DON'T WAIT TO GO E-CAR; JUST WAIT FOR THE CHARGERS

 HOW TO CHOKE EV USE - CAR FIRST, SERVICES LATER

 

The High Court striking down Victoria’s electric vehicle levy shows policies around the technology are a dog’s breakfast, reports Duncan Graham* after a fossil fuel-free trip across the Nullarbor.

 

Governments across the nation claim they want to reduce pollution. On their list are electric cars. Consumers are encouraged with rebates, tax breaks and blarney, but discouraged by inaction on infrastructure.

 

Though the ocean is 200 km to the south, Norseman is a port. It’s the cast-off point into the Nullarbor, the great isolation that early explorers hoped might include an inland sea, They should have asked the traditional owners who knew it as Oondiri - ‘waterless’.

 

A 19th-century writer called the 200,000 square kilometre treeless plain ‘the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams’. 

 

Now the sealed Eyre Highway is run daily by fleets of monster trucks and cars dragging campers, Adventurers heading east leave Norseman with swags of anxiety. Will they get to the next harbour? No probs with a spare full jerrycan in the boot, impossible when the vehicle is electric.

 

Politicians have made such a fuss about their ‘initiatives’ that the casual consumer would assume the E-Age is upon us and all is ready.

 

Depending on the car’s capacity, it could take nine hours to fill up. Imagine doing that in a busy fuel station with a dribbling bowser.

Williams:  Who has the right plug?

 

The WA Government blows hard on its alleged commitment to driving away from fossil fuels. So it’s installed power points around well-populated tourist centres drawing oenophiles and surfers.

 

That’s not why travellers visit Norseman, a small gold-mining town named after a prospector’s lame horse. Few go to see the nag’s statue or the tailings dump, they go there to get away. 

 

Though there are no fast chargers there are four churches where spirits can be revived and thanks given to their deity for surviving the wilderness. Not for forty days - just five unless you hit a roo and rollover - but even if all goes well and the drivers don’t doze, it will still seem like an Old Testament trek. Don’t travel alone,

 

Planning is critical so the agency that’s supposed to be in charge was asked: What’s available now in Norseman? ‘Work will start next year.’ Question repeated. Three days later an update: A socket in a rusty box at the sports ground.

Norseman - looks grand but not connected

 

This is the thinking: When enough people have bought e-cars we’ll install chargers. Like - we’ll build a hotel when enough holiday makers we’ve invited  are sleeping in cars.

 

When long-distance driving an e-car pack patience and planning. That’s made a few volts easier with the free PlugShare app, full of maps, feedback about queues and gripes.

 

Travellers report broken contacts, unhelpful roadhouse staff and slimes who’ve grabbed the only outlet during the holiday season and then gone for a few beers. They report East Coast chargers aren’t too bad - but few compliments for WA.

 

There’s much work to be done by governments and car manufacturers before travellers can comfortably do more than drive from home to office. Some power points are BYO plugs. Standardisation is needed - best to carry four different cables.

 

A key selling point is the cost, with fuel around $2.50 and electricity often free - though at one Nullarbor stop it’s $2 a kilowatt-hour, close to the price of petrol.

 

In South Australia where fast chargers are being built by an automobile association, the cost is usually 60 cents a KwH, less off-peak. There are a few dinkum greenies, like a Whyalla vet who has put in a shaded point for public use. (right)

 

Some progressive shire councils have also done the right thing, though usually only slow systems.

 

Even where locals have e-servers they’re rarely under cover or close to shops. Handling 500-volt plugs in pouring rain isn’t a good idea. Likewise when 40+.   Public toilets are better signposted, 

 

Cut a car’s advertised range by a third because sellers use a last-century European system based on short trips. 

 

Range anxiety ranks up there with the ‘did I lock the front door?’ terror when two hours from home. Gas guzzlers may have conscience twinges about polluting the planet, but they rarely worry about running dry 500 km from the nearest breakdown truck.

 

Scott Morrison’s 2019 election campaign sneer that Labor’s support for e-cars would ‘end the weekend’ is oft repeated by sneering e-nthusiasts bragging about their marvels of electronics. 

 

Little need for knobs and switches - just speak and the system obeys in a soft female voice and neutral accent - even steer if the driver tires. She’ll warn when the battery is going flat, though useless if there’s no nearby charger,

 

Then terror strikes. Before hitting the Nullarbor don’t watch the creepy killer movie, Roadgames. 

 

For those good at juggling percentages, KwH, km, vehicle weight, wind speed and direction, and fiddle all to reach the safe sweet spot where maths and reason rules and worry retreats, then the e-xperience can be fun and e-ducational.

