Australia’s Sham Elections: Rooted in Racism - Australian
Politics - One Beast with Two Heads
02 September 2010By Ghali Hassan
In a nation that prides itself of being a
“tolerant” and a “fair go” for all Australians, one
expects the candidates campaigning for Prime Minister
position will be concerned with the Australia’s
complicity in illegal imperialist wars, equality and
the environment. Sadly, both candidates are playing
the race card, because racism is deeply entrenched in
white Australia.
An Election Rooted in Racism
Both Julia Gillard, the Labor Party installed Prime
Minister, and Tony Abbott, the leader of the
Opposition Liberal Party, migrated from Britain to
Australia in search of “better life”. Gillard is from
Wales, Abbott from England. You expect them to take a
stand against racism and injustice, but it was not to
be. Both Gillard and Abbott are products of one of the
most racist societies in the world. They moved to a
society founded on systemic racism and violence.
Gillard is campaigning on the “right kind of migrants”
and Abbott is campaigning on John Howard’s racist
card, “we will stop the boats”. Both phrases are the
result of a deep racism that has become part of the
Australian culture.
When Ed Husic, an Australian from a Muslim background,
was nominated to run for Labor in the West Sydney seat
of Chiefly, the Liberal Party’s largest cabbage bag,
David Barker, attacked all Muslims and Islam. “We
don’t want Muslims in our parliament”, said the
cabbage bag. Although he was disendorsed by the
Liberal Party, Barker was not condemned for his
outrageous racist behaviour and anti-Semitism. It
should be said that the attack on Muslims during
elections is not an anomaly, but rather the
culmination of an increasingly anti-Muslim trend in
Australia.
Abbott’s and Gillard’s election campaign rhetoric on
population growth in a “comfortable” Australia is
designed to appease racist Australian bigots and win
votes. As former Labor Party leader, Mark Latham
rightly observed: “It is not an immigration debate,
it’s no debate”. Gillard’s position on “population”
growth is “clever politics but it's a fraud. It's a
fraud of the worst order". It is fraud because there
is no policy in place for a long-term development of a
sustainable Australia. Both Gillard and Abbott have
been blaming migrants for overcrowding, failing
infrastructure and lack of services. As Peter
McDonald, a professor of Demography at the Australian
National University rightly observed: “Migrants are
being used as a scapegoat for the failure of
government planning”. It is populism designed to
appease racist voters, using a small number of
desperate refugees fleeing U.S.-led Western wars as a
tool to promote xenophobia.
Scapegoating a few desperate refugees has become a
ticket to success. It is the politics of
scaremongering used by the One Nation racist party and
now integrated in the politics of the Labor and
Liberal parties. The percentage of refugees arriving
by boat to Australia is between 2 to 4 per cent of all
“unauthorised” arrivals. The majority (95 per cent) of
them are genuine refugees.
It is important to remember that, there are more than
60,000 illegal immigrants in Australia, mostly from
Britain, New Zealand, U.S., Europe, South Africa India
and China. According to Bob Brown, leader of the
Australian Greens:
“There are another 17,000 who came in the last three
years, queue jumpers legally, because they had either
business connections, they've been in charge of
companies with more than 50 people, or they've got
$250,000 in their back pocket and they can get here at
the front of the queue. But if you're poor and you
don't come from an English-speaking background or a
European background, you have much more difficulty
getting to the country”.
They are living freely in Australia, receiving
services and paying less in taxes. They are not
incarcerated, like refugees, in isolated detention
centres and prisons in remote Australia.
The majority of the so-called “asylum seekers” are
Chinese arriving at Australian airports with one-way
tickets. According to Patricia Cruise, a former
immigration officer with the Department of
Immigration, it is the flood of dubious applications
from Chinese who claim “asylums” on false pretence
after they fly to Australia. “They are well organised
in terms of migration agents, tour operators,
fraudulent documents which are readily available in
China and also in Sydney”, she added. They turned
Australia’s fine education system into an immigration
racket, and forced low-income Australians into shoddy
rental housing controlled by mafia-like landlords. It
is a well-organised racket and most politicians know
it, but it doesn’t pay dividends.
Australian Politics: One Beast with
Two Heads
Furthermore, there is really no difference between
Labor and Liberal. Both parties are white
male-dominated right-wing parties, and their policies
have converged long time ago. Neither party is
offering anything that will serve the interests of the
nation and the people of Australia. Their only
interest is in winning power and preserving the
political status quo. The election campaign is a show
about instilling fear and promoting divisions.
The Greens in Bed with Labor
Furthermore, the Australian Green Party is like all
Green parties around the world. Far from being an
alternative progressive movement, the Green Party is a
collection of opportunists and outright white
extremists. While there some honest people in the
Greens, political power and decisions rest with a few
people at the top. They have an “attack response
group” to threaten and frighten off their critics. The
Australian Greens have been working in coalition with
Labor on major policies. They are “in bed” with Labor
on major issues. The so-called “secret backroom
preferences deal” with Labor in this elections is just
one example of the Greens dishonesty and betrayal.
It is utterly false to argue that Australia has
changed to a “progressive” and “forward-looking”
society. Australia hasn’t changed. The country is
still accustomed to treating Aborigines like dogs and
Australians from non-Anglo-Saxon minorities as
second-class citizens. It is a racist and backward
society. Racism formed the foundation of
Anglo-Australia and was forged into the Australian
national character, and remains so today, alive and
thriving throughout Australian culture. A
male-dominated society is not going to change because
the Prime Minister is a woman.
