Dr Jiggens

From the eulogy by Mary Kelly

Errol was born on 8 March 1945 at Old Cleveland Rd Coorparoo. His parents -Francis Patrick O’Neill (called Frank or Bluey), and Gladys May Lutvey (whose parents were Lebanese migrants) – already had two boys – Dan then 7, and Michael then 2. Errol was to be the last – the youngest of the three O’Neill brothers. The family had moved from Gayndah to Brisbane a few years previously, first living at the Stones Corner shop with Gladdy’s three sisters Mona, Mary and Rose, and later settling in Nicklin Street.  ‘Bluey’ was a taxi driver and they lived the typical Catholic working-class family life of the 1950s with a focus on church, family and the practicalities of making ends meet. His schooling was at St James’s Primary School Coorparoo and Villanova College.

In 1968, he  studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University, Rome, before deciding the priesthood was not for him. Returning to Brisbane, he studied an Arts Degree at the University of Queensland (majoring in English Language and Literature) and began seriously to develop his skills in writing and acting, and just as seriously to involve himself in the issues and politics of Queensland.

By the time he finished his degree, Errol had been deeply involved in a number of revues at the University, honing his satirical writing and acting skills; had been summonsed to court for his refusal to register for national service and thus be drafted into the Vietnam war; had been in many demonstrations and protests; and had experienced his first main stage acting role at the Queensland Theatre Company.

For the next 40 or more years he pursued these themes and threads, successfully forging a career in a notoriously difficult industry, and doing so with a steadfast focus on politics and social change. (Perhaps this focus and this pursuit was assisted by the fact that he was sacked from his first ever job in the public service after 2 weeks because of his Special Branch record.)

Later it would be taxi-driving, just like his father had done, which would fill the gaps between theatre jobs, and again his sharp observational skills meant these experiences became short stories about the characters and situations he came across. Errol could take a minute exchange and weave it into something funny and tragic, and he performed his taxi stories by reading aloud many times over the years.

From 1977 to 1982, he was a performer and then writer-director with the Popular Theatre Troupe, a Brisbane-based company specialising in political satire.

After his stint in the Troupe, he was essentially free-lance for the rest of his working life during which he wrote more than a dozen plays on aspects of Australian society, politics and history which were produced by main stage companies in Brisbane and interstate; acted in nearly 20 films and a dozen television series; performed in numerous training films and corporate videos, radio plays, voice-overs and narrations; directed a number of productions; and acted in well over 50 plays. He also wrote short stories and other prose.

For someone who had so many run-ins with the law, he played a surprisingly large number of policeman roles – from the unrecognisably aggressive Sergeant Simmonds in ‘The Removalists’ to the more affable Len in ‘East of Everything’.

In the quest for work, Errol was entrepreneurial and relentless. With friends, he started a new theatre company – the Brisbane Theatre Company – and later in life the collective called ‘The Forgetting of Wisdom’ to help generate opportunities to perform.

He also involved himself in organisations dedicated to improving the performing arts industry such as the Australia Council, the Writers’ Guild, the Literature Board, and his union Actors’ Equity. A centenary medal in 2003 and the Alan Edwards Lifetime Achievement award in the same year were public acknowledgement of his contribution.

By John Jiggens

Errol O’Neill died on the 400^th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, his timing as always a marvel.

Like Shakespeare, Errol had a great love of history and like Shakespeare he translated his history to the stage. He wrote 12 plays, and the core of his work is a quintet of plays dealing with the history of the labour movement in Queensland: On the Whipping Side, Red Soil White Sugar, Faces in the Street, Popular Front and The Hope of the World.

While Shakespeare wrote in an age of kings, and had kings as his heroes, Errol O’Neill wrote about a time, now vanished, that was called ‘the era of the common man’ and his heroes were the men and women who built the labour movement in Queensland.

Shakespeare employed a class-based rhetoric: his nobles spoke in beautiful blank verse, while the lower classes spoke in prose. Blank verse is a relative rarity in Queensland, but Errol O’Neill’s dialogue was similar to Shakespeare in his lower register, when he was writing for the proles: often crude, disrespectful, very funny, and exhibiting a deep love of the language of the low.

