This is the greatest privilege of my very privileged life. And I thank the Whitlam Family for it.
Gough Whitlam sets Time itself at defiance. Can it really be 45 years ago, he stood right here to open his epic campaign in 1969? Is it really 42 years since it was time at Blacktown in 1972 – making anew and forever his own, John Curtin’s clarion call to the men and women of Australia?
We had developed a little ritual between us. Before a speech he would touch me on the shoulder for luck. He didn’t forget even amid the tumult of Blacktown. “It’s been a long road comrade, but I think we are there”. He knew how much the words and the touch would mean to me at such a moment. You would go to the barricades for such a man.
The Whitlam touch is on us all. He touches us in our day to day lives, in the way we think about Australia, in the way we see the world. He touches still the millions who share his vision for a more equal Australia, a more independent, inclusive, generous and tolerant Australia. And a nation confident of its future in our region and the world.
And in that world context – you will forgive an old man’s pride, but the last time he performed that little gesture was in 2001, as we entered the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the scene of his triumph thirty years before, over fear of China.
But his great stage was the House of Representatives – stage, pulpit, arena. For a decade, he won memorable victories in the House of Representatives. In 1975, he fought his mightiest flight, in defence of the House of Representatives, and suffered his worst defeat, on the verge of victory.
First and last, Gough Whitlam was the Member for Werriwa. More than a place in outer Western Sydney. To him, modern Australia in the making – with all its growing inequalities in “schools, hospitals, cities” – his shorthand for all the social conditions for decent Australian living, including, dare I mention, sewerage in the suburbs.
He saw that only the nation’s Parliament and the nation’s government could bring quality and equality to areas of Australian life, where Canberra had never before dared or cared.
From Werriwa too, came his magnificent obsession with electoral equality, one vote, one value. He believed with a passion, that this our nation of immigrants must crash through the barriers of intolerance and prejudice about birth or background, race or religion. This was a new voice, new themes, a new agenda for Australia.
The Whitlam agenda remains part of the Australian agenda. “Contemporary relevance, comrade” – that was his watchword. And if ever he soared too high – or too long – there was always the other member for Werriwa, Margaret, to bring him back to earth. And Mick Young.
“The fun is where I am, Mungo”. The irrepressible Mungo McCallum had asked him if he missed the fun of Canberra when Bob Hawke sent him to liven up Paris.
Gough was very serious about making us laugh. Not least at himself, and his ego. There was a lot of laughter in the Whitlam years. Some tears too. But always, energy, urgency, enthusiasm, for the high and noble calling of political service. Drive and purpose for his Party and his country.
He believed profoundly in the Australian Labor Party as the mainstay of Australian democracy and equality. And always, there was the sense of living Australian history. And making it. In his rich and mellow autumn, he worried occasionally lest he be like King Charles, remembered mainly for losing his head.
Your tributes, your presence here today, attest his true place in the hearts of his fellow Australians.
Paul Keating is right: “There was an Australia before Whitlam, and there was a different Australia after Whitlam”. He was the bridge. Within the wonderful continuity of our national life, our long parliamentary democracy underpinned by strong political parties, Gough Whitlam built a bridge.
As he put it in 1972: “Between the habits and fears of the past and the hopes and demands of the future”. Optimism, enthusiasm, confidence – against fear, prejudice, conformity. That is his enduring message to the men and women of Australia. Never more than now.
The Economics Editor of the Guardian, Larry Elliott, describes how capitalism is facing an increasing crisis. He says that after the fall of the Berlin wall, we have seen the dark side of the post-Cold War model. Instead of trickle-down, there has been a trickle-up. Instead of the triumph of democracy there has been the triumph of the elites. We are seeing this in so many ways – the avarice of bankers, growing inequality, executive salaries and greed. This article suggests that the Vatican may be right that markets must be underpinned by morality. For this interesting and challenging account, see the link below. John Menadue.
Gough Whitlam had political courage and a vision for Australia. A forward-looking, pragmatic realist, he sought to reshape Australia’s approach to the countries of North and Southeast Asia, the region in which we are forever situated.
It was stimulating to be a senior official in the then Department of Foreign Affairs when Gough became prime minister on 2 December 1972 and the winds of change swept so forcefully through this country. Three days after his election, Whitlam said:
…the change of Government provides a new opportunity for us to reassess a wide range of Australian foreign policies and attitudes…the general direction of my thinking is towards a more independent Australian stance in international affairs, an Australia which will be less militarily orientated and not open to suggestions of racism; an Australia which will enjoy a growing standing as a distinctive, tolerant, co-operative and well regarded nation not only in the Asia Pacific region but in the world at large.
Whitlam certainly did ‘reassess a wide range of Australian foreign policies and attitudes’. It was Whitlam who pushed through Australia’s transfer of recognition from Taiwan to China and the need to substantially develop relations with Indonesia, our large and growing neighbour of increasing importance.
Whitlam redirected Australian foreign policy away from its established World War II roots based largely on the ‘anglosphere’. He also acknowledged that the US and its allies, including Australia, had virtually lost the war against North Vietnam. He completed the withdrawal of Australian forces from the Vietnam War and abolished conscription, which was feeding young Australian troops into a losing conflict.
On East Timor, Whitlam’s critics maintain he gave ‘the green light’ to Suharto for the Indonesian invasion in December 1975. Between 1973 and 1975 I was present at all Whitlam’s meetings with Suharto (in Jakarta, Wonosobo, the Dieng Plateau, and in Townsville and Magnetic Island in Queensland). Gough told Suharto he believed the best outcome of the decolonisation of this neglected Portuguese colony would be for it to become part of Indonesia. But he maintained this would need an educational process of some years in East Timor, Portugal and Indonesia, followed by an act of self-determination.
Indonesia knew at the highest levels that Australia would not condone the use of force. Indonesia invaded East Timor on 7 December, almost a month after Gough had ceased to be the prime minister.
Gough’s active and productive involvement in foreign affairs was not without error. I think it was a mistake to confirm that Australia recognised Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as part of the Soviet Union. And while Gough made some good diplomatic appointments — for example Stephen Fitzgerald to Beijing and Mick Shann to Tokyo — he also made the bad political appointment of Senator Vince Gair to Ireland.
Gough has been criticised for damaging relations with the US. I accompanied Gough on his visit to Washington in 1973. President Nixon and Dr Kissinger were annoyed by the Australian Government’s changing attitude to Vietnam and Cambodia. In my view, their criticism was fed largely by highly critical remarks made by other ministers such as Jim Cairns, Clive Cameron and Tom Uren.
Gough was determined to pursue an independent Australian foreign policy within the framework of the alliance with the US. He believed the alliance did not equate to compliance, and that understanding China’s policies and role in the region did not equate to supporting it where we had disagreements.
Gough was attuned to the end of Western colonialism and wanted to avoid Australia being seen as the last European colonial power in the region. It was for this reason that he wanted to hasten the movement of Papua New Guinea towards independence, which he did in close co-operation with then Chief Minister Michael Somare.
His strong support of an Australian republic was reinforced naturally by his dismissal by the Governor General. But he also saw the need for an Australian republic in the wider context of Australia’s identity in the world. He saw the final public abandonment of the White Australia policy, which he acknowledged was started by Prime Minister Harold Holt in the late ’60s, in the same light.
I had many conversations with Gough Whitlam over a period of 45 years. I recall clearly that he said to me in 1973, ‘I have always had a long-standing and deep belief that we must have good relationships with China, Indonesia and Japan as well as with the United States and Great Britain.’
It was a pleasure to travel with him. While he expected well informed, culturally sensitive and carefully evaluated advice from officials, he was receptive to other views. I observed during these trips that many leaders were impressed by Gough’s knowledge of their countries, histories and cultures, which he was often able to relate to Australia. This was particularly evident in his eight hours of discussion with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. In Manila the head of the Catholic church, Cardinal Sin, was surprised when Gough detected a mistake in a Latin inscription in the Manila Cathedral. After checking, the Cardinal had it changed.
Gough had an excellent and at times self deprecating sense of humour. There are many stories I could quote, but two will have to suffice.
On an official visit to Papua New Guinea we attended a colourful Sing-Sing in Goroka. A local who was very short in stature and wearing little more than bird of paradise feathers on his head and red and white football socks on his feet was standing beside me looking at Gough and me. I realised he wanted some explanation. I had acquired some very rusty Pidgin, and when he next pointed at Gough, I said to the Papua New Guinean, ‘Him long fella number one belong Australia.’
An Australian official turned to me. ‘Do you realise you have just referred to the Prime Minister as the biggest prick in the country?’
Overhearing this, Gough said to me, ‘Thank you comrade. Not all my attributes are known to public servants.’
Another story I recall was when I was travelling with Gough on a somewhat criticised visit he made to 15 countries in four weeks. In The Netherlands, as we waited in an outer office to call on the prime minister, Gough browsed through the London Times. He looked up and said, ‘Have you seen this comrade? Guinea-Bissau, Bangladesh and Grenada have just been admitted to the United Nations. They are creating these countries more quickly than I can visit them.’
Gough was a towering figure in the pantheon of regional leaders. I am proud to have served him as a foreign policy adviser and from March 1975 as ambassador to Indonesia.
This article was first published by the Lowy Institute on 28 October 2014. Richard Woolcott was Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and amongst other appointments, Australian Ambassador to Indonesia.
In my blog of 29 May 2014 ‘Australia-Japan – friends should be frank’, I referred to the tipping point in Japanese domestic politics with the growing ultra nationalism being promoted by Prime Minister Abe. Sir Hugh Cortazzi, who served as Britain’s ambassador to Japan from 1980 to 1984 has expressed similar concerns about trends in Japan. In an opinion piece in the Japan Times on 3 November, he asked the question ‘Does right-wing extremism threaten Japan’s democracy?’ The link to this article is below. John Menadue.
Japan’s central bank, 18 months into a monetary stimulus strategy of unprecedented scale, has decided to dramatically raise the bet. Since an extra 60 trillion yen annually fed into the economy failed to do the trick, perhaps 80 trillion (A$800 billion) will work. The look on the face of central bank chief Haruhiko Kuroda when making the announcement resembled that of a World War I general who having spent 100,000 men to gain 100 yards sees no way forward except to spend another 100,000 for ‘total victory’.
