John Howard's servility to the US is even greater than Tony Blair's and has
earned him the nickname Bush's deputy sheriff. The conspiracy between
Washington, the media and politicians is eroding the country's freedoms.
In June this year, 26,000 US and Australian troops will take part in bombarding
the ancient fragile landscape of Australia. They will storm the Great Barrier
Reef, gun down "terrorists" and fire laser-guided missiles at some of the most
pristine wilderness on earth. Stealth, B-1 and B-52 bombers (the latter alone
each carry 30 tonnes of bombs) will finish the job, along with a naval
onslaught. Underwater depth charges will explode where endangered species of
turtle breed. Nuclear submarines will discharge their high-level sonar, which
destroy the hearing of seals and other marine mammals.
Run via satellite from Australia and Hawaii, Operation Talisman Sabre 2007 is
warfare by remote control, designed for "pre-emptive" attacks on other
countries. Australians know little about this. The Australian parliament has not
debated it; the media is not interested. The result of a secret treaty signed by
John Howard's government with the Bush administration in 2004, it includes the
establishment of a vast, new military base in Western Australia, which will
bring the total of known US bases around the world to 738. No matter the setback
in Iraq, the US military empire and its ambitions are growing.
Australia is important because of a remarkable degree of servility that Howard
has taken beyond even that of Tony Blair. Once described in the Sydney Bulletin
as Bush's "deputy sheriff", Howard did not demur when Bush, on hearing this,
promoted him to "sheriff for south-east Asia". With Washington's approval, he
has sent Australian troops and federal police to intervene in the Pacific island
nations; in 2006, he effected "regime change" in East Timor, whose prime
minister, Mari Alkatiri, had the nerve to demand a proper share of his country's
oil and gas resources. Indonesia's repression in West Papua, where American
mining interests are described as "a great prize", is endorsed by Howard.
This sub-imperial role has a history. When the six Australian states federated
as a nation in 1901, "a Commonwealth . . . independent and proud", said the
headlines, the Australian colonists made clear that independence was the last
thing they wanted. They wanted Mother England to be more protective of her most
distant colony which, they pleaded, was threatened by a host of demons, not
least the "Asiatic hordes" who would fall down on them as if by the force of
gravity. "The whole performance," wrote the historian Manning Clark, "stank in
the nostrils. Australians had once again grovelled before the English. There
were Fatman politicians who hungered for a foreign title just as their wives
hungered after a smile of recognition from the Governor-General's wife, who was
said to be a most accomplished snubber."
Australia's modern political class has the same hunger for the recognition of
great power. In the 1950s, prime minister Robert Menzies allowed Britain to
explode nuclear bombs in Australia, sending clouds of radioactive material
across populated areas. Australians were told only the good news of being chosen
for this privilege. An RAF officer was threatened with prosecution after he
revealed that 400 to 500 Aborigines were in the target zones. "Occasionally we
would bring them in for decontamination," he said. "Other times, we just shooed
them off like rabbits." Blindness and unexplained deaths followed. After 17
years in power, Menzies was knighted by the Queen and made Lord Warden of the
Cinque Ports.
An undeclared maxim of Australian politics is that prime ministers become
"statesmen" only when they serve imperial interests. (Honourable exceptions have
been dealt with by smear and subversion). In the 1960s, Menzies connived to be
"asked" to send Australian troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam. Red
China was coming, he said. Howard is more extreme; in his decade of power, he
has eroded the very basis of Australia's social democratic institutions and cast
his country as the model of a Washington-style democracy, where the only popular
participation is that of voting every few years for two "opposing" parties which
share almost identical economic, foreign and "cultural" policies.
For "cultural", read race, which has always been important in creating an
insidious state of fear and compliance. In 2001, Howard was re-elected after
manipulating the "children overboard affair", in which his senior advisers
claimed that Afghan refugees had callously thrown their children into the sea in
order to be rescued by an Australian naval vessel. They produced photographs
that were proven false, but only after Howard had touched every xenophobic nerve
in the white electorate and was duly re-elected. The two officials who brought
the "crisis" to its fraudulent fever pitch were promoted after one of them
admitted that the deception had "helped" the prime minister. In a more
scandalous case, Howard claimed his defence department had been unaware of
another leaking, stricken boat filled with Iraqi and Afghan refugees heading for
Australia until after it had sunk. An admiral later revealed this, too, was
false; 353 people were allowed to drown, including 146 children.
