THIS SITE IS ABOUT TO GO INTO THREE MONTHS” HIBERNATION:  

 

SPEAKING NOTES FROM A RECENT  FORUM IN COBARGO – “ABUSES OF AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT POWER, AND WHAT WE AS CITIZENS CAN DO ABOUT IT”  - Tony Kevin , 1 May 2006

 

Ed – I’m putting these speaking notes up here now, because they sum up pretty well where I stand politically,  as my site  goes into temporary  hibernation for three months. 

 

Next week I am off on a walking pilgrimage in Spain,  to Santiago de Compostela.  I’ll keep a stamped pilgrim record book as I walk, which will also (should that ever be necessary – who knows, in these War-on-Terror days? ) establish retrospectively where I was and what I was doing while overseas.

 

With the now utterly appalling Sgt. Jake Kovco death cover-up story – read today’s Canberra Times report by Jack Waterford,  which indicates the truth may be far worse than any fictional script from the TV series “Silent Witness” – it seems a good time to leave the lies and sleaze of Australian federal politics behind for a while.   

 

I won’t be in Internet contact during the trip, or following Australian news.  I hope this site will resume political commentary activity after I return from Europe in late July, morally and physically refreshed. Meanwhile, the site will remain open to readers and accessible to any feedback  email correspondence – though I won’t be reading this for three months. 

 

**

 

I was a guest speaker at this “Voice”  forum entitled “ Community, Politics and Technology: Salvaging a Future from the Past”, that was organised by “Voice” magazine (published by Ginninderra Pres, Canberra)  and the Bermagui-based Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust, and held in Cobarhgo, NSW on 19 March.

 

It was a good meeting, enlivened by one person who walked out, complaining that he had not come to listen to an anti- John Howard diatribe (a protest action that I took as a compliment). Another person reacting to my analysis of the  steady build-up of US Administration war threats against Iran,  wrongly accused me of being prejudiced against Israel.  Apart from that, the audience seemed to like the talk.  

 

TK, Canberra 1 May 2006

 

SPEAKING NOTES FROM COBARGO

 

“Power corrupts , and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – the historian, Lord Acton

 

“ Politics is as it is, because people are as they are” – Senator John Faulkner, in his recent Henry Parkes Oration, Tenterfield , NSW.

 

Politics brings out the worst in people – their drive to power, their fear of the loss of power, their desire to live and work in orbits of a successful leader’s power, their desire to exercise corporate or bureaucratic power over other people.

 

That is why,  as Acton knew,  we must have strong checks and balances over those who exercise power over us. We used to have such checks and balances in Australia – but they are steadily weakening.  See.examples from my recent previous article on this site

 

http://www.tonykevin.com/Howards10Years.html

 

 “Howard’s 10 years – An alternative political analysis” –  commentary by Tony Kevin, 2 March 2006.

 

We are losing checks and balances in Australian federal politics because of powerful environmental pressures:

• information technology enabling and encouraging an unprecedented centralisation of data and the power that brings  to the custodians of that data 
• the public fear and willingess to sacrifice freedoms induced by the pumped-up War on Terror
• the drive for government economic efficiency,  and elimination of waste and duplication in governance.

 

Howard – our very own Wizard of Oz,  closely resembling that storybook fictional character in that he has neither wisdom, vision, courage or charisma, but hides behind a rickety apparatus of spin and deceit, that for a time substitutes for and disguises those personal defects  - until Dorothy discovers the subterfuge and exposes the Wizard’s fraudulent image for what it is. 

 

Howard runs on fear, not on hope. He has made his personal fears our national fears. A weak man, he needs to live in the greater orbit of US power,  as protection against what he sees as a dangerous world. of potential predators on “his” Australia.  Australian foreign and national security policy did not use to be like that  - we had national pride and self-respect,  and governments in our neighbouring  Asian region respected us for our independence. That is not the case now – we are seen as a US toady.

 

So “where did my Australia go” ? Can we get it back,  or is it now lost for ever?

 

Some time ago, Paul; Kelly made the correct observation in The Australian: that to be a dissident against the Howard regime is to be a dissident against Australia as it now is.  His intention may have been further to marginalise and isolate dissidence,  to make it seem un-Australian. But I cannot fault his conclusion.

 

There are real costs in maintaining an active dissident position in Australia now. You must be morally strong to do it. Because politics intrudes everywhere now into our lives – from federal through state to local government levels tiers,  affecting our whole physical , economic and social environment.

