Abbott Did Not Offer Wilkie $1 Billion For The Royal Hobart Hospital

Since the election of the minority Gillard Government in 2010, LNP-friendly commentators have continually attempted to smear and intimidate the Independent MPs (Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakshott, Tony Windsor) providing support to the ALP. In this way they hope to discredit the Independents in the eyes of their electorates and so aim to scare the Independents into withdrawing their support from Gillard.

One skein of this campaign of mud-slinging has been to claim that Wilkie asked Abbott for $1 Billion for the Hobart hospital but that Wilkie then rejected Abbott’s agreement to the offer once forthcoming, so that Wilkie might be seen as a trickster, liar or bad-faith negotiator who never seriously engaged with Abbott in the minority government negotiations. An alternative form of the same traducement of Wilkie claims that Wilkie asked for a Billion dollars then feigned shock and disgust at Abbott’s profligacy when receiving that very offer.

Gerard Henderson, in uncharacteristically lazy form, recently gave this Hobby Horse another whirl in his SMH article, Gillard the Ace Negotiator Deals Labor into trouble Again.

Following Wilkie’s appearance on Q&A, ‘Live From Hobart’ on 2 April 2012, Henderson wrote:

It seems clear Gillard never needed to do a deal with Wilkie in the first place. On the Q&A program on April 2, the Liberal Party leader in the Senate, Eric Abetz, put it to Wilkie that, in the negotiations concerning the formation of a government, he asked Abbott for $1 billion to revamp the Hobart General Hospital. Abetz added that when Abbott agreed to the proposal, Wilkie rejected his offer. The allegation was not denied. This is further evidence that Wilkie was always going to back Gillard over Abbott.

Contrary to Henderson’s assertion that Wikie did not deny receiving a Billion dollar offer from Abbott, Wilkie quite plainly said that Abbott effectively offered him nothing. Wilkie said that Abbott’s offer of $1 billion was conditional on the Tasmanian government providing a matching $600 million, which the Tasmanian government didn’t have. So effectively Abbott did not offer one cent.

Wilkie reports:

If I had accepted the $1 billion from Tony Abbott, we would have ended up getting nothing because it would have relied on the Tasmanian State Government contributing 0.6 of a billion dollars to finish the job and we now know the Tasmanian State Government doesn’t have two bob to rub between its fingers, let alone $600 million.

The salient part again:

If I had accepted the $1 billion from Tony Abbott, we would have ended up getting nothing

Wilkie contrasted Abbott’s non-offer with the far more sensible and credible offer from Gillard which was unconditional apart from boilerplate funding governance provisions.

the sorts of commitments [Gillard] could make, they certainly were more credible and I had more confidence they would be delivered. For example, she offered $340 million towards the rebuilding of the Royal Hobart Hospital..

Credibility

Wikie’s reference to ‘credibility’ is important. Wilkie, along with the other Independents, had received Treasury advice that Abbott’s budget costings were in deficit by approximately $9 Billion. Abbott had told Wilkie that the hospital revamp would be paid for out of the supposed ‘budget savings’ listed in those costings. Since Treasury had determined those ‘savings’ were non-existent. Abbott’s offer was unfunded.

Here is Andrew Robb on Lateline, 2nd September 2010, soon after minority government talks had concluded in late August, stating that the Hospital revamp would be paid for from those non-existent savings:

TONY JONES: So where exactly was the money, the $1 billion was going to come from? You say it was going to come from savings, but of course they are under threat from Treasury, saying you have a $7-11 billion black hole?

ANDREW ROBB: That hospital, and in fact any concessions that we seek to make to the various independents who are considering who they would join to make up a government, all of those would be paid out of savings that we have identified through this budget process.

To summarize thus far: Abbott’s offer of $1 Billion for the Royal Hobart Hospital revamp was not a credible offer because it was:

1) Conditional on a known impossibility (Tasmania providing a matching $600 million)
2) Unfunded.

Since Abbott’s offer was not credible it amounts to a non-offer.

Lazy

It is unusual for Henderson to be so lazy with the facts and to be so overt with his misrepresentation of Wilkie. Henderson is by no means beyond misrepresenting his opponents but he usually does so in a much more crafty way, as in his comments on the Balibo Five and the Australian film Balibo.

But here, Henderson simply asserts that Wilkie did not deny on Q&A that Abbott offered him $1 Billion, whereas Wilkie actually said that Abbott’s offer was not credible and amounted to a non-offer.

Wilkie has portrayed Abbott as reckless, even desperate, in his willingness to throw money and other inducements at the Independents in order to secure government, a charge which is supported by Tony Windsor and even inadvertently by those inicimal to Wilkie (See Abbott’s additional offer of a Sports Centre in Wiklie’s electorate of Denison in ‘Hospital sting leaves Coalition nursing wounds’, by Tony Wright in the SMH.

Did Wilkie Ask For It ?

A key plank in the alternative accusation that Wilkie was trying to trick or trap Abbott was that it was he, Wilkie, who asked for the Billion and not true that Abbott offerred the Billion unilaterally as a means of bribing or pork-barrelling Wilkie into supporting the Coalition.

Unfortunately for the Wilkie-smearers in the commentariat, Andrew Robb, the LNP Finance spokesman detailed the Abbott-Wilkie negotiations on Lateline 2nd September 2010. Robb makes it plain that while Wilkie indeed sought funds for a new hospital he merely stated that the cost of such a hospital could be up to a Billion dollars. Wilkie did not ask for a Billion dollars. He was asking for a contribution towards that amount. Abbott decided to provide a blank cheque for the whole amount for the purposes of electoral bribery. From the transcript Andrew Robb states how Wilkie described the project and total cost…

Andrew Robb: It was Andrew Wilkie who said to Tony Abbott, ‘we need a new hospital. The State has not got any money and we could need up to $1 billion to produce that hospital’ and then he proceeded to provide all the arguments why it should be spent there as a priority and not elsewhere in Australia.

..and then Robb goes on to describe how Abbott took the decision to offer the $1 Billion:

TONY JONES: So you’re saying the $1 billion figure came from him and you just accepted it as face value did you, is that how it worked?

ANDREW ROBB: We said up to $1 billion so, obviously…

TONY JONES: So you said, ‘well, you can have a billion in that case’?

ANDREW ROBB: No, we said, we said that whatever it costs, up to a billion dollars.

Later in the same interview Robb again confirm that the Coalition tabled the $1 Billion:

TONY JONES: there is every possibility evidently. Does that offer of the $1 billion for the Hobart hospital remain on the table? I mean is that a commitment you’ve actually made to the people of Hobart, or is it just a bargaining chip for an independent?

ANDREW ROBB: No, that was a decision that we took to put on the table win or lose, win or lose office.

From Robb’s Mouth

From Robb’s mouth then:

Wilkie said ‘we could need up to $1 Billion’
The Coalition: ‘that was a decision that we took to put [$1 Billion] on the table’

Describing the cost of a project is not the same thing, no matter Robb or Abetz’s protestations, as a demand for funding for the full amount.

Nowhere did Wilkie say ‘I want a Billion dollars’. Nor did he expect an offer of a Billion dollars. He was asking for a Commonwealth contribution, not the blank cheque produced by the Coalition. He was shocked and disgusted at Abbott’s profligacy and naked bribery, especially in the context of Abbott’s fraudulent ‘budget’ spreadsheet which was contained a $7 Billion to $11 Billion black hole. Clearly, Abbott was not a person who could be trusted to produce honourable financial commitments. And the supposed $1 Billion offer was based on conditions that Abbott knew were impossible for Tasmania to fulfill.

Abbott offered nothing to Wilkie. Hence he was rejected.

Abbott perhaps misread Wilkie’s description of the cost of the revamp as a request for the whole amount whereas Gillard understood Wilkie was just asking’ for a contribution. As Wilkie said on Q&A:

[Gillard] read her interlocutors, I think, much more effectively

As for Henderson, he has wilfully or lazily misprespresented Wilkie in a manner not consonant with his usual standards. I would guess that Henderson is so confident of an LNP victory he no longer feels the need to honour facts when discussing those not in his camp.

Double-Checking

I asked Gerard Henderson for his comments on the above and was somewhat shocked by the calibre of his reply. Henderson says Wilkie did demand the $1 Billion because senior Liberals told him Wilkie did (Argument By Name-Dropping).

He said that I had no grounds to adjudge the credibility of Abbott’s offer, so therefore if Abbott says his offer is credible then it is (Argument From Faith In Speaker). Of course, in coming to a view on the credibility of Abbott’s hospital offer I, like Wilkie, relied on the objectivity of Treasury and their costings. Henderson, showing straight-forward bias, simply elides Treasury costings from the discussion in order to establish incomplete grounds for evaluation of Abbott’s offer.

Henderson also elides Robb’s Lateline interview of 2nd September 2010 on the ludicrous basis that Robb’s comments were made after the minority government negotiations were completed in late August. This is simply dismissal of contrary evidence i.e. bias.

Finally Henderson said that since Wilkie had not objected to his article then Wilkie must agree with it which is Argument From Silence.

Frankly I expect better from our public intellectuals than that.

Can The Coalition’s Collection Of Circus Freaks Prevent A LNP Victory In 2013 ?

I was watching Q&A’s pollie-heavy edition “The Queensland Election” this week, hopeful for a illuminating stoush about the Queensland election result. Question 1 was put “Now that Labor has effectively been killed in Queensland, is it possible for the party to survive off the rest of the country?” and the panel rotated to Graham Morris, ex-Howard campaign manager.