 

If not wait till the States get their act together and plug  pledges into infrastructure.

 

* Duncan Graham and son Andrew took a week and 20 stops to drive from Perth to Adelaide in a 2023 Chinese e-car. Total cost $250 for 3000 + km - around a quarter of a conventional trip expense.

 

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First published 25 October 2023 in Independent Australia: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/governments-choking-ev-use-by-putting-cars-first-services-later,18018

and here: https://johnmenadue.com/how-to-choke-ev-use-car-first-service-later/

MR CLEAN GETS DIRTY

 

 The making of a dynasty and unmaking of democracy                    

 

Indonesian politics are played hard. Corruption is a given, but a devious ploy to keep the present president wielding power has backfired with wholesale anger against a gross display of law-bending and nepotism. 

 

In one sly move, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, 62, has lost the backing of the moderate mainstream led by the Republic’s leading public intellectual, Goenawan Mohamad.(below, left)

 

The writer, poet and campaigner against despots was not a friend, but an open supporter and organiser for Jokowi in the 2014 and 2019 elections.

 

Past endorsements by Goenawan, 82, have helped sustain the President’s Mr Clean image at home and overseas in a country rotten with graft.  When first elected he was seen as an ‘avatar of reform’.

 

Jokowi had no links to the military, political Islam, big business or regal families yet got to the top as a darling because he was a competent, humble, small-town man of the people. He’s been dazzlingly popular with big business and the wee folk.

 

Then to widespread dismay came a push to extend his Constitutionally-limited two terms in power. When this failed he turned to family to remain as a dahlang - puppet master.

 

The tactic involved approving the nomination of his eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, as a vice president candidate. Not for his father’s party but his opponent’s.

 

This was altogether too much for Goenawan.

 

‘Jokowi should have retired in dignity,’ the veteran press freedom activist and founder-editor of Tempo magazine told Michael West Media.  ‘He did much that was good; we have free health care, better infrastructure and much more. The country is safe and the economy is growing. 

 

 ‘He once had my respect. No longer. I do not support politics being practised without values.’

 

Gibran is on the ticket of disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto, a former bitter rival to Jokowi in previous elections and head of the right-wing Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement) party.  

 

Posters promoting Prabowo featuring Jokowi and Gibran are already on the streets, some confusingly captioned ‘Jokowi Party’. This is like having Albanese validate  Dutton as next PM.

 

To get in the running Gibran had to persuade the Constitutional Court to make an exception to the rule limiting the VP role to the over-40s.

 

This month the court ruled five to four in his favour. One of the assenting judges is the applicant’s uncle. The Australian-educated Gibran was formerly mayor of a small Central Java town, a position previously held by his father.

 

In an open letter to the President and published this month Goenawan wrote: ‘The sense of justice is violated, the agreed rules are betrayed … because the person we trusted turns out to be deceitful.

 

‘In 2022 I said Jokowi was the best president in Indonesian history until now.

 

‘But in 2023, I am reminded of the classic wisdom, that a leader who is admired and praised is a man who is tempted. Power and praise are evil for the person on the throne, and addictive.’

 

 Prabowo expected that recruiting Gibran would rocket him to the front. But Goenawan’s surprise attack on Jokowi and public dismay at the fall of their idol and what appears to be judicial activism could well shoot down Prabowo’s chances.

 

In Indonesian affairs, there’s rarely a separation of faith and politics. Candidates’ personalities, families and quirks carry more clout than policy. 

 

The three main contestants are all male, Muslim and from Java.  They want  to rule a nation of close to 278 million (of course half are women) from 1,300 ethnic groups spread across the world’s largest archipelagic state of 6,000 inhabited islands.

 

The number of Christians in Indonesia almost equals the total population of Australia.

 

The campaign is revving hard and the people next door are being chased  down with promises of El Dorado and sometimes hard cash for their 14 February vote. The world’s largest single-day election for 20,000 national and local parliament seats is held once every five years. 

 

Voting isn’t compulsory but in 2019 the turnout of 83 per cent from 191 million registered voters suggests Indonesians like democracy (or a mid-week holiday), though the toll was awful; 456 election officers, 91 supervisory agents and 22 police officers died, mainly from stress and exhaustion. Seven million worked on the poll.

 

 

The election outcome will be critical for Australian trade and regional security, maybe even tourism if a fundamentalist candidate wins and diplomatic relations are threatened by xenophobic politicians.

 

Indonesian politics don’t follow the Westminster model of government and opposition.

Switches are rarely made on matters of principle. Minor parties get seduced into coalition with promises of access to ministries and the chance to reward donors, so opposition withers.