 

Just one recent example – the ACT Education system is now at risk of losing $150 million federal finding (which it sorely needs) unless ACT teachers agree to introduce an unwanted ABCDE student grading system throughout ACT schools. They don’t like it for valid professional reasons and many parents agree with them  - but they were given no option by Brendan Nelson in one of his last diktats as federal Education Minister.

 

I see that Labor governments have just been reelected in Tasmania and South Australia. It bears out the recent political analysis  -  I forget by whom – that we now have an effective de facto ”Grand Coalition” governance in Australia, with the Liberal- National coalition directing at the Commonwealth level and Labor directing at the subsidiary state level. Our taxpayers’ money is all divvied up between them amicably enough in the annual COAG (premiers’ conference) process.  

 

This system well suits Howard and the Labor state governments. Weak federal and state opposition parties  rhetorically use the language of opposition but are basically reconciled to the national power-sharing system that prevails. The only real opposition in federal parliament comes from the Greens and Democrats. We pretend we have a healthy two-party system but it’s really a grand powersharing coalition of convenience. No wonder major party memberships are way down, and the Greens’ vote is up. People are seeing through the sham – Australians are not so politically stupid..

 

I turn now to the role of our “court intellectuals” in federal politics – e.g, Paul Kelly, Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan, Peter Hartcher, Glenn Milne and many more  -  in contrast to the more radical and independent “prophets”  (borrowing this useful juxtaposed phraseology from Noam Chomsky)  – people like Manning Clark and Donald Horne in their day, Germaine Greer, Hugh Stretton, Clive Hamilton, Alan Ramsay, Mike Carlton on his good days, Phillip Adams, Frank Brennan, Julian Burnside, John Pilger   ….   people who write about Australian society and politics from outside the square of conventional wisdom .

 

Foreign and national security policy is an area of profound state irresponsibility and criminality now. My research work here on SIEV X and on the illegal Iraq War (many examples are on this website) convinced me since 2002 of the truth of this.

 

I am now worried about the growing risk of an aggressive Western coalition war against Iran on the false pretext of its alleged nuclear weapon intentions and plans.  This weekend’s national commentary press had articles by Peter Hartcher in the SMH and Michael Costello in The Australian. Both take as fact the following very dubious assumptions being put about by the Bush administration’s cynical propaganda machine – “creating new realities”,  as it does so well:

 

• That Iran is determined to destroy the state of Israel;

 

• That Iran is buying time to build a nuclear weapons production and delivery capability,  that it will then use or threaten to use against Israel .

 

So these Hartcher and Costello commentaries - and they are only two examples among many in the Western mainstream politics and media establishments,  who have accepted this US and Tel Aviv hawkish argument - conclude that Australia must support a Western coalition or US–led pre-emptive air bombing strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities before it is too late – we have no real choice but to bomb Iran’s nuclear industry out of existence,  at whatever cost in human lives and Iranian investment, and regardless of the international consequences.   What cruel and reckless folly this is. .   

 

However,  a public momentum for this position is building,  and public opinion is being indoctrinated to accept its necessity. 

 

Howard, Downer and Nelson will certainly be part of this planning process, just as Howard, Hill and Downer authorised that Australia take part in detailed US military operational planning for an Iraq invasion, long before it happened in March 2003. They will go on claiming that no decisions are being taken and no firm plans are being made, until the last possible minute. These will be lies, as they were lies in the year leading up to March 2003. (As revealed in The Bulletin in 2003)  

 

It is truly horrifying that our leaders, after seeing how their actions have laid waste Iraq,  are now contemplating a new round of unprovoked aggressive war on Iran.. Have our leaders learned nothing?  Have they no shame or conscience ?

 

In today’s world, there are no rules, no international sanctions, on the international aggressive wars that the US might launch supported by a few loyal allies like the UK and Australia. “Might makes right”, at least while the Bush Administration remains in power in Washington.   It is a terrible time now.

 

The truth about Iran’s nuclear program is readily accessible on the Internet.  E.g., reputed writers like Professor Ed Herman on the Znet website,  Paul Rogers in the New Statesman and on the Open Democracy, Robert Fisk in The Independent…. The facts are available, but our court intellectuals prefer to ignore these sources – they are happy instead to sing from the Bush-Blair-Howard song  sheet.

 

There is a growing possibility now of an aggressive US war on Iran before Bush’s second presidential term ends.  He has that power to launch a pre-emptive surprise attack.  The fact that the Iraq war goes badly for Bush would not stop him from mounting an air attack on Iran

 

There is a precedent – Nixon and Kissinger in 1969 recklessly attacked Cambodia from the air and using special forces on the ground,  when the war in Vietnam was going badly for them . And that is how the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia a few years later – Nixon’s and Kissinger’s bombing had destroyed Cambodian civil society .  

