‘The tsunami just keeps coming’: Europe’s growing cocaine market
Squeezed between the two channels of France’s biggest container port is a warren of narrow alleyways, blowsy 1950s bungalows and – along a windblown high road – a disheartening parade of shuttered shops.
Les Neiges is Le Havre’s dockers’ district. At the end of each side street stands a 3-metre, steel-and-concrete fence topped with razor wire; beyond that, dipping and swivelling, the cranes and gantries that process more than 3m containers a year.
Hidden away in those shipping containers, stashed among the bananas, frozen prawns, cane sugar and canned fruit, is an ever-increasing quantity of cocaine. Of the record 27 tonnes of the drug seized in France last year, more than a third was intercepted in the Normandy port.
“What we’re actually seeing,” said Laurent Laniel of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), “is a concerted, ongoing attempt to flood Europe with cocaine. It’s an expanding market, and it shows no sign of slowing.”
Each year since 2017, Laniel said, EU police and customs officers have seized more of the drug than the last.
In 2021, the most recent year for which full data is available, it was 303 tonnes – five times more than a decade ago. “And that’s just what we intercepted,” he said. “Right now, it doesn’t seem like a battle we’re winning.”
The consequences, within and beyond the continent’s key north-western gateways of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Le Havre, are spiralling corruption as the drug cartels bid to co-opt port logistics firms, local union officials and politicians, even the judicial system – and a dramatic increase in violent crime.
As South American traffickers link up with European organised crime gangs to share the spoils of a €10bn market, the Netherlands, Belgium and France have witnessed drug-related contract killings, torture, bombings, shootouts and deaths. Credible plans have been uncovered to kidnap senior government ministers.
In Les Neiges, unsurprisingly, it’s not something people much want to talk about. “Seriously?” asked one longtime resident, standing foursquare on her doorstep and declining to give her name. “You don’t seriously expect to find anyone round here who’ll be happy to tell you about that?”
With reason. Last year, a few hundred metres from here, police opened fire on a group of men unloading cellophane-wrapped bricks of cocaine from a container. In another incident reminiscent of Mexico or Colombia, heavily armed criminals stormed a high-security warehouse to liberate their stash.
This February, six local men, all of whom grew up in or operated out of Les Neiges – including Louis Bellahcène, alias “Doudou” or the “King of the Port” – were handed prison sentences totalling more than 100 years for helping to smuggle 1.3 tonnes of South American cocaine out of the terminal.
Unable to resist the temptation – as one said at his trial – of “earning a year’s salary in a couple of hours”, dozens of Le Havre’s 2,200 dockers, as well as port agents, truck drivers and other port workers, have been arrested over the past five years.
For those who hesitate, the cocaine cartels have other, more forceful methods. More than 30 port workers have been kidnapped or held hostage since 2017. In 2020, one – a 40-year-old union leader and father of four – was beaten to death and dumped behind a local school; two years earlier, another was found alive but horribly tortured, his calves repeatedly stabbed with a screwdriver.
Some give way to the coercion. “Guys will come up to them at the school gates, or in a cafe, and show them smartphone photos of their wife and kids,” says Valérie Giard, a lawyer who has defended several. “They say: do what we say, or they get it.”
Many, though, need little encouragement: according to a list of tariffs found by police, the going rate for helping to extract a container from the port is €75,000. Moving it out of CCTV range or closer to a fence will earn you €50,000, while a loan of your security badge is worth €10,000. Recruiters can earn €100,000 per operation.
The sums are tiny compared with the drug gangs’ staggering profits: a
kilo of cocaine bought for $1,000 in Colombia is worth more than €35,000 in Europe and, once smuggled out of port and cut – or diluted with other substances – can be sold on the street (or, more likely, ordered by WhatsApp or Signal) for €50 to €70 a gram.
Cultivation of coca leaves in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru has been rising since 2014, according to a report this year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and surged by 35% from 2020 to 2021. Meanwhile, global cocaine manufacture has surpassed 2,000 tonnes, double the 2014 figure. The drug is also 40% purer now than in 2010.