Above all, it is the control of dissent that has changed Australia. Rupert
Murdoch's influence has been critical, far more so than in Britain. Whenever
Howard or one of his more oafish ministers want to bend an institution or smear
an opponent, they carry out the task in alliance with a pack of rabid mostly
Murdoch commentators. As Stuart MacIntyre describes in a new book, Silencing
Dissent, the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist, Andrew Bolt, conducted a campaign
of ridicule against the independent Australian Research Council which, he
claimed, had fallen into the hands of a "a club of scratch-my-back-leftists"
whose work was "hostile to our culture, history and institutions", as well as
"peek-in-your-pants researchers fixated on gender and race". The then minister
of education, Brendan Nelson, vetoed one project grant after another without
explanation.
The National Museum of Australia, the national child benefits centre, Aboriginal
policy bodies and other independent institutions have been subjected to similar
intimidation. A friend who holds a senior university post told me: "You dare not
speak out. You dare not oppose the government or 'the big end of town'
[corporate Australia]."
As embarrassing corporate crime rises, the treasurer, Peter Costello, has
blithely announced a ban on moral or ethical boycotts of certain products. There
was no debate; the media was simply told. One of Costello's senior advisers,
David Gazard, recently distinguished an American-run seminar in Melbourne,
organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, at which those paying
A$595 were taught the tricks of conflating activism with "terrorism" and
"security threat". Suggestions included: "Call them suicide bombers . . . make
them all look like terrorists . . . tree-hugging, dope-smoking, bloody
university graduate, anti-progress . . ." They were advised on how to set up
bogus community groups and falsify statistics.
Schoolteachers who do not fly the flag or music concert organisers who
discourage the attendance of racist thugs wrapped in the flag are at risk of a
dose of Murdoch poison. Equally, if you reveal the shame of Australia's vassal
role you are deemed "anti-Australian" and, without irony, "anti-American". Few
Australians are aware that Murdoch, who dominates the press, abandoned his own
Australian citizenship so that he could set up the Fox TV network in the US. The
University of Sydney is to open a United States Study Centre, backed by Murdoch
after he complained about the inability of Australians to appreciate the
benefits of the bloodbath in Iraq.
Stifling dissent
Having recently spoken at overflowing public meetings in Brisbane, Sydney and
Melbourne, I am left in no doubt that many are deeply worried that freedoms in
their sunny idyll are slipping away. They were given a vivid reminder of this
the other day when Vice President Dick Cheney came to Sydney to "thank" Howard
for his support. The New South Wales state government rushed through a law that
allowed Cheney's 70 secret service guards to carry live weapons. With the
police, they took over the centre of Sydney and closed the Harbour Bridge and
much of the historic Rocks area. Seventeen-vehicle motorcades swept theatrically
here and there, as if Howard was boasting to Cheney: "Look at my control over
this society; look at my compliant country." And yet his guest and mentor is a
man who, having refused to fight in Vietnam, has brought back torture and lied
incessantly about Iraq, who has made millions in stock options as his
Halliburton company profits from the carnage and who has vetoed peace with Iran.
Almost every speech he gives includes a threat. By any measure of international
law, Cheney is a major war criminal, yet it was left to a small, brave group of
protesters to uphold the Aussie myth of principled rebellion and stand up to the
police. The Labor Party leader, Kevin Rudd, the embodiment of compliance, called
them "violent ferals"; one of the protesters was 70 years old. The next day, the
headline in the Sydney Morning Herald read: "Terrorists have ambitions of
empire, says Cheney." The irony was exquisite, if lost.
John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US.
John Pilger's bestselling history of Australia, "A Secret Country", is
available through http://www.johnpilger.com
Be first to comment this article
Write Comment
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article.
Comments posted are the sole opinion of the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of AIM.
