Climate activists cop harassment but heavy hands of the law won’t deter them

Jonathan Ridnell writes: I read “FIFO cops: WA police are steamrolling climate activists” with a growing feeling of dread. When police resources are stretched in so many areas, the use of intimidation on climate activists to achieve some unknown goal for some unknown person/group is more than worrying. I suppose at least they didn’t turn up to Joana Partyka’s home at 4am in leather coats, but the parallels with other political and corporate thuggery in failed states is striking.

I really thought our leaders were better than this.

Dr John Nightingale writes: WA has become the exact equivalent of the narco-state, the fossil-fuel state. The government has been captured by Woodside and other miners, and these companies demand freedom from the flea bites of protesters. How long before there are disappearances?

Jo Vallentine writes: “FIFO cops: WA police are steamrolling climate activists” makes for very sobering reading. People’s houses being searched while they’re in custody for daring to challenge the business-as-usual activities of government and only-for-profit corporations is outrageous. Activists being hounded for past “demeanours” or possible future actions to bring attention to the climate crisis is chilling indeed. 

Obviously such heavy-handed tactics, with the full support of government which is protecting the damaging fossil-fuel extractive industries, are meant to deter activists from daring to do anything to alter the status quo. But this tactic is not working. People involved in the campaign to thwart Woodside’s Burrup hub will not be deterred. It is time for more citizens to rise to their defence, to join them, for the sake of a possible liveable future for our grandchildren, and theirs.

Is Don. Is not good

John Peel writes: Donald Trump, defeated or undefeated, imprisoned or free, will be a threat to American democracy for as long as he lives (“It was always going to end here — Trump’s indictment is the logical conclusion of Trumpism”). Why? Because close to half of the United States electorate, to put it politely, appears to be pathologically stupid. That wouldn’t matter if the rest of the world were not affected, but of course it is. We are all going to pay the price of a once great democracy gone mad.

Jock Webb writes: Of course Trump will continue to create havoc. But worse are the immoral scum who run the Republicans to help him do it.

My great-grandfather was a Lincoln-voting Republican. He was also a six-gun-wearing cattleman in the bushranging days and I reckon he’d have shot Trump without a moment’s hesitation. This venal, odious parasite represents the utter failure of the American state. Its neoliberal idiocy has bankrupted the treasury, life expectancy is going down and Congress is a farce.

The US fought a war to remove a king but turned its presidency into one. This is a man whose hero president is the genocidal Andrew Jackson, who when told that his ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee was unlawful said: “The Supreme Court doesn’t have an army.” This is a possible leader of our major ally who could in theory run and rule from a prison cell.

Star-crossed

Kyle Turpin writes: I watch a lot of theatre, right across the country and find the best reviews are the ballsy ones that don’t beat around the bush (“The Australian one-star theatre review barely exists. But should it?”). I know the state of modern arts journalism is dire in Australia and that probably fosters an environment wherein writers are aiming to encourage attendance rather than write about what to avoid, but the comparison to film criticism in the article (from what Rita Bratovic said) illustrates the issue: if something is godawful, tell your readers that it is.

There are a number of plays and musicals I’ve seen I would gleefully give one or no stars to. Lazarus, the David Bowie musical that The Production Company produced in Melbourne a few years ago, is far and away the worst thing I’ve seen on stage. Reviews weren’t kind but giving a circular three-starred review hinting at the reviewer’s discomfort with what was a piece of excrement which drew out its 100 interminable minutes into what felt like years is not useful for audiences who need to be told honestly if the show is straight up bad.

Another example is the ludicrous The Lucky Country from the Hayes Theatre in Sydney. It didn’t receive a rapturous response, but it barely got a bad review. The original songs were Play School-level, hastily assembled in a jarringly disparate construction. Nothing was coherent let alone cohesive, with current-affairs virtue signalling shoehorned in.

Arts criticism needs to be braver. If something is truly awful, say so. Enough of these middle-ground three-starred pieces of nothing. I understand if something is mediocre then three stars is the default but audiences deserve to be told honestly if something isn’t worth their time or money. Take a leaf out of film criticism’s book and really let us have it.

Juliana Payne writes: As a volunteer reviewer on a local Sydney website (Theatre Thoughts) I grapple with this weekly. We are required to give a score out of five and it kills me. If I have to go the low end I try to say constructive things rather than just negative insults — you can usually see what the company is trying to do, and it mainly falls short due to underdevelopment and poor execution as it is rushing to market often, just like our film industry which suffers from the same creative and executional squeezing by commercial realities.

In the past couple of years I have given more four and even five stars to small theatres and it’s the mainstage that has been largely stuck in the two- to three-star rating, so it’s not always the small crews that need the stern review. Mind you, I still laugh out loud at some of the fantastic one-line insults I read by those ruthless London and New York reviewers.