditions. To handle the thousands of temporary contracts, Amazon took on Chinese secretaries last year. They worked in a big empty hall without furniture and piled up the contracts on the floor. It was surreal." Coachloads of the unemployed recruited by temp agencies arrived from Spain, Greece, Poland, Ukraine and Portugal.

Forty-four nationalities

"The managers boast about the international workforce and hold it up as a source of pride," said Brumma. "At a company party I was asked to put up the flag of each country represented - there were 44 of them. The Spanish were the most numerous. Some of them were very highly qualified: there was a historian, sociologists, dentists, lawyers, doctors. They were out of work, so they came here on short-term contracts."
Norbert Faltin, a former German IT worker who lost his job in 2010, worked as a temporary picker at Bad Hersfeld. "In the middle of winter, I spent three months with five foreigners in a bungalow used for summer lets. It had no heating. I've never been so cold in my life. We were all adults and we had to take it in turns to sleep in a child's bed." Most workers want a chance to sign an open-ended contract after a series of short-term ones, but in the meantime, they would be unwise to join the union or strike. The arrival of a huge temporary and foreign workforce before Christmas undermines the effect of Ver.di-initiated strikes in the short period during which Amazon is uniquely vulnerable - it generates 700f its annual turnover in Q4.
Amazon's slogan, "Work hard, have fun, make history", is on the walls of all its warehouses around the world. But it monitors employees with a rigorous management technique, "5S", inspired by Japanese car plants, and organises paternalistic events during the working day and after. "In Q4, the managers play music full blast, around the clock, to keep us moving," said Rudolf. "One day during the Christmas period, they put on rock music at top volume to make us work faster. It was so loud that it gave me a headache and palpitations. When I asked the manager to turn it down, he laughed at me because I'm over 50, and said that this was a young person's company. Despite my age, I was expected to have the same picking rate as a 25-year-old. But after my husband died, I had no choice. I had to take this job."
Some Bad Hersfeld workers remember seeing Bezos whenAmazon's first German warehouse opened in 2000. He arrived by helicopter in the staff car park and left his palm prints in paint on a commemorative plaque. "Everything at Amazon is in English. The workers are called hands," said Schulz. "Jeff Bezos held up his hands and told us we were all hands like him, and that we were his associates because we would have the chance to buy shares in the company after we had worked here for a number of years. Back then, he told us we were all part of one big family. After that, he phoned up from time to time and his voice was broadcast on loudspeakers in the warehouse to motivate us. And it worked. We were proud of Amazon. For us, it was the American dream. But it quickly became a nightmare. That's why I now take part in strikes."
After the union meeting I attended, the members of the afternoon shift quickly got up from a table covered in leaflets, badges, legal documents and press cuttings about the latest strike, to clock in. "It was really hard when I arrived. The workers were terrified at the thought of speaking to us or taking a leaflet," said union organiser Heiner Reimann, while we waited for the members of the morning shift to show up for the next meeting.
After more than a decade at Ikea and with a solid grounding in social law, he began his campaign for Ver.di in 2010. He realised how depoliticised most of the Amazon workers were and how alien union culture was to them, and adapted his approach. He is slowly getting results thanks to activities organised by a small core group.
Since 2011, activists have been putting up little stickers all over the German warehouses, each with an anonymous question highlighting a breach of employment law, injustice or management failure. The examples are chosen by the workers, who get family members to write them out so that the handwriting cannot be identified. Thousands of stickers have been put up; they don't damage the fabric of the workplace, but they have alarmed management. After discussion in the weekly union meetings in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig, which are open to all, demands are now coming from the workforce.

Where is the negotiated rate?

In Leipzig, no one is paid the rate negotiated by Ver.di for workers in the distribution sector. Wage agreements for Germany's eastern Länder stipulate a minimum rate of €10.66 an hour, but Amazon pays €9.30. In Bad Hersfeld there is a similar discrepancy between the collectively negotiated rate (€12.18) and Amazon's rate (€9.83). Two-and-a-half years after the first Ver.di meetings, nearly 600 German employees regularly picket to demand the negotiated rate (Tarifvertrag). Now union members and their supporters wear a red wristband to work, with the words "Work hard, have fun, make Tarifvertrag".
Rudolf has noticed that when she meets former colleagues "the attitude to the union has changed a lot. People are less and less afraid of joining, and it becomes almost a reflex action when they suffer a humiliation. They want to take action to defend their rights and their dignity."
In France on 10 June this year, around 100 union members atAmazon's Saran warehouse heeded a strike call from the CGT union. The following day they were all summoned individually by management. "Because I'm a union member, they tried to subject me to arbitrary searches during my shift," said Clément Jamin. "I refused. So they told me to sit on a chair, ostensibly to wait for the police to arrive. I was sitting there in full view of everyone for six hours and the police never came. They tried the same thing the next day and the day after that. The CGT have lodged a complaint." Amazon managers are hostile to unions and try to humiliate them. Recently I saw a parody video made in-house, in which two HR managers at Saran dressed up as union members waving a CGT flag.
"The pace of work is relentless," said a worker at Saran, who wanted to remain anonymous. "And what do we get? 'Have fun': raffles during our breaks, handouts of chocolate and sweets. But I don't go for the idea of unloading a lorry dressed as a clown." Employees are regularly asked to come to work in fancy dress according to a theme chosen by management. "Even so, our productivity is still monitored by computer," he said. "They ask us to be 'top performers', to do better, to keep beating our own productivity records. Since June the managers have been making us do group warm-up and stretching exercises before our shift."
Staff rules demand that each employee's productivity increases constantly. Real-time recording of performance allows supervisors to pinpoint where workers are in the warehouse at any time, to get a detailed record of their output, and organise competition between them. Heiner Reimann has recently discovered that this personal data "is sent every day from the German warehouses to Seattle, where it is stored. That's completely illegal." Ben Sihamdi, a former Amazon manager who went on company training courses in Luxembourg, confirmed this practice, which most employees are unaware of: "All their productivity data is recorded, then sent to Seattle."

