[Reader-list] Media and Apartheid in Australia

[A. Mani]

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How the Murdoch Press Keeps Australia's Dirty Secret
Friday 13 May 2011
by: John Pilger, Truthout

(http://www.truthout.org/how-murdoch-press-keeps-australias-dirty-secret/1305298464)

The illegal eavesdropping on famous people by the News of the World is
said to be Rupert Murdoch's Watergate. But is it the crime by which
Murdoch ought to be known? In his native land, Australia, Murdoch
controls 70 percent of the capital city press. Australia is the
world's first Murdochracy, in which smear by media is power.

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the
Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British
in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover.
"Nigger hunts" continued into the 1960s and beyond. The
officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families,
justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced
those known as the Stolen Generation, and in 1997 was identified as
genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life
expectancy of any of the world's 90 indigenous peoples. Australia
imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa did during
the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is
eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of
resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and
natural gas are in Western Australia and Northern Territory - on
Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal "progress" is all but defined by
the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and
coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice
is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of
Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission, which made clear
that social justice for Australia's first people would only be
achieved with universal land rights and a share of the national wealth
with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor general in a
"constitutional coup." The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with
such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their
newspaper in the street.

In 1984, the Labor Party "solemnly pledged" to finish what Whitlam had
begun and legislate Aboriginal land rights. This was opposed by the
then Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, a "mate" of Murdoch. Hawke
blamed the public for being "less compassionate"; but a secret 64-page
report to the party revealed that most Australians supported land
rights. This was leaked to The Australian, whose front page declared,
"Few support Aboriginal land rights," the opposite of the truth, thus
feeding an atmosphere of self-fulfilling distrust, "backlash" and
rejection of rights that would distinguish Australia from South
Africa. In 1988, an editorial in Murdoch's London tabloid, The Sun,
described "the Abos" as "treacherous and brutal." This was condemned
by the UK Press Council as "unacceptably racist."

The Australian publishes long articles that present Aboriginal people
not unsympathetically, but as perennial victims of each other, "an
entire culture committing suicide," or as noble primitives requiring
firm direction: the eugenicist's view. It promotes Aboriginal
"leaders" who, by blaming their own people for their poverty, tell the
white elite what it wants to hear. The writer Michael Brull parodied
this: "Oh White man, please save us. Take away our rights because we
are so backward."

This is also the government's view. In railing against what it called
the "black armband view" of Australia's past, the conservative
government of John Howard encouraged and absorbed the views of white
supremacists - that there was no genocide, no Stolen Generation, no
racism; indeed, whites are the victims of "liberal racism." A
collection of far-right journalists, minor academics and hangers-on
became the antipodean equivalent of David Irving Holocaust deniers.
Their platform has been the Murdoch press.

Andrew Bolt, columnist on Murdoch's Melbourne Herald-Sun tabloid, is
currently the defendant in a racial vilification case brought by nine
prominent Aborigines, including Larissa Behrendt, a professor of law
and indigenous studies in Sydney. Behrendt has been an authoritative
and outspoken opponent of Howard's 2007 "emergency intervention" in
the Northern Territory, which the Labor government of Julia Gillard
has reinforced. The rationale to "intervene" was that child abuse
among Aborigines was in "unthinkable numbers." This was a fraud. Out
of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, four possible cases
were identified - about the rate of child abuse in white Australia.
What this covered was an old-fashioned colonial grab of mineral-rich
land in the Northern Territory where Aboriginal land rights were
granted in 1976.

The Murdoch press has been the most lurid and vociferous in its
promotion of the "intervention," which a United Nations Special
Rapporteur has condemned for its racial discrimination. Once again,
Australian politicians are dispossessing the first inhabitants,
demanding leasehold of land in return for health and education rights
that whites take for granted, driving them into "economically viable
hubs" where they will be effectively detained - a form of apartheid.

The outrage and despair of most Aboriginal people is not heard. For
using her institutional voice and exposing the government's black
supporters, Behrendt has been subjected to a vicious campaign of
innuendo in the Murdoch press, including the implication that she is
not a "real" Aborigine. Using the language of its soul mate The London
Sun, The Australian derides the "abstract debate" of "land rights,
apologies, treaties" as a "moralizing mumbo-jumbo spreading like a
virus." The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia's dirty
secret.

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