Letter
From Australia
By Ghali Hassan
31 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
It
is getting harder to describe Australia in terms of an independent,
democratic and morally responsible nation. Australia has moved from
a forward looking to a backward sliding society. Many people, including
many Australians are regarding this shift in direction as morally reprehensible.
In recent time, Australia’s
vote at the UN has taken a dive into the sea of extremism by following
in the footsteps of George W. Bush, sacrificing Australia’s sovereignty
and identity as an independent nation. Australia has voted against strengthening
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR), and abstained from
a vote to support the economic rights of all countries to better their
living conditions. Australia was the only nation to vote against a resolution
expressing concern about the impact of globalisation” on human
rights, and abstained from a resolution to draft a right to development.
Finally, Australia is one of only two (the U.S. is the other) countries
not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol combating global warming, and remains
opposed to reducing Greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Government of John
Howard, Australia’s new defined (imperialist) role has been the
U.S. “deputy sheriff” (i.e. subservient to U.S. power).
In order to fulfil it role of bullying and intimidating its small and
defenceless neighbours, Australia’s military spending has increased
dramatically – at the expense of other important services –
and considered the highest in the region. The growing militarisation
in connected with Australia’s superiority and imperialist mentality.
When asked about Australia’s
plan” for the Pacific, Papua New Guinea independence leader and
current Prime Minister Michael
Somare said: “Their real intention is they want to
have some controlling device in the whole region. They want to control
the region so that the Prime Minister [John Howard] can go back and
talk to Prime Minister of Britain and President of United States and
say, "The Pacific is no problem, [and] we're looking after it."
I have a lot of time and respect for John, he's a good friend of mine,
but I think the imposition of that kind of mentality in the Pacific
amongst the Pacific leadership, you're undermining the integrity of
the Pacific Island people”. The old imperialist mentality that
is many people in Australian and Britain want to revive.
Despite the years-long exploitation
of its rich natural resources by Australian corporations, Papua New
Guinea has been sliding into poverty. The Solomon Islands remain under
the control of Australian police, army and NGOs. East Timor has just
lost its democratically elected Prime Minister – replaced by an
Australian puppet – and its aspiration for independence as a result
of ongoing Australian interference in its affairs.
In addition to its new imperialist
role, Australia has been moving in a direction of intolerance and extremism,
thanks to the Howard Government’s right-wing ideology and a very
biased and inherently racist media. The Australian media, a small fish-bond
controlled by Rupert Murdoch and the Government, have been promoting
the Howard Government’s ideology and fomenting racism and divisions
among the Australian diverse community.
Since elected to govern Australia
in 1996, the Howard Government (a coalition of right-wing elites) has
moved swiftly to oppress dissent and stacked the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC) board with political allies who have an agenda to
steer the ABC further to the right and break its perceived ‘impartiality’.
The current ABC board is a cabal of right-wing of Government appointees
and Liberal Party cronies. The “public” broadcaster has
become a school for Islamophobia and Anti-Muslims hatred. Its journalists
and commentators is a collection of liar and bigots. The main aim is
to manipulate the Australian public by aiding an abetting the Howard
Government’s ideology and support the U.S. and Israel war crimes
in the Middle East.
The largest chunk of the
fish-bond is controlled by Rupert Murdoch media business. Murdoch is
a global propagandist; a modern version of Nazism propagandists. His
target has always been the defenceless Muslims and Arabs wherever they
live. His latest attack was on Muslim Australians. He told Australian
(Anglo-Saxon Australians) recently: “You have to be careful about
Muslims, who have a very strong, in many ways a fine, but very strong,
religion, which supersedes any sense of nationalism wherever they go”.
Murdoch was the “Australian”
who renounced his Australian citizen for a U.S. citizen, so he can pursue
his Zionist ideology on a global scale. Murdoch knows how to manipulate
the public to promote his Zionist ideology of pro-war jingoism and anti-Muslim
racism, but he does not know anything about Islam. Any Australian, regardless
of origin, religious affiliation and the length of time in Australia
makes far better and loyal Australian citizen than Murdoch.
As rightly described by Alexander
Cockburn of CounterPunch
magazine; “Murdoch is far too fearsome an affront
to any civilized values to escape with mere facetiousness … Murdoch
offers his target governments a privatized version of a state propaganda
service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth. His
price takes the form of vast government favours such as tax breaks,
regulatory relief (as with the recent FCC ruling on the acquisition
of Direct TV) monopoly markets and so forth. The propaganda is undertaken
with the utmost cynicism, whether it's the stentorian fake populism
and soft porn in the UK's Sun and News of the World or shameless bootlicking
of the butchers of Tiananmen Square”. Indeed, Murdoch’s
promotion – fabricated by his despicable Fox TV – of racism
and war is not only affront to any civilised society but also destroying
democracy and guiding the peoples of Australia (Britain and the U.S.)
into becoming racist and intolerant societies.
It is important to remember
that, Muslim Australians are the most marginalised and alienated community
in Australia. They remain unsophisticated, divided and poor community.
The level of unemployment among Muslim Australians is around 30 per
cent and rising. Muslim Australians are discriminated against and denied
employment just because they have a Muslim name, not because of their
fabricated “disloyalty” to Australia.
The racist cliché
of “loyalty” – a variant of U.S. false patriotism
- to Australia, promoted by the Howard Government and Murdoch, is only
applied to Muslim and Arab Australians. When an Israeli soldier –
who happened to have an “Australian” citizen – was
killed during Israel’s violent aggression against Lebanon, he
was simply immortalised as a hero. His name and photos were all over
the country. Had he been an Australian with a Lebanese citizen, he would
have been portrayed as a “terrorist” and his family and
friends would have been questioned by Australia’s new special
police squads. In fact, Australians were up in arms against the evacuation
of Australian citizens – of Lebanese descent – from Lebanon
during the Israeli fascist attack on Lebanon. “Leave them die.