I knew Errol O’Neill from my Queensland University days, when he was one of an extraordinary group of actors and directors, including Geoffrey Rush, Bille Brown and William Yang, who were associated with the Architecture Revue and DramSoc. While Geoffrey Rush and company left to conquer the world, Errol stayed behind, striving to create a local theatre in Brisbane.

I worked most closely with Errol in the 1990s, when he was the Chair of the Brisbane Theatre Company (BTC) when he championed a vision of a local theatre that was concerned about Brisbane, which produced and workshopped plays by Brisbane writers, with scripts and subjects that were important for Brisbane.

We edited the BTC’s publication Brisbane Theatre Magazine together. I handled production and design, while Errol was the commissioning editor.  As commissioning editor, he organised great pieces from the likes of Lorna Bols, Sue Rider, Sean Mee, and the other directors and writers of the Brisbane theatre community, many of whom were also members of the BTC and who also championed the project for a theatre that spoke to us about our city and our lives. Although Errol initiated the Brisbane Theatre Company, it was a shared aspiration, the culmination of a collective vision for theatre in Brisbane. Errol O’Neill was its intellectual leader, but he was an ensemble player, who blended and harmonised, listened respectfully, and never dominated. Like one of his heroes, Fred Patterson, Errol O’Neill was always the first amongst equals.

Although the Brisbane Theatre Company failed, this was when Mary and Errol started their family. In later years our sons would play together while Errol and I talked about politics and history and writing and the projects we were working on, while he prepared another marvellous meal. He and Mary were fantastic hosts, both for the Brisbane diaspora and for locals.

As an actor, I make a passable extra. The only play I performed in with Errol was in the grounds of Ithica Creek State School, which our sons attended. It was a play for the children, performed by their parents, about the Gold rush, a humorous romp, which Errol had written. Errol played starring roles in all the major theatres in Brisbane and he performed at humbler, spontaneous spaces in street-theatre, at protests, in factories, and in school yards with the same sense of bon-hommie.

In forty-five years I never had one quarrel or argument with him. My face would always light up with a smile whenever I saw him, as it did on the last day we met, the week before he died. He cocked his head slightly in reply, and smiled that wry, Errol smile. He’d been researching the conscription debate during the First World War because he’d been commissioned to write a play about it. He was happy, that happy feeling writers get when their minds are engaged and their creative juices are flowing. For a writer with his love of radical history, the subject was ideal. In its day, the conscription referenda debate split the nation. And there were two of them, because Prime Minster Hughes did not accept the decision of the first. What a plot twist that would be! Errol would have Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan as one of his heroes, and Archbishop Mannix as the other, with Billy Hughes as villain!

I received the news of his passing by email. I cried and swore obscenity after obscenity. It was the worst sentence I have ever read: Errol O’Neill is dead.

