At the same time as the Australian government is trying to improve relations with China, it is greatly increasing spending on offensive weapons for a potential war with China – without adhering to any published treaty explaining the ground rules.
The Saturday Paper, 14 Jan 23
Australia has now joined the United States in refusing to discuss the ANZUS Treaty, let alone claim it is the foundation of Australia’s security. What was once seen as a virtue is now considered a drawback.
The perceived trouble is that the treaty bans the aggressive use of military force – something the US and Australia both use. Consequently, statements released during the Australia–US ministerial meetings on defence and foreign policy in early December did not mention ANZUS or its constraints. Instead, they refer favourably to the “rules-based international order” in which the US, not the United Nations, makes the rules.
In his subsequent comments on the need to build Australia’s military forces and welcome more American forces, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made no reference to ANZUS. This is part of a trend in which Australian leaders cannot bring themselves to criticise recent harmful US breaches of the international rules on trade and investment.
Article 1 of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty requires the parties to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or the use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”. Aggression is clearly inconsistent with the Charter of the UN, which states, “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force.”
Labor’s then External Affairs minister, Bert “Doc” Evatt, played a significant role in establishing the UN in 1945 and served as its president from 1948-49. Initially, Labor gave enthusiastic support to ANZUS’s prohibition on aggression. No longer. The preferred “rules-based international order” doesn’t ban aggression, except presumably for countries such as Russia and China. Unlike with the ANZUS Treaty, no text of the new rules or the AUKUS pact is available.
Albanese won’t explain why he wants a large and hugely expensive arms build-up. In a media interview published on December 19, all he said was that we need to spend a lot more on defence because the need for new capabilities is so great. He did not explain why. He refuses to nominate a potential enemy. He merely says we need to spend more on our military to “promote peace and security in the region”.
Participating in an arms race is not necessarily the same as promoting peace. Yet Albanese refuses to invest in arms control measures – unlike the Hawke–Keating governments……………….
Albanese takes for granted that there’s no need to explain where the threat comes from – although the implication is, of course, China……………………
Perhaps China will start a major war within a few years. No one knows. Alternatively, it may put renewed stress on its policy of living in “Confucian harmony” with its neighbours.
Albanese lacks an informed grip on defence issues.
In the interview quoted above, he stated Australia must become more self-reliant in its defence, apparently unaware this is not possible because the US won’t give Australia the computer codes needed to operate American weapons systems and sensors. Nor will it show Australian technicians how to repair or modify any classified components.
This will get worse because of Albanese’s determination to buy eight American attack nuclear submarines for the Australian Navy. Because of the submarines’ extreme complexity, Australia won’t be able to operate them on its own. It may even have to let the US borrow them under the new “interchangeability” policy announced by Defence Minister Richard Marles………………………
Unlike noisy nuclear subs, the latest conventional ones are much cheaper and can operate silently for three or more weeks. ……………
There is no indication Albanese has warned the Americans not to use their forces in Australia for military aggression, in breach of the ANZUS Treaty and UN bans. Similar considerations apply to electronic intelligence facilities in Australia, which play a crucial role in war fighting…………………………
………successive governments have integrated Australian forces so tightly with their American allies – in the planning, training, doctrine, logistics and communications process – that the nation may find itself plunged into a devastating war between the US and China without parliament having the ultimate say after full consideration of the issues…………………..
At the same time as the Australian government is trying to improve relations with China, it is greatly increasing spending on offensive weapons for a potential war with China – without adhering to any published treaty explaining the ground rules.
In 1975 prime minister Gough Whitlam, who has died this week [Oct 2014], dared to try to assert his country’s autonomy. The CIA and MI6 made sure he paid the price.
Across the media and political establishment in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.
Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution”. Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm”. In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history, Britain’s colonisation of Australia, and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast natural wealth.
……………………………………… Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention”
Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House … a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion.”
Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were decoded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the decoders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally”. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr”.
Kerr was not only the Queen’s man, he had longstanding ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as “an elite, invitation-only group … exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA”. The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige … Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money”.
When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state”……………………………..
The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was bugging cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”
…………………………….. On 11 November – the day Whitlam was to inform parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia – he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers”, Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The “Whitlam problem” was solved, and Australian politics never recovered, nor the nation its true independence.
John Pilger’s investigation into the coup against Whitlam is described in full in his book, A Secret Country (Vintage), and in his documentary film, Other People’s Wars, which can be viewed on http://www.johnpilger.com/
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky,
Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.
Le Monde Diplomatiqe by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert, Translated by George Miller March 2023
After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.
In France, too, the code of conduct set out by Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the daily Le Monde (and this publication), counselling ‘contact and distance’, has been set aside. At least when it comes to Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘In real life, he’s nice, quite cool, often funny and not at all grudging with his time,’ said Isabelle Lasserre, Le Figaro’s diplomatic correspondent and darling of the media, France Inter and news channel LCI in particular, since she adopted an uncompromising stance on Ukraine. ‘He has an incredible leadership style, a very intense charisma. He gets straight to the point, he always speaks with conviction,’ she told C politique on France 5 (12 February 2023).
Eulogies, hugs, gushing questions: the Western press’s veneration of this president in khaki fatigues suggests media in thrall to political leaders. But that impression is misleading. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and particularly since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, ‘journalism’ in the United States and also in Europe has increasingly behaved like an autonomous political force with its own ideological agenda.
Unlike traditional political parties, the media are simultaneously bringing to life and feeding rival tendencies that form two branches of the market for news: one on the hard right (Fox News, The Sun, CNews etc), the other liberal (the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, Le Monde etc). With these two audiences, both of which demand their own partisan reading of events, ‘journalism’ is careful not to alienate the faithful by ever making them doubt the bewitching story it serves up.
Media in combat mode have polarised the US around fictitious issues (‘Trump is the Kremlin’s puppet’, ‘Joe Biden’s election victory was rigged’). Since the invasion of Ukraine, they have involved the West in a war against Russia by suppressing any public debate on the risks of military escalation.
This undertaking has been aided by instincts inherited from the cold war: (much-replayed) archive footage of American schoolchildren learning how to protect themselves from a Soviet nuclear attack; a long-standing obsession with communist subversion in the US; and recurrent paranoia about the ‘enemy within’.
It was conceivable, though, that the demise of the Soviet Union and the election of a president who enjoyed strong support in the West, and was almost servile towards it — Boris Yeltsin — would call for more cordial relations between the two former protagonists in a confrontation that had become futile. The Russian people longed for this just as much as their leaders: in the early 1990s, when former Soviet citizens were asked about their favourite international partner, 74% of them picked the US (1).
To ensure US hegemony
This enthusiasm was not mutual. US politicians and media treated Russia as a defeated country, whose role was to not only bend to the rules of then-triumphant neoliberal capitalism, but also to remain strategically weak so that no hostile power could ever again threaten US hegemony. In 1992, only a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union, the leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), better known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a Pentagon document that the press published immediately, already had Russia in its sights. It stated that Washington would henceforth need to ‘refocus on precluding the emergence of any future global competitor’. The power of American ‘conviction’ would be all the more compelling because the Pentagon promised to back it up with a military capable of ‘preclud[ing] hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests’ (2). However, ‘the master of the Kremlin’ was then Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin.
