The Agonist - Oceania

Scientology a 'criminal organisation' - Australian Senator

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:09:31 -0800

Nov 18

Abc.net.au - The Church of Scientology says allegations made in the Australian Federal Parliament by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon are an abuse of parliamentary privilege.

Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment and forced abortion.

He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status.

"I am deeply concerned about this organisation and the devastating impact it can have on its followers," he told the Senate.

A spokeswoman for the church, Virginia Stewart, says she is shocked to hear Senator Xenophon's claims, as no-one within the church seems disgruntled.

"If these people had key issues, then how come they haven't contacted the church officially?" she said.

"We actually have an entire section that responds to people. So if someone has a complaint about the church, we really are so happy to meet with them."

Ms Stewart says the church tried to contact Senator Xenophon earlier this year after he spoke about Scientology on television.

"We offered to meet with him, to be completely open, answer any of his questions," she said.

"He didn't even bother to reply so I think it's a bit disingenuous that someone stands up in Parliament, where they can say whatever they want.

"He hasn't even spoken with us before, and we have attempted to speak with him."

Parliamentary speech
Senator Xenophon told Parliament the Church of Scientology was a criminal organisation that hides behind its "so-called religious beliefs".

"Do you want Australian tax exemptions to be supporting an organisation that coerces its followers into having abortions? Do you want to be supporting an organisation that defrauds, that blackmails, that falsely imprisons?" he asked.

"Because on the balance of evidence provided by victims of Scientology you probably are.

"The letters received by me which were written by former followers in Australia contain extensive allegations of crimes and abuses that are truly shocking.

"These victims of Scientology claim it is an abusive, manipulative and violent organisation."

Australia 'sorry' for child abuse

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:47:26 -0800

November 16

BBC -
Australian PM Kevin Rudd has apologised to the hundreds of thousands of people, some British migrants, who were abused or neglected in state care as children.

Under the Child Migrants Programme - which ended just 40 years ago - the UK sent poor children to a "better life" in Australia, Canada and elsewhere. As they were compulsorily shipped out of Britain, many of the children were told - wrongly - their parents were dead. Many parents did not know their children, aged as young as three, had been sent to Australia.

Care agencies worked with the government to send disadvantaged children to a rosy future and supply what was deemed "good white stock" to a former colony.In many cases they were educated only for farm work, and suffered cruelty and hardship including physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

JOhn Pilger - 2009 Sydney Peace Prize speech

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:05:10 -0800

Breaking The Great Australian Silence |John Pilger | November 5

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and "uttering unlawful oaths". In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a "courting day" - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother's eight siblings used the word "stock" a great deal. You either came from "good stock" or "bad stock". It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock - that we had what was called "the stain".

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. "Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!" she said. And we did - until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our "bad stock". There was outrage. "Your son," my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, "is no better than a damn communist". She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: "We are civilized today and they are not." "They", of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: "It's important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause."

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard's lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That's the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn't give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: "Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It's a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name." That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and they can't know."

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- "public relations", or PR. "What matters," he said, "is the illusion." Like Kevin Rudd's stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier's family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia's highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia's military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the "army's dirty work" in "urban combat zones". What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

"I confess," wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, "that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world." We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed - that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a 'training team', requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: "Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government."

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about "the downward thrust of Chinese communism". What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America's objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. "We have to inform the British to keep them on side," he said. "You are with us, come what may."

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

"It's time we sang from the world's rooftops," said Kevin Rudd in opposition, "[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...".

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: "Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if "we" do it. Terror is not terror if "we" do it. A crime is not a crime if "we" commit it. It didn't happen. Even while it was happening it didn't happen. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They're in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an "arc of instability" that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this "full spectrum dominance". More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion - that's enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn't matter who is president - George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush's wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to "annihilate". Iran's crime is its independence. Having thrown out America's favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn't occupy anyone else's land and hasn't attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America's behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It's taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism - the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama's case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: "The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum."

Compare that with Rudd's words the other day. "I make absolutely no apology whatsoever," he said, "for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia ... a tough line on asylum seekers."