The Japanese economy, says Kuroda, is at a tipping point. Again. The risk is it will slip back into a deflationary cycle and all his and the Abe Government’s efforts to restore growth and confidence will have come to nothing. The size of the stimulus expansion surprised the markets: stock prices leapt and the yen fell to its lowest level in six years. But will ‘shock and awe’ have the desired effect on Japanese consumers? They’ve seen and heard the big guns of monetary policy being fired so often in recent times, Kuroda must know he is captive to the law of diminishing returns. Significantly, the bank board voted only narrowly in favour of the extra stimulus, 5 to 4, the decision obviously hanging on Kuroda’s vote.
What has been gained so far by the much-touted Abe-nomics, the government’s money-printing strategy for recovery? The yen has declined in value, which has helped exporters increase their profits (from very low levels in investment terms), and some of this increased income has been passed on through wage increases. But, at the same time, domestic consumption remains anemic. The overall economy contracted by 1.7% in the June quarter and price growth is almost flat again (the central bank wants inflation running at 2% per annum). There was a bout of spending ahead of a consumption tax hike in April (the government had to do something to rein in its huge budget deficit), but it was followed by an equally large contraction once the tax rise took effect.
Here is the nub of the problem. Income growth in Japan has been so weak for the past 20 years, and confidence levels so low, what little money people have left after paying the mortgage and school fees and meals they choose to save rather than spend. Which is why another announcement made at the same time as the central bank unveiled Abe-nomics Mark II was equally remarkable.
A big drag on consumption is the increasing share of household expenditure accounted for by retirees: aging Japanese drawing on the national pension scheme. The pension scheme’s earnings have been woeful for many years, largely as a result of its conservative policy of salting away 60% of investments in low-yielding Japanese government bonds. The managers of the pension scheme on Friday announced that would be cutting by half the proportion of investments held in domestic bonds while greatly increasing exposure to foreign shares and bonds, in a bid to increase returns to retirees. Younger Japanese refuse to spend their pay packets; perhaps the greying generation will spend their pension increases––or so the thinking goes.
If this step had been taken unilaterally the withdrawal of support from the domestic bond market might have been highly disruption. However, the central bank’s simultaneous decision to increase its purchases of government paper offsets the pension fund’s move into more speculative investments. The sight of two supposedly independent agencies acting collaboratively in this way might seem sensible, at one level, but it also suggests that official Japan has staked everything on one horse in a marathon steeple chase. Most observers have probably judged this to be the case already: nobody seems to have an alternative strategy. But might one ask, if the central bank is printing more money to buy an investment the nation’s own pension fund is so bearish about, how can that work?
Kuroda and Abe could point to the example of the United States, where the economy is growing again nicely following a similar monetary transfusion (now being turned off). There are, however, differences between Japan’s economic problems and the American recession. Endemic deflation, rather than credit flight, lies at the heart of Japan’s malaise. It is linked to weak income growth, a decline in the working-age population and the vast accumulation of government debts from a series of fiscal pump-priming measures undertaken with little effect after Japan’s asset bubble burst in the 1990s. Ironically, one result of the latest moves will be to make certain assets, notably stocks, more attractive: benefiting a small minority, with no automatic flow-on benefits to the wider economy. Small and medium firms don’t raise money on the stock market; they rely on bank credit, and if their principal market is the domestic consumer, the commercial banks are unlikely to be moved simply by this latest arrow fired into the air from the bow of Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party government.
Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for 11 years.
Australian media had never seen anything like it. Suddenly print, radio, television and social media were overwhelmed – blanket coverage of a single event.
Edward Gough Whitlam, Australia’s 21st and greatest reforming Prime Minister, was dead.
Newspapers were turned over to almost complete coverage ,not only of the fact that the former PM had died, but with coverage of the extraordinary series of changes he made to life and living in Australia in a short three years in office more than 40 years ago.
Throughout Australia newspapers (including News Limited) carried full facial photographs and wrap- arounds of up to 8 pages, outlining the major events of the Whitlam Era. Radio talkback shows were flooded with Whitlam tributes, anecdotes and testimonies. Greek, Chinese and other ethnic newspapers who might occasionally give front page treatment to a political event but rarely to a personality, featured the late reformer all across their covers.
Aboriginal leaders lauded Whitlam as “a brother” who had made great steps in advancing land rights and other interests of Australia’s native people. Within two days newspapers worldwide had made more than one and a quarter million references to Whitlam and what he had done for Australia.
Television stations began screening hours of features on the Whitlam era, listing the dozens of major changes initiated by Whitlam and which were still part of Australian life. Social media were similarly overwhelmed. At one stage one media site registered more than 410 accolades to Whitlam in just over an hour.
These came from professional people acknowledging the importance of Whitlam’s free universities in building their careers, from people who themselves or their families had come through health crises thanks to Medibank which was won against strong political opposition only after the holding of a Double Dissolution election. Others, from formerly unsewered sections of our major cities, expressed gratitude for the new comfort in which they now lived thanks to Whitlam’s initiatives. And there were dozens from men, now of mature years, who in their youth had been saved from possibly perilous tours in the Vietnam War by the Whitlam intervention. And there were many others.
Nowhere, it seemed, was there anyone who had not had some aspect of their lives affected by changes made by Gough Whitlam 40 years ago and which have been left untouched by succeeding Governments.
No other major event – the outbreak of World War II, the unexpected (in Australia) death of King George VI, the passing of Churchill or Menzies has generated nearly the outpourings that followed the death of Gough Whitlam.
But somehow this impressive cross section of the Australian community, including media masters, had somehow got it wrong. In one quarter we were told Gough was not great; the endless string of enduring changes for which he was responsible, it seems, had just routinely happened.
The political battles which Gough was forced to fight over recalcitrant political opponents to win these changes it seemed had never occurred.
For this unusual view we have three principal authorities – all unsurprisingly from the Murdoch Press. Miranda Devine who is considered to be a mere convenience in her predictable religio-political views by thinking conservatives but is actually taken seriously by some others; Andrew Bolt, who having failed to distinguish himself in mainstream journalism, has won some notice with his nutty extremism; and Greg Sheridan who was immortalised in an online publication some years ago in a hilarious two page listing of his erroneous predictions and fatuous assessments and, more recently, reinforced this criticism removing any doubt about his worth as a commentator with the novel assertion that George W Bush would come to be seen as one of the great US Presidents.
For the millions who somehow “got it wrong” the list of Whitlam’s accomplishments is awesome – almost endless. It is as impressive as it is long.
Organisations like the Federal Court, the Foreign Investment Review Board, The Trade Practices Commission, The Administrative Appeals Tribunal, every day institutions in Australia today, came from Whitlam initiatives.
The Honours system, which is now exclusively Australian, came when Whitlam discarded the borrowed British system of Knights and Dames. He started the move to scrap “God Save The Queen” and adopt an Australian anthem of our own. He put “Australian” rather than “British” on our Passports for the first time.
Whitlam started the process of granting Independence to Papua New Guinea, finally abolished the White Australia Policy, he introduced legislation for equal pay for women and introduced benefits for single mothers and homeless people. He created the Australia Film Commission, introduced FM radio and colour television, removed the necessity for a paid licence to watch television and, in his first year, doubled the amount of Government money directed to the Arts in Australia.
He created the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Consumer Affairs Commission, established the National Film and Television School in Sydney and unveiled the plaque launching the construction of Australia’s National Gallery.
At the Government level he amalgamated five Defence oriented departments – Army, Navy, Air Force, Supply and Defence into a single Defence entity. He split Australia’s largest, but most cumbersome department, the Postmaster Generals, into two efficient and highly profitable sections, Telecom (now Telstra) and Australia Post. The list goes on.
For the first time he went beyond the provision of Science blocks to Catholic and other Non-Government Schools providing, for the first time, assistance to all schools on a needs basis (something that may have appealed to Miranda Devine), he gave votes to 18 year olds whom the previous Government had unhesitatingly drafted for war in Vietnam while denying them any say in the governance of their country. He legislated for no fault divorce and for the first time introduced parental leave for Commonwealth employees.
The handful of detractors who would have us believe that these reforms had somehow “just happened” ignore the fact that almost, without exception, they were bitterly opposed in both Houses of Federal Parliament by the Liberal-Country Party Coalition of the day. From the recognition of China to the exit from Vietnam and the creation of our enduring health system, Medicare, opponents fought to frustrate the Whitlam Government. These critics also ignore the fact that there had been 23 years – a generation – of non Labor Government and four non Labor Prime Ministers leading up to 1972 where there had been no action on these fronts or, indeed, any evidence that they had even been contemplated.
And while these remain among the hallmarks of Whitlam’s accomplishments leaders like Howard who in 11½ years left us two unhappy wars and a GST, Turnbull and Abbot continue to assert that the Whitlam Government was somehow totally inadequate.
One reminds the reader that in more than 20 years and three non Labor Prime Ministers since, not a single major Whitlam reform has been reversed – surely a matter of some disappointment to those who assess the Whitlam reign as a failure.
Eric Walsh was a long-time member of the Canberra Press Gallery, and Press Secretary to Prime Minister Whitlam.
I first met E. G. Whitlam when he spoke at a series of ‘State Aid’ rallies in Sydney prior to the 1969 federal election. He was in full voice before a Catholic community that had packed halls and cinemas on eight Sunday evenings, demanding financial support for their schools from federal and state governments.
The final gathering was in the Sydney Town Hall. Around 5,000 people crammed into the upper and lower levels, and on the George Street steps. The proceedings were broadcast live on radio station 2SM.
His message was always the same. Australia must increase spending on education and both government and Catholic schools should be funded according to need. Gough had a very clear view that the Commonwealth must make “a comprehensive and continuous financial commitment to schools, as it has to universities.”
A few years ago, I located a sound recording of the Town Hall speeches. I sent a copy to Gough who phoned me the next day with his reminiscences of the campaign by Catholics for financial assistance for their schools.
Over the past 40 years, I have had many discussions with Gough. He spoke about the struggle in the early 1960s to change the attitude of the ALP to state aid. He was convinced that Labor was unelectable until the divisive issue of school funding was resolved. He also believed that funding all schools was the right thing to do. It was a justice issue, not a religious one.
He took considerable pride in the role he played in ensuring that all students had access to well-funded schools.