But that barely mattered, because with rare exceptions — notably Saudi Arabia and Israel — the US and its media were almost equally inflexible towards and dismissive of their puppets (Yeltsin), their ‘allies’ (European states) and their enemies (China, Russia, Iran). The idea in the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the international order is ultimately guaranteed by the United States and that the US must be in a position to ‘act independently, as necessary’ when international support is ‘sluggish or inadequate’ was the consensus in the State Department, Washington think tanks and newsrooms. This imperial prism explains the unquestioning acceptance with which all American wars, including the most illegal ones, have been greeted by Fox News and the New York Times.
Journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count?
So Russians gradually became disenchanted with the West…………and NATO’s ongoing expansion, together with the experience of privatisation, finally convinced the Russian public that the US intended, if not to ‘humiliate’ Russia, then at least to subordinate it. ……….
In the US, the construction of the Russian enemy had proceeded in parallel as disagreements and tensions between the two former superpowers grew. ………………………………………….
‘Trump, Putin’s lackey’
Much inanity flowed from this belief. And the European media picked up most of it…………………………………………………….
The US mainstream media’s war on Trump illustrated the transformation of the news business into a political force………………………………………………….
……..journalist Jeff Gerth, who spent three decades on the New York Times, recently published a rolling investigation of the media’s Russiagate coverage in the respected Columbia Journalism Review (5). This mountain of fake news, whose main purveyors were the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, asserted that, without collusion between Trump and Putin, Clinton would have been sitting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for them, after two years of investigation, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, a darling of the Democrats, burst this bubble and disproved any collusion (6). The Washington Post even had to correct several of its scoops and take down the most grotesque fabrications from its website.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation can be read like a textbook of journalistic errors: elision of information that doesn’t corroborate a reporter’s thesis, a competitive race for scoops at the expense of rigour, passing off as ‘Russian disinformation’ stories that are true but embarrassing to the Democrats, the misleading presentation of statistics, misuse of anonymous sources (a thousandfold during the Trump era) vaguely described as ‘administration officials’ or ‘intelligence officials’.
Misleading use of statistics
Even when the agencies corrected or denied the information they had published, the press, acting as an autonomous political force, went on to make doctored ‘revelations’ to keep up the pressure on the White House. ……………………………………………….
As if to confirm this damning indictment of the press, the media outlets involved greeted Gerth’s investigation with stony silence, no doubt confident that their readers would rather have their convictions reaffirmed than be disabused. The result, Gerth explained, is that a profession that is highly influential in public life faces no penalty when it goes wrong……………………………….
Russiagate had turned questions about a ‘Russian threat’ into a domestic political weapon; the media emerged from it discredited. But the war in Ukraine saved them in a sense. It enabled them to recycle their obsession, this time based on real aggression and in a more favourable political context, since both US parties agree that their country should be arming Ukraine against Russia for as long as it takes.
The cult of ‘Western values’
A similar consensus exists in Europe. The 1999 Kosovo war had already seen Germany’s Greens commit themselves wholeheartedly to NATO; even today, the most fervent support for Kyiv is found among the liberal left and environmentalist groups that were once tempted by pacifism. . For these educated sections of society, defending Ukraine is a secular religion: journalists, high priests of the cult of ‘Western values’, preach the salvation of progressive souls at last mobilised against Moscow’s imperialism. Putin’s nationalist diatribes and reactionary traditionalism encourage this militancy, as does the presence of a Democrat in the White House.
The almost total absence of dissenting voices within the ‘progressive’ universe is also partly explained by the price exacted for straying from the bellicose line that is asserted with almost imperceptible shades of difference by LCI and France 2, Médiapart and Paris Match, L’Opinion and Politis, RTL and France Inter. Any reservation expressed about the general mobilisation for Ukraine sparks controversy or scandal,………………………………………………………………
This question gives rise to others. Why do the hosts of this morning show have guests who are almost unanimously in favour of increasing military aid to Kyiv: François Hollande, Bernard Guetta, Isabelle Lasserre, Pierre Servent etc? Why is it that from 8pm on LCI, under the leadership of Darius Rochebin (an admirer of Bernard-Henri Lévy), ‘debates’ on Ukraine assemble panels of Atlanticist journalists (a rotating cast of Pierre Servent, Isabelle Lasserre and Nicolas Tenzer), former NATO researchers (Samantha de Bendern), an exiled ‘former KGB agent’ and Ukrainian activists? Why do magazine covers look like leaflets distributed in Kyiv (‘Ukraine must win’, ran the headline in L’Express on 16 February 2023)? Why do reporters make do so often with simply illustrating a story devised in newsrooms in Paris and why, finally, do editorials only add a patina of respectability to this crusading tone?
It is as if everyone had agreed there is only one possible foreign policy, the policy being pursued by Ursula von der Leyen and the US State Department, and summed up by the German foreign minister on 25 January: ‘We’re waging a war against Russia’. The absence of pluralism is all the more noticeable because any leftwing opponents stay silent or invisible (8). …………….. journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky, who has become the most famous influencer on the planet, to the extent that no book fair, film festival or American football match can claim success without his blessing via video link.
……………………………………………………………..The fear of offending Kyiv sometimes borders on self-censorship: when the New York Times ran a story online initially headlined ‘Ukraine corruption scandal stokes longstanding aid concerns in US’ (27 January 2023), it was immediately amended to read: ‘US officials overseeing aid say Ukrainian leaders are tackling corruption.’
The West’s sanctions campaign
The second front is the campaign to destroy Russia economically and militarily through sanctions and stepping up arms deliveries to Ukraine in the form of artillery, missiles, tanks and fighter planes. Not content with brushing aside the debate on the dangers of such a military escalation, the media equate any idea of negotiation with giving Moscow a full pardon (shades of Munich, 1938). As for economic retaliation, they are reluctant to admit their relative failure;…………………………………………………………..
The third front, which is probably most effective because least visible, is the avoidance of any historical perspective on the conflict and unfolding events. When France Inter’s geopolitics commentator Pierre Haski, who is also the president of Reporters Without Borders, rightly accused the Russians of ‘hitting cities and infrastructure’ (14 February 2023), he failed to point out that this is precisely what NATO did during the war in Kosovo. ………………………………………
The idea that other people might compare Russian imperialism to that of the US — wars without a UN mandate in Kosovo and Iraq, Washington’s denunciation of several disarmament agreements with Moscow, embargoes and boycotts against Cuba and Iran, extra-judicial executions by drone, the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning — is unwelcome in most newsrooms. As a result, these Western decisions are erased from memory or treated as exceptions, not part of a pattern.
