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Making The World A More Dangerous Place: The Eager Role Of Julia Gillard

October 25, 2012 By John Pilger
John Pilger's ZSpace Page / ZSpace


The Australian parliament building reeks of floor polish. The wooden
floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon-like portraits of
prime ministers, bewigged judges and viceroys. Along the gleaming
white, hushed corridors, the walls are hung with Aboriginal art: one
painting after another as in a monolithic gallery, divorced from their
origins, the irony brutal. The poorest, sickest, most incarcerated
people on earth provide a façade for those who oversee the theft of
their land and its plunder.

Australia has 40% of the world’s uranium, all of it on indigenous
land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell
uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a
non-signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant.
Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal
in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long-standing
policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's
obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures
relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to
nuclear disarmament&quo t;.

Like the people of Japan, Australian Aborigines have experienced the
horror of nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, the British government
tested atomic bombs at Maralinga in South Australia. The Aboriginal
population was not consulted and received scant or no warning, and
still suffer the effects. Yami Lester was a boy when he saw the
nuclear flash and subsequently went blind. The enduring struggle of
Aboriginal people for recognition as human beings has been a fight not
only for their land but for what lies beneath it. Since they were
granted a status higher than that of sheep -- up to 1971, unlike the
sheep, they were not counted – many of their modest land rights have
been subvert ed or diminished by governments in Canberra.

In 2007, prime minister John Howard used the army to launch an
"emergency intervention" in Aboriginal communities in the
resource-rich Northern Territory. Lurid and fraudulent stories of
paedophile rings were the cover; indigenous people were told they
would not receive basic services if they did not surrender the
leasehold of their land. Gillard’s minister of indigenous affairs has
since given this the Orwellian title of "Stronger Futures".

The tactics include driving people into “hub towns” and denying decent
housing to those forced to live up to a dozen in one room. The removal
of Aboriginal children has reached the level of the infamous "Stolen
Generation" of the last century. Many may never see their families
again.

Once the “intervention” had got under way, hundreds of licences were
granted to companies exploring for minerals, including uranium.
Contemporary politics in Australia is often defined by the power of
the mining companies. When the previous Labor prime minister, Kevin
Rudd, proposed a tax on record mining profits, he was deposed by a
backroom party cabal, including Gillard, who reduced the tax.
Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks reveal that two of the
plotters against Rudd were informants of the US embassy, which Rudd
had angered by not following to the letter US plans to encircle China
and to release uranium for sale to US clients such as India.

Gillard has since returned Australia to its historic relationship with
Washington, similar to that of an east European satellite of the
Soviet Union. The day before Barack Obama arrived in Canberra last
year to declare China the new enemy of the “free world”, Gillard
announced the end of her party’s ban on uranium sales.

Washington's other post-cold war obsessions demand the services of
Australia. These include the intimidation of Iran and destruction of
that country’s independence, the undermining of the NPT and prevention
of nuclear-free zones that threaten the nuclear-armed dominance of the
US and Israel. Unlike Iran, a founding signatory of the NPT and
supporter of a nuclear-free zone Middle East, the US and Israel ban
independent inspections. And both are currently threatening to attack
Iran which, as the combined agencies of US intelligence confirmed, has
no nuclear weapons.

The necessary inversion of reality and double standard require a
“carefully orchestrated process”, the US embassy is assured by an
Australian official quoted by WikiLeaks. According to the US cables,
there are enthusiastic "Australian ideas" for "dredging up"
information to help discredit Mohamad El Baradei who, as director of
the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 2009, repeatedly
refuted US claims that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. The
Director of the Australian Arms Control office is portrayed as a US
watchdog, warning against "a slippery slope" of governments
"exercising independent judgement" on nuclear matters. A senior
Australian official, one Patrick Suckling, is reporting as telling the
US that “Australia wants the most robust, intrusive and debilitating
sanctions possible” against Iran. Suckling’s victims are today mostly
ordinary men, women and children.

On 5 October, the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance, which includes
Aboriginal groups from across the country, gathered in Alice Springs.
They called for a moratorium on all uranium mining and sales.
Indigenous women made a special plea to Gillard, recently ordained by
the white media as a feminist hero. No response was expected.

On 17 October, all the testaments of obedience and servility to the
mighty patron finally paid off when Australia was rewarded with a
non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, known in Canberra as
“the top table”. The timing is striking. An attack by Nato on Syria or
Iran, or both, has never been closer. A world war beckons as 50 years
are marked since "the world stood still", wrote the historian Sheldon
Stern. This was the 1962 Cuba missile crisis when the US and the
Soviet Union came within an ace of nuclear war. Declassified files
disclose that President John F. Kennedy authorised "NATO aircraft with
Turkish pilots ... to take off for Moscow and drop a b omb."

The echo today could not be clearer.

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From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/making-the-world-a-more-dangerous-place-the-eager-role-of-julia-gillard-by-john-pilger