The rise of Gillard is the result of a quota system in
the Labor Party that is dominated by white males. She
was installed as PM – to seduce the public – by a few
“faceless men”, helped by her disloyalty and
dishonesty to her colleagues. She was illegitimately
installed as Prime Minister. The elections are not a
substitute for legitimacy.
There is nothing serious about Gillard’s
“Moving-forward” campaign catch cry. Australia doesn’t
move forward, it moves backwards. The road to move
forward has been deliberately blocked. Like all
politicians, Gillard uses deception to manipulate
voters. As Suvendrini Perera, a Senior Research Fellow
at Curtin University in Western Australia rightly
observed: “Beneath the facade of a thoroughly modern,
optimistic and relentlessly ‘forward-moving’ Prime
Minister is a campaign that returns us to the ‘race
election’ threatened by John Howard in the 1990s”.
Abbott, on the other hand is not moving anywhere; he
will continue with the Liberal’s old ideology.
Complicity in the U.S. War in
Afghanistan
The one major issue missing in the elections
campaign is Australia’s complicity in the Afghanistan
bloodbath. According to official count, a total of
twenty Australian soldiers have been killed and more
than 160 have been wounded in the U.S.-led war on
Afghanistan since 2001. Playing by the U.S. rule, the
war on Afghanistan is a taboo for both Labor and
Liberal. Gillard and Abbott are competing with each
other to serve the U.S. imperialist agenda. Gillard
said before the election campaign, “Our objective is
clear: to combat the threat of international
terrorism, to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming
a training ground for terrorists launching attacks
against us and our allies”. She added: “That is why
coalition forces are in Afghanistan under a United
Nations mandate and with the Afghan government's full
support”. It is a lie.
The invasion of Afghanistan is an illegal act of
aggression in violation of the UN Charter and
international law. The Afghan government is an
illegitimate U.S.-installed puppet government.
Australia’s complicity in Afghanistan is not about
“rebuilding” Afghanistan, “democracy”, or “assisting”
the Afghan people; it is about enhancing a U.S.
imperialist agenda. In addition, the majority of the
Afghan people want an end to the military Occupation
of their nation. There is no justification of self-defence
or “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, as many
politicians and academics claim. Under international
law, the U.S.-NATO war on Afghanistan is a war crime.
Complicity in Aggression and
Sanctions Against Iran
On Iran, as requested by the U.S. – without a debate
or the slightest hesitation – Australia approved new
sanctions against Iran, similar to those adopted by
the U.S. and Canada. Labor legislator, the pro-Israel
Zionist Labor politician, Michael Danby, said:
“History teaches us that going soft on hard-line
dictators is a recipe for catastrophe. The Labor
government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard will not
shirk its historic responsibility to stand with Israel
at its hour of maximum danger”. Gillard, of course,
has an unquestionable “loyalty” to Israel.
Complicity in the Israeli War
Against Palestinians
On a visit to Israel, Gillard was praised by Israeli
leaders for her defence of Israel during Israel’s
murderous attacks on Gaza where 1,400 innocent
Palestinian women and children were massacred. “You
stood almost alone on the world stage in support of
Israel's right to defend itself,” said Israeli
minister Isaac Herzog in welcoming Gillard to Israel.
Her visit (with her partner, Tim Mathieson) has been
organised by the pro-Israel Zionist lobby group, the
Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange. While in Israel,
Gillard met with leaders of the Israeli fascist
regime. Like her predecessors, Gillard is following
the Zionist rules of ‘We pay and You do what We say’.
Even Gillard’s partner is employed as a “sales
consultant” – despite having no property experience –
by a Zionist and Labor Party benefactor, Albert Dadon
of Ubertas Group.
Australian and U.S. Two Party
Systems Mirror Images
It is noteworthy mentioning that the Australian
political cycle closely resembles America’s. There are
only minor differences between the two major parties
in America (Democrats and Republicans) and Australia
(Labor and Liberal). The electoral systems of both
countries are nearly identical; they provide “an
illusion of democracy”. As Ted Mack, the former
independent mayor of North Sydney, accurately put it,
in Australia, “neither the Senate nor the House of
Representatives voting system reflects the will of the
people”. (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 August 2010). The
people will be conned by the elections.
It is no surprise that Gillard has adapted “Yes we
will”, Barack Obama’s election catch cry “Yes we can”
which was a concoction of Sí se puede (Spanish for
"Yes, it can be done"), the motto used by the
oppressed United Farm Workers in 1974 in Phoenix,
Arizona. Further, it wasn’t a coincidence that
Australians re-elected John Howard and Americans
re-elected George Bush in 2004. Howard showered people
with the illusion of becoming rich in “comfortable”
Australia. Labor is using the same tactics, bribing
voters with the illusions of wealth and happiness.
Australians, of course, are obsessed with money and
material possessions.
In his seminal De la démocratie en Amérique (Of
Democracy in America), the French thinker Alexis de
Tocqueville observed that:
“As one digs deeper into the national character of the
Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of
everything in this world only in the answer to this
single question: how much money will it bring in?”
De Tocqueville’s observation of Americans is very true
of Australians today. According to the fourth
Australian Work and Life Index, ‘more than one-fifth
of Australians spend 48 hours or more at work each
week, and 60 per cent do not take holidays’. Like
Americans, despite their material wealth Australians
are becoming increasingly unhealthy and unhappy. Like
America, Australia becoming an increasing unequal and
divided society.
As some 14 million Australians are preparing to take
part in the world’s most sham elections, they are
unaware that their votes do not really count, because
ultimately they have little or no choice. So, it
doesn’t matter who will be Australia’s Prime Minister
tomorrow, all politicians ought to be mistrusted.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in
Australia.
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