………………………………………………. But the biased presentation of history does not just impoverish Westerners’ ability to judge the ongoing war. It also renders less comprehensible the reaction of other peoples who are aware of facts that their media are willing to tell them. For Arabs, Africans or Latin Americans, the assertion that Ukraine is ‘fighting for our values’ (11) can only reawaken memories of the Iraq war. At the time when the US was preparing to invade that country on a false prospectus, it received the support of eight European leaders — from the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, Poland and Denmark — in the form of a joint letter published in the Wall Street Journal on 30 January 2003. It began, ‘The real bond between the United States and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law.’ The result: a country destroyed and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
Does this mean that beyond Ukraine, other acts of aggression, massive destruction, violations of people’s right to self-determination have not aroused the same indignation, the same batteries of sanctions, the same abundance of military assistance to the besieged country? Silence in the ranks! https://mondediplo.com/2023/03/08media
Historic win as South Australian Aboriginal traditional owners defeat nuclear dump plan.
Bipartisan efforts by successive federal governments to impose a national nuclear waste dump on the land of Barngarla Aboriginal traditional owners in South Australia (SA) have been upended by a federal court decision in favour of the Barngarla people.
Australians will have their say in a referendum about whether to change their constitution to recognise the First Nations of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice later this year.
The Voice would be an independent and permanent advisory body giving advice to the Australian parliament and government on matters that affect the lives of first nations peoples.
Ignored
Sadly, the federal Labor government has at the same time continued with the plan of the previous regime to establish a national nuclear waste dump near Kimba in South Australia – despite the unanimous opposition of the Barngarla traditional owners.
This plan has now come a-cropper. The Barngarla traditional owners sought to revoke the nomination of the dump site and the federal court this month agreed, arguing that the nomination of the dump site was infected by “apprehended bias” and “pre-judgement”.
The government might yet appeal the decision. However it seems likely that the plan for a nuclear dump on Barngarla country will instead be abandoned.
Aunty Dawn Taylor, a Barngarla elder, said: “I am so happy for the women’s sites and dreaming on our country that are not in the firing line of a waste dump. I fought for all this time for my grandparents and for my future generations as well.”
Jason Bilney, chairperson of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation, said: “The Barngarla fought for 21 years for Native Title rights over our lands, including Kimba, and we weren’t going to stop fighting for this. We have always opposed a nuclear waste dump on our country and today is a big win for our community and elders.”
The Kimba site has been targeted for a dump since 2015. In 2021, the conservative Coalition government formally nominated the Kimba dump site, and the Labor government has continued with the plan since winning the May 2022 election.
Violation
Barngarla traditional owners were excluded from a so-called ‘community ballot’ by the Coalition government. An independent and professional ballot of Barngarla traditional owners found absolutely no support for the proposed dump ‒ but it was ignored.
The federal parliament’s joint committee on human rights unanimously concluded in an April 2020 report that the government was violating the human rights of Barngarla people. Even the Coalition members of the committee endorsed the report.
But the Coalition government continued to ignore the human rights of the Barngarla people. The Coalition government also tried to pass legislation which would deny Barngarla traditional owners the right to challenge the nomination of the Kimba dump site in the courts. However the draft legislation was blocked by Labor, minor parties and independent senators.
It was expected ‒ or at least hoped ‒ that the incoming Labor government would abandon the controversial dump proposal after the May 2022 election. But Labor only went as far as pointing out that Barngarla traditional owners could challenge the dump plan in the courts.
The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation was forced to launch a legal challenge against the previous government’s nomination of the Kimba dump site – and the Labor government fought the case.
Battle
There are at least two problems with Labor’s position. Firstly, the government has vastly greater resources to contest a legal challenge. Indeed, the government has spent A$13 million (£6.8 million) fighting Barngarla traditional owners in the federal court.
Barngarla traditional owners have spent significantly less than A$500,000 – needless to say, they have many pressing demands on their limited resources. There is no other example in recent Australian history of this level of legal attack on an Aboriginal group.
Secondly, the relevant laws are stacked against the interests of traditional owners. In 2007, the conservative Coalition government passed legislation ‒ the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act ‒ allowing the imposition of a nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land with no consultation, and no consent from traditional owners.
At the time, Labor parliamentarians described the legislation as “extreme”, “arrogant”, “draconian”, “sordid”, and “profoundly shameful”.
But when the Labor government returned to the legislation in 2012 ‒ and renamed it the National Radioactive Waste Management Act ‒ the amendments were superficial and still allowed for the imposition of a nuclear waste dump with no consultation or consent from Traditional Owners.
Immoral
Regardless of the federal court’s decision, the plan to impose a nuclear dump despite the unanimous opposition of Barngarla traditional owners is immoral. It contradicts the spirit of the Voice to Parliament currently being championed by the Labor government.
Jayne Stinson, chair of the South Australian parliament’s environment, resources and development committee, said: “In this day and age, when we’re talking about ‘voice, treaty and truth‘, we can’t just turn around and say, ‘Oh well, those are our values but in this particular instance, we’re going to ignore the voice of Aboriginal people’.
“I think that’s just preposterous and it’s inconsistent with what most South Australians would think.”
The plan to dump on Barngarla country makes a mockery of Labor’s professed support for the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that “no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent”.
There is no informed consent from Barngarla traditional owners: there is informed unanimous opposition.
‘Dreadful’
Dr Susan Close, now the Labor deputy premier of South Australia, has consistently opposed the dump. She said in 2019 that it was a “dreadful process from start to finish” that led to the nomination of the proposed Kimba dump site and that SA Labor is “utterly opposed” to the “appalling” process which led to Kimba being targeted.
Dr Close noted in a 2020 statement, titled ‘Kimba site selection process flawed, waste dump plans must be scrapped’, that SA Labor “has committed to traditional owners having a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites, yet the federal government has shown no respect to the local Aboriginal people.”
She has called for her federal Labor colleagues to abandon the Kimba dump proposal once and for all in the wake of the recent federal court decision.
In February 2008, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd highlighted the life-story of Lorna Fejo ‒ a member of the stolen generation ‒ in the historic National Apology to Aboriginal People in Parliament House.
At the same time, the Rudd government was attempting to impose a nuclear waste dump on Fejo’s country in the Northern Territory. Lorna said: “I’m really sad. The thing is ‒ when are we going to have a fair go? Australia is supposed to be the land of the fair go. I’ve been stolen from my mother and now they’re stealing my land off me.”
Resistance
Federal Labor’s “nuclear racism” is disgraceful and it diminishes all Australians. And Labor’s nuclear racism is always supported by the conservative Coalition parties, who are still today arguing for a ‘no’ vote in the upcoming referendum on a Voice to Parliament.
But nuclear racism has always met with resistance. Remarkably, community campaigns led by Aboriginal people have stopped five nuclear dump proposals since the turn of the century.
Plans for a national nuclear waste dump in SA have been defeated in 2004, 2019 and 2023 (touch wood), a planned national nuclear dump in the Northern Territory was defeated in 2014, and a plan to turn SA into the world’s high-level nuclear waste dump was defeated in 2016.
Three of the five successful campaigns involved legal challenges that made it much more difficult for governments to override community resistance.
The federal Labor government should abandon the Kimba dump site and apologise for attempting to foist a dump on Barngarla country despite the unanimous opposition of traditional owners.
Veto
The federal Labor government should also adopt SA Labor’s policy that traditional owners should have a right of veto over any proposed nuclear dumps.
That would give traditional owners across the country some confidence that their voice will be heard as the government progresses plans to store and dispose of waste arising from nuclear-powered submarines in the coming decades.
