- Strange days in Australia. "Paranoia in the lucky
country", say the headlines in Sydney, "Terror threat grips a
nation". The government of John Howard has issued full-page advertisements
calling on Australians to protect their "friendly, decent society"
from terrorists within by spying on each other. More than a thousand people
have used a hotline "to report things", causing grief to Muslim
Australians. Asked if he thought it better that Muslim women made themselves
"less conspicuous at this time" by not wearing their traditional
headdress, Howard replied: "Obviously."
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- Howard's is the only government in the world willing
and eager to join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq, a faraway country that
buys Australia's primary produce and with whom Australians have no quarrel.
For those Australians yet to succumb to the amnesia of the times, this
is all very familiar, evoking a melancholy history of obsequious service
to greawithout a hint of irony, let alone the truth of what Australian
troops actually did in Afghanistan - kill tribespeople without knowing
who they were.
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- Mushroom Club citations have been handed out. An Australian
pilot beams from the news pages with his American Bronze Star, awarded
for flying Black Hawk helicopter gunships "in combat". Untold
numbers of innocent Afghan villagers were killed by these gunship attacks;
but that is beside the point. The gormless television news begins with
"heart-warming" scenes of Australian sailors being welcomed home
from the Gulf, where they are "playing a leading role in the international
community enforcing the sanctions against Saddam". There is no mention
of the human cost to their fellow human beings, not a word about the latest,
shocking UN State of the World's Children report that child mortality in
Iraq has tripled since sanctions were imposed.
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- Unheard and unheeded by the rest of the world, Howard
is our mouse that roars. Almost anything that falls from the, the Herald
Sun, claims that "terrorists train in forests in secret camps"
near Melbourne. Australia has the most narrowly based and tightly controlled
press in the western world. Seventy per cent of capital-city newspapers
are owned or dominated by Rupert Murdoch; in Adelaide he controls everything,
including the printing presses. The only national daily, the Australian,
is owned by Murdoch. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, directly
funded from Canberra, is routinely intimidated. Much of the rest is Murdochism
by another name.
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- This is demeaning for Australian democracy, but never
more so than now, when the fabrication of a war atmosphere here surpasses
any absurdity spun by Jack Straw. The foreign editor of the Australian,
Greg Sheridan, is not untypical. Sheridan earned a formidable reputation
as an apologist for the genocidal Suharto regime, mocking the Australian
parliament's study which revealed that 200,000 East Timorese had died under
Suharto's brutality.
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- Now a crusader for George self-evident. Mandatory detention
does not apply to the thousands of Britons and other Europeans who overstay
their visas.
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- The conservative former prime minister Malcolm Fraser
has described these camps as "hell-holes". Australians caught
a glimpse of their horrors when an ABC programme told the story of a six-year-old
Iranian boy. Having spent a quarter of his life behind the wire of Woomera
camp in the South Australian desert, he witnessed desperate adults set
themselves on fire and a suicidal man slashing himself. Silent and depressed,
he refused food and drink and sat day after day, drawing pictures of razor
wire. The Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace has described
conditions in the camps as "institutional child abuse".
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- When the head of the United Nations Working Group on
Arbitrary Detention, Louis Joinet, was finally allowed to visit Woomera
and other camps, he said he had not seen a more gross abuse of human rights
in more than 40 inspections of mandatory facilities arou "political
skills". Having waged a war of attrition against the Aboriginal people,
denying them universal land rights and incurring a shaming judgement of
racism from the UN committee on discrimination, Australian government policy
is clearly directed at exploiting the "threat" of non-European
refugees - when, by any measure, there is no threat. Some 4,000 asylum-seekers
arrive illegally by boat in Australia every year, one of the lowest figures
in the world.
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- During the last election campaign, in October 2001, it
has since been revealed, Howard and his ministers lied about refugees throwing
their children into the sea, an incident that was presented as evidence
of their inhumanity. His re-election was credited to this "tough stand".
While he was telling his favoured radio talkback bigots why it was kind
to be tough, a leaking boat on its way to Australia took 353 people to
their deaths - including 150 children. Known only as the Siev-X, it was
overloaded with Iraqi refugees and in Australian waters, alet the ship
sink, but what is clear is that Australia's defence forces have become
immersed in corrupt, callous and racist policy designed to keep the Howard
government in power. Navy personnel have been ordered to act as jailers;
and prior to their accredited heroics in Afghanistan, Australian SAS troops
were sent into action against a Norwegian ship whose captain had rescued
asylum-seekers from drowning in Australian waters.
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- A handful of tenacious journalists have told these stories
for as long they can, but a consensual silence inevitably descends on what
George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies". The price Australians
are paying for this silence and compliance is not immediately obvious in
these midsummer days. But Australian social democracy, which was achieved
by the struggle of the ordinary people of my parents' and grandparents'
generations, is being subverted if not dismantled. (The minimum wage, an
eight-hour working day, pensions, child benefits, the secret ballot were
all won first in Austror government of New South Wales is enacting legislation
that gives its police force totalitarian powers in the "war on terror".
No longer, says a bill being rushed through parliament, can police behaviour
"be challenged, reviewed, quashed or called into question on any grounds
whatsoever before any court, tribunal, body or person in any legal proceedings".
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- The great American sage Mark Twain loved Australia. He
described it as "a place where the ordinary man is king, or thinks
he is". In The Mysterious Stranger (1916), Twain also wrote about
"statesmen [who] invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation
that is attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing
falsities . . . and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after
this process of grotesque self-deception".
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- http://pilger.carlton.com/print/128041
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