In summing up the malign influence of the Murdoch media in the UK, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger commented: “We’ve allowed something really ugly to happen in this country…” The same has to be said about the ugliness of Australian foreign policy, with the Murdoch media bearing some responsibility for uncritical support of nefarious practices.
Early last month, on February 5, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda, announced that the court, after five long years of examination, had the legal right to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israelis and by Palestinians.
Israel’s foreign ministry immediately instructed its overseas ambassadors to get foreign affairs ministers to issue public statements of opposition and to tell Bensouda personally “not to move forward”, threatening that “if an investigation against Israel starts it will create a continuous crisis between Israel and the Palestinian Authority …”
Two days later, Australia and the US had complied. Foreign Minister Marise Payne announced that the ICC “has no jurisdiction in relation to “the situation in Palestine” and that “Australia does not recognise a “state of Palestine”.
Ironic, since it was an Australian, Bert Evatt, who presided at the United Nations when the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state was approved. Some 138 of 193 UN member states now recognise the State of Palestine, after the UN General Assembly voted to upgrade Palestine to a “non-member observer state” in 2012. If Palestine is not yet a fully sovereign state it is because Israel, the US and Australia have made every effort to prevent it.
Bensouda and the ICC have been under sustained attack from the US and Israel ever since its Israeli investigation was first mooted, after about 2000 Palestinian civilians were killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, and more than 200 unarmed civilians had been killed in rallies held at the Gaza border from 2018.
As revenge against the ICC’s impertinence, in 2020 the Trump regime imposed sanctions on Fatou Bensouda and another African national heading the ICC’s prosecution jurisdiction division. They are forbidden entry to the US, any assets or property is frozen, and US citizens and companies are banned from doing business with them. Secretary of State Pompeo added that any who “materially support those individuals risk exposure to sanctions as well”.
It’s been noted that out of the five top officials in the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor, sanctions have only been imposed on the two who happen to be African nationals. That a black woman dares to challenge the male rulers of white colonial settler states is no doubt unbearable.
As a result of the sustained personal abuse, Bensouda has announced her retirement in June. This will be a loss to that vague entity called the ‘international community’. She is an award-winning international jurist and was included in the BBC’s list of the world’s 100 most inspiring and influential women. She works for gender equity in a leadership network group; is on the board of the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights; and works on a Gambian committee tackling “harmful traditional practices” such as female genital mutilation.
But for Marise Payne, Minister for Women, sisterhood with Bensouda was out of the question. Australia is always ready to make a mockery of international law and norms. This was again obvious last year when Israel requested the Morrison government to tell the ICC that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity should not be prosecuted. To Australia’s shame, Morrison and Marise Payne obliged, and of course the ICC rightly refused this disgraceful bid for impunity.
In September 2020 the European Union not only urged the US to drop the sanctions against ICC staff, calling these “unacceptable and unprecedented measures that attempt to obstruct the Court’s investigations and judicial proceedings”, but also added that “impunity must never be an option”. What were our leaders thinking? As the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands commented, “The ICC is crucial in the fight against impunity and upholding the international rule of law.”
Our government’s disregard of international law follows the disgraceful rip-off of East Timor, conducted over decades by Foreign Ministers and DFAT bureaucrats. Whistleblowers and witnesses are facing prison, and are embroiled in secret trials at the behest of the Morrison government and Attorney-General Christian Porter: proceedings described by the Law Council of Australia as an offence against open justice.
Top silk Bret Walker SC’s offer to represent Bernard Collaery, former ACT Attorney-General and counsel for East Timor’s leader Xanana Gusmao and ‘Witness K’ from ASIS, was impeded, and Collaery was warned not to publish his book outlining the facts.
Nevertheless Oil Under Troubled Water: Australia’s Timor Sea Intrigue came out last year, and this jeremiad should be read by all Australians. Collaery’s book is a blow-by-blow description of the struggle of East Timor to gain independence and then, as one of the world’s poorest countries, to gain its fair share of the oil and gas produced in the so-called Timor Gap.