In Europe the drug sells at up to twice the price in the US, where the market is now saturated. With an estimated 3.5 million Europeans using cocaine in 2021, four times more than 20 years ago, Europol puts the total streetlevel value of the European cocaine market at somewhere between €7.6bn and €10.5bn.
“With those kinds of sums involved, the logistics chain has become very efficient,” Laniel said. “It uses mostly containers, but also yachts, fishing boats, private jets, now manned semi-submersibles or submarine drones. And once it gets here, there’s a veritable European army to distribute it – we estimate at least 100,000 people.”
The business is largely controlled by Mexican mafia gangs, police say, who once served as middlemen for the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels but are now in command of much of the chain, from financing production to organising the smuggling into Europe.
Shipments are separated to reduce cost and risk, and sold to pan-European crime syndicates including the Moroccan “Mocro maffia” active in Belgium and the Netherlands, Serb, Albanian and Kosovan gangs, and Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta.
The main entry point remains Antwerp, about 450km north-east of Le Havre, where police and customs officials – who, as in most ports, have the resources to check only between 1% and 2% of all containers – intercepted more than 43 tonnes of cocaine in the first half of this year alone, after 110 tonnes in 2022.
“The tsunami,” said the Belgian port’s customs chief, Kristian Vanderwaeren, “just keeps coming.” Brussels’ chief public prosecutor, Johan Delmulle, this year warned that with molotov cocktails, car bombings and gun battles regularly rocking the streets of Antwerp, the country could soon “come to be seen as a narco state”.
Antwerp has witnessed more than 200 drug-related violent incidents over the last five years, including 81 last year alone. In January, an 11-year-old girl – the niece of two of Belgium’s top accused drug smugglers, the El Ballouti brothers – died after five bullets from a Kalashnikov assault rifle were fired into the family kitchen.
A retired Belgian police officer, who asked not to be named because he still advises government agencies, said the hidden share of the drug business in Antwerp, Europe’s second busiest port, was “just huge.”
About 100km further up the coast, in Europe’s largest port of Rotterdam, a reinforced customs operation – including the full automisation of the port’s cargo terminals – has made things “significantly more difficult” for the smugglers and helped reduce seizures from 70 to 47 tonnes last year, according to a senior customs official, Ger Scheringa.
But drug-related violence has reached unimagined heights in the Netherlands. In July 2021, the investigative TV journalist Peter R de Vries was gunned down in a car park in Amsterdam and died nine days later. A crime specialist, one of his sources was the key state witness against alleged drug baron Ridouan Taghi, arrested in
Dubai in 2019.
A lawyer involved in the same case, Derk Wiersum, was also shot dead in 2019, prompting – along with incidents such as the discovery of a shipping container transformed into a torture chamber – the mayors of Amsterdam and Rotterdam to warn of a “culture of crime and violence … taking on Italian traits”.
Everywhere, police and customs investigations are being heavily ramped up. Le Havre brought in 25 new officers this year, while Antwerp has a new drug commissioner and aims to ensure all containers coming from South America are automatically scanned within the next five years.
Police have made breakthroughs: in 2021, Sky ECC, a messaging service seen as uncrackable by its users, was broken, leading to thousands of new drug cases. But the overall impact on Europe’s ballooning cocaine trade was minimal. “You take one out, another just replaces him,” said a French investigator.
Increasingly, too, the traffickers are spreading their bets. As seizures in Rotterdam have shrunk, those in nearby Vlissingen have doubled. Smaller, less well-guarded ports are being targeted: fishing harbours in Spain and Portugal, minor Swedish ports. Last year, for the first time, 600kg of cocaine was seized in Montoir-de-Bretagne, a small roll-on, roll-off dock in the Loire estuary.
Equally alarmingly, instead of making cocaine in South America and shipping the finished product to Europe, the gangs are also setting up sophisticated factories on the continent to extract cocaine paste hidden in maritime cargos ranging from plastic polymers to asphalt products, and then transform it into powder, Laniel said.
More than 30 such labs were dismantled on the continent in 2021, according to the EMCDDA. In May, a police raid on a remote cottage in Galicia, north-west Spain, allegedly found eight “cooks” working around the clock. Once fully operational, the new production line could have turned out 200kg of cocaine a day, Spanish police said.