Now Morris, through no fault of his own, looks and sounds like a 250 year old Goblin who has just sculled a quart of Claret. Morris’s answer, produced below, was several times interrupted with loud laughter from the studio audience as his comically bug-eyed delivery and the hysterically inbred stereotypes of his content, contrasted so pointedly with the refreshing normality and appeal of the Green’s Senator, Larissa Waters, two seats away, whose party and leader, Bob Brown, constituted the point of Morris’s attack.

Morris said:

The labour, L-A-B-O-U-R, vote and support has just collapsed. It is down under 30 per cent, which means in everywhere from here on in they’re going to have to rely on the Greens and that is really hard. You know, how do you tell a truck driver that he’s got to get into bed with some of Bob Brown’s supporters. How do you tell a brickie’s labourers…

CRAIG EMERSON: I’m going to leave it alone.

LARISSA WATERS: Yeah, I’m not touching it either.

GRAHAME MORRIS: How do you tell a brickie’s labourer that, you know, some tree frog is more important than his family’s jobs.

Morris was oblivious that it was in fact the Green, Ms. Waters, who looked and sounded rational and appealing, while he looked and sounded like a bigoted circus freak forcefully defending the necessity of using children to sweep chimneys.

The above effect was replicated by George Brandeis’ extended impersonation of a vampire cousin of Dr. Evil while sitting next to the articulate and fresh Liberty Sanger, descibed as a ‘Labor Lawyer’. She is married to Victorian Labor Senator David Feeney.

Which got me thinking about Clive Palmer’s hideously less-than-magnaminous victory spew to the media on Qld election night, which the Courier Mail described, accurately, as ‘an almost hysterical rant’.

Palmer himself, due to years of self-indulgence, now has the appearance of a besuited and overflowing sack of onions, stretched to the point of explosion, and his heart-felt response to the question ‘Has the LNP won too many seats ?’ was

No. We should get the lot.

…surely a concise expression of his personal ideology, with We replaced by I.

Palmer’s graceless and self-indulgent behaviour added ‘unashamed greed’ to a public face already shaded in as ‘several screws loose’ after his assertions that the Australian Greens were funded by the CIA, a statement which he has lately admitted was invented with the intention of transient political (which for Palmer means ‘personal’) gain. So let’s add ‘opportunistic liar’ to that list.

Palmer and Morris are key Lib/Nat operatives. Palmer is their No.1 donor and Morris is a senior strategist. Their behaviour and/or appearance and/or attitudes are light-years from that of your normal Aussie. I hope that both will spend much more time in public commenting as loudly as possible as they display a heart of the Coalition which is alternately rotten (Palmer) and bizarre (Palmer and Morris).

Nick Minchin must be chewing through his mobile credit trying to get Palmer to shut up and leave the talking-to-the-public to those trained in its art like himself and Abbott. But Palmer, a man of enormity in ego, size and wealth has developed a taste for public interaction. His 2010/11 advertising campaign over the Mining Tax crippled the ALP and he now apparently believes his Green-CIA-Link Horror was an adroit and subtle manouver which rescued the LNP from disconcerting pressure. Palmer is not so easy to sit down or shut up. Minchin will have to convince him money is at stake.

Great! Let’s hear more from Palmer. With any luck he’ll cost the LNP about 20 seats at the next Federal Election.

And finally, there’s Gina Rineheart. Well, she’s a female version of Palmer. Though not boorish, she’s just as greedy, just as self-obsessed and just like Palmer, titillated by the success of the mining tax campaign and enervated to see more of herself on the teev. And everywhere else. Hence at the macro level she’s bought a big stake in Fairfax and Channel 10 including a position on its board, and at the micro-level she’s started depositing her personal manifesto in public space.

In behaviour which can only appear normal to a gazillionaire buffoon, Ms. Rhinheart installed a poem of her own devising on a plaque on a boulder in a Perth street. Its not the poem-on-a-plaque itself which is weird, but the content of that poem which called for Australia to establish special economic zones to facilitate minerals export (I kid you not – in a poem) and Palmer-like, excoriated ‘political hacks’, no prizes or guessing who. The intriguing blog ‘The Worst Of Perth’ has pictures of the boulder and plaque including readable images of the poem and a serious artistic review of Gina’s muse.

Like Morris in his obliviously self-targeted critique and Palmer in his ‘almost hysterical rants’, Gina’s main target is the treacherous – yet though they know not, much more normal than them – Greens. In feminine type, Gina’s attack on the Greens is much more oblique and subtle than Clive’s, as it uses a typically inner-city Green mode of communication, public art, to convey her message. But there is something chilling about Rineheart’s excursion into Greensville. And it is this:

Rineheart’s poem and boulder, like the Dome Of The Rock on the Jerusalem Temple Mount colonizes a precinct previously belonging to others, does so with grandiose and profane boasts, and proclaims victory over lesser and conquered faiths.

It is the victory monument of the Jihadist.

I only hope that Gina’s Jihadic rants via Fairfax and Channel 10, like those of Clive who comports himself as fetchingly as Russ Hinze psychically controlled by Sir Les Patterson, will be repeated continuously and in such conspicuously poor taste as her boulder poetry so that the voting public can get a good ear-, eye- and gutful of the intellectual freakery which drives the Liberal and National Parties.

So, here’s hoping the coalition’s collection of circus freaks can prevent a LNP victory in 2013. Graham, Clive and Gina, over to you.

Rudd Gives Caucus Three Days To Recant

Rudd is a narcissist. He is quite willing to destroy the ALP for what it did to him. Using thermo-nuclear weapons. Except it would make his hair-do untidy.

Of course Rudd did attempt to destroy the ALP in 2010. All this kerfuffle of past months is merely his second attempt. He would have stopped if Swan, Arbib etc had come to him grovelling for mercy, but they didn’t, so they must die.

After months of steadily calibrated destabilisation but still not in receipt of grovelling apology from the Factional creeps who shamed him, Rudd has finally recognising he will never have the numbers to defeat Gillard in a spill.

Consequently Rudd is now forced into suicide bomber mode. Like Sampson, Rudd is going to pull down the entire temple in order to defeat the Philistines.

Suicide Bomber

Rudd has resigned because he got wind that JG is calling the spill. He will lose the ballot and then resign from the ALP and become an Independent. He will then selectively vote against ALP bills thus causing Wilkie or Windsor to support a Coalition no-confidence motion hence early election hence Abbott => PM.

As Islam give apostates three days to recant or be beheaded, so Rudd has told his party that he, Rudd, is the only one who can defeat Abbott. That message has until Monday to be understood by the party room. Last chance to grovel, guys and girls… or else.

Shreds Of Reason

Rudd as Independent is Scenario A. I think it has complete concordance with Rudd’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder and would be his preferred mode of operation.

However, shreds of reason may still exist in the Ruddean cortex in which case he may opt for Scenario B, resign from his seat and force a by-election which the ALP will lose and reduce their parliamentary working majority to on, as it was prior to Slipper becoming speaker. I would estimate this Scenario B as unlikely as it removes Rudd from the public eye, which he would loathe, and does not guarantee defeat of Gillard/Factional creeps.

Hence, more likely if those shreds of reason still function is Scenario C in which Rudd remains on the backbench after losing the leadership ballot, then pontificates loudly and at length on Gillard’s deficiencies from within parliament, thus gaining maximum exposure and continuing to poison the well of the ALP’s electoral fortunes.

Thus detroying them, natch.

Understanding Andrew Bolt

Andrew Bolt is an intelligent, sensitive and highly informed
columnist. Many of his articles are meticulously researched and rich in detail.

They are also designed to delberately misinform his readers.

It takes an especially perverse mind to devote a career to concealing truth. In this short post I will offer an explanation as to why Mr. Bolt is so dedicated to misinforming his readership.

In my view there are three motivating forces behind Bolt’s systematic and deliberate dedication to obscuring truth:

1) His dedication to a higher cause, namely the protection
of decent society from the Green movement, which Bolt believes wishes to enact a totalitarian Communist anti-human One World Government

2) His assimilation and adoption of systematic deception and
propagandist techniques learnt while an employee of Graham Richardson
in the infamous ANiMaLs section of the ALP.

3) His personal emotional and psychological history as a victim
of bullying.

Bolt The Animal.

As is now more widely known, Bolt had two periods of employment working for the ALP including the infamous aNiMalS or National Media Liason Unit, sometimes described as the ALP’s ‘fearsome attack machine’.

It was during those engagements Bolt was first exposed to – and soon intoxicated by – the journalistic dirty tricks, disinformation and propaganga tactics employed by professional political parties.

Bolt immensely enjoyed these jobs working inside the soulless ‘whatever it takes’ political machine created by Graham Richardson and has ever since dedicated his own efforts as Richardson did, to the achievement of political goals irrespective of truth.

Revealingly, Bolt describes an emotional satisfaction and moral justification in defeating one’s enemies through lies and distortion.

Says Bolt:

“It was just really intoxicating and it was the first time I got that real buzz you get from politics which is really dangerous.

You know, that space where you’re so convinced that your side is right and
in those conditions the other side is immoral and therefore you’re excused
all sorts of things.

You start thinking:
“they’re immoral so why should you be nice to them? Why should you follow all the rules?’’’

Spin

Because Bolt has a personal and moral commitment to distortion, because Bolt’s primary mode of opertion is to distort the arguments of his opponents, then naturally he sees distortion (a.k.a. ‘spin’ in the propaganda/marketing
speak of the well trained aNiMaL) in all the utterances of his opponents.

A search for the word ‘spin’ on Bolt’s own Herald-Sun Blog finds many hits, not merely in the copy of his Blog posts but in the very titles. Spin is constantly uppermost in Bolt’s mind; he therefore decorates his Blog journalism with the name of his god.