Finally, Labor must commit to amend the shameful and racist National Radioactive Waste Management Act.
Risk assessment is a complex subject, but nuclear cultist would have you believe it is a simple straightforward matter. There are at least two aspects of risk that they always ignore.
The first is the issue of risk consent.
Some risks in life are ones that consenting adults decide to take. For example, they might go rock climbing or skydiving, or some other adventure sport. Or they might smoke, drink to excess or have an unhealthy diet.
These are examples of risks that they have decided to take.
There is another type of risk though. Risks that are imposed on a person.
Your neighbour might bring home an ill trained guard dog and allow it to roam the streets without supervision. A food manufacturer may include dangerous ingredients in their product and not disclose this fact. A person might drink and drive and cause an injury to another person.
These are examples of risks that exist, but that are imposed on a person who has NOT consented to that risk.
All risks can be analysed both as to the probability of the risk as well as what consequences the risk poses. The risk of being involved in a minor car accident at some point in your life is rather high, but the likely consequences are minimal.
Proper risk management assesses BOTH the likelihood of a risk AND the potential consequences.Poor nuclear cultists don’t use this method, as it immediately highlights a significant problem that nuclear faces.While the likelihood of an accident is low, the consequences can be catastrophic. The victims of such an accident did not consent to this risk. It is imposed on them.
Chernobyl (an accident that cultists like Goronwy Price prefer to ignore) had impacts both health and economic, right across the northern hemisphere. The victims had the risk imposed upon them. This is fundamentally unjust. N-Cultists are happy to put other people at risk regardless.
War Criminals Welcome: Australia, A Sanctuary for War Criminals since 1945 By Mark Aarons Black Inc, 2001 649 pp, $34.95 (pb)
When justice minister Amanda Vanstone said that the alleged Latvian war criminal Konrads Kalejs was “welcome” to stay in Australia, it was a revealing slip of the tongue. Since 1947, when the first Nazi war criminals arrived in Australia, “successive governments have knowingly allowed hundreds of men responsible for the cruel imprisonment, torture, rape and mass execution of tens of thousands of innocent civilians to make Australia home”. This is the damning conclusion of Mark Aarons’ book on how and why Labor and Liberal governments have allowed Nazi killers into Australia and protected them.
When the first European refugees arrived in Australia after the second world war, under the displaced persons migration scheme, their number included dozens of fascist collaborators from central and eastern Europe. Amongst them were officers, like Kalejs, of the Arajs Kommando, the Nazi-controlled Latvian security police, a volunteer police auxiliary which, by mass shootings, mobile gas vans or deportation to concentration camps, wiped out Latvia’s 70,000 Jews and murdered other racial, religious and political targets of the Nazis.
There were also Croatian fascists, whose cruelty is said to have sickened even hardened German Nazis. One of them was Srecko Rover, alleged to be the fanatical officer in charge of a mobile killing unit which massacred Jews, Serbs and, especially, communist-led partisans in the Balkans. Recruited by US intelligence before arriving in Australia in 1950, Rover immediately began a decades-long career as an ASIO agent and organiser of terrorist operations against left-wing migrants and President Josep Bros Tito’s communist Yugoslav government.
How did these killers slip through the screening process which was supposed to weed out war criminals from genuine refugees? Post-war confusion, incompetence, diffidence and corruption by Allied immigration officials in Europe were partly to blame. But more important was the Cold War political climate.
Many anti-socialist conservatives thought the Allies had fought the wrong war (it should have been with Hitler against Stalin). Australia’s attorney-general Bob Menzies in the 1930s was an admirer of the Nazi state as a bulwark against “atheistic Bolshevism”. The Nazi war criminals may have been anti-Semitic mass murderers but they were anti-communists and therefore welcome.
These Nazis found a ready champion in ASIO. Allied intelligence agencies gave the Nazis a clean bill of health in the screening process, allowing them to assume false identities or lie about their past, and frequently recruiting them as agents. ASIO put them to use as spies and covert operatives against the migrant left.
When Australian governments were forced to investigate suspected war criminals, they happily relied on ASIO which was far more interested in putting Nazis on the payroll than investigating their crimes. When the Yugoslav government requested the extradition of Milorad Lukic and Mihailo Rajkovic in 1951 for their fascist war crimes at POW camps, the head of ASIO in Western Australia reported that the two men, ardent anti-communists and supporters of Menzies, “represent a body of Yugoslavs who cause infinitely less trouble to this organisation than the great body of their fellow immigrants”, as well as providing “invaluable assistance to ASIO”, as ASIO boss Charles Spry wrote to the head of the Commonwealth Department of External Affairs.
Post-war Labor and Liberal governments ignored mounting evidence of Nazi arrivals. Refugees, immigration staff, crew members of US Army transport ships and even ASIO’s predecessor, the Commonwealth Investigation Service, reported anti-Semitic incidents, including serious assaults, on the refugee ships and in the migrant reception camps and hostels. The blood group tattoos, or scars from their removal, observed under the left armpit were a giveaway of SS membership. Nazi memorabilia, such as Hitler statues and swastikas, were regularly seized in the migrant camps.
When the import of Nazis turned to the so-called Volkdeutsche, ethnic Germans expelled from Stalinist Europe under the terms of the post-war settlement, many brought with them not only trade skills for major infrastructure projects but Nazi ideology and a past of war crimes committed in support of the invading German armies.
On the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, for example, an Auschwitz survivor recognised an SS officer who had served at the camp. At the Commonwealth Railways project in Port Augusta, Nazi cells were seen doing drills, giving “Heil Hitler” salutes and assaulting other migrants.
All these reports were angrily dismissed by Arthur Calwell, the ALP immigration minister, as “gross and wicked falsehoods”. His Liberal successor, Harold Holt, denigrated the Jewish community’s charges that Nazis were active in Australia as those of a minority sectional interest.
Both Labor and Liberal governments conducted a systematic cover-up of the import of Nazis to hide their connivance in assisting them into Australia to counter the left.
The Liberals were least shy about openly embracing their new anti-communist buddies. A Hungarian fascist was president of the Hungarian branch of the New Australian Liberal and Country Movement. Following the establishment by Nazi emigres in Australia in 1957 of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a peak body of ultra-right migrant groups, senior Liberal politicians flocked to support it. Victorian Premier Henry Bolte and prime ministers John Gorton, Billy McMahon and Malcolm Fraser were just a few who shared platforms down the decades with their fascist hosts whom they extolled as noble anti-communist “freedom fighters”.
The first ABN president, a Hungarian mayor who organised and participated in the murder of his town’s 18,000 Jews, was a wanted war criminal, known to ASIO, who nevertheless became a prominent member of the Liberals’ Migrant Advisory Council.
In the 1970s, the Nazi emigres became entrenched in the NSW branch of the Liberal Party. Heading a powerful, extreme-right, pro-fascist faction (dubbed the “Uglies”) was Leo Urbancic, a senior Nazi propagandist in Slovenia during the war. Such propaganda created a climate that made the mass killing of Jews, communists and Allied soldiers acceptable.
