Hi,
This article from John Pilger for a British Newspaper covers
the Quadrant dirty-tricks campaign, it's dated the 13th October.
Cheers,
Matthew Davis
Australia is the only developed country whose government has
been condemned as racist by the United Nations
According to the folksy writer Matthew Engel, the glories of
the Olympic Games have a cathartic effect on nations. The 1984 Olympics
in Los Angeles �helped the US regain the confidence it lost in Vietnam�.
He omitted to explain the benefits of this renewed confidence for the
millions of bereaved, maimed and poisoned Vietnamese. As for the Sydney
Olympics, he described a �glorious self-confidence� that will �sustain
Australia for years�.There is no doubting the efficiency of the Sydney
Olympics, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the setting; but
there was a political fa�ade. Soon after the Aboriginal runner Cathy
Freeman won her gold medal, the cabinet of John Howard�s government met
in Canberra to mount yet another attack on her people by planning to
change the Land Rights Act.
In 1998, the Howard government enacted legislation that effectively
took away the common-law rights that the High Court said belonged to
Aborigines. Nothing like it has been passed by a modern parliament. It
is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia
the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has
been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN has also called racist the
mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and Western
Australia, which have given black Australians an imprisonment rate at
least as high as that of apartheid South Africa, and have been a primary
cause of one of the highest suicide rates in the world, among young
Aborigines.
The Howard government�s response, on the eve of the Olympics, was
to bar UN human rights officials from entering Australia and
investigating further.Howard�s racist administration is a beneficiary of
an Olympic Games that successfully co-opted Aboriginal motifs, culture
and talent, leaving the question begging: if �glorious self-confidence�
can produce such brilliant organisation, why can�t the same energy and
political will be applied to ending the shameful treatment of the first
Australians?Take sport, a passion of all races. Why are the annual
Aboriginal Games in the Northern Territory, an event of great
significance to black Australians, played in a dust bowl without the
most basic facilities? There are no athletics tracks, no swimming-pools,
no basketball court, often not even a set of goalposts.
Professor Colin Tatz, author of Obstacle Race, a study of Aboriginal
sport, told me: �I think most white Australians would weep if they were
taken on a tour of black sporting Australia. There is a great push to
have more and more Aboriginal athletes, more and more scholarships for
an elite group, because it�s wonderful to say in the year 2000: �Look,
we have half a dozen Aborigines in our briefcases, which shows that
Australia makes no racial distinctions.� But the Aborigines who
represented Australia in the Olympics had to show three times as much
talent in order to rate an equal place with whites. Cathy Freeman is the
greatest thing that ever happened to white Australia, because this
happy, delightful, fun-loving young lady looks as though she is the
representative of all black womanhood. But she is not; she is an
aberration.
�Professor Tatz is also the author of a monograph called Genocide in
Australia, which concludes that, under international convention,
Australia is guilty of at least two types of genocide: massacre (�nigger
hunts� continued into the 1960s) and the theft of mixed-race children
from the families: the �Stolen Generation�. Compared with the death of a
third of world Jewry in the Holocaust, a majority of Aborigines are
believed authoritatively to have died in the initial white invasion and
appropriation.
Partly to win over the million Australians who voted for Pauline
Hanson�s overtly racist right One Nation Party, Howard has aggressively
campaigned against the teaching of the rapacious past, deriding it as
the �black armband view of history�. Last year, he abolished Abstudy, a
programme designed to help Aboriginal people reach secondary and
tertiary education. He holds the unique position of being the only
leader of a white settler nation to refuse to apologise for the
decimation of the original inhabitants. He and his ministers have caused
widespread hurt among the survivors of the Stolen Generation by doubting
their stories. Last year, his Aboriginal affairs minister, John Herron,
was guest of honour at a conference in a Sydney hotel attended by a
group of revisionist commentators and academics whose reactionary views
are reflected in Quadrant magazine. They discussed the �hoax� of many of
the Stolen Generation. The Australian equivalent of David Irving
denialists, they are supported by the prime minister.
On the eve of the Olympics, clearly timed to interest the foreign
media, Quadrant mounted another conference, at which a little-known
academic, Keith Windshuttle, set out to demolish the reputation of
Professor Henry Reynolds, a pre-eminent historian, whose 1981 book The
Other Side of the Frontier effectively broke the popular silence over
the 19th-century assault on Aboriginal Australia. Reynolds estimated
that 20,000 Aborigines were killed by settlers: a figure Windshuttle
accused him of inventing. Four historians came to Reynolds�s defence,
describing the 20,000 as a conservative estimate of �massive violence
and pitiless dispossession�. However, in a small elite not renowned for
its bravehearts, the failure of others to speak out is striking. Olympic
hype will not give Australia glorious self-confidence. Justice for its
indigenous people might.
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