Ergo:

Calculating ABC spin May 22, 2008
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/calculating_abc_spin

How the Age drowned its readers in spin
blogs.news.com.au/…/index…/how_the_age_drowned_its_readers_in_spin/

G20 spin unspun 31 Mar 2009
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/g20_spin_unspun/

Big boat comes in to spoil Gillard’s spin 20 Jul 2010 …
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…/big_boat_comes_in_to_spoil_gillards_spin/

Spin overboard 21 Oct 2009
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/spin_overboard1/

How will Garrett spin this? 4 May 2009
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/…/how_will_garrett_spin_this/

The lie in Gillard’s population spin 23 Jul 2010
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/…/column3/

Smith demands better spin doctors to hide the kind of damage he’s …17 Apr 2011 blogs.news.com.au/…/smith_demands_more_spin_merchants_to_clean_up_his_mess

Tanner unleashes on Gillard and Rudd’s spin .24 Apr 2011
blogs.news.com.au/…php/…/tanner_unleashes_on_gillard_and_rudds_spin/

The essence of spin 30 May 2008
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/the_essence_of_spin/

Tanner spins Labor’s obsession with spin May 2011
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…/tanner_spins_labors_obsession_with_spin

Rudd gets 1000 to help him spin Feb 2008
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…php/…/rudd_gets_1000_to_help_him_spin/

Rudd’s spin unspun
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/rudds_spin_unspun/

Another leak exposes Gillard’s spin 2 Aug 2010
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…php/…/another_leak_exposes_gillards_spin/

So much spin 21 Mar 2011 .
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/so_much_spin

Rudd spin makes Ferguson ill
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…/rudd_spin_makes_ferguson_throw_up/

Ellis on Gillard’s cold spin 19 Dec 2010
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…/index…/ellis_on_gillards_cold_spin/

How Rudd’s spiders spin 17 May 2008
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index…/how_rudds_spiders_spin/

Rudd can’t say “billion”, Oakes can’t say “spin” 30 May 2009
blogs.news.com.au/…/index…/rudd_cant_say_billion_oakes_cant_say_spin/

New spin needed
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/new_spin_needed/

Let the part tell the whole. Spin is an instrinsic and instinctive part of Bolt’s thinking and modus operandi; He is continuously producing it, continuously ascribing it to his opponents and continuously genuflecting to it in his Blog Post titles. Spin simply pours out of Bolt.

As a wise man once said “From the overflow of his heart, so a man speaks”;
or more prosiacally “The fox detects his own stink first”.

Bolt’s treasure is spin. His mind and heart therefore continually attend it.

Higher Truth

Bolt is a moral man. His dedication to distortion is justified because it serves a higher truth; namely the salavation of Australia from TEH LEFT and most particularly The Greens.

Bolt is an Independent Advisor to the hilariously misnamed “Galileo Movement”, an AGW denialist group whose patron is the spittle-flecked Alan Jones.

The Galileo Movement’s semi-rational manifesto has five planks of which four (by discarding ‘protect the environment’) can be taken seriously and two of which reveal the slightly nutty character of the typical One World Government conspiracist.

These latter two are:

- Protect freedom – personal choice and national sovereignty;
- Protect people’s emotional health by ending Government and activists’ constant destructive bombardment of fear and guilt on our kids and communities.

The reference to ‘national sovereignty’ is a dog-whistle for ‘escape the clutches of the evil United Nations and IPCC’ while the second is the polemical paranoic utterance of persons too much acquainted with Ayn Rand and Frederick Hayek, where dwell the modern under-read Libertarians, Cold War dinosaurs and careerist, knee-jerk reactionary anti-Leftists (Bolt is in this category) for which revilement of TEH LEFT and GREENS is as merely automatic and as reasoned as the tribal hatreds bedevilling suburban football fans.

A quick Google for ‘Fear Guilt Left’ on Bolt’s Blog easily shows how Bolt shares with the Galileo Movement the nuttiest fifth plank of its manifesto, while reading his posts on The Greens (e.g the Hamilton one below) soon show that he considers them innately totalitarian in agreement with the polemic associated with the Galileo Movement’s first plank.

The posts also contain elucidations of various other anti-left/Green memes including

- How the Left (surely typified by the Greens) encourage disprespect for
institutions and engender societal sickness and therefore violence and thus are
seeking its ultimate collapse (in order to institute a totalitarian
Communist Green dictatorship);
- Are rampantly hypocritical and morally sick.
- Are Anti-Human
- Poison the minds of children

Here’s “Fear Guilt Left” from Bolt’s Blog

Hamilton stands for Greens – and for fear and less democracy …23 Oct 2009 .
blogs.news.com.au/…/hamilton_stands_for_the_grees_and_for_fear_and_less_democracy/

Attacking what they no longer respect or fear 14 Feb 2011
blogs.news.com.au/…/attacking_what_they_no_longer_respect_or_fear

The Left vs Israel 9 Aug 2006 ..
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/the_left_vs_israel

The ABC of spreading baseless fear 4 Aug 2008
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…of…fear/…/P20/

Better left unsaid | 12 Aug 2009 .
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…better_left…/P20/

This “good” racism of the Left is killing black children .9 Nov 2010

Bullies of the Left 3 Sep 2007
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…of…left/asc/P20/

Save the planet! Hurt people! 14 Mar 2009
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/…/save_the_planet_hurt_people

Earth Hour bores 28 Mar 2010 … Messing with children’s minds
by installing a sense of guilt and fear over …. From
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/…/earth_hour_bores

This is the real Australia 1 Jul 2011 … As someone so aptly said today,
‘white guilt is heroin for the left’.
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index…/this_is_the_real_australia

Why David Marr dances 9 Nov 2010 …
Guilt and fear were instilled in young people from an early age. … Marr is an act, this ultra left, ultra permissive, contrarian view on every …
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index…/why_david_marr_dances/

Arnie gases on about “sexy” greens 13 Apr 2007 …
You know the kind of guilt I’m talking about: Smokestacks belching pollution and …
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/…php/…/arnie_gases_on_about_sexy_greens/

This is why Bolt has no compunction about misrepresenting his enemies. Bolt’s enemies are evil. They do not deserve truth or fair play. They deserve only defeat and preferably destruction.

To reprise Bolt’s own words about his experience as a political apparatchik:

“You know that space where you’re so convinced that your side is right and
in those conditions the other side is immoral and therefore you’re excused
all sorts of things.”

Bolt joyously inhabits that dangerous space. In fact, the article in which he made those statements is, in my view, a confessional. Bolt is telling the world that truth is irrelevant to him because his enemies do not deserve it.

Revenge Of The Nerd.

Bolt has an extremely poor self image and was an outsider at school,
an experience he did not enjoy.

This explains his constant projection of victimhood, his hurt at people
apparently trying to victimize or silence him for no good reason apart from their innate bullying or their own farcical self-confidence at being part of the
brainless clique/mob of conformists/insiders.

Maybe at times Bolt was derided or the victim of name-calling or other anti-social acts directed at he, Bolt, the quiet, shy Dutch boy not fiting in.

Bolt’s first published piece was a poem he wrote at 13 years of age about
his abhorrence at bullies and at becoming a bully himself in order to fit in.

Bolt’s sense of victimhood is eternally fresh. Always present, it has been
conspicuosuly on display somewhat pathetically twice. Once when Bolt asserted
that he was in physical danger of mob violence agitated by an obscure (but brilliant) political blog, and most recently when whinging and moaning at his finding of guilt by the Federal Court of Australia for Racial Discrimination.

David Marr succintly skewers Bolt’s nonsense here. detailing how Bolt simply ignored inconvenient facts while penning the articles which led to his conviction

Robert Manne here notes the side-splitting insanity of Bolt who has a newspaper column and a blog in a wide-circulation national newspaper, his own TV program and a regular Melbourne radio slot claiming that his views are muzzled and that being held accountablee for untrue and racially-based slurs is an unfair prohibition on his free speech.

David Penderbethy here describes the embarrassment his colleague, Bolt, embodies to serious journalists and journalism ans also notes the imbecility of Bolt’s claims to be silenced or otherwise victimized.

I see Bolt’s articles and certainly his persona as strongly informed
by those boyhood experiences. The ‘mob’ is transmuted into his poltical enemies, The left/Greens, but now the power relationships are inverted.
Bolt has freedom to excoriate ‘the mob’ protected by the financial resources
of his attack dog newspaper, and as his boyhood poem prophetically stated,
Bolt has become the attack dog and bully himself.

The well-spring of Bolt’s rage, as all emotional hurts are, is inexhaustible.
As an adult Bolt is now able to channel that rage into excoriating the left/Greens dressing it in the fig leaf of moral justification since the Greens themselves are irredeemably evil and therefore deserve it.

Bolt’s articles are the revenge of the hurt boy.

Bolt’s Fundamental Motivation

So, in the end, what motivates Bolt ? To answer to this question I believe one must look to where Bolt expends most energy: Aboriginal Affairs and Climate Change.

Bolt came to prominence as a Poison Pen for the Right on the back of the ‘Stolen Generations’ issue which was the centrepiece of the ‘History Wars’ in Australian Politics from 1996-2007.

Bolt engaged in an extended public debate with one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, Robert Manne, over the Stolen Generations. The question is why would Bolt bother to expend such energy on this particular issue ? That question has added salience now that Bolt has been found guilty of Racial Discrimination by accusing nine prominent part-Aboriginal Australians of falsely claiming or duplicitously emphasizing their Aboriginal heritage merely for financial benefit. What is it about Aboriginal issues that engages Bolt to such a degree ? Why does this issue in particular motivate him to write with such passion ?