In 1961, when Liberal federal attorney-general Garfield Barwick announced that the government had “closed the chapter” on war criminals in Australia, an amnesty was in effect granted to Nazi murderers. This was presented, with twisted Cold War logic, as a triumph of democracy over “Communism”, the government trumpeting the “right of asylum” as its excuse for rejecting the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries’ requests for the extradition of war criminals. It was one in the eye for the evil Reds. The Labor “opposition”, which did not want to be seen as “soft” on communism, remained silent on the amnesty.
It took 40 years before an Australian government formally recognised the fact that Nazi war criminals were in Australia. In 1986, Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, under pressure created by Aarons’ exposure of Nazi war criminals in an ABC radio series, established the Special Investigations Unit to track down Nazis for prosecution in Australia under an amended War Crimes Act.
However, because of the evidence trail having grown cold, the age of key witnesses and accused, and a lack of bureaucratic support, only three of the 800 suspects who were investigated were brought to trial, none successfully (thanks to obstructionist judges and prosecution blunders). Hawke also prevented the SIU from investigating ASIO’s role in protecting and employing Nazi war criminals. Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating pulled the plug on the unit in 1992.
Australia remains the only Western country with a significant Nazi war criminal problem which has no legislation to allow the deportation of suspects for trial in their homelands. The Howard government did pass legislation to deal with war criminals who arrived in Australia after 1997 (50 years behind the times as usual).
Only the Kalejs case has disturbed the complacent political waters, embarrassing the government into rushing through an extradition treaty between Australia and Latvia.
For more than 50 years, the Australian capitalist establishment has opened its doors and closed its eyes to fugitive Nazi mass killers. Aarons’ book is a solid, impressively documented indictment of successive Labor and Liberal governments’, top public servants’ and the spy agencies’ complicity in harbouring Nazis and war criminals.
Today, as thousands of refugees fleeing tyrannies around the world languish in Australian detention centres, they may well be wondering why the red carpet was rolled out for right-wing murderers and what this shows about the true colours of Australia’s “democratic” government.
On 22 September, during a visit to the Canadian Parliament by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Speaker Anthony Rota publicly introduced ninety-eight-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a constituent ‘who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians’ as part of the First Ukrainian Division during the Second World War. He was ‘a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.’ Hunka received a standing ovation from all present.
This scene was reported two days later by an antifascist site on Twitter, who pointed out that the First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galizien Division. Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski linked to a veterans’ webpage in which Hunka wrote that he had been a volunteer recruit to the Galizien Division in 1943. Hunka had also uploaded photographs showing him in uniform with the ‘boys’.
These embarrassing episodes continue to occur in countries that resettled the post-war displaced persons of Central and Eastern Europe. This mass of around one million people had refused to return to homes that were under Soviet control. As well as concentration camp inmates and forced labourers, these political refugees included soldiers who had fought in German military units, as well as civilian collaborators. Security screening was difficult and there was also some sympathy from the Allied military authorities for veterans on the losing side. Whole cohorts were resettled in Britain, including 8,000 Ukrainian members of the Waffen-SSGalizien Division. Ukrainian nationalist declarations were also treated seriously. While all Ukrainian displaced persons held either Polish or Soviet Union citizenship, they were treated as a separate group quite quickly.
Many of these men should have been charged with war crimes. The German-led Holocaust had relied on the firepower and administrative skill of non-German Central and Eastern Europeans, including Ukrainians. Ukrainian anti-Soviet and anti-Polish nationalists were initially involved in individual and group paramilitary acts, including voluntary local pogroms and/or acts of murder before or beside the German occupation. One of the pogroms, which involved the massacre of 12,000 Jews, was named Aktion Petliura after the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, who had been assassinated by a Ukrainian Jew (this assassination itself framed as retaliation for earlier pogroms) in 1926.
After the initial wave of pogroms, Ukrainians became progressively involved with an institutionalised German genocidal machinery. Ukrainians joined a Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Force (Schutzmannschaft), the German security police (Sicherheitspolizei, SiPo) and the intelligence agency (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, SD). Others hunted Jews in their forest warden jobs. Local policemen were empowered to kill anyone the Germans defined as enemies of the state, including Jews; indeed, the Germans relied on the dramatically increased numbers of local forces to do the dirty work of the Holocaust, including the shooting of children. Between 1941 and 1944, 1.6 million Jews had been murdered in Ukraine. In 1943, 100,000 of these men volunteered to join the Waffen-SS Galizien Division. In this capacity, they have been accused of murdering Polish civilians.
The United Nations’ International Refugee Organisation resettled the displaced persons in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The western world was eager to use the labour of these healthy, white, and stridently anti-communistic young men. Australia resettled 170,700 displaced persons including Poles, ‘Balts’ (Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians), Yugoslavs, Ukrainians and Hungarians. There was immediate criticism by Jewish groups and sections of the press that the new migrants included war criminals but these were roundly dismissed as Soviet communist propaganda.
Decades later, all four of the main resettlement countries instituted judicial processes against the alleged perpetrators of the Holocaust who were now resident in their countries. In Australia, such men were guaranteed a fair criminal trial: the evidence, for crimes that occurred over forty-five years before, had to include documentary and material evidence and, ideally, eyewitnesses to the alleged individual perpetrator carrying out a war crime. Of course, the nature of the Holocaust was such that very few eyewitnesses to genocide survived in order to testify against individual killers.
After a flawed investigative process, only three men were charged. All three were Ukrainians who had resettled in Adelaide. Ukrainian auxiliary policeman Mikolay Berezowsky was accused of being party to a mass murder of 102 Jewish villagers. Henry Wagner, an ethnic German liaison officer between the German and Ukranian auxiliary police force, was charged with being party to two mass murders, including the shooting of nineteen part-Jewish children. Forest warden Ivan Polyukhovich was accused of hunting and killing Jews under the German occupation, and in taking part in a mass shooting. However, the evidence bar was so high that there were no convictions.
Immediately after the unsuccessful war crimes trials, Ukrainians again attracted attention with an award-winning novel by Helen Demidenko, purporting to be written by a Ukrainian-Australian and based on the life story a member of that community. To the great embarrassment of the Australian literati, Demidenko was soon unmasked as English-Australian Helen Darville, who had attended the Polyukhovich trial with a young man who was noticed to be repeatedly muttering ‘Jews’.
Many responses to Ivan Katchanovski’s tweets shedding light on this unsavoury history — one that Canada and Australia share — claimed that this was not the time to be critiquing Ukraine or Ukrainian nationalists. Ukraine was, of course, invaded by Russia in 2022 and that war is ongoing. Most in the West sympathise with, and support, Ukraine’s fight. And Russia has attempted to smear all Ukrainians with accusations of Nazism, which is simply not true. Dismissing inconvenient histories and the problematic pasts of individual migrants to both Canada and Australia, however, is not useful.
The complicity of the West in assisting perpetrators to escape justice should be acknowledged, and we must be wary of any attempt to normalise fascist views and actions in the public sphere.
Arabunna Elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott passed away in Alice Springs on November 29, 2023. A fierce advocate for his people and for a nuclear-free Australia, Kevin will be sorely missed.