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term "illegal immigrants" is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear - they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that's not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, "turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe".

Why isn't this spelt out? Why have weasel words like "border protection" become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There's a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase "Palestinian land" to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as "the subject of negotiation". That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as "the subject of negotiation".

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a "right to exist" in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, "There's going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now."

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - "an episode", according to one study, "more deadly than the Rwandan genocide". In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. "Building democracy", said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It's set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canap? They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There's a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable "looking from the side".

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it's tricky, isn't it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence - to no longer "look from the side" in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister's wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don't like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by "a person or persons unknown". That's how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie's parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I've known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He's in his sixties. He's a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, "doesn't have a clear idea of what's happening on the ground" in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international "shame list" for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That's it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called "intervention", which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in "unthinkable numbers", according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the "unthinkable numbers". Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been "quarantined". What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent - not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, "You're exhausted."

He replied, "Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I'm just tired to death, mate." He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as "a piece of political wreckage" that "the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away... in a way that responds to some of its supporters' emotional needs".

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don't hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don't look from the side - those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia's historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep has fallen on you

Ye are many - they are few

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clich?that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people's Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It's true some people don't give a damn - but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged - a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

"The struggle of people against power, "wrote Milan Kundera, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

In Australia, we have much to be proud of - if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we've progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world's first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement - until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect - and our legacy to the next generation - is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

Science and Politics downunder

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:20:49 -0800

Philanthropy is not a life style choice for most of Australia's rich and famous.
But Australian science, especially the federal Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO )got a major financial boost due to a 10 year struggle fighting with HP, Apple, Dell et al. over the invention of WiFi; that was settled back in April.

However, Australian politics and science remain closely related, and casting aspersions on the ruling parties attitude to global emissions is not kosher.

Coastal homes in Australia at risk from rising sea levels

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:32:14 -0700

Kathy Marks | Oct 28

The Independent - Government report shocks country where 80 per cent of population lives on coast

Australia's love affair with the beach is in danger of being rudely terminated. A parliamentary report released yesterday suggests that the government may have to force people to abandon prime oceanfront homes along thousands of miles of coastline vulnerable to rising sea levels.

The report, published in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit on climate change in December, sent a shiver through a country where 80 per cent of the population lives on the coast. With more than 700,000 homes within two miles of the ocean and less than 20ft above sea level, rising seas – together with more frequent storm surges and higher tides – are a serious threat.

A parliamentary committee spent 18 months investigating the state of Australia's coastline, and MPs were shocked by what they found. Mal Washer, deputy chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Climate Change, said yesterday: "There's little in reality left of our coast. It's all breakwaters or sandbags... It's a disaster."

Mr Washer said that popular beaches, such as those lining the Queensland Gold Coast, a popular tourist destination, would not exist if sand was not pumped on to them artificially.

The report, entitled The Time to Act is Now, calls for national guidelines to govern development in sensitive coastal areas, replacing the current piecemeal approach by local councils. Mr Washer told ABC radio that a line should be drawn around the coast, "and beyond that there should not be development".

Desert dust storm chokes Sydney

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:57:35 -0700

September 23

BBC - Australia's biggest city, Sydney, has been shrouded in red dust blown in by winds from the deserts of the outback.

Visibility is so bad that international flights have been diverted and harbour ferry traffic disrupted.Emergency services reported a surge in calls from people suffering breathing problems. Children and the elderly have been told to stay indoors.

Sydney's landmarks, including the Opera House, have been obscured, and many residents are wearing masks. Traffic has been bumper-to-bumper on major roads. The dust blanketing eastern parts of New South Wales has been carried by powerful winds that snatched up tons of topsoil from the drought-ravaged west of the state. Photo: Bloomberg

Health Care In New Zealand

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:56:04 -0700

~by Don Welch

I was in the U.S. last December and had a talk with a RWR (Right Wing Relative) about health care reform. She was horrified at the prospect of socialized medicine. I asked her if she would like to hear my experiences with the health care system in New Zealand. The answer was no.