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

Democracy and Community in West End
An interview with Councillor Jonathon Jonathan Sri
Earlier this year, the Greens claimed their first victory in Queensland’s local government elections with their candidate Jonathan Sri, 28, musician, poet, and law graduate, who won the inner Brisbane ward of The Gabba. The Greens won 31.7% of the ward’s vote, up from 17.7% in 2012. Although Sri’s vote fell behind the LNP’s 35.8%, he won the ward with the help of ALP preferences. Sri is no stranger to the electorate. He ran for the Greens for the seat of South Brisbane during the 2015 state election against current Qld Deputy Premier Jackie Trad, where he won nearly 22% of the primary vote.
Sri’s victory can be attributed to the more than 200 volunteers who assisted with his campaign. Many of the volunteers were motivated by the rapid urban development that is rapidly changing the unique bohemian character that identifies The Gabba ward’s suburbs of West End, South Brisbane, Highgate Hill and Woolloongabba. Sri’s election campaign put the spotlight on housing affordability and urban transport, two issues of especial concern to the ward’s younger residents. Many young people live in sharehouses, a rite of passage to adulthood for the students enrolled at nearby tertiary institutions, and a necessity for low-income workers that keep the city functioning. Former West End resident and lecturer at UQ’s School of Communication & Arts, Dr Kitty Van Vuuren, recently caught up with Cr Sri to reflect on his first month in office.
In the first month after being sworn in as a councillor, the mainstream media have already labelled Cr Jonathan Sri, Brisbane City Council’s first Green Councillor, as ‘combative’ and ‘controversial’. Sri won The Gabba ward with the help of ALP preferences, but he faces an overwhelming LNP majority in Council Chambers. So, just how can a single Greens councillor make a difference?
Sri asserts that “none of the policies I’ve been pushing and none of the stances I’ve taken are particularly extreme or controversial. It’s just that our current political landscape is very homogenous and unadventurous when it comes to policy-making.”
He admits that his approach “seems a bit unconventional,” but points out that direct action and broad-based social campaigns are common practices in other democracies.
‘Unconventional’ is one way to put it, but Brisbane’s Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, wasted no time to suggest that Sri’s approach encourages ‘illegal’ protest, and that a councillor has a responsibility to be a lawmaker, not a lawbreaker.
“I think it’s a shallow response to a complex issue. As an elected representative I do have some responsibility to uphold the rule of law, but I was elected to change the law, to change the system. I made no bones about that during my election campaign. I don’t think anyone who voted for me could reasonably feel surprised with the strategic approach I’ve taken,” he said.
Sri points out that laws are not written in a vacuum, but are written to preserve the interests of the people who are in control of the system.
“I guess on some level direct action does challenge established laws, but it’s important to recognize that the laws which govern our society have been written by a subset of people who benefit from the current system.”
“So for me, if the laws don’t represent the democratic will of the people and they don’t uphold the long-term interest of society, then those laws are illegitimate.”
Sri is currently working on the Right to the City campaign, based on the idea that ordinary residents deserve a say in how the city evolves. A key value underpinning the campaign is the idea that decisions about urban planning and development should not simply depend on property rights, and that all citizens who are part of the city (including renters and those on low incomes) have the right to influence how their city is shaped.
”Previously in Brisbane a sustainable development campaign has been too easily framed as wealthy owner-occupiers who are just NIMBY’s and trying to protect their own property values. We have shifted that discourse to be about housing affordability and renters’ rights, and so a whole generation of people who don’t own any land and don’t really have a long-term stake in the community in that sense, are now stepping up and saying ‘yeah we do want affordable housing and we do want better rights for renters’.”
“So for me, if the laws don’t represent the democratic will of the people and they don’t uphold the long-term interest of society, then those laws are illegitimate.”
Sri is currently working on the Right to the City campaign, based on the idea that ordinary residents deserve a say in how the city evolves. A key value underpinning the campaign is the idea that decisions about urban planning and development should not simply depend on property rights, and that all citizens who are part of the city (including renters and those on low incomes) have the right to influence how their city is shaped.
”Previously in Brisbane a sustainable development campaign has been too easily framed as wealthy owner-occupiers who are just NIMBY’s and trying to protect their own property values. We have shifted that discourse to be about housing affordability and renters’ rights, and so a whole generation of people who don’t own any land and don’t really have a long-term stake in the community in that sense, are now stepping up and saying ‘yeah we do want affordable housing and we do want better rights for renters’.”
Part of Sri’s sustainability agenda is to increase the number of dedicated bike lanes. Brisbane’s topography and climate are amenable to cycling and walking, but the city lags behind Sydney and Melbourne in promoting safer cycling infrastructure.
“The fact that we still have such a car-centric approach to urban planning and traffic management is just unimaginative, it’s regressive,” he said.
Sri believes that being the only Green in Council Chambers can be an advantage to achieving more sustainable planning. He claims that Council is concerned about the political backlash expected from reclaiming street parking to put in bike lanes.
“It puts me in a situation where I can play the diplomat and look for areas where my priorities might line up with the LNP administration, and basically convince them that what I’m proposing might be a good idea,”
“I’ve been able to say to the LNP, ‘look I think people voted me in because they care about cycle safety, so I’m willing to wear a bit of the flak from the people who are annoyed about losing a bit of street parking’, because the long-term goal is to make cycling safer and therefore get more people on their bikes.”
While open to political alignment, Sri strongly supports broad-based community campaigns to achieve positive outcomes for residents. His ward office is a hive of activity with the comings and goings of supporters, from within as well as outside the ward. As part of his political agenda, Sri aims to support a collectively oriented culture.
“We do have a moral responsibility, and it is in our own long term self-interest to look out for other people, and recognise that particularly in cities, our fates as residents are all inextricably linked. So I think it’s silly and naïve to say that we shouldn’t collaborate and think collectively, particularly on things like urban planning. The way that that’s been left up to the free market is just ridiculous.”
With a federal election set for July 2, Cr Sri is well aware that his style of representation may influence the Greens’ federal electoral success.
“I’m very conscious that how I conduct myself will reflect on the Greens throughout Queensland. It’s a huge honour and privilege as well, because it means to some extent we get to shape the direction of the Greens in Queensland.”
“I’d like to think that I’m a responsive and responsible representative. One thing we have demonstrated is that even a lone Greens Councilor can get issues onto the agenda and can put a lot of pressure on the system to change.”
“What’s exciting about the way that we’ve gone about it is that we’ve put together a policy agenda that is relatively radical in the current system, and we’ve stuck to it.”
“You need not abandon who you are and you can stay true to yourself and push for change to the system. That excites me and that excites a lot of Greens supporters.”