Kevin was born in 1946 at Finniss Springs, on Arabunna country in South Australia. As a youngster, he learnt culture, language, how to live off the land and he learnt to work with cattle and horses.
Over the years, Kevin and his family lived in many places including Alice Springs, Tarcoola and Gawler. He worked on the railways for many years.
In 1984, Kevin moved to Port Augusta, where he worked as alcohol and drug worker. In 1985 he moved to Alice Springs where he worked on the successful campaign to stop the Todd River from being dammed. He helped establish the Arrernte Council in Alice Springs and served as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission regional councillor.
Kevin returned to South Australia in the mid-1990s to protect Arabunna country.
One of his major campaigns was to try to stop the rapacious water take from the Great Artesian Basin by mining company WMC (and later BHP) to supply the Olympic Dam copper/uranium mine at Roxby Downs.
The extraction of around 40 million litres of water has adversely affected the precious Mound Springs on Arabunna country — desert oases supported by the underlying Great Artesian Basin.
Kevin’s campaign might eventually succeed: there are plans to build a desalination plant on Spencer Gulf which could lead to a reduction and possible cessation of the water take from the Great Artesian Basin.
Kevin explained: “I’ve been at this game of calling for justice and peace for 30, maybe 40 years, but what really got me going was when Western Mining Corporation (WMC) set up the Olympic Dam mine. They started doing deals with the government on pastoral leases. So they did deals with S. Kidman & Co. and took up one of their cattle stations, Stuart’s Creek Station, which is on Arabunna land. Because of our native title and ongoing land rights campaigning, we’ve been fighting for these places for a long time. Stuart’s Creek is a very special, sacred place for us, and we’ve been trying to get it back for a long time.
“I thought that just before they bought that place I’d go and protest and camp on it. Also, it is on that station, on the shores of the Lake Eyre, where WMC started taking the sacred water out of the Lake Eyre Basin. That was where they started sucking the life blood out of us. That is where they put their big bore down, right on the shores of the lake. That was a real kick in the guts for me and really got me going.”
……………………………………………………………………….. Protest camp
Kevin set up a protest camp on Arabunna country in March 1999. WMC was among the most viciously racist mining companies in Australia and, true to form, the company tried to have Arabunna Elder Kevin Buzzacott evicted. The protest camp lasted until it was busted up by WMC goons and local police in December 1999.
Kevin initiated court actions against WMC and the federal government. These actions weren’t successful in the courts, but helped draw attention to the issues Kevin was fighting for.
“I did a court action against Hugh Morgan, who was the head of WMC. I charged Hugh Morgan with genocide, trying to flush him out and some of the shareholders. Hugh Morgan is based in Victoria. People in Melbourne deserve to live in a good place, they don’t need to live with these criminals and warmongers. Another court action I did was one I brought against Alexander Downer and Senator Robert Hill for stopping Lake Eyre from becoming a World Heritage site.”
After the protest camp on Arabunna country was busted up, Kevin set up a protest camp at Genocide Corner, outside the SA Governor’s residence in the centre of Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide.
“I had to go to Adelaide for the court case against Hugh Morgan, and when I was there the charges against Hugh Morgan were dismissed. The judge was a pastor in the Lutheran Church, and I asked him to stand down because I believed he had a conflict of interest as his church was a shareholder in the WMC. When he refused to do so I told him to get stuffed, walked out and went straight down to Government House to start a protest. I took banners, and whatever things I had,” Kevin said
“While I was talking to the media I was confronted by the cops. I looked over the road and saw a patch of grass and thought, ‘Bugger it, I’ll make camp and a fire here’. I ended up calling it ‘genocide Corner’, and renamed Adelaide the ‘City of Genocide’. It was on the intersection of King William Street and North Terrace [one of the main intersections in the city] so loads of people were passing by.
“Four ceremonial fires for peace were lit and, after 21 days, the Adelaide City Council and 50 police came down and arrested me for failing to cease to loiter. It was one of those laws they hadn’t used in a long time, but they used it to clear away all my stuff and my supporters.
“One of the court conditions was that I was not able to walk within the vicinity of Genocide Corner. I was of a mind just to walk straight back there, but I had the Peace Walk from Lake Eyre to Sydney coming up so I had to let that one go.”
The Peace Walk was timed to reach Sydney for the Olympics in September 2000.
“We walked for months, for 3000 kilometres, and all sorts of people from all walks of life joined us. We were carrying the fire for peace and justice. I made sure that we went through lots of different Aboriginal communities. I got a lot of support, but the government also pressured a lot of people not to support me by threatening their jobs and funding. Each place we went to, people took us through their land and we respected each mob.
There were all types of pressure put on people along the way. The cops were nasty and threatened some of the walkers with guns and everything. I visited all the jails along the way from Broken Hill to Dubbo and Bathurst. It was sad to see so many young brothers confined and locked up.
“We went to Canberra and met up with the Tent Embassy mob. A couple of politicians came to meet us and then we all went to Government House to present the Governor-General with a document of peace and justice.
“When we arrived in Sydney for the Olympic Games the Tent Embassy mob had already set up a camp [in Victoria Park], so we joined up with them. We did all sorts of things. We did a re-enactment at the beach where Captain Cook came in. We re-enacted the bad way in which he came with guns and all that and then the next day we did how they should have come.”
Reclaiming totems
In 2002, Kevin reclaimed the Emu and Kangaroo totems from the Australian Coat of Arms hanging outside Parliament House, Canberra………………………………………………………..
In 2004, Kevin participated in the Peace Pilgrimage from the Olympic Dam uranium mine to Hiroshima, Japan.
“During the first walk and then in Sydney we met people from all over and that got everything going. Aboriginal nations from Queensland were saying there should be a walk up the coast to show the world the things they were suffering. Then some people made contact with people in Hiroshima to have a walk from the uranium mine in Roxby to where the bomb was dropped in order to show how all these things are linked. Aboriginal people, Japanese monks, all sorts of people were involved. It started at Roxby and then went to Canberra and then an aeroplane took us to Japan where we walked all over the country. We visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima and met a lot of people who were kids when the bombs were falling. We did talks and took part in a huge ceremony on the anniversary of the bomb being dropped. There were people everywhere and lanterns lit and people crying, it was full on.”
In 2006, Kevin went to Melbourne for the Stolenwealth Games…………………………………………..
“BHP have taken over WMC. They now own Olympic Dam and want to make it bigger. Myself and others who want to stop the mine got to be proxies for shareholders, they gave us tickets and we got to go inside on their behalf. I got to speak and I told the people there about the damage they are doing and that they need to stop it immediately.
“Aboriginal people have lived here for more than 40,000 years and cared for this country, but now it’s being turned into a sick and evil place. Myself, and others around this country, were born to be peacemakers.
“We mustn’t be frightened to educate others and fight, but not in a warlike way, to protect the earth and let everything run free. I don’t want to shoot or bomb the people from BHP and the others who are destroying this country because two wrongs don’t make a right. I think if I can help them to wake up to what they are doing then that will be punishment enough.”
Kevin was at the first meeting of the Alliance Against Uranium (later renamed the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance) in 1997 and, for many years, he served as the Alliance’s President.