I didn’t know it then but her response was a harbinger of the health care ‘debate’ that would soon follow. Simply put, for many in the U.S. there can be no debate about health care reform. There can be no fact gathering or analysis. There can be no comparative shopping.

There are just over 4 million people in New Zealand in a land/sea area roughly equal to California. More than 25% of those folks live in Auckland, which means there are a lot of little places in the wap-wap. I live in Nelson, a town of 56,000 , which makes us the 13th largest urban area in the country. Delivering consistent health services is not easy.

Our system here is single payer with a private option. Non critical surgeries are wait-listed. The wait times are about the same as those at Kaiser-Permanente in California. If the wait times get too long, all hell breaks out; people write letters to the editor; the Health Minister gets hung in effigy.

I can buy private insurance to get around the wait times. At 59 years old, male, a smoker, that would cost me $100 (U.S) a month.

I get to pick my primary doctor and can change it if I’m not satisfied. Doctor’s visits cost $10 (U.S.) unless they are for preventive care or advice. Those visits are free. Medicine cost on average about $3 (U.S) for a months supply as long as I use the brand that the government has selected. Sometimes I have to wait as much as 5 minutes before the doc can see me.

They consider the brain a major organ here so mental health services are included (free).

They have an organization called ACC (Accident Compensation Corporation). If I am injured anywhere at anytime, the ACC pays for treatment. They will also pay for lost income. Because the ACC exists, it is rare for someone to sue as a result of an accident or medical malpractice. So my car insurance costs S 140 (U.S) a year.

I do pay more in taxes. My effective tax rate runs at 30% . Still, if I had to pay US rates for health and car insurance, it would cost me thousands more each year. And that doesn’t include the money I save by not buying insurance for my employees.

If my relative had let me share my experience, I would have told her that New Zealand Health care is not perfect. The sparse population does create inconsistencies and our World Health Organization rating is actually lower than the US (41 vs 37).

My own personal experience, here in the bustling metropolis of Nelson, is that it is better, dramatically better, and at a much lower cost.

I would have also told her that I feel safer here. I would have told her that at 59 I feel free to change jobs. I would have told her that I feel good about being part of a culture that protects its people first, then lets all those smart corporate types and lawyers find ways to make money doing something productive.

Oh, by the way, there are a lot of Canadians that live or travel here. I always ask them if they like their health services.

They do.

Bindoon Boys Town: The sad truth behind Britain's lost children

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:08:32 -0700

Kathy Marks | Sydney | Sept 6

The Independent - Australia is to apologise for the appalling treatment meted out to thousands of boys and girls shipped to its shores as orphans

Bindoon Boys Town: it sounded like an adventure camp to the pale-faced youngsters who emerged blinking into the sunlight at Fremantle, in Western Australia, after their six-month voyage from Southampton. Among them was Laurie Humphreys, looking forward to his new life in the "land of milk and honey", where food was plentiful and children rode to school on horses, so he had been told.

It was September 1947, and the SS Asturias had just docked in Fremantle with 147 boys and girls, the first to arrive under a post-war plan to empty overflowing British orphanages and repopulate the former colonies with "good white stock". Humphreys and other boys were dispatched to Bindoon, an isolated institution 60 miles north of Perth, run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic lay order.

The first shock was the desolate landscape; the second was the place itself, an abandoned farm property. It was the boys who were to build Bindoon, and children as young as 10 were set to work, constructing schools, dormitories and kitchens. They hacked at the ground with picks and shovels, and mixed concrete by hand in the blazing heat. Those unable to cope with the back-breaking labour were flogged, sometimes until their bones were fractured.

But the routine thrashings – meted out for "offences" as trivial as bed-wetting or stealing fruit to supplement a miserable diet consisting mainly of bread and dripping – were not the worst of it. Sexual abuse was rife at Bindoon, and the boys dubbed their religious guardians the "Christian Buggers". This grim regime was presided over by Brother Francis Keaney, 6ft tall and 17 stone. "I guess you could call him a sadist," says Humphreys, one of an estimated 10,000 British children sent to Australia between 1947 and 1967.