 

Although Indonesia became a republic in 1945, Javanese oligarchs flaunt their connections to the Sultanates of colonial days. Prabowo adds aristocracy to his credentials for office.

 

Deleted from the CV are these facts: He was kicked out of the military in 1998 for disobeying orders and fled to exile in Jordan. For several years his human rights record had him banned entry to the US where he’d studied the arts of killing at Fort Benning.

 

He was also booted from his 15-year marriage to Soeharto’s daughter  Siti Hediati Hariyadi. Their only son Didit Hediprasetyo is a fashion designer in Germany and is widely whispered to be gay.

 

So what? Only that last year his homeland legislators made adult consensual same-sex conduct illegal, bucking the international trend.

 

Now 72 Prabowo seems nothing like a general, apart from the strut and arrogance. He’s plump and short and it shows when standing close to his slim, young recruit.

 

Hung with the albatrosses of disgrace, divorce, and ‘deviancy’ should have made Prabowo politically impotent.  The shame of losing by ten percentage points to Jokowi  in the 2019 contest, was then followed by Trump-like tantrums with accusations, appeals and riots. Eight people died and more than 600 were injured.

 

Then Jokowi made him Minister for Defence, following the Lyndon  Johnson fugly wisdom that it’s ‘better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’ 

That gave him a platform and an equal chance, say pollsters. He’s a US dollar multi-billionaire backed by a tame media, keen to protect the nation from multiple imagined threats.

 

These include the claim that Australia plans to Balkanise the ‘Unity State’ to plunder its mineral riches, and treating a US sci-fi fantasy about a 2030 apocalypse as a fact.

 

Like the referendum debate, the slur-throwers care only that some lies will stick to the blanket of indifference and confusion.

 

Prabowo changes his colours like the Pacific tree frog. One commentator put it succinctly: ‘He appeared as a patriotic soldier in his 2004 bid for the vice presidency (representing yet another party) … then as a rabble-rousing nationalist in the 2014 presidential race, before polarising the public as an aggrieved Islamist in 2019.’

Ganjar Pranowo with author

 

 Now he’s hunting the youth vote through social media and having Jokowi’s son as a subaltern. His main opponent is Ganjar Pranowo, 54.

 

Logically (by Western standards) the former Central Java Provincial Governor should succeed Jokowi as both are in the mildly left populist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI_P) which has a majority (128 of 575) seats in the Legislative Assembly.

 

Their party boss is Megawati, daughter of founding president Soekarno.

 

Earlier this year she ordered Ganjar to reject Israel’s national team in the Under-20 World Cup football (soccer) tournament. Hosting rights were then lost to Argentina. Millions were angered by their sport being kicked by politicians. Seventeen to 39-year-olds make up half the voters.

 

Logically this cohort should back former Jakarta Governor Dr Anies Baswedan who appears to be the most acceptable candidate for Australia. He often visits so knows our views and values. 

 

He’s running behind largely because he hasn’t been blessed by Jokowi. The two men fell out when the reformist and ambitious Anies was Minister for Education and seen as a threat.

 

The US-educated former rector of a liberal university has Arab ancestry so pulls the Islamic vote.  Indonesia is a secular state but has the world’s largest population of Muslims. 

 

Ganjar is deft at handling controversy. In a 2019 podcast, he admitted to watching porn, risky in an uptight nation that bans sites like Tumblr and Vimeo.

 

He told an interviewer: ‘If I watch porn, what is wrong with that? I like it. I am an adult. I have a wife,’ Ganjar played the story for laughs suggesting it was a publicity stunt to tickle the lads.

 

The real porn stars are the power-crazed contenders raping democracy.

 

From now to Valentine’s Day there’ll be much hate and little love on the hustings. 

 

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First published in Michael West Media, 24 October 2023: https://michaelwest.com.au/indonesian-elections-the-making-of-a-dynasty-and-unmaking-of-democracy/

GRETA IN THE TROPICS

 MUD LADY MAKES CONSERVATION COOL              

 

She’s Indonesia’s Greta Thunberg minus the environmental activist’s Swedish scowl,  replaced instead by a Javanese smile. Interpreting this as an absence of determination would be a grievous error. 

 

Lia Putrinda, 29, and the mother of two daughters has already amassed more awards and recognition than many didactic academics who’ve struggled for decades to make us change the way we treat our world. 

 

Factors in her success include youth, gender, cheeriness and an ability to inspire. She’s also a gifted musician and singer, which helps lighten the delivery of her heavy message: Care for the world. 

 

‘I was always serious at school and wanted to do my best for my country,’ she told Indonesia Expat in her Sendangbiru resource centre on East Java’s south coast.  