He actively supported countless campaigns against uranium mining and plans to dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal land. He was at the Beverley uranium mine supporting Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners in May 2000 when SA Police viciously and illegally attacked protesters, children and journalists.
Kevin was awarded Nuclear-Free Future Resistance Award in 2001 by the Nuclear-Free Future Foundation and travelled to Ireland to accept the award. Kevin was awarded the SA Conservation Council’s Jill Hudson Award in 2006.
Kevin was awarded the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Peter Rawlinson Award in 2007 for two decades of work highlighting the impacts of uranium mining and promoting a nuclear free Australia.
ACF Executive Director Don Henry said: “Kevin is a cultural practitioner, an activist, an advocate and an educator. He has travelled tirelessly, talking to groups large and small about the impacts of uranium mining and the threats posed by the nuclear industry. Kevin has had a profound impact on the lives of many people – especially young people – with his many tours and ‘on-country’ events. For many young activists ‘Uncle Kev’ is truly an unsung hero and, against the current pro-nuclear tide, his is a very important struggle and story.”
Kevin participated in many of the Radioactive Exposure Tours run by Friends of the Earth. We camped at the ‘Old Lake’ (Lake Eyre) and generations of young activists learnt first-hand about the impacts of the Olympic Dam mine on country and culture.
Kevin’s partner Margret Gilchrist passed on Kevin’s final message when he returned to Alice Springs with his health failing: “Keep that old fire burning; don’t stop til we’ve won; Lake Eyre for World Heritage.”
[Kevin’s funeral service can be viewed online and many videos featuring Kevin can be found at Cinemata and YouTube. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth.]
Peter Dutton and his Coalition opposition party keep calling for a “mature” debate on nuclear power, as if no-one has ever discussed it seriously. But Australia has had many “mature” inquiries and discussions related to nuclear energy, uranium mining, and the nuclear fuel cycle over the past 60 years. Here are some notable ones:
1.] Radium Hill Royal Commission (1953):
This inquiry examined the safety and health concerns related to uranium mining at Radium Hill in South Australia. It investigated radiation exposure for workers and nearby communities and made recommendations for improved safety measures.
2.] McMahon Report (1955):
Commissioned by the Australian government, this report explored the potential for nuclear power generation in Australia. It assessed the feasibility, costs, and benefits of establishing nuclear power plants and considered the country’s uranium resources.
3.] Fox Report (1976):
The report, officially titled “Uranium Mining, Processing, and Radiation Safety”, was commissioned by the Australian government to investigate the health and safety aspects of uranium mining and processing. It examined radiation exposure risks for workers and surrounding communities and recommended regulatory measures.
4.] Joint Select Committee on the Environment (1980-1981):
This parliamentary committee inquired into the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining and processing in Australia. It examined issues such as radiation contamination, waste management, and rehabilitation of mining sites.
5.] Commonwealth Government Inquiry into Nuclear Energy (2006):
This inquiry examined the potential for Australia’s involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium mining, nuclear power generation, and waste management. The resulting report, known as the Switkowski Report, provided analysis and recommendations on these issues.
6.] South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission (2015-2016):
This inquiry was established by the Government of South Australia to investigate the potential for the state’s further involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium mining, enrichment, energy generation, and waste management. The final report provided a comprehensive analysis and recommendations regarding these issues.
7.] Federal Government Inquiry into Nuclear Energy (2019):
The Australian Federal Parliament’s Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy conducted an inquiry into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in Australia. It examined the economic, environmental, and safety implications of nuclear power generation and assessed public opinion and regulatory frameworks.
These inquiries reflect Australia’s ongoing evaluations and debates surrounding nuclear energy, uranium mining, and the broader nuclear fuel cycle, considering various economic, environmental, social, and political factors over the past 60 years.
First, Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America into lethal adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and, today, via its active and crucial complicity in Israel’s deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Children are not starving in Gaza today. No, they are being deliberately starved. Without hesitation or remorse. The famine in Gaza is no collateral damage. It is an intentional policy of starving to death thousands until the rest agree to leave their ancestral homeland.
Second, Australia has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War. To understand that this can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.
Imagine an Australia that helps bring a just Peace in Ukraine, as opposed to a mindless forever war. A non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but, also, not automatically aligned with every warmongering adventure decided in Washington.
Imagine an Australia which, having re-established its credentials as a country that thinks and acts for itself, engages with China in the spirit of peaceful cooperation – a far better way of addressing Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism toward its own peoples than buying useless, hyper-expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing China’s political class to close ranks around a more authoritarian core.
Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister who tells the American President to cease and desist from the slow murder of Julian Assange for the crime of journalism – for exposing American war crimes perpetrated behind the back of US citizens in their name.
To conclude, if Europe and Australia are to escape gross irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated European and Australian Green New Deals.
DiEM25, our paneuropean movement, is working toward this goal.
Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.”
Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday 13 March, 2024
…………………………………. The three post-war phases that shaped Australia’s and Europe’s habitat
Our present moment in Europe and in Australia has been shaped by three distinct postwar phases.
The first was the Bretton Woods system. America exited the war as the only surplus, creditor country. Bretton Woods, a remarkable recycling mechanism, was, in effect, a dollar zone built on fixed exchange rates, sustained by capital controls, and erected on the back of America’s trade surplus. With quasi-free trade as part of the deal, Washington dollarised Europe, Japan and Australia to generate aggregate demand for the products of its factories – whose productivity had skyrocketed during the war. Subsequently, the US trade surplus sucked the exported dollars back into America. The result was twenty years of high growth, low unemployment, blissfully boring banking and dwindling inequality. Alas, once the United States lost its trade surplus, Bretton Woods was dead in the water.
The second phase was marked by the violent reversal of this recycling mechanism. The United States became the first hegemon to enhance its hegemony by boosting its trade deficit. Operating like a powerful vacuum cleaner, the burgeoning US trade deficit hoovered up the world’s net exports. And how did America pay for them? With dollars which it also hoovered up from the rest of the world as German, Japanese and later Chinese capitalists sent to Wall Street 70% of dollar profits made from their net exports to the US. There, in Wall Street, these foreign capitalists recycled their dollar profits into Treasuries, real estate, shares and derivatives.
This audacious inverted recycling system, built on US deficits, required ever increasing American deficits to remain stable. In the process, it gave rise to even higher growth than the Bretton Woods era, but also to macroeconomic and financial imbalances as well as mind-numbing levels of inequality. The new era came complete with an ideology (neoliberalism), a policy of letting finance rip (financialisation), and a false sense of dynamic equilibrium – the infamous Great Moderation built on hugely immoderate imbalances.
Almost inevitably, on the back of the perpetual tsunami of capital rushing in from the rest-of-the-world to Wall Street, financiers fashioned gigantic pyramids of complex wagers – Warren Buffet’s infamous Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction. When these crashed, to deliver the Global Financial Crisis, two things saved Wall Street and Western capitalism:
The G7 central banks, that printed a total of $35 trillion on behalf of the financiers from 2009 to last year – a peculiar socialism for bankers. And,
China, which directed half its national income to investment, thus replacing much of the lost aggregate demand not only domestically but also in Germany, Australia and, of course, in the United States.