“Cocaine kills people slowly,” Laniel said. “It also brings with it unprecedented violence, and corruption. A lot of bad people are making huge amounts of money. It’s being taken seriously now. But it’s a massive challenge.”
• This article was amended on 18 October 2023. An earlier version said that Antwerp was about 450km northwest of Le Havre instead of north-east.
the Liberals into a no position. But the tone of his letter was pugnacious. It felt like a portent of conflict. But some in the opposition insist Dutton was attempting to keep his options open, despite being lobbied by fellow right wingers in his party to line up, pronto, with the Nationals.
Some Liberals say the 15 questions foray was a public signal that Dutton wanted to negotiate. One says the hope was the volley of questions would prompt Albanese to bring Dutton to the table; to put everyone in a room, articulate some parameters and test whether there was any prospect of agreement.
Albanese had taken the opposition by surprise by announcing the wording of the referendum question on the constitutional amendment at the Garma festival the previous July. While Albanese made it clear at the time he regarded the three sentences as a “starting point” for dialogue, Liberal voice supporters felt Albanese – buoyed up by his post election honeymoon and at the zenith of his internal authority – effectively locked them out from that point by telegraphing words publicly in advance of any process to test and build political consensus. Some Liberals also wanted a two-step strategy, legislating a model then moving to a referendum.
While Albanese had hoped initially that Dutton might be able to be persuaded to support the voice – the appointment of Julian Leeser as the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, a longtime supporter, was considered a hopeful sign – the prime minister thought the chances of that were remote, given the hostility from Dutton’s conservative base. When it came to prosecuting the voice, Albanese had hoped to be dealing with Josh Frydenberg post-election, not the Queensland right-winger.
Getting Dutton on board would have involved the government finding a model that could be supported by both Nampijinpa Price and the Indigenous leaders who had crafted the Uluru statement, particularly Megan Davis.
In the real world, this seemed a stretch, to put it mildly. Davis was very clear she wanted the voice to make representations to parliament and the executive government. Some moderate Liberals who might have been persuaded to campaign for yes were strongly opposed to that wide remit. One in that camp says: “The government strapping themselves to the referendum working group was a mistake. No one was prepared to call Megan’s bluff.”
This analysis is logical, but the counter-factual was also obvious: how could the government go to the voters proposing a voice that the original architects of the voice were fully prepared to disavow? That position is untenable for a prime minister who had promised to listen to Indigenous people.
This strange tango – Dutton demanding detail, Albanese pointing to the wealth of detail in previous parliamentary and other reports about the voice, Liberal moderates hoping there was a universe where very obviously irreconcilable differences of policy and strategy could somehow be resolved – continued until just after the Liberals lost the Aston byelection in April.
After that electoral blow, Dutton said no to the voice, Leeser left the opposition frontbench and Nampijinpa Price was installed in Leeser’s former shadow ministry.
Australia entered a brutal cycle of structural division. And public support for the voice started to tumble.
Sowing voter confusion
The yes campaign was an unusual beast. There were two bodies – the Yes23 campaign and the Uluru Dialogues entity headed by Megan Davis and Pat Anderson. A dual structure is an unconventional campaign setup; it’s not a model for efficiency.
It was clear in real time, and it’s crystal clear in hindsight, that the yes campaign began flat footed. It lost the critical opening messaging war. Dutton’s questions about the voice over the summer became definitional in the minds of many voters. One insider says: “That’s where it was lost. We were too slow.”
The yes campaign spent months trying to reframe the conversation, but reaching people was laborious and commanding voter attention was difficult. The growing conflict in the referendum conversation was a turnoff for a lot of voters. The divisive algorithms of social media were working their dark magic, saturating voters in ad hominem and negativity.
Questions about the campaign’s planning and preparedness would be a common theme until polling day. In South Australia, one of few states allowing corflutes to be affixed to telephone poles, local campaigners said they’d been pleading for more of the plastic signs to arrive in the last few weeks. One campaigner said a huge load finally arrived on the Friday afternoon before the Saturday polling day.