2009's hottest destination (and that's when the trouble started)

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:49:20 -0700

Kathy Marks | Aug 21

The Independent -

Lonely Planet's decision to bestow its ultimate accolade on Tasmania's Bay of Fires has angered Aborigines and tourism chiefs who fear a backpacker invasion

The Bay of Fires, a beautiful, isolated spot on Tasmania's north-east coast, was until recently a well-kept secret. Then Lonely Planet declared it the world's "hottest" destination for 2009. Now an almighty row is shattering its tranquillity.

Shortly after Lonely Planet bestowed its accolade, the state premier, David Bartlett, announced plans to turn the Bay of Fires – a 20-mile strip of picturesque coves and deserted white beaches – into a national park. This came as a surprise, for there had been no consultation. And Mr Bartlett appeared to have forgotten a long-standing promise to return the area to Aboriginal ownership. Aboriginal activists are now threatening to mount a blockade and reclaim it by force.

While environmentalists have welcomed the designation of a national park, they disagree about the merits of the indigenous land claim. Green politicians and the island's leading conservation organisations back it but others accuse Tasmanian Aborigines of being poor land managers and say that conservation must take precedence over social justice.

Then there is a third interest group: tourism operators and other businesses, itching to exploit the area's newly-acquired international profile. They want neither a national park nor Aboriginal control, but seek planning curbs to be relaxed to allow more development, and they are cynical about everyone else's motives.

"We've been trying to raise recognition of the Bay of Fires for years and we were ignored," said Peter Paulsen, who is president of the local tourism association. "It wasn't until Lonely Planet decided it was important that everyone got excited."

Phone call sparked Operation Neath

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:19:10 -0700

Melbourne | August 4th

Australian.com.au - IT was a single phone call that sparked the second-largest terror investigation in Australian history, known as Operation Neath. A plot by Islamic extremists in Melbourne to launch a suicide attack on an Australian Army base has been uncovered by national security agencies.

* Police swoop on Melbourne homes after Somali Islamists' terror plot exposed
* Terror suspect to face prolonged grilling
* Out of Africa, a new terrorism threat dawns

In January, at the height of Melbourne's parched summer, an Australian-Lebanese man in his 30s telephoned a Somalian in the city's western suburbs and made a disturbing request. He wanted assistance for himself and some of his friends to travel to the war-torn African state of Somalia.

The men wanted to become Islamic warriors with al-Shabaab, an extremist group in that country with close links to al-Qa'ida, and which is listed as a terrorist organisation by the US. The fledgling Somalian terror group, barely three years old, had become the new face of Islamic resistance in Africa and was actively recruiting foreign fighters to help it overthrow the US-backed government in Somalia.

Investigators were monitoring the Lebanese man's calls after he came to their attention late last year for espousing extremist views at his local mosque in Melbourne's northern suburbs.

What unfolded over the next few months would confirm the worst fears of the nation's counter-terrorism chiefs and provide a grim reminder that Australians remain vulnerable to the threat posed by a handful of Islamic extremists, living in our suburbs, who are seduced by the dark side.

Australia's security agencies had suspected for several years there were illegal links between small pockets of the nation's 16,000-strong Somali community and the extremists in their war-torn homeland.

But the AFP and ASIO had never been able to prove the links, and an AFP investigation called Operation Rochester in 2007 petered out after no illegal connections were identified.

Australia gets the hump – and reaches for the gun to settle its camel question

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:30:10 -0700

Roger Maynard | Sydney | July 27

The Independent -

Brought to the country as beasts of burden in 1840, today there are one million camels eating the outback

There are more than a million of them and they pose one of the greatest social and environmental challenges to Australia's outback.

They munch their way through desert vegetation, further denuding this arid nation's heartland and threatening its sensitive ecosystem. They damage Aboriginal communities in their search for water, fracturing pipes and knocking air conditioning units off walls. And their population is more than doubling every eight to nine years.