Collaery names and shames politicians and bureaucrats and takes aim at the hypocrisy embedded in our foreign policy with its “self-deluded claims of Australia’s long-standing support for a ‘rules-based’ order” as against its actual breaches of international law and norms:
“Australia, in both foreign policy and many areas of international humanitarian and civil liberties law, is one of Western democracy’s least “rules-based’ societies.”
Most of the benefits of Australia’s plundering didn’t even accrue to Australia but went to foreign-owned corporations:
“Australia is now marked in history as a pariah state that lacked even sufficient skill to benefit its own citizens with the proceeds of its plunder in the Timor Sea.”
There has been no effective parliamentary control over maverick foreign policy, which remains emboldened “by government and opposition sharing a common outlook that is contrary to rules-based order” and with decisions made “in the confidence that international law could be ignored.”
Bernard Collaery is on the mark in his analysis of Australia as pariah state. I can only fault him for his representation of moral decay in foreign policy as a downhill run from what he imagines was a golden age of moral vision and integrity in the days of Labor PM Curtin and Foreign Affairs Minister Evatt, only ending when they were ousted from office in the election of 1949.
In very recent posts on this web site, I outlined Evatt’s callous disregard for Indigenous Australians, Palestinians and other non-white colonised peoples coming into his purview.
Evatt’s conduct when successfully pushing for the partition of Palestine at the UN was a template for the ongoing deceit, deviousness and amoral dealings of subsequent Australian Foreign Affairs Ministers and bureaucrats.
Evatt spent his final year at the UN in a mammoth effort to secure recognition of Israel and approval of its membership of the United Nations, although UN mediator Count Bernadotte had been assassinated by Jewish terrorists for his plans to enact fairer partition boundaries and to allow the return of refugees to their properties.
In 1948, while Evatt was President of the UN General Assembly, well-publicised massacres of Palestinian villagers were taking place and the new state was already in breach of UN Resolution requesting the return of Palestinian refugees “wishing to live in peace with their neighbours.”
As well as his blindfold where the rights of Palestinians were concerned, Evatt also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and did not go along with postwar efforts to reform the labour contract system in PNG as colonial planters flooded back to their plantations from wartime havens.
We never did have a golden age of moral foreign policy, quite the reverse.
Comments
18 responses to “Pariah state: ‘Something really ugly’ about Australia’s foreign policy”
Australia needs to be careful about blindly serving US policy interests by spooking our own voters versus having our own (locally developed) policies reflecting our own economic interests, culture and regional neighbours, in this the ‘Asian century’.
However, Australia has always been prone to following the UK and/or US (with even more former MPs and/or NewsCorp types ‘grifting’ in esp. the UK when promoting Brexit) and now it is more about imported US political and economic ideology, not in the interests of most Australians, let alone Australia’s future in the region (our elections are presently dominated by older generations in regions, now catered to by SkyNews on WIN) but to support the nebulous, as coined by Thatcher, ‘Anglosphere’.
From post WWII in the US there has been the John Birch Society (founder included Fred Koch Snr.) obsessively anti ‘Communist’ to the point of conspiracies aka McCarthy trials, along with now Koch promoted radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology joined at the hip with eugenics (the GOP/Tory ‘top people’ want to remain being the ‘top people’, by voter support).
Exemplified by Howard government’s use of dog whistling, promoting Christianity, the flag, English language etc., encouraging antipathy towards non WASPs or non Anglo/Irish i.e. refugees and ‘immigrants’ etc. with assistance from Crosby Textor, IPA importing (again Koch linked e.g. ALEC) socio-economic policies and middle class welfare, NewsCorp, but then in recent years the emergence of Sinophobia.
This centred round Liberal ‘Wolverines’ (many from the IPA), CIS think tank on Asia (Koch linked of course), the weaponised ASPI (defence interests linked with dud equipment that Oz cannot get enough of) and the confected issue of on campus ‘freedom of speech’ linked to China and/or minority groups supposedly against men and/or alt right….. then all the above communicated by media with NewsCorp in the lead.