'Everyone's watching everyone else'

Besides competing with each other, employees are also encouraged to report "anomalies". "That might be a box left blocking a doorway," my anonymous source said, "but it could also be a colleague chatting. If you see someone doing that, you're supposed to report them. That helps you get promoted and become a 'lead'." Sihamdi said that "a colleague asked me what I thought about Jeff Bezos's personal fortune, and I said it made me sick. He reported me and I was disciplined for criticising the Amazon spirit. The working environment isn't good. Everyone's watching everyone else. And the temp workers are treated like cattle, which I hate. I know the world of industry, especially car manufacturing. But my experience atAmazon is easily the most brutal in my career."
There are many accidents at Amazon: falls, illness, finger injuries from the conveyor belt, exhaustion. But press coverage about stock market performance, Bezos's latest activities or the construction of distribution centres is far more plentiful than investigative reporting. Three new centres that will soon open in Poland worry German workers, who fear their jobs may be undercut by lower-paid Polish workers. The press reaction is enthusiasm for the creation of precarious jobs that will cause a net shrinkage of employment in the local economy.
German journalist Günter Wallraff, a supporter of the Ver.di-led strikes, is following Amazon's rise carefully: "When I found out about working conditions there, I immediately called for a boycott and asked my publisher to take my books off the site. That was a problem: Amazon accounts for 150f their sales. After wrestling with my request, the publisher eventually agreed. But now Amazon is sourcing stock from wholesalers and still selling my books. And I can't stop them. So people say: 'You're all talk, because your books are still on sale on Amazon.' In reality, it's not possible to fight this business individually. It's a multinational organised according to a well-defined ideology. Its system doesn't just pose a neutral question about whether we want to shop on its site or not; it raises political questions about what sort of society we want to belong to."

Not paying the tax

A book bought from Amazon in Spain or a vacuum cleaner in France will both be billed in Luxembourg byAmazon EU. This company, which has only 235 employees, had a turnover of almost $10bn in 2012, but thanks to clever financial arrangements, recorded profits of just $20.4m. It controls the national operations in Europe that carry out the work: logistics, marketing, supplier relations. At the top of a pyramid of holding companies is the financial reserve, Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS, which is itself held by three entities based in Delaware in the US.
At the heart of this fiscal network, Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS, also based in Luxembourg, handles the flow of cash: at the end of 2011 it had accumulated reserves of €1.9bn and no recorded employees. This complex system of tax avoidance enables the multinational to sidestep tax in the countries where it operates and where it generates vast turnover. Since Andrew Cecil, Amazon's director of public policy, appeared before the UK parliament's Public Accounts Committee in 2012, the turnover in France has been public knowledge: €889m in 2011. The French subsidiary declared a significantly lower figure to the tax authorities, and is due a tax readjustment of €198m.
Amazon's French operation, which employs over a thousand people, declared a turnover of €75m and profits of €3.2m in 2012. The company benefited from public subsidies when it set up its third French distribution centre in Chalon-sur-Saône, with the backing of the minister for economic regeneration, Arnaud Montebourg. Besides subsidies from the state and the department of Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy's regional council, run by Socialist François Patriar, also contributed €1.125m to helpAmazon hire 250 employees on open-ended contracts. "The worst thing," said former Amazon manager Ben Sihamdi, "is that politicians ignore the fact that Amazon is investing hugely in robots. There's no way that those jobs are going to last."

Translated by George Miller

(1) There are streets named after the company in Graben, Pforzheim and Kobern-Gondorf in Germany, and two in France in Sevrey and Lauwin-Planque.
(2) Amazon warehouses all have names consisting of three letters and a number that match the nearest international airport, in this case Frankfurt (FRA).
(3) Spencer Soper, "Inside Amazon's warehouse",The Morning Call, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 18 September 2011.
(4) In 2012 Jeff Bezos was named business person of the year by the American magazine Forbes.
(5) Amazon has also set up a market in online work, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which invites people to complete microtasks for micropayments. See Pierre Lazuly, "Artificial artificial intelligence",Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2006.
Jean-Baptiste Malet is the author of En Amazonie: Infiltré dans le Meilleur des Mondes (In Amazonia: Under Cover in the Best of all Possible Worlds), Fayard, Paris, 2013, which he wrote after working in an Amazon warehouse.