The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:
It grabs our attention.
It manufactures our desires.
It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.
It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.
It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.
It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.
Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!
Where did the money for so much cloud capital to accumulate come from, if not from profits? Remember the $35 trillion of central bank monies printed to refloat Western banks? That’s where. For example, 9 out of every 10 dollars that went into creating Facebook came from these central bank monies.
So, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what cloud capital has already done to us. And now a question of immense importance to Europe and to Australia: In which countries is cloud capital, and with it the exorbitant extractive power it grants its owners, concentrated? In the United States and in China. Nowhere else! Hold that thought, while I turn to Europe.
Europe
…………………………………………………..Europe’s doom loop between banking losses, stagnation, unpayable public and private debt and an investment strike lasting quarter of a century thus leading, now, to Europe’s and, in particular, Germany’s de-industrialisation. Quarter of a century later, in addition to its deepening North-South divide, Europe now suffers an incurable East-West divide while:
the essential fiscal and political union is further away from the horizon than ever
the EU’s Green Deal is honoured in the breach, not in the implementation
Europe’s industries are falling rapidly behind their competitors in the United States and China in every technological race that matters, in green tech and green energy in particular
our continent lacks cloud capital in an age of technofeudalism where power stems from cloud capital, that only the United States and China possess in substantial quantities.
Why is there a New Cold War?
In my introduction, I said that Europe and Australia are facing irrelevance and marginalisation. Two are the reasons: One, neither Europe nor Australia possess significant cloud capital – it is a little like trying to make our way during the 19th century without steam engines. The second reason is the New Cold War, which is upending our business models, Europe’s and Australia’s.
……………………………….during the long period Washington was pushing Australia to induct China into the WTO and the globalised capitalist world order, the One China policy and Beijing’s determination to maintain sovereignty over Taiwan were, rightly or wrongly, unchallenged givens. As for China’s military threat, on this I am with Malcolm Fraser who opined that nothing short of Chinese navy surveillance ships anchored outside America’s navy bases at San Diego or Norfolk, Virginia can count as provocation. And, please, can someone, anyone, explain why on earth a country so reliant on a trade surplus and imported energy would ever wish to threaten international trade routes? No, the New Cold War is neither due to Taiwan nor to China’s military build-up. The answer lies in cloud capital.
………………………….Chinese cloud capital has built an all-singing-all-dancing payments superhighway, denominated in yuan, that few used. But, this superhighway’s very existence is a clear and present danger to the US monopoly of the dollar payment system on which America’s hegemony rests. Especially after the Ukraine war created jitters amongst oligarchs around the world.
In short, the New Cold War has nothing to do with trade routes, Taiwan, or Chinese escalation in the Pacific. It is, rather, the manifestation of a dangerous clash between two technofeudal systems – one denominated in dollars, the other in yuan.
What should Australia do domestically?
So, the question becomes: What should Australia do in this topsy-turvy, increasingly technofeudal world? At the domestic front,
First, ditch the old rentier business model of banking on holes and homes. That’s now a Ponzi scheme whose maintenance will result in a country marred by minimal investment, low productivity, debilitating inequality, high inflation and low wages pushing its talented people into a low innovation sinkhole.
Instead, adopt a Green New Deal for Australia as a necessity, rather than a luxury. Europe is about to impose a border-adjustment carbon tax. America will surely follow. Australia must end its dependence on fossil fuels and unrefined minerals and let rip with solar and wind power that produces green hydrogen, not for export but, for powering new factories that will produce, domestically, green copper, green nickel, green cobalt and green steel for export to South East Asia and to China where they will be used to produce the electric cars and the cloud capital that Europe will then purchase tariff-free. To achieve this, this country needs a massive public investment project, a latter-day version of the 1950s Snowy Scheme.
Second, acknowledge that never before has it been so dismal to be young in Australia
Reverse the absurdity of the Australian government collecting more money from HECS than it does from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.
Tax rents properly to make higher education free again.
End negative gearing and, especially, the inane capital gains exemption on real estate investments.
Tax those with concentrated power to set prices and rents through the nose and, instead of inefficient tax cuts that just inflame house prices and consumer price inflation, build social housing that benefit not only those who live in them but suppresses private house price inflation.
Third, since Australian capitalists cannot compete with America’s and China’s cloudalists, it is the role of the Australian government, in the same way it once created the ABC, or the CSIRO, to put at the disposal of Australians important new technologies; to build up public cloud capital – beginning with a digital Australian dollar, essentially a free checking account for every resident using only a tax file number and a pin which would allow for free transactions and pay interest on deposits equal at the Reserve Bank’s overnight rate.
What should Australia do internationally?
What about internationally?
First, Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America into lethal adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and, today, via its active and crucial complicity in Israel’s deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Children are not starving in Gaza today. No, they are being deliberately starved. Without hesitation or remorse. The famine in Gaza is no collateral damage. It is an intentional policy of starving to death thousands until the rest agree to leave their ancestral homeland.
By lending credence to the notion that Israel is exercising the right to self-defence and by de-funding, on the basis of unsubstantiated Israeli accusations, the only agency that can ameliorate the starvation, Australia damaged its already wounded reputation. Reversing this decision is now too-little-too-late for the Australian government to wipe clean its complicity in ethnic cleansing by weaponised, designer-hunger. It will take a great deal more than that.
Just as there was a bipartisan campaign, led by Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, to end South African apartheid when Washington was supporting it, the Australian political class needs to lead a campaign to end apartheid in Israel-Palestine. This is Australia’s duty for another reason: Because of the sorry history of terra nullius, the white settlers’ ideological cover for the genocide of native populations, which has been transferred from Australia to the land of Palestine under the banner of “A Land Without a People for a People Without A Land”.
Second, Australia has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War. To understand that this can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.
Imagine an Australia that helps bring a just Peace in Ukraine, as opposed to a mindless forever war. A non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but, also, not automatically aligned with every warmongering adventure decided in Washington.
Imagine an Australia which, having re-established its credentials as a country that thinks and acts for itself, engages with China in the spirit of peaceful cooperation – a far better way of addressing Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism toward its own peoples than buying useless, hyper-expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing China’s political class to close ranks around a more authoritarian core.
Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister who tells the American President to cease and desist from the slow murder of Julian Assange for the crime of journalism – for exposing American war crimes perpetrated behind the back of US citizens in their name.
In the end, American powerbrokers will appreciate such an Australia better – in the same way you appreciate better a friend who tells you when you are wrong compared to a yes-man who never opposes you directly but whinges behind your back.
Conclusion
To conclude, if Europe and Australia are to escape gross irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated European and Australian Green New Deals. This will prove pie in the sky in a world buffeted by an uncontrollable New Cold War that threatens the green transition necessary to preserve our viability as a species. To have a future, Europe and Australia must end our mindless slide from strategic dependence on the United States to improvised-impulsive-inexpedient servitude to the United States.
DiEM25, our paneuropean movement, is working toward this goal. In the last fortnight, during this visit, I was thrilled to discover that there are talented people and effective organisations dedicated to the same cause. Optimism is perhaps not yet empirically justified. But hope burns strongly.