Think, or hope, maybe it’s generational with Anglo/Irish oldies dominating for now but insecure and to be followed by flatter demographics (or lower fertility rates) during next generation by more balanced, educated and diverse generations who the LNP, NewsCorp/legacy media, IPA, AFL etc.; view as an existential threat, the ‘great replacement’ theory in action, good.
The US and Israel assert that they should have the protection and benefits of the rules based international order (RBIO) without the RBIO applying to them. The UK is the same: the Chagos Islands for example. Ofc the US goes on to say that for example the RBIO must apply to Iran and China but those countries must never benefit from the RBIO. The RBIO is neocolonialism at its finest!
Some good points. I hope one of the excellent staff at Foreign Affairs Department might give us a written response to this article. Perhaps at least offer that opportunity, even if it is not taken up?
Democracy works best through public discussion and good reasoning. So it would be great if Foreign Affairs engages in reasoned public discussion.
Marise Payne and her advisers do not even have the courtesy to reply to polite letters. Most ministerial offices with any substance usually manage a response to a serious issue when raised in a letter from a committee. Even if only a paragraph or two.
Thank you, what an excellent piece! Australia needs to do a LOT better.
I am so despaired at the double standard and hypocrisy shown by our government towards the people of Palestine and towards China. Australia absolutely doesn’t not have the moral standing to comment or criticise other nations on human rights.
Nothing to add, other than Bravo!
Apart from; ‘Anyone got Hartcher’s email address……………?’
Pariah state Australia should stop pontificating to the world about a Rules Based Order. We should instead be ashamed of ourselves breaking the rules, and acting like a dog to Israel.
Did anybody say KFC? (I am not advertising for KFC. It seems the best diversion from the pain of reading such disgrace behaviour). Thank you, Professor Graham for making sure that those of us who care to keep ourselves informed are not perennially lied to.
Agree mate. An outstanding article. Cant wait to leave this disgraceful appalling country. For most of my life i have been abused with “Well why dont you leave if you dont like it?” Now in my last years i agree. Cant come soon enough.
Paul, I’ll miss your sharp comments.
Hopefully I wont be falling off the twig mate. Going to the Philippines so will still be having my two peso worth. All the best to you also mate.
“Foreign Minister Marise Payne announced that the ICC “has no jurisdiction in relation to “the situation in Palestine” and that “Australia does not recognise a “state of Palestine”.”
OK, no surprises there. What about the ALP? Can anyone shed any light on where they stand? Does the ALP support an ICC investigation into war crimes in the Israel/Palestinian conflict, or not?
I also especially like the Israeli foreign ministry’s comment that “if an investigation against Israel starts it will create a continuous crisis between Israel and the Palestinian Authority …”. Are they really saying that a continuous crisis does not already exist, that this investigation, if allowed, will create something new?
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Don’t hold your breath on whether the ALP is any different. I stand to be corrected- I don’t think there is a record of any Australian vote at the UN that is actually against the state of Israel. The best we could do was to abstain from the vote.
Ariel Sharon used to boast that he had America in his pocket. Our Israeli-friendly media will not say it, but Australia too are in the same pocket. And I dare say any future ALP government voting against Israel will probably presage its downfall. [If you want to imagine what being in somebody else’s pocket means]
Re the ALP: The support that Labor PM Bob Hawke gave to Israel when in power almost puts Evatt’s one-sided intervention in the shade. And yet in retirement Hawke joined the call by ALP elders Bob Carr and Gareth Evans for recognition of the Palestinian state.Blow me down! Leaders so often see the light in retirement, when they no longer face meaningful retribution. Like President Eisenhower, who came out with that forceful protest about the military industrial complex after he left office. And so it goes …
Caroline, Not meaning to split hairs. I googled Eisenhower’s statement- it was in his farewell address on 17th January 1961. His term as President ended a few days later on the 2oth. But in substance, it is very true what you are saying.
And thanks for ‘speaking truth to power’!