On a number of occasions, he came back to the 1969 rallies. He lamented the passing of public meetings that provided a stage for a gifted orator. “Television is a poor substitute for the Town Hall,” he said.
Gough played a key role in changing the attitude of the electorate to the funding of Catholic schools. He gave legitimacy to the claim by Catholic parents for some government funding for their schools.
Much of the opposition to the funding of Catholic schools by governments, and the sectarianism that was very obvious in the 1950s and early 1960s, had largely disappeared by the early 1970s. Whitlam played a key role in this change of attitude across the electorate.
When elected in December 1972, Gough established the Interim Committee of the Australian Schools Commission. This committee reported back in May 1973 (Karmel Report) and funding for all schools was increased immediately.
In Sydney Catholic schools, the benefits of the long-awaited funding increases were felt immediately. Additional teachers were employed and class sizes reduced. Teacher salaries came in line with colleagues in government schools. Programs to meet specific needs of students were introduced and teachers had access to a range of Commonwealth-funded professional development courses. The survival fears of the late 1960s were quickly replaced by a new optimism, and the decline in Catholic school enrolments was soon arrested with the opening of new schools in the growth areas.
While the Whitlam government lasted just three years, successive governments have continued to fund Catholic schools along the same trajectory, and the Commonwealth is now a major player in school education. Today, Catholic schools in NSW receive nearly 80 per cent of their annual income from federal and state governments or about $8,000 per student. When Whitlam was elected in 1972, the comparable figure was about $122.
By reforming the way that governments funded schools, Gough Whitlam changed forever – and for the better – the educational landscape in Australia.
Br Kelvin Canavan, fms
Br Kelvin Canavan has been a leader in Catholic education since he was appointed Inspector of Schools in the Catholic Education Office Sydney in 1968. He was Executive Director of Schools from 1987 to 2009 and was appointed Executive Director Emeritus: Catholic Schools, Archdiocese of Sydney in 2009.
A year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a postmortem of the media coverage of the so-called “Iraq war”. The conference included academics, journalists, UN weapons inspectors and diplomats.
UC Berkeley also invited Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, whose job it had been to prepare journalists to be embedded with American forces as they rolled into Iraq. The invasion would soon be described as “the greatest strategic disaster in US history”, by no less than retired Lieutenant General William Odom, a former senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations.
But, as Long told the gathering, the strategy for managing the media had been beautifully executed:
Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. Overall, we were very happy with the outcome.
When we needed them most, the Fourth Estate rolled over and let the military establishments of the belligerent countries tickle their tummies.
By “we”, I mean the thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqis, the millions of Iraqis made homeless, the dead and permanently disabled servicemen and women and the constituents of the belligerent countries who saw trillions of their hard-earned tax dollars flushed down the sewer of the military industrial complex.
Democracy depends on informed and engaged citizens
When Dwight Eisenhower coined the term “military industrial complex”, the US president and former general prescribed only one antidote to the potential misuse of its power, an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry”. But Eisenhower’s alert and knowledgeable citizenry requires a critical and independent media.
Sadly, it is not that hard to take legions of journalists along on a military adventure. It helps that media moguls get a nice windfall when America is “at war”. Murdoch used his used his newspapers – he owned 175 at the time – to support the 2003 Bush-Blair-Howard Iraq invasion.
But the coverage by papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post was also so poor that both apologised to their readers for the gullible fashion in which they bought into the official narrative.
The narrative of war
Ideologies around “war” run deep, so deep that when a country is “at war” – or “a mission”, as prime minister Tony Abbott prefers to call the current exercise against Islamic State – its media get caught up in the “rally around the flag” effect.
I say “war”, in scare quotes, because what made the last “Iraq war” a “war” is not self-evident. The observable phenomena of “war” – the violation of sovereignty, the bombardment of cities, towns and remote outposts, the rolling tanks and marching armies – look exactly like a “crime of aggression”.
One is the stuff of honour and sacrifice, the other, according to the 1946 Nuremberg judgment, is:
… the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Media mouthpieces
For the military to “dominate the information environment” they have to naturalise their version of reality. They need us to believe their acts of war are warranted. They need journalists to use their words – their words for “the enemy”, their words for what makes this enemy especially “evil”, and their words for what they are doing.
They need us to believe that their killings and maimings, their destruction of property and infrastructure, their creation of new refugee camps, are legitimate because this is part of a striving towards some greater good.
They need the media to echo and reiterate the aims and goals of “the mission”, to report uncritically announcements about “the campaign” and to fill news stories with ongoing updates on “operations”.
And they need the media not to mention whose pecuniary interests are being served, never to seriously consider whether the military actions are legal, and to avoid historical facts, context or comparisons which could provide an alternative view of what is going on, and what it might lead to.
Once the official version gets momentum, it doesn’t matter if things go wrong. If some journalists report on “collateral damage”, or disquiet about “strategies” or “tactics”, this won’t shake the firm foundations on which the dominant narrative rests.
The ABC’s record on Iraq
My research into the ABC coverage of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 shows how this same old script was allowed to run its course.
I examined the ABC’s nightly news bulletin and its flagship current affairs program during the initial period of the Coalition invasion of Iraq (March 20 to April 2, 2003), when the “Iraq war” dominated the news. The ABC put five correspondents in Washington, but had none in Baghdad and none at the UN in New York. In this period, not one news item on the ABC was solely devoted to covering Iraqi civilian deaths – but there were four separate stories on the killing of a cameraman working for the ABC.
The ABC’s embedded reporter dramatised the experience of one troop of marines, with vignettes of individual marines and banal recounts of their reactions to daily events. By levelling his vision squarely on one small group of American soldiers, his reports lacked the wider context of the unfolding invasion.
He reported, wrongly, that Iraq had fired scud missiles. If his source was the Australian Defence Force, he missed the correction they issued the following day.
From the Coalition media centre in Qatar, the ABC’s correspondent told viewers that Australia’s mission had “a code name all of its own” and that Australia would have a “frontline role”. He recounted the comings and goings of HMAS Anzac and the FA-18 Hornets, and gave details of events and places so far away from his personal gaze that he could have been in Timbuktu. He reported that the bombing of 1000 Iraqi soldiers was a case of the Coalition “heading off fighting”.
The ABC duly regurgitated Australian Defence Force briefings. Three days into “the war”, the ABC news anchor, in a tone suitable for announcing a world cup victory, reported that Australian forces had “engaged the enemy”.
The ABC used Defence Department footage of Aussie soldiers boarding a civilian Iraqi boat with a cargo of dates. They did not acknowledge the provenance of the footage, or that it had nothing to do with the content of the story. Instead, they reported the view of Defence Force Chief Peter Cosgrove that our diggers had just prevented “mayhem in the Gulf”.
Australian forces were “fighting on the frontline”. The “elite armed forces of Australia” were “intercepting Iraqi ballistic missile sites (sic)”. Our navy divers, ABC viewers were told, were doing the hard yards to clear a port for the delivery of Australian humanitarian aid. In fact, the aid was a boatload of stranded AWB wheat that the government had stepped in and taken off AWB’s hands.
The invasion of Iraq was reported by the ABC as Coalition troops “crossing the Kuwaiti border”.
We got the “rules of engagement” story – the one that trumpets the ADF pilot for aborting a “mission” for fear of killing civilians. Here, it is being recycled for Iraq War mark III, so eerily familiar that plagiarism software would detect the similarities.
On the 7.30 Report, Kerry O’Brien interviewed a panel of Australia’s “best military minds”. In my study of the questions O’Brien put to his panel, I could not avoid the conclusion that the 7.30 Report was, in this period, a megaphone for the official narrative. And in this way, it helped legitimise the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
These military experts made wild predictions: Saddam was dead, the “war” would soon be over, the Coalition would be able to take charge of Baghdad because their tanks had “a very good frontal arc”. They had free rein to roll out their pseudo-scientific military twaddle about the campaign’s “centre of gravity”, “the modern battlefield” and the war’s “psychological phase”. These “experts” showed not even a glimmer of understanding what was to come.
The ABC journalists who strayed from the script – Linda Mottram and John Shovelan – endured official complaints by then-communications minister Richard Alston. Their words were raked over by a bevy of review panels.
Outside the chorus line
Of all the gigs that journalists do, reporting on “war” is the toughest. Not because of the dangers – though these must not to be underestimated. But when reporting “war”, journalists face off against the world’s most powerful vested interests and compete with society’s deepest cultural mythologies.
At its best, the Fourth Estate uncovered the My Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib scandaland the incestuous relations in the Bush era of retired military officers, the US Defence Department and the “defence” industry.
In this incarnation, the Fourth Estate frightened even Napoleon. In his words:
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
But the military’s “reality” is powerful, insidious and covert. It is seductive.
To be truly independent, you can’t just criticise it, you have to stand right outside it. You have to find your own words, and you to have know some history. Then your language will sound “ideological” – like Fisk or Pilger – because you’ll no longer be humming the military tune.
Annabelle Lukin is the Senior Lecturer, Linguistics at Macquarie University.
This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 28 October 2014.
The current outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa shows no signs of halting. More than4,500 people have died and many thousands more are infected. Despite the creation of a new United Nations mission to tackle Ebola and commitments of thousands of western military personnel to help combat the disease, the virus is still “winning the race”.
In September, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the international community to donate US$1 billion to help fight Ebola. Yet one month later, despite dire predictions that we could see 10,000 cases a week by December and 1.4 million cases by January 2015, the UN has received less than 40% of the funds needed.
While the main focus is on what governments are or are not doing, the role the corporate sector can play in the current crisis has received very little attention.
Is the mining sector doing enough to fight Ebola?
With six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies in Africa and rich mineral resources that include major iron ore deposits, the region has attracted considerable foreign investment over the past decade from some of the world’s largest resources companies.
In a statement obtained for this article, a Rio Tinto spokesman said the company had donated GNF$1.5 billion (US$220,000) to date to health organisations, including donating 10,000 prevention kits containing soap and chlorine for hand-washing, constructing latrines and conducting public awareness campaigns in the Guinean “sous-prefectures” of Boola, Beyla and Kouankan.
Another Australian resources company, BHP Billiton, which has mining operations in Guinea and Liberia, has donated a total of US$400,000.