Bolt gave a significant clue in an article of his ‘Why I Wont Change’ which appeared in the Herald-Sun in Feb. 2004.

In the article Bolt cites a plea for help from a Year 12 student seeking accurate information about the Stolen Generations. The student sent Bolt a Stolen Generations ‘Fact Sheet’ supplied by the school which Bolt typifies as full of ‘luxurious falsehoods’ and says:

I admire that girl for already knowing that what matters is that she first be told the truth, before she’s taught what to feel about it. I admire her for demanding the right to exercise her own conscience, rather than mimic her teacher’s. How can we tell lies to such a young woman — however noble our motives — and have such contempt for her perception, her reasoning and her moral sense?

So Bolt claims his motivation is the defence of the minds of Australia’s youth from the fear/guilt propaganda inflicted on them by TEH LEFT via the education system. i.e. Bolt is standing up for the fifth plank of the Galileo Movement manifesto:

Protect people’s emotional health by ending Government and activists’ constant destructive bombardment of fear and guilt on our kids and communities

.

For Bolt, the Stolen Generations history is a myth invented by the Left to poison the minds of children, presumably to engender mistrust in our institutions in order to foment leftist revolution.

Ironically, of course, the Stolen Generations is a true history; but like former Prime Minister John Howard, Bolt prefers the received myth of Australia’s white settlement, that it was concluded largely without violence and without racism expect for some limited and unfortunate mistakes made only in the best interests of Aboriginal persons by those trying their best at the time.

Bolt styles himself as a truth crusader. On Aboriginal issues, however, he is in reality a myth crusader. His recent conviction for Racial Discrimination has bought out that Bolt ignored facts inconvenient to him when compiling his dossier on prominent Australian ‘false Aboriginals’. His previous conviction, for Defamation in 2002 also showed that Bolt ignored facts known to him when writing an article containing defamatory untruths regarding Magistrate Jelena Popovic. Simply, Bolt prefers myth to fact and falsehood to truth as he serves his Higher Truth.

As Emile Durkheim noted, the function of myth is to validate, explain and preserve an established belief or authority system.

The question then becomes ‘what Higher Truth is Bolt serving’.

I submit that Bolt’s Higher Truth is the salvation of Australia from Leftists and Greens. The battle is fought on ideas. Therefore no Leftist idea, Stolen Generations or otherwise, must be allowed to survive. Leftists ideas must be defeated and, as Bolt learned as an aNiMaL, truth is the first casualty of this war. Lies must be mobilized to preserve truth. The minds of Australian youth must be fortified with good Right-wing lies in order that evil left-wing lies be defeated.

In short Bolt has adapted a Vietnam War dictum: The minds of Australians must be destroyed in order to save them.

The Utility Of Andrew Bolt

Bolt is allowed his privileged safe haven at the Herald-Sun because he serves the interests of power. His strident and duplicitous vocalisation of anti-Left, anti-Green propaganda buttressed by his sneakily adduced statistics provides a superficially authoritative denunciation of the Left/Green perspective.

Bolt’s passionate advocacy provides a pseudo-intellectual justification for the rejection of progressive reforms and entrenchment of the privileged status quo.

Bolt is a useful tool for entrenched privilege. So the Herald-Sun is prepared to pay well to keep Bolt’s megaphone open. Which is why the Herald-Sun is gritting its wallet to pay Bolt’s legal fees and keep Bolt’s misogynistic, homophobic, counter-factual and anti-scientific diatribe page open…for business.

Mandatory Detention: $664,285 Per Person

With the release of the recent Australian Federal Budget (2011) comes a chance to examine just how much Australia’s policy of Mandatory Detention really costs.

Answer: $664,285 per asylum-seeker.

Here’s The Figuring

Numbers
2009: 2750 asylum seekers by boat
2010: 6800 asylum seekers by boat
2011: trending towards 2800 asylum seekers by boat.

Costs:
Offshore Asylum Seeker Management $1.06 billion
Onshore Immigration Detention $800 million
Total $1.86 bn

Acceptance Rate: 85%

So at 2800 asylum seekers this year it costs $664,285 per asylum seeker to pick through all the pieces to discover that they are in fact legally entitled to be here.

Put another way to detect one non-entitled asylum seeker costs about $4.4 million.

Is that really an effective cost-benefit ratio ?

I’d sooner be spending that loot an something else like funding the CSIRO or Health or anything else worthwhile.

Based on the above figures I have come around to the Greens thinking of abandoning Mandatory Detention and instead setting up a policing system similar to what we use for those on parole.

Safe

Despite the Coalition nutcasery about criminal asylum seekers there are almost NO criminals amongst those seeking asylum in Australia. In 2000, 13,000 people sought asylum in Australia. Just 11 failed the Character Test i.e 0.08%. (see the link to ‘Debinking The Myths’ from the Edmund Rice Centre at the bottom of the linked page)

Applying that percentage to the projected 2800 boat arrivals expected in 2011, gives a grand total of 3 “criminals” (rounded up) at a cost of $620 million per criminal.

Its not worth it.

But since this issue is opposed merely on emotional and xenophobic grounds, mostly fear of having our standard of living reduced and fear of cultural hijack then many of those opposing would pay any price for the defence of their emotional security. $620 million per criminal, for those, is money well spent.

Eyeless In Balibo

Getting Acquainted With Balibo

Around the time of the release of the film Balibo I read Gerard Henderson’s review of that film, Hindsight Has Not Cleared The Vision Of An Atrocity. At the time I felt Henderson’s review was a useful corrective to the more romantic viewpoints on the deaths of the six journalists executed by the Indonesions in Balibo and Dili.

Recently I saw Balibo for myself and did a bit of reading about events associated with the invasion. I now see Henderson’s article rather differently.

Henderson’s article is a morass of willing distortions, misrepresentations and obfuscations. It amounts to an abuse of his position as a public intellectual. At every turn Henderson aims to deflect criticism from Indonesia and Australia and heap it on the journalists and Fretilin.

My question to Henderson: ‘Why ?’

Henderson’s Corrective

Henderson views Balibo as a fictional account of events serving a Marxist or generalized romantic Leftist view of the invasion and subsequent killing of the journalists, which has the effect of undermining confidence in Australian Government and politicians. He sees it as historically inaccurate and selective in its presentation.

Never Too Busy For A Culture War

Henderson says that the public broadcasters ABC and SBS are willingly complicit in the distribution of the Marxist Romantic Fiction which is Balibo and that their culpability in the undermining of Australia’s political institutions is enlarged by the fact that they are taxpayer funded.

It’s an irony that much of the alienation evident in the public debate in Australia is funded by taxpayers and finds expression on the public broadcasters ABC and SBS, within universities and on stage and screen. The latest example of this genre is Robert Connolly’s film Balibo…

The particular facts of historical omission or emphasis that Henderson cites are:

• Portugal is not criticised for abandoning East Timor, its then colony, to the fate of invasion i.e. Australia and Indonesia alone are held to blame for the invasion and its aftermath
• Whitlam is excoriated for complicity and “no alternative view is heard”, presumably that Whitlam acted with a mature grasp of geo-political reality, or his policy, though with regrettable consequences, was in Australia’s best interests, or that he could have done nothing else except comply with the Indonesion desire to invade.
• Fretilin contributed to the invasion, or its severity, by willingly allowing itself to be portrayed as Communist because it wanted to be known in that way.
  and by uniltarally declaring independence. These points are, superficially at least, supported by quotes from Jose Ramos-Horta himself.
• Fretilin itself committed atrocities during the civil war. This is admitted by Ramos-Horta.
• Fretilin was pro-communist
• The journalists themselves bear responsibility for their deaths by choosing to go to Balibo and by painting a Fretilin flag on the interior of their living quarters in Balibo. If they didn’t go they wouldn’t have got killed.
• Greg Shackleton, the dominant personality amongst the reporters, possibly exhibited suicidal tendencies as manifested by his determination to go to Balibo, so he may have semi-consciously wanted to get killed anyway.

Henderson concurs that “There is no doubt that six Australian journalists were brutally killed”, but concludes on the basis of the above, that Balibo does not tell a truth, i.e. it is fiction.

At First Sight

Yep, seems mostly fair, I thought on first reading that.

Portugal shouldn’t be let off the hook, the journalists willingly put themselves in danger and a Fretilin flag on their wall would have enraged the Indonesians. Yes, there was a cover-up, but let’s not get dewy eyed about the Balibo Five.

That’s one of the thinks I like about Henderson. His ability to critique and research does have a way of pricking the balloon of the Left sometimes.

Let’s Get This Out
So the other week, the wife and I are down at the Video Shop. She picks up Balibo. ‘Let’s get this out’, she says. ‘Sure. Why not’.

What’s It Like ?

Balibo is a beautiful film. Its shot in an understated way and the dialogue is very natural. The story unfolds, it is not forced down your throat, and when the invasion comes, the restrained depictions of the Indonesian atrocities actually makes them more moving, more powerful. The performances are believable, LaPaglia is very good as Roger East, and the reporters behave like reporters. The overall depiction is as believable and natural as watching your next door neighbour pull out of his driveway and go to work in the morning. Practically suburban in its non-intrusive documentary feel.

Only the Jose Ramos-Horta character has a slightly unreal feeling. It was only he that I experienced as being ‘acted’ but the relationships between him and the other Timorese characters are well done, again very natural and restrained; no hero worship, or Yes, your noble highness, Sir. Just a very natural respect without obsequiousness.