The camel – which was introduced to Australia in 1840 to help transport heavy goods to the remote interior of the country – has now become one of its greatest pests. Dealing with the alarming population growth of one-humped Camelus dromedarius has been vexing governments, conservation bodies and scientists for years.

Now the federal government is to set aside nearly £10m to address the problem, which will almost certainly be solved at the barrel of a gun.

One option being considered is a mass aerial shoot – which experts regard as the most effective and humane method of culling the animals.

Aussie comedy show raids John Yoo's Berkeley class

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:07:01 -0700

Raw Story - A popular Australian comedy show took the fight over the US's torture program straight to John Yoo's law class at the University of California-Berkeley.

A performer from The Chaser's War on Everything interrupted a lecture by John Yoo -- the former Department of Justice lawyer who wrote many of the legal memos justifying the Bush administration's torture program -- by standing up on a desk dressed in "Abu Ghraib" fashion -- a dark cloak and a black, pointed hood.

"Professor, I've got one question," the comedian asked. "How long am I required to stand here until it counts as torture?"

When students suggested that the comedian leave, he replied: "I'd love to move but every time I do my balls get buzzed."

"Unfortunately, I'm going to have to end the class," Yoo said, gathering his papers and moving towards the exit. more

Quake moves NZ towards Australia

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:53:31 -0700

July 22

BBC -

A massive earthquake last week has brought New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists say.

The 7.8 magnitude quake in the Tasman Sea has expanded New Zealand's South Island westwards by about 30cm (12in).

Seismologist Ken Gledhill, of GNS Science, said the shift demonstrated the huge force of the tremor.

But correspondents say that with more than 2,250km (1,400 miles) separating the countries, the narrowing will not exactly be visible.

Nor, as the New Zealand media have observed, is it likely to bring cheaper air fares.

Tension rising in Fiji

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:26:28 -0700

On July 15, the Fiji Times headline was METHODISTS IN DEFIANCE. STATE FIRM ON CHURCH. At issue is the annual conference organised by the Methodist Church that was going to have several past political figures as speakers. The government banned the August conference. Over the past 24 hours matters have come to a head. The paramount lady chief Ro Teimumu Kepa of the Suva region is in detention, as are five or six Methodist Ministers, all allegedly held for questioning. Tribal and church tensions rise with warnings of civil unrest.

The Fiji Daily Post is 'ignoring' the story, but is reporting that "the Prime Minister has defended his local government’s media censorship at a conference of Asia-Pacific broadcasters in his country. Commodore Frank Bainimarama told guests at the conference that the regulations were achieving its desired impact in inspiring positive changes in the local media industry and the community. " Positive change meaning no letters to the editor I guess.

Blogs updates: sympathetic to the Methodist position and hardline support for Bainimarama.

A long walk spoiled: the 850-mile golf course

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:27:51 -0700

Kathy Marks | Sydney | July 13

The Independent - With a distinct lack of greenery, and an average of 50 miles between holes, the Nullarbor Links may not appeal to every golfer. But those fed up of swinging their clubs in suburbia may relish the challenge of the world's longest course, which will open later this year in the Australian Outback.

The par-72 course straddles the inhospitable, sparsely populated Nullarbor Plain, stretching 850 miles from the gold-mining centre of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia to the fishing town of Ceduna on the South Australian coast.

Most visitors traverse the Nullarbor – named for its lack of trees – at speed, but locals hope the new golf course may persuade them to linger.

Eighteen holes will be sited at small towns and roadhouses along the Eyre Highway, which snakes across the dramatic desert plain. Each hole will have a synthetic green and tee, along with a rugged, natural terrain fairway.

Construction will be completed next month, and an inaugural tournament is scheduled for October. The project manager, Alf Caputo, said yesterday that golfers from England, China and Japan had already shown interest. Mr Caputo said the course was unique.

"There's some absolutely amazing scenery out there. One of the holes is right smack bang in the middle of a sheep station. This is the real Australia," he said.

A round of golf is expected to take a minimum of four days, with scorecards stamped after each hole has been played. Some established courses have loaned a hole, but most have been purpose-built.