Don’t bring them back”, a caller told 2GB Radio, the most
racist talkback radio in the history of radio. It is no wonder why John
Howard described the deliberate and indiscriminate wanton destruction
of Lebanon the murder of more than 1300 innocent Lebanese civilian,
mostly women and children, as an act of Israeli “self-defence”.
As always, John Howard thrives
and gains political mileage out of the tears and sorrow of others, whether
they are refugees or defenceless civilians in the Middle East. Refugees
(mostly from Muslim countries) were used as political pawns –
in violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention – to light the flame
of racism, instil fear and win elections. We now know that Australia’s
participation in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent
Iraqi civilians has nothing to do with “democracy” or “human
rights”. The Howard Government cut a deal with the U.S. in return
for Australia to sell cheap quality wheat to Iraq. However, the naivety
of the Howard Government and its unawareness of the power of the U.S.
farmers lobby saw Australia end up with just few crumbs.
The other group of Australians
who bears the brunt of the Howard Government’s right-wing ideology
are Australian Aboriginal people. While the majority of Australian enjoy
a high standard of health and life expectancy in the world, Aboriginal
Australians health is shameful. There is a 20-year gap in the life expectancy
between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The infant mortality
rate of Aboriginal Australian is comparable to that of the most impoverished
countries in the world. Aboriginal Australians infant mortality rate
is at 11.4 per 1000, it is much bellow the infant mortality rate of
New Zealand Maoris (6.8 per 1000) and Canadian First Nations People
(8.6 per 1000). Other critical areas, such as education, employment
and housing are similarly neglected.
Australian Aborigines accounted
for almost 40 per cent of all young people on remand and sentenced to
detention in 2004-05, according to the department's figures. In June
2006, Aborigines made up about 50 per cent of the more than 300 young
people in detention in NSW. There are more Australian Aborigines locked-up
in detention now than ever before. According to a Legal Aid Commission
study, Australian Aborigines have the highest incarceration rate for
indigenous people in the world. Despite this, the Department of Juvenile
Justice will go ahead with a proposed “transition of positions”
that would eliminate its six Aboriginal program support officers, said
John Doyle, and industrial officer with the public service Association.
A report, Evaluation of the
Aboriginal Over-representation Strategy, released recently, found that
the Department had failed on almost every level to deal with the problem
of high numbers of young Aborigines in detention. “The Department
of Juvenile Justice is a downstream agency with limited ability to influence
the decisions of police and the courts”, said Andrew Vickery,
a spokesman for the Department. In other words, racism is institutionalised
and needs to be rooted-out, not just seasonally modified to political
opportunism.
The economy has benefited
the rich and the well-off with tax cuts and wage rise. By contrast,
low-income Australians got poorer. To increase the misery of low-income
Australians, the Howard Government has began importing cheap workers
from Asia, the right to strike has been banned and employers have been
given greater power to negotiate wages, hire and fire as they see fit.
In addition, the Government has increased the policing of workers, removed
the union from negotiations and abolished workers rights to silence
when questioned about meetings and industrial actions. It is a shocking
reminder of the rise of Fascism in Europe.
The public education system,
particularly the tertiary education sector, is starving of funds and
continues to rely on full fee-paying international students, destroying
a unique education system in the process. Special visas are in place
to allow foreign graduates to remain in Australia and compete with debt-ridden
Australian graduates and the newly-arrived migrants to Australia.
The justice system and human
rights law have been replaced by unjust system and draconian “anti-terror”
laws. These new laws – specifically targeting Muslim Australians
– are a threat to democracy and an attack on the basic rights
of citizens. With no legislation to provide the rights of a person for
a trial, Muslim Australians are left at the mercy of a very extreme
and unfair justice system.
The current trial of Muslim
Australians accused of terrorism is just a case in point. “The
combination of ASIO's [Australian Security and Intelligence Organisations]
coercive powers, the broad definition of terrorist offences, the extremely
harsh conditions of custody in which terrorist suspects are held, and
the running commentary of politicians and the media about the arrest,
prosecution and detention of terrorist suspects are all combining to
create very difficult conditions for the trials of these people”,
defence barrister Phillip Boulten, told the ABC.
The trial of Faheem Lodhi,
a Muslim Australian fraudulently accused of terrorism, was simply a
farce. Lodhi was convicted on circumstantial evidence for “intention”
to plan “unspecified” act of terrorism and sentenced to
20-years in solitary confinement. There were no witnesses or hard evidence
to support the charges. There was no presumption of innocence. During
the trial Lodhi was asked by Judge Anthony Whealy about his view of
the U.S. war on Iraq. Lodhi replied with courage that the war was an
illegal act of aggression in violation of international law.
Lodhi’s conviction
is used to justify the new “anti-terror” laws and as a deterrent
to “others”, i.e. Muslim Australians. Indeed, Lodhi’s
lawyers rightly argued that their client’s actions were far less
serious than those of Jack Roche, the Anglo-Saxon Australian who conspired
to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Canberra, and should receive a lesser
sentence.
Finally, of great concern
to the Australian community in general is the blurring of the military
and police functions. The creation of new paramilitary units and the
embedding of these units with the police increased the state repressive
power and policing incidents, such as fatal shootings and abuses of
demonstrators.
Any society with no dissent
voices and no opposition to government’s policies becomes submissive
to state power and loses its moral responsibility and civilised destiny.
Australians have a choice to join the civilised community of nations
undermining the violent, imperialist and racist ideology or risk being
complicit spectators.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth,
Western Australia.