Blame

Henderson is wrong at the most fundamental level of his criticism. Contra Henderson, Balibo does not blame only Australia and Indonesia and specifically Balibo does apportion blame to Portugal.

In a scene about two-thirds of the way through the movie a Fretilin soldier asks Shackleton ‘Why doesn’t Portugal help us ?’ . That question is then repeated by the Shackleton character in the film as he files Shackleton’s last report, the actual text of which is included verbatim in the script.

Why, they ask are the Australians not helping us?
When the Japanese invaded they did help us?
Why, they ask are the Portuguese not helping us, we’re still a Portuguese colony
Who, they ask will pay for the terrible damage to our homes

Green Lights

In addition the film specifically names the USA as green-lighting the invasion (as Australia did) and supplying the Indonesians with weapons (including helicopters) and Britain for supplying the money with which Indonesia bought the helicopters.

The film could have said, but did not, that Suharto’s decision to invade East Timor was only made once Whitlam had assured him that Australia would offer no objection:

Whitlam discussed the future of East Timor with Suharto on two occasions: 5th to 8th September 1974 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and 4th April 1975 in Townsville, Australia. Suharto requested an authoritative statement on Timor from Whitlam. Later, Major-General Ali Murtopo, the head of Indonesia’s covert special operations project for East Timor, told the Australian Ambassador to Portugal, “until Mr Whitlam’s visit to Djakarta, they had been undecided about Timor. However the Prime Minister’s support for the idea of incorporation into Indonesia had helped them to crystallise their own thinking.”

Who’s Responsible ?

In Balibo, the specific bearers of responsibility for the invasion are Indonesia, Australia, Portugal and the USA with Britain suppliers of weapons-money. More broadly, graphics at the start of Balibo say, to paraphrase, ‘Indonesia invaded East Timor and the world looked the other way’.

So, responsibility is sheeted to Indonesia, Australia, the USA and Portugal. This line-up accords with historical fact. Henderson’s specific criticisms that Portugal is let off the hook and that only Indonesia and Australia are blamed is baseless. He could not have paying proper attention to what he was watching.

Additional parties that Henderson claims share blame for events in Balibo and East Timor generally are, respectively, the journalists themseves and Fretilin.

Their Own Stupid Fault

Watching Balibo I felt of the journos, no doubt as many people do: “Fools. What did they expect ?” Running into a war zone carries with it the obvious risk of death. I watched them make the foolish decisions so common to young men and watched them reap the consequences.

So I agree with Henderson that the jounalists (including East) must bear some responsibility for what happened to them by putting themselves in the line of fire.

Its Not Just Some Deaths, Its A Cover-Up

But its not the fact that the journalists died or were in fact murdered, or contributed to their own deaths by foolishness that that makes the story of the Balibo Five so potent.

The Balibo Five story is that that Australian Governments covered up the murders of its own citizens, and assisted the Indonesians to do so. That is the dirty secret of Balibo and that secret is what the Australian government and associated diplomats lied about for so many years.

The fact of this cover-up is no longer seriously contested, not even by Henderson.

If Australian Governments will lie to their citizens, then any alienation so caused is deserved and self-inflicted.

Traducing Shackleton

Henderson is quite capable of grasping the salient difference between the bare fact that some journalists died, (even that they were brutally killed in Henderson’s words), and the amoral actions of the cover-up. He chooses instead to obfuscate that difference and impugn the journalists themselves by insinuating that Greg Shackleton had a semi-conscious death-wish and, as the dominant personality, caused the other journalists to put their lives in danger and be killed.

Henderson sources his insinuation from Tony Maniaty’s book, Shooting Balibo. Here is what Maniaty says about Shackleton and the other jounalists:

”My thoughts run up alleys with labels ranging from bravery and the quest for truth to mild suicidal tendencies and blatant stupidity, but in none can I really find an answer, or even the beginnings of one. These guys weren’t dumb, they were bright and savvy young Australians with exciting careers and lives ahead of them.”

So with equal validity Henderson could have said ‘Maniaty thinks Shackleton is brave’. Instead he chooses to say ‘Maniaty speculates that Shackleton had suicidal tendencies’.

But Henderson would prefer to derogate Shackleton and his team and deflect criticism of the Indonesians. No wonder Shirley Shackleton wrote an article entited ‘Killing Greg Shackleton Again And Again And Again’

Of course, Roger East was not in Balibo, but Dili. He was bound with wire and shot like a dog on the Dili wharf along with 150 Timorese. Was he too suicidal or under the spell of Shackleton’s dominant personality? Henderson does not say.

Protecting Indonesia’s Reputation

Stomach-turningly, Henderson is more solicitious of the reputation of their murderers, the Indonesians, than the Australian journalists

He says ‘Balibo is likely to tarnish Indonesia’s reputation in Australia’.
Well yes.

The Indonesians murdered six journalists and about 150,000 Timorese children, babies, women, men and grandmothers. Not shown in the film are the daily atrocities of the Indonesians over the next 25 years including mass deportantations and systematic rape from day one and, when required, hacking people to death with machetes:

Matt Frei,
“Face to Face with Timor Terror”
BBC Online, 4 September 1999
[...] While I was running towards the UN compound a pro-independence supporter was being hunted down like an animal. The young man fell after being hit on the head with a machete. Then six black T-shirts descended on him. A colleague hiding in a shack just opposite the gates to the UN compound filmed the whole thing. It took only 30 seconds to hack the man to pieces. The attack was so ferocious that bits of him were literally flying off. The sound reminded me of a butchers’ shop n– the thud of cleaved meat, I’ll never forget it. [...]

The Indonesian reputation richly deserves to be tarnished.
Same as that of Stalin.

What, exactly, is Henderson’s objection to that ?

No Alternative View is Heard

Henderson, caustic at what he perceives as lack of balance in relation to Whitlam and even to the bloodthirsty invading Indonesians, cannot find one good word to find about the Balibo Five. In Henderson’s view, the journos invited death and were Fretilin barrackers, which could only have angered the Indonesians even more. No alternative view is heard.

Henderson could have said that the Balibo Five initially motivated by the professional opportunity to scoop a great story became personally moved by the obvious injustices of the abandonment of the Timorese and the bravery of Fretilin and the general population. Or he could have said that Roger East had a genuine humanitarian concern for the people of East Timor, all of which which is true, unlike Henderson’s traducive insinuation that Shackleton had a semi-conscious death wish.

But Henderson has nothing positive to say about the innocent. Henderson instead seeks to magnify the faults of all except Indonesia and Australia, the primary criminal and a major accomplice. As to why, one must speculate

Henderson’s Possible Motivation

Henderson’s overall objective in discussing Balibo and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor is to deflect blame from Indonesia and Australia and heap it on Fretilin and Fretilin.

In this, and by going as far as saying that ‘Balibo does not proclaim a truth’, Henderson gives approval to the decades long cover-up of the murder of the journalists. It is important to Henderson for some reason that Balibo be seen as fiction even though Balibo is true in all its significant truth claims.

Henderson agrees with Whitlam’s view that it was best for Australia that East Timor be incorporated into Indonesia. It is possible that Henderson feels some shame at advocating a course of (in)action that led to such horror. He may be not inclined to want to look too closely at the consequences of what he advocates. Such shame may incline Henderson to assist the prolongation of the cover up and to argue Indonesia’s horrific slaughter was understandable, legitimate, not preventable or provoked by Fretilin.

Henderson may also view Indonesia’s invasion as a regrettable realpolitik necessary for Australia’s overall security and feel that considerations of truth or justice are ultimately expendable given geo-political realities pertinent to Australia. Like Michelle Grattan in Emotion Makes It Hard To Focus On Harsh Realities he may believe of the pursuit of justice for the Balibo Five

Our national interest won’t be particularly served by going down a path that could put our two countries at odds.

…and needless to say, forcing Indonesia to own up to its sickening record of slaughter, rape and destruction in East Timor would be even more…delicate.

There is also Henderson’s reflexive anti-Leftism to consider. Henderson would like to pigeon-hole the 1975 Fretilin as pro-Communist as this makes them baddies. If Fretilin are Communist and the Balibo Five are Fretilin barrackers then this also makes the journalists baddies who even more deserved their fate.

This probably constitutes a reason why Henderson, similarly to Richard Woolcott, the Australian Ambassador to Indonesia during the 1975 invasion, emphasises the Fretilin flag on the wall of the Journalists’ living quarters in the Chinese House in Balibo. Woolcott additionaly emphasises that the Fretilin Flag is a Communist flag. If the journos are Communist-friendly this makes them easier to dislike, disrespect and disregard.

Flying The Flag(s)

The importance of the Fretlin Flag to Woolcott and additionally to Henderson, is that it creates a counterpoint to the well-known fact that the Balibo Five painted a likeness of the Australian flag on the exterior of their living quarters in the belief that this would afford them some kind of protection from the Indonesians, who would recognise it as a sign of neutrality. For Woolacott and Henderson, the Fretilin Flag in the journalists’ living quarters removes the journalists neutrality and makes them legitimate or at least understandable targets of war.

It is obvious, however, that the Fretilin Flag was irrelevant to the fate of the Balibo Five.

Quite simply the Indonesian soldiers had been ordered in advance to locate and kill the journalists.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported in Spying Game Keeps Its Peace, June 6, 2006

George Brownbill and Ian Cunliffe, staffers of the Australian Hope Royal Commission On The Intelligence services [in 1977], said they were shown an intercept at [Defence Signals Directorate facility] Shoal Bay in March 1977, saying: “As directed/in accordance with your orders, we have located and shot the Australian journalists. What do we do with the bodies and personal effects?”