The London Mining Company, which owns an iron ore mine in Sierra Leone that generated US$299 million in revenue in 2013, has claimed to be assisting with the construction of a 130-bed Ebola treatment facility. This assistance, though, equates to the loan of a surveyor and fuel to help clear the land – the actual construction of the facility will be “at cost” and operated by the United States and Irish governments.
Beyond this, in terms of financial contributions, the London Mining Company joined a consortium of businesses that collectively donated US$279,643, but independently the company has donated just US$122,100 to the UN Ebola Appeal.
Yet even these extremely modest contributions compare favourably to some Canadian-based firms such as Aureus Mining Inc, which has offered equipment (on loan) but has donated just US$30,000; while IMAGOLD has donated a mere US$35,000.
For their part, mining companies have stressed their efforts to protect employees and contractors, citing the initiation of public education campaigns and testing regimes underway at various operations.
It seems clear that many of these companies see it primarily as a government role and their own as using influence to lobby. Aureus chief executive David Reading was one a number of senior resource company executives who co-signed a letter calling for a stronger global response to the crisis.
What about the rest of the corporate sector?
This contrasts to the efforts of other corporate donors. By any measure, the leading private sector contributor to the Ebola crisis has been the IKEA Foundation which, according to the UN, has donated over US$6.7 million to the Ebola Virus Outbreak – West Africa Appeal. This is followed by General Electric which has donated US$2 million, and Kaiser Permanente and GlaxoSmithKline, which have donated US$1 million each.
A number of other corporations have made either in-kind or cash donations to the UN Fund. Some of the companies that have donated cash include the Bridgestone Group (US$500,000), Coca-Cola (US$248,000), DuPont (US$250,000), and Exxon Mobile (US$225,000).
In-kind contributions have also been received from companies like the Chevron Corporation (ambulances), Ericsson (collecting donations), FedEx (shipping logistics), the McKesson Corporation (medical supplies), 3M (medical supplies), and the Shell Oil Company (petroleum and vehicles), among others.
Certainly the UN has encouraged the corporate sector to donate resources, even publishing an Ebola Business Engagement Guide.
Multi-billion dollar corporations – those with the financial capacity to do much more – however, have been slow to respond. And without exception, even the contributions that have been made pale into insignificance against the contribution by the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who personally donated US$25 million to combating Ebola.
In the meantime, the virus continues to spread. World leaders, including former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, have expressed “bitter disappointment” at the international community’s lack of response. While much of the focus may appropriately be on governments, the corporate sector also has a responsibility to step up.
In launching a fresh campaign for funds, Ban Ki-moon recently declared:
This is not just a health crisis; it has grave humanitarian, economic and social consequences that could spread far beyond the affected countries.
Let’s hope the message is heard.
Dr Adam Kamradt-Scott is Senior Lecturer at University of Sydney. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 21 October 2014.
Gough Whitlam’s sheer presence, drive and ambitions disguised some deep flaws. But his vision and achievements stand in stark contrast to the politics we often have seen since, writes Mike Steketee.
“It’s time”. It seemed like a modest slogan for a momentous event – after 23 years, a new government led by a towering figure promising sweeping change.
But it was perfectly pitched for maximum impact. Not all Australians were swept up in the political euphoria but all but the most died-in-the-wool conservatives could see that after 23 years, with the party of Menzies now under the leadership of the comical Billy McMahon, the Liberals had reached their fag end.
In his first election as leader in 1969, Gough Whitlam secured a 7 per cent swing and gained 18 seats to reduce the Gorton government’s majority to seven. To some extent, it was a predictable correction following the landslide Coalition win in 1966 but its size – the largest swing since 1943 – spoke to another factor: for the first time for many years, Labor under Whitlam looked like an alternative government.
In Canberra, there was a feeling of irresistible momentum, with Labor sweeping all before it at the next election.
At least that is how it felt as a 20-year-old reporter arriving in the national capital in 1969. Canberra then was a mecca for journalists. Working cheek by jowl with politicians in the confined quarters of the old Parliament House, there was a sense of being part of great national events.
In part it was the Whitlam style – what his speechwriter and first biographer, Graham Freudenberg, called “a certain grandeur”. His intellect dazzled, his wit sizzled.
“Who’s this – Aristophanes?” he said as I walked into the opposition leader’s office and encountered him talking to his staff. Without the benefit of an education in the classics, I had to take the first opportunity to repair to the parliamentary library to discover that Whitlam was referring to an ancient Greek playwright. About all we had in common was a beard.
The mood of the time could not be more different from the all-pervading cynicism surrounding politics today. There was a rare idealism: Australians dared to dream that a government could build a better, bigger nation than the outpost of the Empire that we sometimes still had trouble putting behind us.
Whitlam elevated politics to a higher plane, convinced of what could be achieved through an expansive role for government and a more confident and independent foreign policy. As he put it in his policy speech for the 1972 election, ever since his entry to parliament in 1952:
I have never wavered from my fundamental belief that until the national government became involved in great matters like schools and cities, this nation would never fulfil its real capabilities.
Allied to this was a faith in his own powers of persuasion. He believed that patient, detailed explanation in countless public forums could convince the public, as he had first convinced his own party, of the merits of a national health insurance scheme that left no one facing crippling debts because of a medical condition; of a system of school funding based on student needs; of broadening access to university education by removing fees; of the national government funding basic services such as sewerage neglected by the states.
If he received the nation’s trust, he would return the favour by keeping his promises – a novel idea in today’s politics. There was a warning sign in the 1972 election result – a swing of only 2.6 per cent, delivering a modest majority of nine seats. There was less a wholehearted embrace of the Whitlam revolution than a wary endorsement of the need for change.
But this was overlooked in the euphoria of victory. The Program, as Whitlam called his policies (or less formally, the New Testament), was holy writ, especially now that he had received a mandate from the people to implement it. He would forge ahead, crashing through the political barriers and trusting his reforms would bring their own reward.
In the modern context, when politicians barely dare move a sinew without reference to the opinion polls, it was a refreshing approach. But it also was the start of Whitlam’s undoing. To the extent that he thought of it at all, economic policy was a given. The assumption was that continued economic growth would bring with it the increase in revenue that would finance this expanded role of the government.
As he said in his policy speech for the 1972 election: “Within Australia today we do not have to plan to ration scarcity but to plan the distribution of abundance, not to restrict shares but to secure a fairer share for all.” After 23 years out of office and with Whitlam’s determination to carry out his mandate, he and his ministers were not to be diverted from their grand plans.
It was not Whitlam’s fault that Middle East oil producing nations decided in 1973 to use their stranglehold over supplies to extract greater returns, resulting in a quadrupling of oil prices and the new economic phenomenon of stagflation – recession combined with high inflation. But he was responsible for Australia’s ambivalent and inadequate response, which fluctuated from pulling in the reins to the government spending its way out of recession.
Sounder economic policies, even at the cost of breaking or delaying promises, may have provided a stronger defence against opponents. Members of the Liberal and Country Party opposition, together with a conservative business establishment, simply did not accept the legitimacy of a Labor government. To them it was an aberration, to be rectified at the earliest opportunity.
It is often forgotten that the Coalition parties not once but twice tried to bring the government down by blocking the budget in the Senate. The first time was in 1974, after less than 18 months in office, when Whitlam responded to the opposition threat by calling an election, which he won but with a majority reduced from nine to five. It was another warning sign.
The following year, with the government in a much weaker electoral position, Whitlam defied Malcolm Fraser’s attempt to force an election, triggering the nation’s greatest political crisis. The fact that Labor held a majority in the parliamentary chamber that determines who forms a government was not enough to confer it legitimacy in the eyes of the opposition, even for the remaining year or so that it would have continued until its almost inevitable defeat.
While it is now generally accepted that Governor-General John Kerr had the constitutional right to dismiss Whitlam, the enduring criticism is that he deliberately deceived Whitlam about his intentions, giving the prime minister no opportunity to react to warnings.
Whitlam’s sheer presence, his drive and his ambitions for the nation disguised some deep flaws. But his vision and the achievements that flowed from them stands in stark contrast to the myopic, reactive politics, we often have seen since.
Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian.
In my blog of 16 October ‘Post-script from France’ I said ‘Like other Europeans [the President of France] hopes that the German economic engine will help power France and the rest of Europe, but the German economic engine has slowed down considerably.’
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in the London Telegraph paints a very discouraging account of Germany and its prospects. He says ‘France may look like the sick man of Europe, but Germany’s woes run deeper.’
For Evans-Pritchard’s account, see link below. John Menadue
The refugee policy of the Fraser government is often invoked in debates about Australia’s current approach to asylum seekers. While the small number of boat arrivals between 1976 and 1981 cannot be compared to the many thousands who arrived between 2009 and 2013, the political difficulties in that era were far greater than simply the reception and processing of asylum seekers. By contrast with more recent policy, the Fraser government overcame these difficulties by choosing to fulfil Australia’s international legal obligations under the Refugee Convention and by explaining this imperative to the Australian community.
Then, as now, the government was acutely aware that Australia was one of the only parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol within the region. Indeed, Australia ratified the 1967 Protocol only three years before the first Vietnamese boatpeople began to arrive in 1976. The Department of Immigration admitted that Australia was now ‘locked in’ to obligations and ‘had never envisaged’ forced migration on this scale. Yet instead of working to distance Australia from the Convention, the Department of Immigration worked to explain to the public that compliance with international legal and moral obligations was integral to Australia’s ‘credibility and status as a civilised, compassionate nation’.
In fulfilment of these obligations, the Fraser government established Australia’s first formal refugee status determination procedure and used this mechanism to reassure the public that all boat arrivals were being rigorously assessed. Even though, in reality, the boatpeople could not be repatriated, the government nonetheless declared that only those found to be genuine refugees would remain in Australia. This was a clever strategy. By employing it, the government was able to emphasise the importance of giving due effect to Australia’s obligations under international law while maintaining the appearance of control over the entry of asylum seekers. There was no need to resort to the image of a militarised ‘national emergency’.
Behind the scenes, the Fraser government was mindful to ensure that its response to asylum seekers should not be in breach of the Convention. The archives record how officials ruled out turning back boats and establishing closed detention centres due to the moral and legal implications of these measures. This was despite intelligence reports that up to 100,000 people could potentially sail to Australian shores. UNHCR records show that even the investigation and deportation of 146 fraudulent asylum claimants aboard the fishing vessel VT838 in 1981 was undertaken with the full knowledge of UNHCR’s Australian office.
