[R-G] Pilger: Australia's Hidden Empire

[Anthony Fenton]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2008-03/05pilger.cfm

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ZNet Commentary
Australia's Hidden Empire March 05, 2008
By John Pilger

When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to  
venerable clichés of innocence - cricket, leaping marsupials, endless  
sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this.  
Witness the recent "G'Day USA" campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and  
Nicole Kidman sought to persuade Americans that, unlike the empire's  
problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under.  
After all, George W Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime  
minister, John Howard, "sheriff of Asia".

That Australia runs its own empire is unmentionable; yet it stretches  
from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the ancient hinterlands of the  
continent and across the Arafura Sea and the South Pacific. When the  
new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to the Aboriginal people  
on 13 February, he was acknowledging this. As for the apology itself,  
the Sydney Morning Herald accurately described it as a "piece of  
political wreckage" that "the Rudd government has moved quickly to  
clear away . . . in a way that responds to some of its own  
supporters' emotional needs, yet changes nothing. It is a shrewd  
manoeuvre."

Like the conquest of the Native Americans, the decimation of  
Aboriginal Australia laid the foundation of Australia's empire. The  
land was taken and many of its people were removed and impoverished  
or wiped out. For their descendants, untouched by the tsunami of  
sentimentality that accompanied Rudd's apology, little has changed.  
In the Northern Territory's great expanse known as Utopia, people  
live without sanitation, running water, rubbish collection, decent  
housing and decent health. This is typical. In the community of Mulga  
Bore, the water fountains in the Aboriginal school have run dry and  
the only water left is contaminated. Throughout Aboriginal Australia,  
epidemics of gastroenteritis and rheumatic fever are as common as  
they were in the slums of 19th-century England. Aboriginal health,  
says the World Health Organisation, lags almost a hundred years  
behind that of white Australia. This is the only developed nation on  
a United Nations "shame list" of countries that have not eradicated  
trachoma, an entirely preventable disease that blinds Aboriginal  
children. Sri Lanka has beaten the disease, but not rich Australia.  
On 25 February, a coroner's inquiry into the deaths in outback towns  
of 22 Aboriginal people, some of whom had hanged themselves, found  
they were trying to escape their "appalling lives".

Most white Australians rarely see this third world in their own  
country. What they call here "public intellectuals" prefer to argue  
over whether the past happened, and to blame its horrors on the  
present-day victims. Their mantra that Aboriginal infrastructure and  
welfare spending provide "a black hole for public money" is racist,  
false and craven. Hundreds of millions of dollars that Australian  
governments claim they spend are never spent, or end up in projects  
for white people. It is estimated that the legal action mounted by  
white interests, including federal and state governments, contesting  
Aboriginal native title claims alone covers several billion  
dollars.   Smear is commonly deployed as a distraction. In 2006, the  
Australian Broadcasting Corporation's leading current affairs  
programme, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery"  
among the Mutitjulu Aboriginal people. The source, described as an  
"anonymous youth worker", was exposed as a federal government  
official, whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory  
chief minister and police. Lateline never retracted its allegations.  
Within a year, Prime Minister John Howard had declared a "national  
emergency" and sent the army, police and "business managers" into  
Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A commissioned  
study on Aboriginal children was cited; and "protecting the children"  
became the media cry - just as it had more than half a century ago  
when children were kidnapped by white welfare authorities. One of the  
authors of the study, Pat Anderson, complained: "There is no  
relationship between the emergency powers and what's in our report."  
His research had concentrated on the effects of slum housing on  
children. Few now listened to him. Kevin Rudd, as opposition leader,  
supported the "intervention" and has maintained it as prime minister.  
Welfare payments are "quarantined" and people controlled and  
patronised in the colonial way. To justify this, the mostly Murdoch- 
owned capital-city press has published a relentlessly one-dimensional  
picture of Aboriginal degradation. No one denies that alcoholism and  
child abuse exist, as they do in white Australia, but no quarantine  
operates there.

  The Northern Territory is where Aboriginal people have had  
comprehensive land rights longer than anywhere else, granted almost  
by accident 30 years ago. The Howard government set about clawing  
them back. The territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth,  
including huge deposits of uranium on Aboriginal land. The number of  
companies licensed to explore for uranium has doubled to 80. Kellogg  
Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the American giant Halliburton, built  
the railway from Adelaide to Darwin, which runs adjacent to Olympic  
Dam, the world's largest low-grade uranium mine. Last year, the  
Howard government appropriated Aboriginal land near Tennant Creek,  
where it intends to store the radioactive waste. "The land-grab of  
Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,"  
says the internationally acclaimed Australian scientist and actvist  
Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and  
converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump."