That intercept was from an Indonesian field commander at Balibo to Major-General Benny Murdani, overall commander of the East Timor invasion.

Ratifying the above, Dorelle Pinch, Deputy NSW Coroner said at her summation of her 2007 Inquiry into the death of camerman Brian Peters at Balibo,

“strong circumstantial evidence that those orders emanated from the head of Indonesian Special Forces, Major General Benny Moerdani, to Colonel Dading Kalbuadi, Special Forces Group Commander in Timor, and then to Captain Yunus….I am satisfied on the totality of the evidence that Colonel Dading Kalbuadi was aware that the journalists were in Balibo prior to the attack on 16 October and that he …[gave]…orders to kill them, to destroy their bodies and to engage in an orchestrated cover-up of the circumstances of their deaths.”

The journalists were targeted for execution by the Indonesian military irrespective of what flags may or may not be drawn on their walls. Henderson knows this but pretends otherwise. Once again one asks of Henderson ‘Why ?’

A Communist Flag ?

In a similar vein to Henderson, Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott is most assiduous to point out that the Fretilin flag on the interior of the Chinese house was a “Communist flag”, his point being that not only does shelter under the Fretilin flag remove neutrality from the journalists but the Communist ideology enrages the Indonesian military, so making the journalists doubly or triply foolish, double or triply responsible for their own deaths and the Indonesians’ killing of the journalists legitimized or at least understandable.

Mr Woolcott in The Australian as late as August 2009 was still saying:

“they always show that flag. They never show the other side of the door, which had a Fretilin (communist) flag on it. [The Indonesians] would have regarded (the reporters) as combatants because of their close association with Fretilin”.

Unfortunately for Woolcott the Fretilin flag of 1975 is bereft of Communist insignia and the Fretilin of 1975 was not a Communist organisation. The Fretlin flag can be viewed here and an explanation of its colours and symbols follows:

The black represents the [experience of] four centuries of colonial oppression, the yellow [appearing in the shape of an arrowhead on the 1975 Flag sewn for the UDI] recalls the struggle for independence, and the red reflects the blood shed by the East Timorese people. The white star symbolizes hope for the future.

Fretilin Pro-Communist?

Henderson is keen to say that there is plenty of blame of go around and that Fretilin bear some responsibility for the invasion or its severity because they were pro-Communist and willingly allowed themselves to be portrayed as Communist.

Henderson is again wide of the mark with this criticism. Neither Fretilin’s civil war opponents, the UDT, nor Whitlam, nor the United States State Department nor President Suharto Of Indonesia himself thought that Fretilin was Communist or pro-Communist. Which means that no-one did, except the targets of Indonesian and US propaganda.

Joao Carrascalao, co-founder of UDT and principal of the August 1975 coup which precipitated civil war

“In Fretilin some leaders were communist, but Fretilin was not a communist party. In UDT some leaders were socialist, but UDT was not a socialist party. It was a social democrat party.”

Gough Whitlam in Parliament on 30th September 1975:

“I suppose there may be pro-communist elements in Fretilin. I do not believe, on the basis of the information available to me, that Fretilin is totally or predominantly communist.”

US State Department, “Indonesia and Portuguese Timor,” 1975

‘Fretilin is a vaguely leftist party’

US State Department Background Notes On Timor-Leste, August 2010

The Indonesians claimed that FRETILIN was communist in nature, while the party’s leadership described itself as social democratic

President Suharto Of Indonesia, Conversation between Ford, Suharto, and Kissinger, July 5, 1975

“those who want independence are Communist-influenced…Fretilin are almost Communist“.

Roger East, Final Commonique From Dili, December 1975

Fretilin’s army is basically anti-colonial, strongly Catholic-tinted and, not surprisingly, has many vehement anti-Communists in its midst….However, Fretilin’s initial planning is a blending of socialistic and cooperative policies…Membership of Fretilin by Australian standards would include thinkers from the centre to the extreme left – the latter in a fringe grouping in the Central Committee.

Henderson must be aware that not even Fretilin’s civil war enemies thought Fretilin was Communist in 1975, yet he intentionally allows the impression of Fretilin as a Communist organisation to develop in his reader’s minds.

Henderson’s pigeon-holing of Fretilin as pro-Communist is another obfuscation which has the intended effect of crystallizing Fretilin as baddies and legitimizing Indonesian actions against them.

Fretilin’s Internal Political Debate

[Note: This section and the next is heavily dependent on Ben Kiernan, Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975–99: Comparative Reflections on Cambodia"]

Fretilin, throughout the years of Indonesion invasion, had a continuing and very sharp internal debate over its political direction over a rainbow of leftist models and indeed whether or not is should be Leftist at all. Leaders from the North-Central region of East Timor, closest to Dili and Indonesia’s power base consistently advocated a non-ideological compromise and accommodation with Indonesia. This was rejected by Fretilin leaders from other regions who saw compromise with Indonesia as a betrayal of the cause of Independence.

Fretilin stood for independence, not Communism. Ideology beyond independence was very much a second-order issue for Fretilin and in fact the Indonesians feared the pro-independence agenda irrespective of the underlying ideology, though Suharto did fear that the Communist influence within Fretilin could provide additional steel to their resolve.

What Kind Of Leftism ?

As to the range of opinions canvassed within Fretilin, Alarico Fernandes, the Fretilin Minister For Information And National Security, originally advocated the social democratic models of Austria and Scandanavia (says Kiernan relying on Gusmao; Horta says Fernandes was a Communist in 1975) became a supporter of Marxism in mid-1976 and then took up a non-ideological position of compromise with Indonesia in 1978. Xanana Gusmao, leader from 1979 was a consistent advocate of European Social Democratic models, though even he in the midst of the worst years of Indonesia’s invasion was ‘dazzled by the [Marxist] vision of human redemption’ (see Kiernan)

While there was indeed a strong Maoist influence in Fretilin after the invasion this was primarily engaged in regard to models of self-reliant guerilla warfare. The overall social, educational and political objectives of Fretilin were not Maoist-directed though Fretilin did also adopt a policy of Land Reform from Maoism.

Xanana Gusmao did not even read Mao’s writings until late 1976 and even then only to understand what some other leaders advocated. Marxism was acclaimed by Fretilin at one stage of the occupation as the most appropriate economic model for East Timor but was never instituted formally as the organisational principle of the Fretilin movement.

Hey! Sit Down! This Is Important!

The review of Fretilin’s severe ideological divisions is engagingly and academically detailed by Ben Kiernan in the work cited above. Kiernan via Gusmao sums up the Fretilin ideological mood at the height of their supposed commitment to Marxism and Maoism.

The discussion which led to the acclamation of Marxism occurred within the Supreme Council of Resistance of the CC Political Committee meeting held at Laline from May 8 to 20, 1977. Gusmao recounts the “sharp debate”, meaning strong for and against positions “center[ing] on a proposal to declare Fretilin a Marxist movement.”.

The President, Xavier do Amaral, favoured compromise with Indonesia and did not even attend. Nicolau Lobato, a Liberation Theology Catholic was as much motivated by Catholicism as Marxism. He berated the Committee for failing to Thank God (i.e say grace) during mealtimes and did not attend the Marxist acclamation debate because he was somewhat repelled by that current focus on politics rather than the sacrifices and deprivations of East Timorese civilians. He feigned sickness to avoid attendance, but donated his coffee plantations to ‘the state’. At this.

Hermengildo Alves complained “Any day now, the state will get my wife’s gold earrings too,”while the “inveterate bohemian,” dos Anjos, told “endless anti-revolutionary jokes, which did not amuse the Department of Political and Ideological Orientation.”

…while many of the political commissars lacked the motivation to finalise a resolution on the matter:

Finance Minster Sera Key “debated issues, making an effort to demonstrate his abilities as a political theorist. In fact he was the only one who livened up the meeting, until all the political commissars were told to sit around the same table and get organized.

The overall ideological picture of Fretilin during their most ideological phase is that a rainbow of leftist opinion, with a majority Marxist viewpoint but with some, including major leaders, ardently disinterested in political ideology at all.

Fretilin were foremost a nationalist and independence front. Their specific ideology was a work in progess to be thrashed out on the floor of many subsequent Fretilin National Conferences and always secondary to the goal of independence

The majority Fretilin opinion did indeed acclaim Marxism and Maoist guerilla warfare strategy during Fretin’s time of extremis during the horrific Indonesian invasion when Fretilin existed, as Mao’s Communists did, as a popular clandestine guerilla army (Keirnan p. 213) .

Further on Maoism some few Fretilin commanders did indeed adopt the practice of internal leadership purges accompanied by interrogations with beatings. Kiernan documents the execution of a Fretilin accommodationist leader, Sergeant Aquiles Soares and three associates, two of whom were Apodeti and one Fretilin, in November 1976 by other Fretilin leaders.

When Gusmao became aware of the practice of extracting confessions by beatings he expressed his disgust and used his personal authority to cause it to cease (Kiernan p. 218) . As noted previously Fretilin’s ideology returned to a conventional Social Democratic model when Gusmao assumed leadership in 1979.

However, Henderson’s characterisation of Fretilin as pro-Communist and therefore inviting invasion in 1975 turns on what Fretilin’s ideology was in 1975. And as we have seen, in 1975 not even Fretilin’s enemies considered Fretilin to be a Communist organisation.

Henderson’s charaterisation and implications are thus invalid.

Jose Ramos-Horta on the extent of Communist Influence on Fretilin in 1975 says:

“When people say that Fretilin was communist in 1974-75 it is not true. It was a political front.