In public, the Fraser government sought to marry arguments about Australia’s international obligations with the need to move on from ‘White Australia’. Instead of expecting impoverished regional neighbours to shoulder the burden of resettlement, as Australia is now doing, the government encouraged the public to see that the admission of asylum seekers would enhance the nation’s standing in the eyes of the world. Efforts to improve Australia’s image abroad would come to nothing, the ministers for Immigration and Foreign Affairs announced, ‘if we now respond to the Vietnamese refugee question in a narrow, ungenerous and emotive way’. Given that the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has recently accused Australia of a ‘chain of human rights violations’ in relation to its offshore processing system, these issues are as relevant as ever.
Working closely with UNHCR to expand and diversify the refugee intake was central to the Fraser government’s long-term vision for Australia’s immigration program. Immigration Minister Ian Macphee collaborated with his Labor shadow Mick Young to speak at public meetings around Australia on the benefits of non-discriminatory entry criteria and refugee resettlement. Macphee and Young recognised that the Indochinese intake was ‘a major wrench to the Australian people’, which brought about ‘more discussion about where our immigration policies were headed than took place at any previous time’. They ‘copped abuse’ from some members of the public as a result. Yet their bi-partisan efforts were based on the belief that these questions were vital to the nation’s future. On reflection, Macphee told the house in 1984, ‘I believe we are now a less parochial people’.
The number of boat arrivals may have been much smaller during the Fraser era, but the political challenge was great. The Fraser government demonstrated that Australia can give effect to its international legal obligations while carefully managing the public’s response to asylum seekers. In looking to the past we are reminded that these objectives are not mutually exclusive.
Dr Claire Higgins is an historian and a Research Associate at the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW
I just wanted to share a memory or two with you before this day is over.
My father came to Australia in 1954 and he always told me that he
never felt Australian until Gough was elected in 1972.
In 1993, at the tail-end of my first visit to Greece, my uncle took me
to the Byzantine ruins of Mystras on the outskirts of Sparta in
Lakonia.
We were sweltering that day as we walked about that amazing setting.
As we were about to leave, a familiar voice came into earshot. I
turned to see a tall man perched on a walking stick with a
handkerchief wrapped over his head. I didn’t recognise him at first –
I had only been hearing Greek for four months. But the voice
resonated.
I decided to move closer to the old man who was encircled by a bevy of
important Greek scholars. As I approached, the scholars motioned me
away, but there was another bloke – a bearded fellow – who called out
to me:
” Do you wanna meet Gough?”
“Yes,” I said.
” Come over here,” he said.
About 15 minutes later after Gough had explained the history of the
place to the bevy, the bearded fellow waved me over.
I’ll never forget it – at the summit of Mystras, of all places!
It’s probably not right for journos to have heroes, but I have a couple.
The Chicago journalist Mike Royko is one of them.
But Gough touched my family in so many ways.
Blessings,
In my blog of 5 January 2013, ‘A Canary in the Coal Mine’, I said that ‘The future of new thermal coal mines is doubtful. Would any sensible investor take not only the political risk but also the financial risk of investing in new thermal coal mines in Australia?’
The canary warning is getting louder and louder, even though Tony Abbott tells us that ‘Coal is good for humanity’.
In an excellent article in the SMH of 18 October 2014, Tony Allard says that Abbott’s faith in coal mining could be wrong – very wrong.
It refers to companies such as Citigroup, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company and Deutsche Bank who stress the decline in the demand for coal and its dubious prospects. It is not just the ANU that is discussing divestment in fossil fuels.
Earlier this year, the Sewol ferry sank off Korea’s southern coast with 304 passengers drowned, mainly school children. An article by Jae-Jung Suh draws attention to an abdication of responsibility by the Korean Government and many others. He says ‘The whole tragedy serves as a reminder of how neoliberal deregulation and privatisation puts people’s safety and life at risk through a process of state collusion with business interests and how a powerful national security state may fail to protect its own people from internal dangers it helps create.’
Jae-Jung Suh has been Head of Korean Studies at John Hopkins University in Washington for over a decade.
The link to his important and disturbing report can be found below. John Menadue
Last night the ABC program, Foreign Correspondent, carried a remarkable and moving account of the work of the Italian Navy in rescuing ‘people fleeing conflict or economic despair in the Middle East and Africa’.
The Italian Admiral in charge of the operations in the Mediterranean said ‘We have the duty in these cases when we are at sea to intervene to save human life. If we are not at sea, then we can’t see what happens. We can close our eyes, turn off the lights and in that way, there’s no need to “turn back” the boats because they will die. We need to remember that International Rights exist. There are international laws that our countries have ratified’.
I wonder if the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, has time to watch this remarkable account of humanity in action.
In the New Daily on 6 October, George Lekakis drew attention to a letter sent to a policy-holder in 1994 by Mary-Jo Henrisson, a customer services manager in Medibank’s NSW head office. Mary-Jo Henrisson said “We would be sorry to see you lose the equity you have built up in the fund.”
For the full story in the New Daily see link below.
In the International New York Times of October 6, Roger Cohen spoke of ‘the community of expulsion’. He was referring not only to the expulsion of Jews and the diaspora, but also the expulsion of the Palestinians. He said “Palestinians have joined the ever recurring community of expulsion. The words of Leviticus are worth repeating for any Jew in or concerned by Israel today: Treat the stranger as yourself for ‘you were strangers in the land of Egypt’.”
On 29 August this year the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which is under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) made rulings on Korean schools in Japan. It said ‘The committee encourages the state party [Japan] to revise its position and allow Korean schools to benefit, as appropriate, from the High School Tuition Support Fund, as well as to invite local governments to resume or maintain the provision of subsidies to Korean schools.’
Korean schools in Japan were established after the liberation of Korean people from colonial rule by Japan in 1945. The schools were established to educate Korean children in Japan who had been deprived of their Korean name, language and culture by Japan. It is estimated that at that time there were 525 Korean schools all over Japan and approximately 44,000 Korean children attended those schools. Today there are about 70 schools from kindergarten to university with approximately 8,000 students.
In April 2010 the government of Japan introduced the Tuition Fee Waiver Program which would waive tuition fees for high school education. It was planned to include not only Japanese public and private schools, but also foreign schools in Japan that are accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ under the School Education Act. It was the first chance for all Korean schools that were accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ to be granted subsidies by the central government of Japan.
However, the government started the program without applying it to Korean schools, because of the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s by DPRK. This amounted to using Korean children as political pawns between Tokyo and Pyongyang. The Abe Government decided to completely exclude Korean schools from the program by changing the legislative provision of the program in February 2013. As of today five civil suits claiming national compensation have been filed by Korean schools in the district courts of Tokyo, Osaka, Aichi, Hiroshima and Fukuoka.
Following such discriminatory decisions by the Japanese central government, some local governments also have refused subsidies or cut subsidies that have been granted to Korean schools up to that point. The subsidies have been halted in some prefectures such as Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima as of October 2014. This represents about one third of local governments that have granted subsidies to Korean schools. In Osaka a civil suit demanding the Osaka prefectural government reverse the decision to refuse the subsidy for Korean schools was filed in the court in 2013 by the Osaka Korean school.
Moreover some municipal governments such as Yokohama and Hiroshima have also followed the decisions of the prefectural authorities and withheld payments of the subsidies. As a result some parents have given up sending their children to Korean schools and sent them to Japanese schools which are granted much more subsidies than Korean schools.
Our Association raised these discriminatory policies against Korean school children with CERD which we believe amounts to racial discrimination and infringes the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Japan ratified in 1995. I also visited Geneva in August to raise these issues directly with the members of CERD. As a result of the examination of the government of Japan, CERD ruled as mentioned above concerning Korean schools. This means that in the view of CERD, the exclusion of Korean schools from the Tuition Fee Waiver Program and refusing subsidies at various government levels constitutes racial discrimination.
The Japanese government has also been directed in the past by several international human rights bodies to revise its policy which infringes on the rights to education in Korean schools.
The history of discriminatory policy against Korean schools by the Japanese government can be traced back to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910-1945. This discrimination was worsened by the compulsory close-down of Korean schools in 1948-49 which has been called ‘4.24 Gyoyug Tujaeng (4.24 교육투쟁)’ which means ‘struggling for education on 24th April’. The Ministry of Education carried out its plan to prohibit Korean children from attending Korean schools in 1948 and over a million Koreans in Japan struggled against that policy. In case of Hyogo prefecture, 10,000 Koreans gathered around a prefectural office and made the governor reverse the decision to close down Korean schools on 24th April 1948. However the 8th US Army, in association with the government of Japan, oppressed those struggles of Koreans by announcing a state of emergency under the anti-communism and cold war structure at the time. As a result, 3,000 Korean were arrested and a 16 year old Korean boy, Kim Tae-il was killed and Korean activist Park Ju-bom was also killed as a result of shooting and torture by the Japanese authorities. These memories of struggle have been handed on to Korean residents in Japan and many of them say the discriminatory policy of the Japanese government against Korean schools has been continued for about 70 years.
In the recommendations relating to hate speech and hate crimes in Japan, CERD recommended the Japanese government ‘address the root causes of racist hate speech’ and it should combat ‘prejudices which lead to racial discrimination’. This suggests that CERD recognizes that hate speech and hate crimes against Korean residents in Japan has not occurred suddenly. It recognizes that there are deep-seated causes which go back to the time when Korea was colonized by Japan. This colonization by the Japanese government is at the core of the discrimination against Korean school students and the spreading of hate speech and hate crimes across Japanese society.
Most Korean residents in Japan are descendants of those who were forced to live in Japan because of the colonial rule of Japan in their homeland. The Japanese government has the obligation to ensure justice to Korean residents in Japan who were deprived of their language, name and culture by Japan. The Japanese government must guarantee ethnic education of Korean children. The Japanese government should immediately stop the discriminatory policies against Korean schools and guarantee right to education for Korean children.
I hope the civil movement both in Japan and elsewhere will support Korean schools in their plea for acceptance and the elimination of discrimination.
Wooki KIM is on the Secretariat staff of Human Rights Association for Korean Residents in Japan.