This "top end" of Australia borders the Arafura and Timor Seas,  
across from the Indonesian archipelago. One of the world's great  
submarine oil and gas deposits lies off East Timor. In 1975,  
Australia's then ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, who had  
been tipped off about the coming Indonesian invasion of then  
Portuguese East Timor, secretly recommended to Canberra that  
Australia turn a blind eye to it, noting that the seabed riches  
"could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with  
[an independent] Timor". Gareth Evans, later foreign minister,  
described a prize worth "zillions of dollars". He ensured that  
Australia distinguish itself as one of the few countries to recognise  
General Suharto's bloody occupation, in which 200,000 East Timorese  
lost their lives.

When eventually, in 1999, East Timor won its independence, the Howard  
government set out to manoeuvre the East Timorese out of their proper  
share of the oil and gas revenue by unilaterally changing the  
maritime boundary and withdrawing from World Court jurisdiction in  
maritime disputes. This would have denied desperately needed revenue  
to the new country, stricken from its years of brutal occupation.  
However, East Timor's then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, leader of  
the majority Fretilin party, proved more than a match for Canberra  
and especially its bullying foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

Alkatiri demonstrated that he was a nationalist who believed East  
Timor's resource wealth should be the property of the state, so that  
the nation did not fall into debt to the World Bank. He also believed  
that women should have equal opportunity, and that health care and  
education should be universal. "I am against rich men feasting behind  
closed doors," he said. For this, he was caricatured as a communist  
by his opponents, notably the president, Xanana Gusmão, and the then  
foreign minister, José Ramos-Horta, both close to the Australian  
political Establishment. When a group of disgruntled soldiers  
rebelled against Alkatiri's government in 2006, Australia readily  
accepted an "invitation" to send troops to East Timor. "Australia,"  
wrote Paul Kelly in Murdoch's Australian, "is operating as a regional  
power or a potential hegemon that shapes security and political  
outcomes. This language is unpalatable to many. Yet it is the  
reality. It is new, experimental territory for Australia."

A mendacious campaign against the "corrupt" Alkatiri was mounted in  
the Australian media, reminiscent of the coup by media that briefly  
toppled Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Like the US soldiers who ignored  
looters on the streets of Baghdad, Australian soldiers stood by while  
armed rioters terrorised people, burned their homes and attacked  
churches. The rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, a murderous thug trained  
in Australia, was elevated to folk hero. Under this pressure, the  
democratically elected Alkatiri was forced from office and East Timor  
was declared a "failed state" by Australia's legion of security  
academics and journalistic parrots concerned with the "arc of  
instability" to the north, an instability they supported as long as  
the genocidal Suharto was in charge.

Paradoxically, on 11 February, Ramos-Horta and Gusmão came to grief  
as they tried to do a deal with Reinado in order to subdue him. His  
rebels turned on them both, leaving Ramos-Horta critically wounded  
and Reinado himself dead. From Canberra, Prime Minister Rudd  
announced the despatch of more Australian "peacemakers". In the same  
week, the World Food Programme disclosed that the children of  
resource-rich East Timor were slowly starving, with more than 42 per  
cent of under-fives seriously underweight - a statistic which  
corresponds to that of Aboriginal children in "failed" communities  
that also occupy an abundant natural resource.

Australia is engaged in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea,  
where its troops and federal police have dealt with "breakdowns in  
law and order" that are "depriving Australia of business and  
investment opportunities". A former senior Australian intelligence  
officer calls these "wild societies for which intervention represents  
a blunt, but necessary instrument". Australia is also entrenched in  
Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudd's electoral promise to withdraw from the  
"coalition of the willing" does not include almost half of  
Australia's troops in Iraq. At last year's conference of the American- 
Australian Leadership Dialogue - an annual event designed to unite  
the foreign policies of the two countries, but in reality an  
opportunity for the Australian elite to express its historic  
servility to great power - Rudd was in unusually oratorical style.  
"It is time we sang from the world's rooftops," he said, "[that]  
despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the  
world . . . I look forward to more than working with the great  
American democracy, the arsenal of freedom, in bringing about long- 
term changes to the planet." The new sheriff for Asia had spoken.

  www.johnpilger.com