He goes on to say:

Alarico Fernandes was a communist. [Sebastiao] Montalvao was communist and there were some others whose names I forget. Nicolau Lobato was not a communist. You could call Nicolau Lobato a secular Christian Marxist, like the theology of Latin American priests. Nicolau Lobato was someone who believed in Marxism but was 100% Catholic. Xavier Amaral, you might try to call him communist or a social democrat, but I don’t think so, he is a little conservative.”

Six Out Of Fifty-Two. That’s Practically Everyone.

Fretilin had fifty-two Central Committee members in 1975 (Kiernan p.219). Here Horta reports perhaps six or so with Marxist in 1975, of which one, Amaral, only loosely fit the desription and two of whom were Liberation Theology Catholics.

Objectively, Fretilin in 1975 could hardly be classified as a Communist organisation

So what of Henderson’s assertion that Ramos-Horta willingly allowing itself to be portrayed as pro-Communist and that Ramos-Horta has admitted that this was a terrible mistake ?

Henderson cites a Four Corners Program of June 15 1998., entited Timor: The Final Solution

Here is what Ramos Horta actually said:

Sure, there were some elements who had come from Portugal — Marxist orientation, but there were no more than five elements, very vocal, made sounding speeches with Marxist slogans and so on. That is what was exploited by Indonesian to portray Fretilin as Communist, but that was an enormous exaggeration. But I acknowledge that was a tremendous mistake on our part.

Contra Henderson, Ramos Horta did not say that Fretilin willingly allowed itself to be portrayed as pro-Communist. What he said was that Indonesia portrayed Fretilin as Communist based on the speeches of a numerically small number of Marxist leaders who happened to be very vocal.

The mistake, as I understand Ramos Horta, is that Fretilin did not foresee how effectively the speeches of the fringe Communist wing in the leadership group would be misused as propoganda against Fretilin. Henderson is, I believe deliberately, misinterpereting Horta’s words to shore up his ‘Fretilin Pro-Communist’ line in order to legitimize Indonesia’s actions against Fretilin or at least mute criticism of Indonesia.

Fretilin Ideology Irrelevant To Invasion Of East Timor

In fact the exact nature of Fretilin’s political ideology was irrelevant to Indonesia’s decision to invade.

Indonesia feared any and all East Timorese political expression irrespective of ideology, even beyond that of the call for Indepedence. As Kiernan documents, Suharto issued a sinister comminique on January 31, 1976 (less than three months after the invasion) that all Timorese political parties had now “dissolved themselves.” and on February 3 simply banned them all, including the pro-integrationist Apodeti and the supposedly anti-Communist UDT.

Why would Indonesia ban an anti-Communist political party if its major motivation for invasion was fear of indigenous East Timorese Communism ?

Indonesia feared the stimulus that an independent East Timor would provide to separatist movements throughout the archipeligo. For this reason East Timorese independence had to be crushed and East Timorese political organisations, irrespective of ideology, had to be seen throughout the archilpeligo to exist only at the whim of Djakarta. Fretilin’s exact political ideology, per se, was not a factor in the decision to invade. It was the Fretilin objective of independence that galvanized the Indonesian political and military elites toward invasion, not Fretilin’s inchoate Leftism.

However, Indonesian leaders feared that Communist countries such as China, Russia or Vietnam might attempt to gain influence in an Independent East Timor and perhaps create a naval base or station troops there. So, while Fretilin’s supposed Communism was largely a propaganda invention, the threat of Communist influence exploiting East Timorese independence within the archipeligo was in my view the greatest contributing factor to the decison to integrate East Timor by invasion.

Kate Masters summarizes the major motivations usually proferred for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor: Fretilin’s supposed Communism, to discourage seperatist movements, that East Timor was unviable economically and would drain Indonesian resources as an aid dependency and that Indonesia could not tolerate the offence-to-pride of an independent nation within its archipeligo.

Of these, the first three are expressed by Suharto himself in the infamous conversation he had with Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger the day before the invasion. A further motivation, the removal of a colonial anomoly and the return of Indonesia’s rightful soil was believed by certain influential persons in the Indonesian elite including the Deputy Speaker and some in Bakin, the Indonesian intelligence service and constituted a permanent undercurrent to Indonesian thinking on East Timor.

In the end, Indonesia wanted the same thing in East Timor that Australia wanted: stable borders. According to CAVR, The Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation

“a Bakin/OPSUS (Special Operations) group took a look at the position in late 1972 or 1973 and came out strongly against the idea of supporting independence of East Timor..which could ‘add a new dimension to Indonesia’s security problems’”.

…and this strategic dimension shaped by a generalized concern about the possibility of one or other of the major Communist nations exporting Communism to an independent East Timor came to represent the major Indonesian rationale for invasion.

Did Fretilin Provoke Invasion By Declaring Independence?

Henderson further seeks to legitimize the Indonesion invasion by drawing reference to Horta’s characterisation of Fretilin’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) as an error, which he supports by a reference in Maniaty’s book ‘Shooting Balibo’.

By quoting Horta as stating that the unliateral declaration of independence was an error Henderson further encourages his readers to consider Fretilin a hasty or provocative organisation that enraged the paranoid Indonesians into invasion.

I have not yet been able to Google Ramos Horta’s ‘error’ quote. The nearest I can find is Horta saying that the Unilateral Declaration Of Independence of November 28 1975 was an act of desperation which supporting text in the article claims Ramos felt ‘played into the hands of the Indonesians who wanted to invade’ ‘U.S. Averted Gaze When Indonesia Took East Timor’ by Michael Richardson, International Herald Tribune, May 20, 2002

Says Jose Ramos Horta:

“The unilateral declaration of independence was an act of desperation, essentially forced upon the leadership of Fretilin in the face of abandonment by everybody,”

If this is the same context that informs the Maniaty reference then Henderson is duplicitous in the extreme to use Horta’s words to imply Fretilin provocation of Indonesia.

Henderson well knows that the Indonesians had already invaded East Timor before the UDI was made and had spent the previous months in intensive military operations in East Timor laying the foundation for that invasion which they had already cleared with Australia and were soon to clear with the United States.

Indonesia Invaded Before Fretlin Declared Independence

Indonesia had full intentions to invade East Timor regardless of any UDI and in fact were already doing so well before the UDI was made. The UDI merely allowed the Indonesians propaganda fodder to portary Fretlin as provocateurs, which Henderson now repeats as blithely as any Indonesian agent.

The immediate precursor to the UDI was the occupation of the East Timorese town of Atabae on November 26 by the Indonesians after two weeks of intensive air and sea bombardment. Predating the UDI, the UDI did not provoke this, or quite obviously, any other attack, naturally including the attack on Balibo of October 16 in which the Balibo Five were located, executed and burnt to a crisp as succintly described in the Indonesian memo back to their HQ.

But the longer context to the UDI was, as Horta states, the abandonment of Fretilin by the international community, the latest galling instalment of which was the farcical Rome talks of 1-2 November 1975 betwen Indonesia and Portugal in which Portugal adopted a studied silence in regard to significant Indonesian military incursions into East Timor.

At this point Fretilin knew it was truly and completely alone. The UDI was a desperate effort to induce United Nations interest in East Timor and prevent the bloodbath that would inevitably follow Indonesian invasion.

Again Henderson dissembles on the facts so as to magnify the faults of others besides Indonesia and Australia and so legitimize or deflect criticism of the invasion and its consequences.

Fretilin Monsters

Henderson’s final point in his attempt to legitimize the Indonesian invasion or at least deflect criticism of it is to draw moral equivalence between Fretilin and Indonesia by pointing out Fretilin atrocities, again quoting Horta this time on ‘senseless killings’ perpetrated by Fretilin.

For once Henderson supplies a correct context and interperetation when quoting Ramos Horta, Ramos Horta did say that Fretilin needs to answer for its own atrocities, for example the execution of 150 Apodeti/UDT prisoners on December 8th or 9th 1975 (Kiernan p. 207), but Henderson’s assertion of equivalence between the Indonesians and Fretilin is knowingly spurious.

The Indonesian military had carte blanche to kill as many men, women and children, soldiers, civilians and jornalists as they wished, even to murder pro-Integrationist Timorese. (Kiernan p. 207). Fretilin pursued no such similar policy of carte blanche slaughter.

Henderson knows this and should make the difference clear instead of deliberately obfuscating it.

Fretilin themselves admit to senseless killings on the part of a couple of commanders. Horta does not say Fretilin are blameless and instead admits Fretilin’s guilt. Horta’s openness about such incriminating details is in fact a model that ought to be followed by both Australia and Indonesia.

What Henderson omits is the fact that the killings were revenge for UDT atrocities, admittedly of a smaller magnitude, that accompanied their coup of August 11 1975. It was the UDT that fired the first shots in the Civil War, not Fretilin, and it was Indonesia that encouraged the UDT to do so, which they did by fraudulently telling the UDT that Fretilin were Communists, as Henderson continues to do today.

Henderson bypasses the facts above to misrepresent Fretilin as Communist revolutionary killers full stop and Indonesia as invaders due to instability caused by Fretilin. In Henderson’s words:

Tony Maniaty quotes Ramos-Horta as describing East Timor’s civil war and Fretilin’s unilateral declaration of independence as errors [of Fretilin (author's interpolation - Under The Milky Way)]

If Australia had been as open and truthful as Jose Ramos Horta about our own culpability in the deaths of the Balibo Five and Roger East and the Indonesian invasion, then no film such as Balibo would be necessary, no lies would have been perpetrated by Australian governments on its own population and the very alienation about which Henderson wails and ascribes to the fault of leftists and the ABC would not have ever arisen.