In The Guardian, Malcolm Fraser has said ‘Air power alone will not make a difference in Iraq. Barack Obama and his allies have the worst strategic understanding possible of what they claim is an existential threat ‘ See link to article below
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on 4 October 2014 said ‘I remain partial to the view that American Jewry is threatened more by its own ignorance than by anything that may happen in the Middle East. But if Rabbis are going to speak about Israel, then they should speak with clarity …’ The article is available online below:
In July 1940, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Emperor Hirohito met with his military planners to discuss the details of Japan’s new “southward advance” policy. An apparently skeptical Hirohito asked them a series of questions, including whether the policy would involve “occupying points in India, Australia and New Zealand.”
Although Japan’s supreme commander felt nervous about his country’s impending military adventure, he did not resist it––as he had, for instance, in 1936 when his disapproval was sufficient to crush a military coup by disaffected elements of the Imperial Army.
Both episodes show Hirohito to have been a much more activist leader than some portrayals suggest.
The latest attempt to paint Hirohito as a strict constitutionalist, obliged to follow the advice of his ministers, and look mildly martial on a white horse, is a 61-volume, 12,000-page publishing colossus, the Annals of the Showa Emperor. (Showa is the era name of Hirohito’s reign that lasted from 1926 to 1989.)
Commissioned by the Imperial Household Agency, and 24 years in the making, it supposedly brings together all available documents related to the Emperor’s life. The first volumes are due to be published next year, with the remainder dribbled out to the public over five years.
Although the work contains some new material of interest to academic researchers, critics complain that, on major points of historical conjecture, it is both incomplete and intentionally obscure. The Mainichi newspaper found it contained “hardly anything new” of real significance. The annals’ summaries make it impossible to link information to a particular source; it omits any direct quotations attributable to the Emperor; and some records of his close aides are withheld altogether. (I rely for this analysis on Japanese media and academic sources, since only a select group of individuals so far has been allowed to see the contents of the annals.)
One example stands out. While the annals make reference to a 2006 newspaper article about a memo in which Hirohito is quoted as criticizing the honouring of Class “A” war criminals at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, the actual memo is not among the documents reproduced. It is not known whether this particular omission was done to appease the Abe Government, with its strong nationalist bent, but there can be no doubt that the project as a whole set out to avoid controversy.
Professor Herbert Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan* told the New York Times he had been asked by a Japanese newspaper to comment on the annals––on condition he refrained from discussing Hirohito’s “role and responsibility” in World War II. Having expended much time and effort researching the Emperor’s close involvement in military planning, Bix naturally declined: “The very idea of a carefully vetted official biography of a leader fits within the Sino-Japanese historical tradition, but raises deep suspicions of a whitewash…”
The annals cultivate the image of a leader who was war shy and peace friendly, and yet this analysis cannot withstand even the most superficial investigation. If Hirohito had the power to end the Pacific War in August 1945––and he did play a decisive role––why did he not have the power to prevent it starting in December 1941 or to bring it to an end much sooner? The evidence, in fact, shows he was enthusiastic about Japan’s early military successes and only swung his support behind the “peace faction” once his very existence was threatened by atomic annihilation.
Australia wanted Emperor Hirohito put on trial as a war criminal, together with the military, industrial and political leaders who were convicted, and in some cases, executed. The United States, however, took the view that hanging Hirohito would play into the hands of Japan’s Communists and make the postwar occupation (and security realignment) of Japan that much harder. The Chifley Government eventually concurred.
For the President of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Australian Justice William Webb, Hirohito’s immunity from prosecution rankled: “No ruler,” he wrote in his separate opinion on the Tokyo Trials, “can commit the crime of launching aggressive war and then validly claim to be excused for so doing because his life would otherwise have been in danger.” Evidence of Hirohito’s responsibility was suppressed during the actual hearings until Hideki Tojo slipped up while being questioned by a defense lawyer. “No Japanese subject,” insisted the loyal wartime prime minister, “let alone a high official of Japan, would ever go against the will of the Emperor.” Tojo was later given a chance (by the prosecution) to “correct” his mistake, but that ghost could never be laid to rest.
Hirohito died in 1989 at the grand old age of 87. I remember, on the occasion of his funeral, standing with the crowds lining the streets near the Imperial Palace, sleet falling on a bitterly cold February day, and reflecting on the legacy of a man who had led Japan through its darkest and its brightest days, first by means of war and then by means of peace. The shuffling, bespectacled, grandfatherly figure I had witnessed performing his many official duties––whose only public opinion was an enigmatic smile––seemed to have redeemed himself. Certainly, at least, he and the Americans (those mighty republicans) had saved the imperial institution.
But there was a cost, which we are still paying.
Professor Bix, in his analysis of Japanese power, identified a “system of irresponsibility,” a closed circle of buck-passing in which politicians and generals acted in the name of an Emperor who, in turn, acted in accordance with their advice. Thus no individual took the blame (each of the Tokyo Trial defendants pleaded “not guilty”) for ideas and actions that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
In some respects modern, democratic Japan perpetuates this system of irresponsibility, including in the way it refuses to render a full and proper accounting for the past.
Japan spent ten years between 1931 and 1941 creeping towards war with the great powers. The imperial institution was the chandelier in the barracks: a decorative incongruity lighting the way for the militarists. Still remote and unaccountable, I wonder what way it will light for Japan in the days ahead.
* From my reading of his book, Bix seems unable to make up his mind whether Hirohito was a warmonger or an acquiescent nationalist, and some of his conclusions about the personality and temperament of the young Hirohito go beyond the evidence adduced. But, particularly in its second half, the book effectively demolishes the revisionist arguments of Japan’s “textbook” patriots.
Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.
China rightly dominates most discussions of Australia’s economic outlook, but Tony Abbott has made it plain he also wants to be good friends with the other emerging Asian heavyweight, India.
A tangible example came during his visit there early last month (September), when he handed over two ancient Hindu statues that allegedly were stolen from temples in Tamil Nadu and subsequently acquired by Australian art galleries.
It was a gesture that prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to express his gratitude and to say Abbott had shown “enormous respect” for India’s cultural heritage.
Next month, the two leaders will have another opportunity to get closer. As well as attending the G20 summit in Brisbane, Modi has accepted Abbott’s invitation to make a bilateral visit to Australia — the first such trip by an Indian prime minister since Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.
As a pro-business leader, Modi’s priority is domestic economic development, including in the manufacturing sector – hence his mantra of “Make in India.” To speed up the process, he needs funding from abroad, which is why he is courting big potential investors in Japan, China, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Australia.
In his first four months in office, Modi has made a string of overseas visits and played host to some key leaders. Under his “neighbourhood first” approach, Bhutan was Modi’s first destination in June, followed by Brazil in July and Nepal in August. In the last month, he has visited Japan to meet the man he describes as a “dear friend,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and has just caught up with US President Barack Obama in Washington. At home, he welcomed Abbott in early-September and then hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-September. During his visit, Xi committed China to investing a further US$20 billion in India over the next five years.
That suits the pragmatic Modi, who made some valuable Chinese contacts when he was drumming up business as Gujarat’s chief minister. China, of course, is the object of as much attention in India as it is in Australia. India wants a lot more Chinese investment, but the border issue continues to weigh on overall ties.
In a September 19 joint statement in New Delhi, Modi and Xi agreed that pending a final resolution of their disputed boundary, the two sides would continue to make an effort to maintain “peace and tranquillity” in the border areas.
India’s relationship with Beijing is nowhere near as comfortable as the one Modi has with Abe’s Japan. “India considers Japan among its closest and most reliable partners,” Modi told an approving audience during his visit to Tokyo, adding that as “two peace-loving and democratic nations,” India and Japan could “play an influential role in shaping the future of Asia and the world.” Abe has committed Japan to doubling its Indian investment and financing to US$35 billion, also over the next five years.
Modi’s other big bilateral challenge is the relationship with the United States, where business ties have not developed as rapidly as both sides might have liked. Issues such as civilian nuclear power liability, intellectual property rights, foreign investment regulations and delayed financial reforms remain impediments to the fivefold increase in trade that Obama and Modi envision in their September 30 joint statement. Two-way trade in goods and services now stands at just under US$100 billion a year. The leaders also committed to a joint investment initiative on infrastructure. But in agricultural trade, India’s recent action to block a World Trade Organisation deal on food security upset Washington, despite Modi arguing that India had to retain the unfettered right to make food available to its poorest people.
Like the US, Abbott wants to quickly grow Australia’s two-way trade with India from the current modest figure of $17 billion. He would also like to have some more big-ticket Australian investors entering India. “We are not as close as we should be,” Abbott said in New Delhi on September 5. “My visit to India reflects Australia’s desire for India to be in the first rank of Australia’s relations.”
The on-the-ground reality is that India is not the easiest place to do business. Plenty of big international investors have burnt time and money trying to make headway there: Wal-Mart and Carrefour in modern retail, for instance, or Posco and ArcelorMittal in steel. Bureaucratic inertia, domestic opposition from vested interests, entrenched corruption in the police, judiciary and government layers, and an ongoing Maoist insurgency in parts of the country, combined with poor infrastructure, difficult labour laws and poor levels of skills and education all make for a testing investment environment.
That said, with 1.25 billion people and a growing middle class of several hundred million, there is no denying India’s promise. Energy demand is rising rapidly, gross domestic product is approaching $2 trillion (still well behind China’s $10 trillion), economic growth this year should finish above 5 per cent and comfortably pass 6 per cent next year, and there is a big push for more and better food, and more consumer comforts in general. All of that plays to Australia’s strengths in energy, agribusiness and technology.
Abbott’s focus in recent weeks has been on security at home and abroad, but his long-term economic agenda is unchanged: how best to maintain and expand the prosperity Australia has enjoyed virtually without interruption for the past 23 years. China, Japan, the United States and India are all crucial to that effort (as are South Korea and Indonesia). So far, Abbott has established good relations with their various leaders, but is the first to acknowledge that ties with India in the past have been under-done because of Australia’s fascination with China. November’s visit by Modi will be a good pointer as to how quickly that situation might change.
Geoff Hiscock writes on international business and is the author of Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources, India’s Global Wealth Club, and India’s Store Wars, all published by Wiley.
While many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line against multiculturalism, Tony Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country, writes Mike Steketee.
“The Australian Government will be utterly unflinching towards anything that threatens our future as a free, fair and multicultural society; a beacon of hope and exemplar of unity-in-diversity.”