As the level of contention got dialled up, support from allies became more muted. Many in the yes campaign were puzzled and hurt that some sporting groups, many of which had made prominent public statements in favour of the voice and some of which had backed the Uluru statement for years, were not more forthcoming in their actual support during the campaign.
Some campaigners started comparing the level of tangible public support to that given to the marriage equality campaign. Major businesses and public organisations – some of whom had developed their own reconciliation action plans and Indigenous programs with help from the same Aboriginal leadership – had gone “missing when it mattered”.
Public polling, including Guardian Essential, tells us a number of Australians voted no because they thought the voice was divisive and the detail was not well understood. Nampijinpa Price rising to the opposition frontbench, becoming the no campaign’s effective figurehead, was also a visual demonstration that not all Indigenous people supported the reform. This reinforced another key no campaign message. The actual vote on referendum day painted quite a different picture, with very high yes vote in communities with large Indigenous populations. But by then, it was too late.
Public support for the voice held up through the first blow to bipartisanship – the Nationals declaring their hand. But Dutton’s decision to say no was a body blow. Private research undertaken for Yes23 and Labor’s private polling tracked a calamitous collapse in support for the voice among rustedon Coalition voters shortly after Dutton declared his opposition. Most of that decline happened within a couple of months, particularly in more conservative parts of the country and support continued to bleed right up until the final few weeks.
By August, no was ahead of yes in the Guardian Essential poll. Also in August, the director of Advance fronted the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney. He was direct about the strategy. Matthew Sheahan said the no campaign aimed to take advantage of voter confusion about the voice.
The process Sheahan described was like kicking an open door. The no campaign was able to “shape the conversation” because “very few people” knew what the voice was. Sheahan said the anti-voice group settled on its central argument – that the referendum would cause division – because that theme had been popular in focus groups. He said Advance’s strategy was to win three states to deny the yes campaign its required double majority of a national majority plus four of six states.
It wasn’t just Coalition voters who sunk the voice. There was a drop off in support from Labor voters too, but the trajectory was nowhere near as steep. In the end, every Australian state voted no.
Reluctant no voters
Not all no voters were a hard no. Campaign research suggests around half the no cohort were reluctant about it.
Liberal MP Bridget Archer campaigned for yes, but a majority of people in her marginal electorate of Bass voted no. Archer noted this reluctant no phenomenon talking to her constituents in northern Tasmania.
Archer describes this group as “middle Australia” no. “For the most part, they recognise the disadvantage faced by Indigenous people, they just disagree on the solution,” Archer says. “They feel a little bit uncomfortable about voting no, because they want to do something, they just didn’t want to do the voice for whatever reason.” She says this group were not going to “stand on a booth wearing a T-shirt that says ‘say no to division’ because they didn’t feel that way about it necessarily, they just felt unsure that the voice was the solution.”
Archer also encountered reluctant progressive no voters as she did the rounds.
With public support for the voice seemingly in freefall, the yes campaign changed tack radically as prepoll voting opened. The campaign had tried to keep the core yes messaging about Indigenous aspiration rather than about problems. But the advertising strategy sharpened in the closing weeks. Television advertisements shot in black and white highlighted gaps in infant mortality rates, life expectancy and employment outcomes, with the tagline “A no vote means no progress”.
The campaign had reached the uncomfortable realisation, backed by research – that many no voters weren’t driven by racism, but more an “apathy”. Noel Pearson said in the closing week of the campaign the “overwhelming attitude” he’d picked up wasn’t racism but “a complete lack of empathy”.
Going negative is a common feature of political campaigns. But the Yes23 campaign did not want to confront Australians with negative imagery. One operative says the shift in strategy necessitated a huge number of conversations over the weekend before the advertisements appeared, both inside and outside the campaign. The Indigenous strategists asked themselves and each other: do we want to go there? What are the implications of going there?
People wrestled deeply with the switch. Campaign leaders spoke with a number of members of their broader engagement group. They needed sounding boards. By the end of the rolling conversations, there was near unanimous support for shifting strategy.
Support for yes was tracking in the low 30s nationally at that point. But the black-and-white campaign pulled the negative trend back. The improvement registered in some of the public polls, including Resolve and Guardian Essential.