 

‘I’d seen how nature had been damaged by clear-felling and pollution which was affecting the lives of everyone in our community.  

 

‘About 20 years ago we had a drought and the fishermen started reporting smaller catches. It was obvious something was wrong and it wasn’t getting better. 

. 

‘I was told not to worry because the wounds would heal themselves, but I wasn’t convinced. I asked myself: ‘What can I do?’ I knew I had a duty.’ 

 

The answer was action - first family and then friends - cleaning forests of trash and planting mangroves in bare tidal inlets where the tree’s prop-roots help stabilise estuary mud. The trees had been felled for firewood and charcoal, causing erosion. 

 

Studies show that the salt-tolerant evergreens provide safe breeding habitats for fish and shellfish, so a vital food source. 

 

Coral in the ecosystem had also been damaged by explosives used to stun fish and mine the reefs for building blocks, even though illegal. 

 

Nearby attractions, including the famous Tiga Warna (Three Colours) beach, had long-drawn swimmers and divers from Malang, a three-hour drive north. 

 

Locals built guest houses to supply tourists’ needs.  But Putrinda realised this boost to the economy - traditionally dependent on fishing - could be lost if the attractions were damaged. 

 

Putrinda is featured in a book on the nation’s inspiring women by the Indonesian Government’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy. She’s also been recognised by the Women’s Earth Alliance, a powerful international organisation. 

 

Like Thunberg, Putrinda started young, speaking out before entering her teens.  She knows what she’s talking about despite having no tertiary qualifications. Her elevated English is largely self-taught, enhanced by a strong vocabulary from reading widely. 

 

She had to forego a scholarship to study marine biology at an Australian university because her family didn’t have the money to sustain her for several years abroad. 

 

Staff and students from Brawijaya University in Malang have surveyed the regional environment and produced scholarly reports which have provided academic credibility. 

 

With her father Saptoyo, who used to run a general store, she started the NGO Clungup Mangrove Conservation to formalise the project and raise funds, largely through entrance fees. 

 

Before the pandemic, CMC was attracting around 5,000 visitors a month. The number is now close to 3,000.  Most are Indonesians - few foreigners know of the eco site because there’s little information in English - a fault yet to be fixed.  

 

Explorers must be accompanied by a guide who explains the features of the 81-hectare park and ten hectares of coral and answers questions. The Rp 190,000 fees help pay the 120 staff and build facilities.  

 

So far 1.8 km of paving has been laid so visitors can get access to isolated points. There are plans to surface two more kilometres of road.  

 

Visitors’ bags are checked for bottles and food packaging - and again on exiting to ensure all waste is carried out. The policy seems petty, but it drives the point that good habits should persist in everyday life. 

 

‘Every person should be responsible for their trash,’ said Lia. ‘What we do now can affect others far away. For example, we are finding plastics on our beaches that have come from India on ocean currents and have been swirling around for years.’ 

 

This is also an economic issue. Pollution of Bali beaches is giving the island a bad reputation overseas that’s likely to push vacationers to seek cleaner places to stay and spend. 

 

The focus of CMC is that education should not be imprisoned in a classroom, all desks facing a blackboard. Students should be able to see, smell and touch the topic. 

 

 Learning becomes fun by adding activities like paddling kayaks, pedalling bicycles, swimming and scuba diving to make a total experience. The mangroves and coral can’t be seen in isolation. 

 

Like a jigsaw, nature is interlocked. The birds, animals and insects need food and shelter among the trees which benefit from the wildlife pollinating and fertilising.   

 

Putrinda’s message is that missing one piece creates a malformed picture. Her organisation has been given some government money but so far has been unable to get backing from big business without compromising principles of no corporate advertising. 

 

Posters and notice boards along the trails only show what the park does and why. There are no urgings to smoke cigarettes or swig colas. 

 

Putrinda is frank about the problems she’s encountered, starting with locals who feared bans against plundering the forest would lead to income loss. She convinced them to turn from cutting trees to working as conservationists. 

 

Another problem has been bureaucrats who’ve resented a community organisation getting credit for caring for land they’re supposed to protect.  

 

Putrinda’s initiative has been praised by conservationists, but the applause hasn’t gone to her head. She credits her parents for raising her and her sister Labda Manggala to appreciate nature and believes that individuals can make a difference, however lowly their status. 

 

‘I want young people to see what’s possible and help their communities, wherever they are,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave the job of change to others.’ 

 

(Pix by Erlinawati Graham) 

First published in Indonesia Expat, 6 October 2023: https://online.fliphtml5.com/qinqh/ertc/#p=18