This is how Tony Abbott expressed his defence of Australian values before the United Nations Security Council this week.
Many, probably most, Australians will find his words commendable, if perhaps unremarkable. Yet not so long ago, he would never have put it that way.
His views on multiculturalism used to align with those of his conservative predecessor, John Howard, who hated the “m” word and avoided it at all costs. As he wrote in his autobiography, Lazarus Rising: “My view was that Australia should emphasise the common characteristics of the Australian identity. We should emphasise our unifying points rather than our areas of difference.”
His views translated into action, with his government’s abolition of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research and with the substitution of “citizenship” for the “m” word in the Immigration Minister’s title.
Many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line. According to Senator Cory Bernardi, “the naïve … proclaim multiculturalism as a triumph of tolerance when in fact it undermines the cultural values and cohesiveness that brings a nation together”.
Queensland National MP George Christensen this week supported a ban on burqas. In 2013, Scott Morrison, then shadow immigration minister, argued thatmulticulturalism “simply means too many things to too many different people and increasingly runs the risk of fuelling division and polarising the debate, which is the antitheses of what it is supposed to achieve”.
But Abbott no longer counts himself amongst the critics. Two weeks ago, he said: “I’ve shifted from being a critic to a supporter of multiculturalism, because it eventually dawned on me that migrants were coming to Australia not to change us but to join us.”
His conversion goes back some years. In Battlelines, the book published in 2009, not long before he became opposition leader, he wrote that he previously had underestimated “the gravitational pull of the Australian way of life”. The influx of people from a long list of countries who applied to become Australian citizens, “far from diluting ‘Australian-ness’ …. shows people’s enthusiasm to join our team”.
That would be Team Australia of recent invocation.
In 2012, as opposition leader, he explained an experience that helped changed his mind:
With (historian) Geoffrey Blainey, I used to worry that multiculturalism could leave us a nation of tribes. But I was wrong and I’ve changed my mind. The scales fell from my eyes when I discovered – while running Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, would you believe – that the strongest supporters of the Crown in our constitution included indigenous people and newcomers who had embraced it as part of embracing Australia.
The irony is that this conversion has come at a time when multiculturalism is under greater stress than at any time since its introduction by the Whitlam government. Each successive wave of immigrants to Australia has caused friction, stretching all the way from the Irish in the 19th century to the post-World War II surge of Italians, Greeks and other Europeans and the large numbers of Vietnamese who arrived in the wake of the Vietnam war.
Yet the cycle became a familiar and reassuring one, from initial resentment and discrimination towards new immigrants to acceptance and later celebration.
“Wogs” used to be a term of derision; now it is a badge of honour for many of Italian and Greek origin. Despite some initial tensions and problems with crime, the successful integration of Vietnamese into a nation that only recently had abandoned the White Australia policy was eloquent testament to a tolerant society.
Immigrants typically worked hard and soon spread out from the then poor inner suburbs as they became more affluent. Their sons and daughters started marrying outside their ethnic group and often became indistinguishable from other Australians.
In short, as Abbott came to realise, Australia changed migrant families more than they changed Australia.
The 2005 Cronulla riots, sparked by an attack on lifesavers by young men of Lebanese origin and fuelled by inflammatory comments by broadcaster Alan Jones, shattered the image of Australia as a model of racial harmony. Still, it could be rationalised as an isolated incident. Harder to dismiss is the emergence of home-grown jihadists who regard themselves as enemies of Australia – hardly a stellar example of unity in diversity.
Unlike previous immigrants, some from the Middle East, predominantly Lebanese with often low education levels admitted by the Fraser government in the wake of the Lebanese civil war, did not follow the traditional path of working, inter-marrying and generally spreading out into society. For some, unemployment, crime and racism contributed to alienation, particularly amongst the young.
In some senses, Abbott’s conversion may be more rhetorical than real. On coming to government, he shifted responsibility for multiculturalism from the immigration portfolio – something for which Morrison may be grateful – to Social Security, suggesting a narrowed focus.
That brings it under Kevin Andrews, a big “c” conservative who, as immigration minister in 2007, cut the intake of African refugees because he said they had more trouble integrating into Australian society.
Deriding their religion, criticising how they dress, let along branding them as terrorists, is seriously counter-productive.
The Australian Multicultural Council, an advisory body to the previous government, is in limbo, with all its nine positions listed as vacant, although a spokesperson for Andrews told me the Government is in the process of appointing new members.
The ministry of multicultural affairs under Labor has been downgraded to a parliamentary secretary’s position, filled by Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who, although a member of the hard right of the NSW Liberal Party, is preaching the success of multiculturalism.
As prime ministers need to do, Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country. The Government frontbench includes members with strong ethnic connections – Treasurer Joe Hockey (Armenian-Palestinian), Finance Minister Mathias Cormann (Belgian), Government Senate leader Eric Abetz (German), suspended assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos (Greek) and Fierravanti-Wells (Italian).
Abbott is conscious that the ethnic vote can swing the result in federal seats, particularly in Sydney. He disappointed some of his strongest supporters with his decision to drop the so-called Bolt amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act after widespread opposition from ethnic groups.
In this area and particularly in the current context, rhetoric matters – all the more so when it comes from the nation’s leader. Abbott is setting the right tone, balancing his uncompromising language against would-be Australian terrorists with words of reassurance for the Muslim community and an appeal to other Australians not to overreact.
Given the rise of Islamic State and threats of beheadings in Australia, it is easy to lose perspective. The number of Muslims in Australia has risen rapidly – by 69 per cent between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. But they still number fewer than 500,000 and represent just 2.2 per cent of the population, fewer than the 2.5 per cent who are Buddhists.
The vast majority are as law abiding as any other Australians. They have alerted Australian authorities to planned terrorist attacks. Deriding their religion, criticising how they dress, let along branding them as terrorists, is seriously counter-productive.
Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian. View his full profilehere
This article was first published by the ABC, The Drum, on 26 September 2014.
You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.
During World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.
Marilyn Lake
World War I had consequences for individuals as well as nations. HB Higgins’s life would be deeply affected by the British decision to invade the Ottoman empire in early 1915. As a member of the new federal parliament in 1901, Higgins had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, fearing that this would set a terrible precedent for involvement in other imperial wars, whose purpose, goals and strategy would always be determined by other powers. He also doubted the legitimacy of the European war, writing to his friend Felix Frankfurter, Professor in Law at Harvard, ‘What do you think of it? … [T]here are higher ideals than attachment to a country because it is my country. I blame our British jingoes…’ Higgins was deeply troubled when his only child Mervyn elected to join British forces fighting in the Middle East.
When his son was killed in battle on 23 December 1916 Higgins and his wife Alice were devastated. Higgins poured his grief – and his bitterness over the imperial cant that had justified the war – into a new commitment to internationalism and disarmament. The only good that might come out of the war was not national pride, but a new world order. ‘Vengeance is a fruitless thing’, he wrote to Frankfurter. ‘I feel that the best vengeance my dead boy could hope for would be an integrated world, an organized humanity.’ No nationalist flag-waving or eulogies to the Anzac spirit for him.
We tend to forget the doubts and expressions of opposition to Australia’s participation in World War I in which in fact only 30 per cent of eligible men chose to enlist. The anti-war mobilisations have largely gone unheeded in official and contemporary accounts of the war, which have recast the widespread destruction as a creative experience, one that gave ‘birth to the nation’, conveniently forgetting that our distinctive Commonwealth of Australia, with its world famous democratic reforms, made its name on the world stage in the years before the war, between 1901 and 1914. Australian nation-building was a peace time achievement.
A decade before the outbreak of the European war, in 1904, an American visitor to Australia, Victor Clark, one of a number of investigators who journeyed south to Australasia, noted that ‘New Zealand and Australia are the most interesting legislative experiment stations in the world and they experiment so actively because their political institutions are extremely democratic’. The colony of Victoria had first invented the idea of a legal minimum wage in 1896, which was later elaborated as a living wage calculated to meet the diverse needs of workers defined as human beings, in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court by HB Higgins, in the Harvester judgment of 1907. Australia and New Zealand had pioneered industrial democracy and women’s political rights. ‘While the principles of democracy were first enunciated in the United States’, noted the historically-minded American suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt, ‘Australia has carried them furthest to their logical conclusion’. Thus did we take our place on the world stage, not in fighting an imperial war.
In Australia, it was noted by numerous overseas commentators, the working man and the voting woman advanced together, during the first decade of the nation’s existence, which saw a steady increase in the Labor vote, until the Fisher Government was elected, with majorities in both Houses in 1910. By war’s end, however, the Labor Party had split, conservative forces had triumphed, and the British Empire had gained a new lease of life in Australia. In World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.
Let’s look at this impact further through the experience of Higgins, now a largely forgotten Australian, but one of our unsung national heroes. Henry Bourne Higgins was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1896, when it introduced the minimum wage. He became an opponent, as noted above, of the British imperial war in South Africa, a member of the federal parliament from 1901 and then, from 1906, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, whose path-breaking reforms, shaped by a profound commitment to social justice and the public good, won him renown around the world. In 1914, he was invited by the Harvard Law Review to contribute an article on his innovative jurisprudence which he titled ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’.
By 1920, however, the conservative backlash unleashed by the impact of World War I and the fevered imperialism of Prime Minister WM Hughes, who sought to by-pass the Arbitration Court by setting up his own tribunals saw Higgins submit his resignation. It would seem appropriate to remember Higgins, the Australian idealist, and others of his generation, as we prepare to deal with the veritable tidal wave of military commemoration, funded already by $140 million, even as our universities face further funding cuts, increased student fees and the number of historians employed to teach students actually declines. Which funding bodies, one wonders, might finance commemoration of those who fought for Australia’s distinctive democratic and political ideals and support projects to carry their ideals forward?
My current research project on the international history of Australian democracy has highlighted Australia’s high reputation around the world before World War I as a distinctive, pioneering, bold, independent-minded democracy. It was the perspective afforded by distance that enabled American Professor Hammond of Ohio State University to write of ‘the most notable experiment yet made in social democracy’ established in Australia in the first years of the Commonwealth, in the years preceding the outbreak of war.