 

So why aren’t we protesting as we did in the days before the Iraq invasion when 1 million Australians marched for peace?  There seems a strange passivity in us now – have we been schooled to think that it is pointless to protest, since our the government ignores us – we were “the mob” in Howard’s contemptuous phrase  -  anyway ?

 

So many of us seem to be giving up on dissidence.  And where is the ALP on this? What are they saying about Iran ? Almost nothing, as they sit on their hands waiting to see which way the international wind blows. .

 

“Le Trahison Des Clercs” – “the betrayal of the intellectuals”, that famous European phrase from the 1920s and 1930s that seems more and more applicable to us now.  As in those decades, when increasingly repressive and authoritarian governments were taking power all over Europe, many in our educated elites silently go along with the flow.  It is a failure of courage, a ”learned helplessness“, a passive attitude of “leave it to federal government,  they know best”.

 

Even with the AWB revelations in Cole, our court intellectuals still censor out the worst  feature of this scandal  –that this was not “bribery”,  misusing AWB money to protect contracts. No, it was in fact far worse than this.  It was a theft of $300 million from the UN Oil-for-Food program: funds that had been earmarked by the UN Security Council to pay for food and medicines for sick and starving Iraqi children . Many must have died who could be living now, with the food and medicines that this $300 million should have bought for them. But we don’t read this. Almost every commentator on the AWB inquiry has quietly slid past this disturbing fact.

 

We now have to shed any presumption we might still have of government regularity  – that Australian governments and their compliant bureaucracies and national security establishments can usually be relied on to behave decently,  and that when things do go wrong it is more likely to be a case of stuff-up than deliberate governmental wrongdoing or deceit.

 

 I knew this was not so , after SIEV X. A lot more people know it now after the AWB revelations [Ed:  And now, the Kovco revelations even more. TK,  1 May 2006].

 

My general conclusion: Australian governments cannot be relied on to be decent or truthful or moral.  At every level of governance we need- and now do not sufficiently have – vigorous and healthy checks and balances against the abuse of state power. We are now in that dangerous state Lord Acton warned us about.  

 

Corruption can be manifested in direct monetary terms – the traditional brown envelope under the desk, e.g.,  from developers to state or local councils or planning officials   – or it can be in less tangible form,  as preferential access to the traditional perks of power –the overseas paid holidays, the appointments or promotions to lucrative or prestigious boards or senior management positions,  the titles or honours, the promised preselections to safe seats, tip-offs of tradeable market information,, favourable land zoning decisions, etc… . We need a far more sophisticated awareness of the possible varieties of corruption in Australia.. It is by no means only about money transfers from one person to another. Nowadays it is usually more subtle.

 

I see misuse of state power frequently, in the examples of the children overboard scandal, the real story on MV Tampa as researched by Marr and Wilkinson, the real story on SIEV X as Marg Hutton and I uncovered it, Australia’s secret and illegal entry into war against Iraq,  the cover-ups of abuses during the occupation of Iraq, now AWB [Ed. - and now the Kovco case] – a long litany of abuses of state power.

 

So what can you or I do?  We can engage at every level where we think we can make a difference,  individually or collectively as groups of concerned citizens and voters .

 

You must hold onto and exercise your Australian civil society democratic values, and your freedoms to protest and dissent against abuses of state power.  You know already what is right and wrong – you have to say so.  

 

Politicians when they are caught out in lying and corruption have to pretend they believe in and want to uphold these same values, even if in truth some of them do not. That is why they are vulnerable to well-documented and well-argued dissenting critiques, at whatever level of governance.    

 

E.g.,  when Bronwyn Bishop M.P. a few months ago said on ABC local Canberra radio that for Australian Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with white scarves worn with their state school uniforms was an “act of defiance” against Australian values that should be prohibited by state school principals, I rang the ABC broadcast talkback line to say to Bishop that her statement was disgusting incitement to racism, probably illegal,  and that she should be ashamed as a federal MP to say such a thing.   Howard must have got the hint, because a few weeks later, in his own typically cowardly and sleazy way, he amended Bishop’s outrageous discrimination and abuse of vulnerable schoolgirls to say instead,  ” I can understand why a lot of Australians may find Muslim dress confronting”. . I hope people criticised him publicly for that closet discrimination too.  

 

This is the message I would like finally to leave with you: that in Australia   political power is a trust, not a right. We have to work as citizens to hold our politicians to account when they speak or act corruptly or improperly or illegally.  No one else will do it for us. The protection of our democracy - and it is threatened now, as it has not been since the 1930s  – depends on us. 

 

Tony Kevin, Canberra 1 May 2006