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

The unconventional gas industry claim there are no proven incidents of fracking polluting underground water, while suppressing any independent attempts to research the topic. However, people who live in gas fields know their water supplies are being polluted and their health imperiled. JOHN FENTON is a Wyoming farmer recently brought to Australia by Lock the Gate. He writes that the coal seam gas industry’s solution to underground pollution is to bury the proof.

In 2008, we noticed the water from our wells had turned bad. It changed colour and smelt of diesel. We asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate. They drilled monitoring bores and, in 2011, released a report that found the shallow and deep aquifers had been contaminated with chemicals linked to fracking and gas extraction. Benzene was present at 50 times the level that is considered safe for consumption. Phenols  – another dangerous carcinogen – acetone toluene, naphthalene, methane and 13 different compounds associated with hydro-fracking were found in the water. Our community was warned not to drink water from our wells and to shower with the windows open, to prevent a build up of explosive gas. My neighbour’s water well exploded because of high-pressure gas. Although the gas company refuses to admit fault, it trucks in drinking water to farmers and has installed reverse osmosis units.

The industry was furious about the EPA report. They knew it was a smoking gun. Gas lobbyists could no longer assert that fracking was safe. Backed by the state of Wyoming, the gas industry lobbied and donated heavily in Washington. Enormous pressure was put on the EPA and eventually they buckled. Further investigation into our polluted water was turned over to the state of Wyoming. To add insult to injury, the gas company Encana provided funding of $1.5 million for another study. The EPA has also caved in to pressure and dropped two other investigations. EPA investigators resigned in protest.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a 2003 Schlumberger oilfield review, 5 per cent of well bores fail immediately and, over a 30-year time frame, failure rates exceed 50 per cent. The pattern in the US is that when water contamination surfaces, the gas company pays an undisclosed sum of money in return for a non-disclosure agreement that prevents people talking about their water contamination. It is the gas industry itself, with its teams of lawyers and deep pockets, that actively prevents investigations into water contamination. That’s why industry lobbyists can say there is no ”proven” case of fracking contaminating the water.

When you turn on your tap and the water smells like diesel and explodes with methane, you know the water has been polluted. In Wyoming, the coal seam gas industry has already come and gone as the price of gas crashed. The industry has moved on to fracking shale for oil, leaving 3000 coal seam gas wells abandoned. The taxpayers of Wyoming will now have to foot the bill to cap these gas wells.

The risks of fracked gas are not worth taking. The gas industry will tell you it’s a pot of gold, but it has become our pot of poison.