But it was not enough. It was too late.
Fighting another day
While not all no voters were hard noes, a yes vote in the toxic and bitterly contested climate of the referendum was a hard yes. Yes voters proved to be a highly motivated cohort. With support from progressive political parties and civil society, Yes23 was able to assemble a significant ground game.
While the voice to parliament was defeated, the campaign – however flat footed at times – succeeded in building a new social movement. The question now, as Hosch said on referendum night, is how to hold and direct that yes cohort for the next chapter in the reconciliation story.
It also seems probable that the next chapter will be written by a new generation of Indigenous leaders who have gained cultural authority over the decade or more they have spent championing the cause of constitutional recognition. While older Australians clearly struggled to accept the need to radically reframe conversations in this country about the past and the future, polling suggests younger Australians will be allies in this cause.
For now, Australia’s reconciliation agenda is in flux. Indigenous leaders are caucusing among themselves after Saturday night’s defeat, but they have exited the national conversation for a week of mourning and reflection. In Canberra, a Labor prime minister who kept his promise about pursuing the voice is waiting for guidance once key people re-enter the fray.
The referendum campaign unleashed and emboldened forces of division and polarisation in our polity. Once unleashed, these forces can be hard to subdue. While yes built a social movement, the no campaign has also succeeded in uniting previously disparate forces in a coherent structure for the permanent campaign. If a constitutionally enshrined advisory body for Indigenous Australians can be weaponised successfully in a national culture war, so can many other things.
At the same time as the yes campaign was holding its wake in North Sydney, the no campaign was dwelling on its triumph at the Hyatt Regency in Brisbane. When many journalists left the gathering to observe a post-result press conference from Dutton on Saturday night, the richest person on the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List this year, Gina Rinehart, drifted through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency and made her way to a private no campaign event upstairs.
The nature of Rinehart’s association with this cause is unclear. But the discrete ascension of the reclusive mining magnate seemed an appropriately sardonic coda to a destructive campaign which had sought to cleave a country into tribes – the so-called “elites” and the rest.
That’s where it was lost. We were too slow
Yes campaigner
mas Song, which evokes a night that’s anything but silent. Other cuts on the album are wholly unexpected, like a cover of the Zombies’ rapturous This Will Be Our Year, from their 1968 cult masterpiece Oracle & Odyssey. “More than anything, I wanted this album to be fun,” Cher said.
And why not? Fun has been Cher’s brand ever since she broke through with Sonny on their bubbly 1965 song I Got You Babe. At the same time, fun, for Cher, isn’t just about pleasure. It’s also about survival. During the many dry stretches in her career, and the long years when critics saw her as a joke, Cher always found a way to have the last laugh by embracing the most garish aspects of her career – the over-thetop costumes, the self-satirizing gestures, the songs like Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves – while simultaneously delivering performances of genuine distinction, passion and pluck. In conversation, Cher reflects all those sides. For more than an hour, she spoke about everything from her goofy, 1964 debut single Ringo, I Love You to the sad litany of anti-trans legislation that has been proposed in the United States in the last year.
Even her new album has a deeper context than it may first seem. It finds an emotional high point in a cover of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), which originally appeared on the classic Phil Spector Christmas Album in 1963, with Darlene Love on lead vocals, and a 17-year-old Cher wailing behind. Now, 60 years later, she and Love perform the song as a duet. “I hate it when people say, ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’” Cher said of the original sessions, “but I actually do. I can see Darlene singing full-tilt boogie right in the room, not even in a booth, and me, Sonny and the other backup singers standing around one mike that was hanging down. It seems so archaic now, but it worked.”
At least it did eventually. While the album went on to become one of the holiday’s most beloved soundtracks, it had the bad fortune to be released on the same day President John F Kennedy was assassinated, blunting its initial impact. “We had been working like crazy on that album,” Cher said. “I kept thinking, I’m only 17 and I’m exhausted, what are these other people doing?’ What I didn’t realize then was they were all doing drugs! The day of the release I remember I was in bed with Sonny and the telephone rang and it was Phil, and
I knew by the look on Sonny’s face that something terrible had happened. I was pretty sure somebody died but I was thinking it was somebody in our group. Then Sonny turned to me and said, ‘The president’s dead.’ And I just got hysterical.”