In 1902, in the shadow of the South African War, HB Higgins wrote an essay called ‘Australian ideals’ in which he asked prophetically whether the new Commonwealth of Australia was to become a militaristic nation or a progressive one: ‘Australia must make her choice between two ideals – the ideal of militarism and the ideal of equality’. Australians had to choose between the opposing standards of militarism and social reform, he suggested. He and his generation dedicated themselves to the latter, while we in our time seem to have committed to the former. Australian values we are now ceaselessly told are military values.
One hundred years on from 1914, Australia has seemingly become the militarist nation Higgins warned about. Rather than celebrate the world-first democratic achievements forged by women and men in the founding years of our nationhood, the years that made Australia distinctive and renowned, we are told that World War I, in which Australians fought for the British Empire, was the supreme creative event for the nation. But those who lived through it knew that our nation was not born in the carnage of the world war, which left the country divided, disillusioned, disoriented, desolate and dependent on a resurgent British Empire.
In the inimitable words of novelist Miles Franklin, writing to her American friend Margaret Drier Robins in 1924,
it seems to me that Australia, which took a wonderful lurch ahead in all progressive laws and women’s advancement about 20 years ago has stagnated ever since. At present it is more unintelligently conservative and conventional than England and I am sad to see the kangaroo and his fellow marsupials and all the glories of our forests disappearing to make room for a mediocre repetition of Europe.
Miles Franklin knew that although men could do many things they could not give birth to nations. Only women could do that. And in 1902, Australian women’s political ‘lurch ahead’ had made Australia the most democratic country on earth, an object lesson to humanity.
_____________________________
Marilyn Lake is Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. This is a revised version of a keynote address presented to the Annual Conference of the History Teachers’ Association of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 23 April 2013.
David was a good Jewish man: faithful to his God; devoted to his family, and deeply connected to his land.
Khalid was a good Palestinian man: faithful to his God; devoted to his family, and deeply connected to his land.
Each year, in early spring, David and Khalid would meet for a chat at a small cafe. It always began with a respectful, silent handshake. Then, after a kindly nod towards the waiter, the pair would sit down.
More silence would follow, usually a couple of minutes at most, until their coffee and sweet biscuits arrived. Then, without any small talk, off they went – as they had done for 34 years:
Said the Jew: “I think it’s important we are allowed to state our case.”
Said the Palestinian: “I think it’s important we are allowed to state our case.”
Said the Jew: “This is rightfully our land.”
Said the Palestinian: “This is rightfully our land.”
Said the Jew: “We are victims of your aggression.”
Said the Palestinian: “We are victims of your aggression.”
Said the Jew: “We will fight ‘til the bitter end.”
Said the Palestinian: “We will fight ‘til the bitter end.”
Said the Jew: “You killed my family.”
Said the Palestinian: “You killed my family”
Said the Jew: “We are a brutalised and traumatised people.”
Said the Palestinian: “We are a brutalised and traumatised people.”
Said the Jew: “You hate us.”
Said the Palestinian: “You hate us.”
Said the Jew: “There can be no peace ‘til you change your ways.”
Said the Palestinian: “There can be no peace ‘til you change your ways.”
Said the Jew: “Look, this is our land.”
Said the Palestinian: “Look, this is our land.”
Said the Jew: “Mmm, a nice coffee. Give my regards to your family. See you next year.”
Said the Palestinian: “Mmm, a nice coffee. Give my regards to your family. See you next year.”
The conversation continues …
Fr Peter Day is the Parish Priest at Corpus Christi, Canberra.
You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue
If the staggering evidence before the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption has taught us anything, then it must surely be to end the charade that democracy can function properly when people are buying favours of politicians, directly or indirectly.
The standard argument that political fund-raising is conducted at arm’s length and that the politicians making decisions are not involved or even aware of who the donors are, no longer has an ounce of credibility. The Chinese wall is rice paper thin.
Geoffrey Watson, SC, a person who does have credibility, arrived at this position a few months ago. The counsel assisting in recent inquiries by ICAC brought up the idea of full public funding of political campaigns. That is, taxpayers would foot the bill and all private donations would be banned.
It seems a radical idea and it may be unattainable in pure form, given the constitutional hurdles. But it also is a logical extension of where the debate about corruption in politics is heading. If politicians so readily and willingly get around NSW laws that they themselves introduced for the purpose of cleaning up their act, or giving the appearance of doing so, and that on paper are the toughest in Australia, then drastic alternatives deserve consideration.
After prosecuting the case against Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and sundry other malefactors with Labor connections, Watson turned his attention to the Liberals. In his opening address for Operation Spicer, he laid out another remarkable saga of politicians rorting the rules to their own advantage. As he put it, “this inquiry will expose the systematic subversion of the electoral funding laws of NSW”. Watson detailed how the office of Chris Hartcher, who resigned as minister after ICAC launched the investigation, had used front organisations to accept some $165,000 from property developers, who were banned from making political donations and some of who had planning applications before the state government.
He argued that the systemic failure of the system of political funding encouraged and rewarded corruption. “Something must change,” he told the Commission hearing, adding that “the problems caused by election funding are not intractable.” One suggestion that had been floated, he said, was full public funding as a way “to free political decision makers from the insidious effect of improperly motivated donations”. While ICAC was not the place for the debate, he pointed out that the Commission had an arm devoted to corruption prevention, whose experts “would be more than pleased to assist”.
Tony Abbott didn’t think much of the proposal. “At a time when we’re talking about a very tough budget indeed, the idea that we should scrap private fundraising and fund political parties through the taxpayer, I think, would be very, very odd.”
Hello! We’re already doing that. Last year’s federal election cost taxpayers $58 million, calculated on the basis of $2.49 per vote received. Four of the six states also have public funding systems – NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia – as well as the ACT.
The implication in Abbott’s comment and the assumption of many others is that public funding would have to be increased to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of private donations. Politicians can make that argument if they like, though Abbott obviously doesn’t have the appetite for it. The major parties even could agree on a bipartisan approach and justify it on the need to end the corruption, which is the position that NSW political leaders have taken.
But there also is a clear alternative: restrict spending to the present amount of public funding. It is not as though the taxpayer contribution is parsimonious – given they have a vote for the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and that not all voters pay taxes, taxpayers are contributing well over $5 each to federal elections.
The major parties in particular might complain long and hard about such belt tightening. But what a relief it would be to be spared of much of the largely fact-free deluge of election advertising that soaks up most of the money donated to the major parties. This competition between the parties has turned into an obscene arms race, in which parties feel compelled to spend more and more on advertising just because the other side is doing so, all the while admitting that they may not be getting much return on their investment.
The campaign managers are coming up with ever more far-fetched schemes for raising money, like conducting auctions at fundraisers for private meetings with prime ministers, premiers and ministers, all the while arguing that no favoured treatment ever flows from this. And they wonder why public trust in them keeps falling.
NSW Premier Mike Baird thought Watson’s idea had enough merit to send it off for review. Or perhaps more correctly, he didn’t feel he could dismiss the idea out of hand. He may have been relieved when the head of the panel he appointed – former senior public servant Kerry Schott – said she thought full public funding would fall foul of the High Court. Last year, the court declared invalid the law by the O’Farrell government banning all corporate and union donations on the grounds that it breached the freedom of political communication implied in the Constitution.
Graeme Orr, a law professor at Queensland University and an expert on electoral funding, does not see the High Court as an insuperable barrier. Rather, he says, the court said in last year’s case that the NSW government had not given a proper rationale for the legislation. “The court is really saying we require you to have an evidence-based explanation for these laws that restrict the implied freedom of political communication.”
He believes a system can be designed that could withstand challenge. It would need to allow for some private funding but a low limit could be applied – perhaps $1000 a year – that could not be considered potentially corrupting.
What about fabulously wealthy individuals like Clive Palmer funding their own parties? Caps can be set on campaign expenditure as well as on donations. They already exist in NSW and Queensland, although the Newman government has announced it will abolish them, together with the cap on donations.
There would be complications in implementing a system relying predominantly on public funding. While it may be possible to stop third parties, like trade unions or business lobbies, from donating directly to parties, they could still run their own partisan campaigns. But if the argument against radical reform is that loopholes will emerge, we may as well throw up our hands and give up. As Watson says, “something has to change”.
An exhibition by Wendy Sharpe is planned for February/March next year. See details below and contacts for Wendy Sharpe and Lee Meredith of the Asylum Seekers Centre. JohnMenadue.
Renowned artist, Wendy Sharpe, is developing a portrait exhibition to highlight our common humanity with asylum seekers. A previous Archibald winner and 2014 finalist, Wendy is drawing portraits of 39 refugees and asylum seekers as her contribution to creating public awareness and putting a human face to the issue.
“This is not about politics. I want to show our common humanity,” she said. “I want to show that they are people like us, with hopes and dreams just like ours.
“Many of those I have met during this project have fled situations of great danger, whether it is political, cultural or religious.
“I can’t imagine how it would feel to have to leave everything behind. But they have had to leave their family, their home, their culture and their country. All of these form your personal identity. But they have survived and are now focussed on rebuilding their lives and starting all over again. It has been an inspiring experience for me.
“Through these portraits I want to reach out to as many people as possible, especially those who may be confused by the many myths about the issue or feel uncomfortable with what is currently happening.”
The exhibition will portray people who are living legally in the community while they wait for their applications for protection to be processed as well as some who have recently been granted protection.
“This exhibition will continue projects I have undertaken in the past, particularly as an official war artist,” said Wendy. “The portraits will be displayed in a major exhibition and then placed on sale. I will not be receiving any commission and intend to donate the proceeds to support the vital work of the Asylum Seekers Centre in Sydney which provides personal and practical support to asylum seekers, such as legal advice, accommodation, health care, food and employment assistance.
Melanie Noden, CEO of the Asylum Seekers Centre, said it is an incredible honour to have the support of an artist of Wendy’s status.
“We believe that most Australian’s want to see asylum seekers treated with respect and dignity while they are in our care and waiting for their applications to be processed.
“Through her art Wendy will be sharing the lives of asylum seekers with the general public, and show that underneath all the troubles and politics around the issue, we are all the same.”
The exhibition will run for four weeks in February/March next year at The Muse Gallery, Sydney TAFE, Harris Street, Sydney.
We are grateful to the following supporters for their contribution towards making this exhibition possible: Sydney TAFE, Michael Amendolis and Kadmium Art+Design Supplies.