John Fenton

by Drew Hutton
A quiet revolution, one to rival the digital revolution three decades ago, has been occurring for years in the world of energy economics, right under their noses but most pundits didn’t recognize it. Not only did they not recognise it but the business owners whose fortunes depended on reading the signs did not either. Perhaps this is the hallmark of any revolution: that those with vested interest in the old order, who frequent the same business and social bubbles that reinforce their prejudices and distort their capacity for reason, will not accurately read the signs and will become the victims of cataclysmic events. They will keep repeating mantras like, “Renewable energy will never provide baseload power”, or “Renewable energy is too expensive” as the liquidators move in.
Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industries are still powerful and capable of putting up a fight to the end and, even if significant transition is made over the next decade to renewables. To make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly and efficiently as possible there need to be mass movements that stop coal, oil and gas mining, pressure for divestment from fossil fuels and pressure governments for radical policy changes. More broadly, a judicious mixture of government intervention and markets – a recipe detested by the neo-liberals – will be needed to bring fairness and accountability to the system. Such a system should be jobs-rich; have in-built flexibility to promote innovation and diverse family and social arrangements; provide welfare and other measures to ensure some in society are not left behind in a changing environment or by such events as disastrous climate change; and enable workers to have a strong say in the direction of their enterprises and communities a strong involvement in determining their futures.
In the meantime there will also be many new-economy jobs, fixing up the mess that the old economy left behind, particularly in mining. If we take the coal-rich Bowen Basin for example, there are over 40 coal mines with 94,600 square kilometres of land disturbed by mining. Rehabilitating such sites involves re-shaping and re-contouring spoil heaps and waste rock dumps, covering tailings dams to prevent leakage of often highly toxic material, and dealing with large voids left over after open cut mining, which often contain high levels of acid, heavy metals or salt. Progressive rehabilitation of the sites is usually specified in environmental authorities for the mines but this is rarely done in any sort of systematic way. Less than 20 per cent of all the sites in the Bowen Basin have been rehabilitated. The cost of rehabilitating these Bowen basin mines varies from $8bn to $16bn. Queensland governments have been notoriously lax about collecting financial assurances from the companies. Over the years, many companies have been allowed to simply walk away from their mines without doing adequate rehabilitation. To the credit of the current Labor government the financial assurances for all mining in the state has been increased to $4.6m but this is still well short of a figure that would ensure taxpayers did not have to foot the bill. The Palaszczuk government has also passed through the Parliament amendments to the Environmental Protection Act that enable it to trace back the chain of responsibility for any mine where the owners have walked away from their rehabilitation responsibilities. That is important because we already have something like 15,000 abandoned mines in the state, about 400 of which are “high risk”.
It is important to know this background because we need to recognise that interventionist government and regulatory enforcement are essential to the creation of so many jobs in the new economy and certainly they are in the area of rehabilitating mine sites. Rehabilitation is not something that companies should be free to choose to do. It is part of the obligations they sign up to when they are given approval to extract minerals. Therefore private money, backed by financial assurances and regulatory enforcement can create thousands of jobs in regional Queensland. The key to creating this situation is motivating the companies to change their cultures so they no longer see environmental management issues as an optional extra but as an integral part of their operations.
We have been working on a case study of Blair Athol, a very old mine in central Queensland which has not been worked since 2012. The mine has 1166ha still to rehabilitate and only 14 workers are left on site after 170 were sacked in 2012. If they started now, they would create about 40 full-time jobs for the next 6-10 years. Multiply that across the Bowen Basin and there would be something like 2000-3000 jobs created at a time when no one is being employed in mining in regional Queensland. For the first time I can remember I can walk into a Government Minister’s office and say, “I can show you how to protect the environment and create jobs.”