By then, Cher had already been a regular player in Spector’s sessions. Sonny was working for him and brought her in for the Ronettes’ Be My Baby. “The big joke was that I had to stand far back from the other singers,” said Cher. “Phil would say, ‘Cher, take a step back. And another step. And another.’ At that point, everybody said, ‘If she takes one more step, she’ll be in Studio B!’ Somehow, my voice just cut through.”
Because of her distinctive tone, Spector decided to use Cher, as well as Sonny, on a host of recordings, including the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, where she provided the lone female backing vocal. By that time Spector’s weirder side was starting to show. Yet even a teenage Cher was well-equipped to handle it. “Phil asked me, in French, if I would have sex with him,” she said. “And I said, in French, ‘Yes - for money.’ He almost fell off his chair. He didn’t expect that from anyone.”
Her tart response put him on notice to watch himself around her, though he still asked her to do sketchy things. “I was supposed to watch Ronnie, Nedra and Estelle [the Ronettes] and report back to him. I said, ‘No fucking way!’ I wasn’t going to nark on these girls. They were my friends.”
Ronnie got it the worst. “Phil was a pig when it came to her,” Cher said.
Even so, she said that, in the studio, Spector wasn’t that crazy at the time. “He was eccentric,” she said, “but not full-on nuts.”
Spector wound up producing Cher’s first solo song, a Beatles exploitation piece called Ringo, I Love You, which she cut under the name Bonnie Joe Mason. Radio stations refused to play it because, due to her low, contralto voice, they thought she was a guy singing a love song to the Beatles’ drummer. Did Cher care about the snub? “Not at all. It wasn’t a very good song anyway,” she said, “and Phil didn’t even want to do it. He wanted me to stay in my place and not do a solo thing.”
Regardless, the next year Sonny and Cher went out on their own, initially under the name Caesar & Cleo. “We were such a bizarre combination,” Cher said. “I was a terrible singer at first and Sonny was a frightening singer. But he was a good songwriter.”
He proved it after they became Sonny & Cher and he wrote I Got You Babe. “He brought it to me in the middle of the night and, with him singing it, it sounded horrible,” she said. “When I first sang it, it didn’t sound that much better. But Sonny didn’t care. He knew what he had.”
Eventually, the song went to No 1 in the US but the couple first found success in England, where, over the years, Cher has enjoyed more consistent success than she has at home. “In America, we were getting beaten up for the way we looked,” she said. “We had to go to London where people understood us and respected us. England has been lucky for me more than once.”
In fact, Cher’s most popular song of all time, Believe, which she cut when she was 52, only came about because of the support of her UK label at a time when her American company had dropped her. To commemorate the Believe album, this month will see the release of an expanded 25th anniversary edition of the set. The title song of the album made history not only for hitting No 1 in over 10 countries, but for being the first of a zillion recordings to use auto-tune as a hook. Later other artists, particularly in hip-hop, began to feature auto-tune on their recordings as not just a hook but as crutch to cover the fact that they can’t sing well. Cher said she had no idea about the latter use until the last few years when Jay-Z came up and told her, “Thanks for keeping my friends in work!”
It was Cher’s idea to change the original lyric in Believe to make the character more assertive. “I thought, ‘A girl can be sad in one verse, but she can’t be sad in two verses,’” she said. “I just won’t have it. So, then I thought of the lines, ‘I’ve had time to think it through / and maybe I’m too good for you.’ I should have asked for a writing credit. I was so stupid!”
Believe earned a new life four years ago, when Adam Lambert radically remade it as a devastating ballad at the ceremony where Cher was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor. “That’s one of the greatest vocal performances of any song by anybody,” she said of Lambert’s take, which has earned over 32m YouTube views. “To recreate it so completely with such a beautiful voice, I just thought, ‘Dude, I’m glad you weren’t around when I was doing this!’”
The self-deprecation expressed in that comment echoes Cher’s oft-stated dissatisfaction with her own singing, though she now says her opinion has evolved. “I used to not like Cher, but I’m much more used to her now,” she said. “I think she’s improved.”
In fact, her voice never sounded stronger than it does on the new album. She uses it to great effect on the album’s ecstatic duets, including one with Stevie Wonder on a Motown holiday song from 1967 titled What Christmas Means to Me. The album’s most surprising guest star is Tyga who raps on Drop Top Sleigh Ride. He was brought in by his producer, Alexander Edwards, who Cher has been dating for the last year. At 37, he’s 40 years her junior, which inspired her to tell him early on, “‘Dude, put this on paper. It doesn’t look good.’ Alexander told me, ‘Well, it couldn’t do any harm.’ I don’t know what happened, but we’re together.” She won’t say any more about it. “There are things people get to know and there are things people don’t get to know,” she said.
She’s more forthright when talking, and tweeting, about subjects like the push against trans people that has greatly escalated in this election year. “It’s something like 500 bills they’re trying to pass,” she said. “I was with two trans girls the other night – and of course my own child [Chaz is trans]. I was saying ‘We’ve got to stand together.’ I don’t know what their eventual plan is for trans people. I don’t put anything past them.”
She’s equally horrified by the possibility of Trump regaining power. “I almost got an ulcer the last time,” she said. “If he gets in, who knows? This time I willleave [the country].”
Cher has been tweeting up yet another storm lately about the issues that face Armenians as tensions flair, and a new wave of violence threatens, with its neighbor, Azerbaijan. Cher’s birth father was Armenian and though she didn’t have much of a relationship with him, she later developed a strong identification with that country after a trip she took some years ago to its capital, Yerevan. “When I got there, I thought, ‘Wow, everybody looks like me! How could I not have strong feelings about this?’” she said.
The last year saw a dramatic change in the other side of Cher’s family: her mother died after a sustained period of living in pain. “The doctor said she was never going to get better, and at that point she wasn’t even there,” Cher said. “I was just so happy that we could help her out of the insanity she was living in.”
Her mother got to the age of 96, underscoring the longevity in her daughter’s genes. “My great-aunts were 101 and 104!” Cher said. Which makes her, at 77, a relative toddler. Small wonder, she feels like she still has a lot more to accomplish. “I never thought about getting this old and still having a job!” she said. “Barbra Streisand once asked me, ‘Why are you still working?’ And I said, ‘Because some day I won’t be able to.’ So, for as long as I can work, I will.”
• This article was amended on 18 October 2023. Cher’s first single was released under the name Bonnie Jo Mason, not Bobbie Jo Mason as an earlier version said.
Christmas is out on 20 October
companies to change their behaviour: reputation, regulation and revenue.
“I think, in some ways, reputation as a driver for potential revenue are bigger drivers than regulation itself.”
She said the fine might add up to the salary of a couple of engineers, but “it’s a step in the right direction”.
The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, speaking at the same event, said it would be a very bad look for X to “keep getting recurring child exploitation fines”.
“For one fine, it’s like you didn’t know. Two fines is unlucky, but three fines – that’s a pattern.”
Dr Jennifer Beckett, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s school of culture and communications, says multiple fines from multiple jurisdictions might compel X to act, but adds stronger powers like those in the EU’s Digital Services Act may have a bigger impact.
“[Breaching] something like the Digital Services Act in Europe … could technically end their capacity to operate in Europe, so they could lose European users.”
That would cost the company revenue, however Beckett admits losses wouldn’t be as substantial in a smaller market such as Australia.
Rys Farthing, a policy and research director for digital platforms critic Reset.Tech Australia, says local regulators need better enforcement powers, suggesting higher fines – up to 10% of turnover – would work better for compliance.
“Perhaps X sees such a small fine as a cost of doing business,” Farthing says. “Few other sectors accept this sort of brazen behaviour that so nakedly disrespects Australia’s laws and processes.
“Preventing harmful content means baking risk mitigation into legislation that links to strong enforcement and meaningful penalties.”
But Nic Suzor, a professor of law at QUT Law School and a member of Facebook’s oversight board, says whether or not X has business interests in Australia, it might come to the table in any case.
“It’s pretty rare for a company like that to flat out refuse.”