Jobs in a low-carbon economy

R egime of Prohibition (RoP) is a measure of how hard governments and police crack down on drug users measured by the ratio of the number of drug offences per thousand drug users. Not all illicit drugs are prosecuted equally in Australia. If the illicit drugs were being policed in terms of their harmfulness (the potential for fatal overdoses and addiction) then cannabis, which is the least addictive, and which is never associated with fatal overdoses, should have the lowest relative Regime of Prohibition, followed by the amphetamine type stimulants, then cocaine and heroin. Instead, the war on drugs in Australia is a war on cannabis, the softest drug, while cocaine, a far more addictive drug, is almost decriminalised. The reason seems to be class: cocaine is the drug of choice of the highest socioeconomic groups and is rarely policed. Relative Regime of Prohibition compares the offences/1000 users of the various illicit drugs to cocaine’s Regime of Prohibition, which was 2.1 offences per 1000 users in 2010.
The main target of the War on Drugs in Australia is cannabis: 70% of all illicit drug offences are for cannabis. Among cannabis seizures, by far the biggest operation is the annual helicopter raids on the alternative communities on the NSW north coast. In the US, drug prohibition falls disproportionally on black Americans. Not so, it seems, in Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander account for 26% of the total Australian prisoner population, an imprisonment rate 14 times more than the non-Indigenous rate. However, they constitute only 4% of the population imprisoned for illicit drugs. As well, they use cannabis and meth/amphetamines, the drugs most Australians get arrested for, at twice the national rate. In this regard, Australia’s drug laws are not racially discriminatory. Drug prosecutions in Australia seem to be about lifestyle and class, rather than colour.

The ecstasy market

Ecstasy is the second most commonly used illicit drug in Australia after cannabis, used by 3% of the population over 14, or about 600,000 Australians. In 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) declared that Australia had the highest annual prevalence of ecstasy use in the world. However, the global MDMA crisis intervened in 2009.

Between 2007 and 2010, use of ecstasy declined from 3.5% to 3% of the Australian population over 14.

Estimated market size 40 million pills in 2011.

Estimated market value $1,400 million.

The cocaine market

Of Australia’s big five illicit drug markets, the cocaine market is expanding most rapidly. Cocaine has grown in popularity at the expense of ecstasy. Seizures are on the increase. Cocaine featured in four of the five massive seizures in the final months of 2012, and 750 kilograms of cocaine were seized.

There were an estimated 390 000 recent cocaine users in Australia in 2010, but only 839 cocaine arrests, an arrest rate of 2.1 arrests per thousand users. The cannabis arrests rate of 30.9 arrests per thousand users was fifteen times higher.

Australia’s annual cocaine market is approximately 4.7 tonnes.

Estimated market value $2.5 billion.

Market size equates to about 94 million lines of coke.

The methamphetamine market

Methamphetamine use declined from 3.4% to 2.1% of the population over 14 between 2001 and 2010. However, methamphetamine arrests recorded the most substantial increase of all drug types, increasing by 62 per cent over the same decade.

The past two years witnessed an extraordinary succession of record-breaking meth seizures.

Estimated number of users is 390,000.

Estimated market size is 6.8 tonnes.

Estimated street value is $5 billion.

The cannabis market

Cannabis is Australia’s most popular illicit drug with an estimated 2 million users. About 250,000 Australians use cannabis daily.

70% of all illicit drug users are cannabis users. 70% of all illicit drug offences are for cannabis. 75% of drug seizures are for cannabis.

Market size is estimated to be between 150 tonnes and 300 tonnes of cannabis.

The value of the cannabis market is estimated at $6 billion.

Depending on how you pack your cone , the estimated market size equates to 2400 million hits from the bong.

The heroin market

A revival of opium production in Southeast Asia seems to be contributing to a revival of Australia’s heroin market. Heroin seizures are at decade-high levels.

Estimated size of the Australian heroin market is two tonnes. This equates to forty million hits.

The estimated street value is $2 billion.

Australia’s illicit drug trade

The Australian illicit drug trade consists of a market of about three million Australians, composed of a cannabis market of between 150-300 tonnes, worth about $6 billion, 2 tonnes of heroin ($2 billion), 4.7 tonnes of cocaine ($2.5 billion), 40 million ecstasy tablets ($1.4 billion), and 6.8 tonnes of methamphetamine ($5 billion), giving an estimated value of the Australian illicit drug market of about $17 billion.
About 90,000 drug offences are prosecuted each year in Australia while an estimated 2680 million drug offences are committed each year (2400 million cones, 40 million pills, 40 million hits, etc.) or about 1 prosecution per 30,000 offences; the cocaine rate is about one prosecution for every 110,000 lines of coke.