Henderson’s Shoebox

Henderson is over-eager to portray the division between Fretilin and the UDT as being between pro- and anti-communist parties. His objective is to misrepresent the East Timorese Civil War of mid-late 1975 into an easily recognisable game of goodies and baddies, with the baddies being the supposedly pro-Communist Fretilin.

The Real UDT/Fretilin Relationship

The division between Fretilin and the UDT was not on communist/anti-communist lines, it was on the degree of relationship that a post-colonial East Timor should have with Portugal. Fretilin wanted full independence within a short timeframe while the UDT advocated an autonomous Federation with Portugal.
(see Francisco Da Costa Guterres, Ph D. thesis, Griffirth University, ‘Elites And Prospects Of Democracy In East Timor’)

The parties were indeed highly distrustful but not initially enemies. In early 1975 the UDT moved to a position very close to that of Fretilin in regard to independence and in March 1975 the two Parties issued a joint communique calling for independence for East Timor.

Indonesia, for its part, feared East Timorese independence would provide stimulus to other independence movements across its provinces (Guterres p.122), so from 1974 implemented ‘Operation Komodo’ which was designed to foment distrust between Fretilin and UDT with the purpose of engineering a Civil War which could be later used to justify invasion. (Guterres p.123)

Australian journalists Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson detail a CIA cable of 17th September 1975 describing the continuation of the strategy of Operation Komodo

“Jakarta is now sending guerrilla units into the Portuguese half of the island in order to provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians with an excuse to invade.”

A review of the facts of the philospohical orientation of Fretilin and the UDT in 1975 shows that Henderson, who cannot be unaware of these facts, has deliberately obfuscated the nature of the two parties differences. Fretilin was not a pro-Communist (which Henderson uses to mean ‘Communist’) organisation in 1975 and the UDT was only incipiently anti-Communist. Its actual platform as recorded in the UDT manifesto was defined in the context of relations with Portugal, not against that of Marxism.

Henderson crams Fretilin and the UDT into a Cold war shoebox in order to present Fretilin as the bad guys to his Australian newspaper readership and so legitimize or deflect crticism of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.

It is curious that Henderson does allow his support for the integration of East Timor into Indonesia to stand in reference only to facts.

In Summary

Henderson’s precis of Balibo, ‘Balibo does not tell a truth’ and the means by which he reaches this conclusion is shocking and offensive in the breadth of its anti-factuality.

Henderson says, ‘only Australia and Indonesia are blamed for the invasion’, but Balibo ascribes responsibility for the invasion to Indonesia, Australia, the USA and Portugal, with the general international community also indicted for turning its back on East Timor.

Henderson says Fretilin must share blame for the invasion but his efforts to impart this blame rely on craftily disingenous misrepresentations of Jose Ramos Horta’s comments on Fretilins actions and omissions.

Henderson knowingly misrepresents many facts about Fretilin, especially its ideology, in order to slur Fretilin as Communists which even its greatest enemies did not believe of it.

Henderson makes traducive insinuations about Greg Shackleton’s mental health in order to convey that Shackleton had a death wish and so was at least partially responsible for the deatrhs of the Balibo Five. Tony Maniaty, from whom Henderson sources his insinuation did not ever believe Shackleton had suicidal tendencies and it is clear from Maniaty’s book that this is so.

In short, Henderson is a hopeless dissembler on the topic of East Timor and Balibo.

One can only ask him ‘Why ?’

Balibo Is Correct About Balibo

Balibo correctly apportions blame in regard to the Balibo Five, Roger East and the 1975 invasion.

Furthermore, the documentary record shows Australian governments lied and colluded with Indonesia to fabricate a story about the deaths of the jounalists (this was not covered in the film) and was complicit in the invasion. Hence any resulting alienation in the general public is a result of Australian government actions factually taken and is deserved by those governments, Labor and Liberal from Whitlam onwards.

Contra Henderson, any alientation so felt is by no means the fault of Robert Connolly, any Marxist, or the ABC.

Henderson is a meticulous researcher and is highly conversant with the literature on East Timor. It is frankly unbelievable that the manifold distortions and omissions he makes in his article are mistakes. I conclude that Henderson is willingly engaging in deceit of the Australian people to minimize Australian Government complicity in the Indonesion Invasion Of East Timor (and consequently the ghastly and vicious events that followed for the next twenty-five years) and the cover-up of the murder of the Balibo Five and Roger East.

He will have to tell us his reasons for doing so, but I suspect it is shame at supporting such a horrific invasion plus his reflexive anti-leftist impulses which cause him a priori to distrust and reject Fretilin and anyone who has a good word to say about them.

Alienation

Should Australians feel alienated from their Government because of the horrors of East Timor and their willing lies in regard to the deaths of the Balibo Five and Roger East ? Ask one who is so alienated, Shirley Shackleton, wife of Greg Shackleton:

Roger fell from the wharf and his body floated in the sea. Someone moved him that night and placed flowers and lit candles all around his body ­ this brave unknown human being did more for Roger East with that courageous act than any Australian official has ever done for him.

To be fair to Whitlam, Australian Intelligence did warn Shackleton et. al. not to go to Balibo and that they could not be protected by the Australian government once there. But Shirley Shackleton is also correct. Once located, executed and burnt to a crisp her husband has then been lied about, betrayed and even ridiculed by Australian officials ever since, an inglorious tradition now continued by Henderson.

No wonder some feel disgust. No wonder Australian Governments behave as if there was something to be ashamed about. There is.

Henderson’s determination to blame the ABC for the resulting alientation shows he is not reading Balibo the event, or Balibo the movie with any objectivity whatsoever.

Clever

One thing that puzzled me about Henderson’s summation of Balibo was his perjerotive use of the word ‘clever’. Henderson says:

Balibo runs a clever argument. But it does not proclaim a truth.

Henderson uses ‘clever’ in the sense that Kevin Rudd used it of John Howard to mean ‘sly, cunning, disingenuous, good at using words to create a false impression, manipulative, able to garner support by duplicitous speech’.

In its dialogue and cinematography Balibo presents as a very simple film. Much of the dialogue is ordinary: Let’s go here and do such and such; How are you going; See you next Wednesday. The transitions between scenes are almost predictable in their simplicity and the actual vision is reminiscent of a home movie.

So if Balibo is clever then it is not that it tries to snow the audience under with a blizzard of dates and times or by misrepresenting a highly interconnected argument; neither does it try to distract or dazzle its audience with special effects. But neither did Howard. Howard merely enunciated truisms to his audience, feeding them a view of reality which reinforced a chocolate-box view of the world that his audience would like to be true. In this way he comforted Australia and sent their critical faculties to sleep. No analysis, no commentary. And when necessary he just told bare-faced lies.

Clever ?

It is actually Henderson’s argument which is clever in the Howardian sense.

Henderson’s article is short, easy to digest and is as simple as a game of cops and robbers. Repeat after me: Australia good, Lefties bad. In order to cram the facts about Balibo and East Timor into his Cold War shoebox Henderson needs to misreport the content of Balibo (the supposed Blind eye to Portugal’s supposed), misrepresent the 1975 Fretilin as Communist (hence bad guys), simplify and misrepresent the 1975 UDT as anti-Communists always and implacably opposed to Fretilin (hence good guys), disgracefully misrepresent Horta at every turn and make wholly offensive insinuations about Greg Shackleton’s mental health.

Henderson’s ‘clever’ is a projection of his own disingenuousness onto Robert Connolly and the other principals of Balibo.

And the bare-faced lie ?

Balibo does not contain a truth.

Balibo tells the truth.
…much against Henderson’s preferences.

Is Slobodan Milosevic On the Staff? – Why Abbott Cannot Win The 2010 Federal Election.

“There is only so much room in a brain, so much wall space, as it were, and if you furnish it with your slogans, the opposition has no place to put up any pictures later on, because the apartment of the brain is already crowded with your furniture.” Adolf Hitler

Don’t think Abbott can win.

Howard, behind in his first term, made the tactical masterstroke of campaigning on the GST against Beazley’s ‘small target’ strategy.

In doing so Howard captured the debate. He gave the electorate an idea to kick around during the camapign – and it was a fairly safe one since the GST had been thrashed to death in the 1993 election. The GST was both new and familiar at the same time.

So, Howard behind in the polls, gave the electorate an idea against the idea-less Beazley. The peepul voted for Howard almost out of sheer gratitude.

Abbott is behind but, unlike Howard, has no ideas – and I agree with the immortal Andrew Elder at ‘Politically Homeless’ that Abbott has not had an original thought for about quarter of a century. His career is based on headkicking and ripping people’s gutses out. He was Howard’s loyal and unquestioning servant: a voice-activated Frankenstein assassin. ‘Kill Hanson, says Howard. ‘Yes Master’ responds Abbott and puts the legwork into the secret slush fund that bankrolled the sleaze attacks on ‘One Nation’ – what was it ‘Australians For Freedom and Democracy’ or somesuch horror.

His Master’s Voice Arms and Legs

Abbott is like Herman Goering who once said ‘I have no conscience except the Fuhrer’ or the brainless servant of absolute loyalty who served the Corleone family in ‘The Godfather’: ask Abbott to put a horse’s head in somebody’s bed and he’ll do it without hesistation, as long as the interests of absolute power are served.

So, without any ideas, Abbott is powerless to wrest the initiative from a position of disadvantage. His simle strategy is to evince fear responses in the electorate by invoking the Full House of Lib/Nat shibboleths about the ALP.

You can’t trust Labor with Money
Tax and Spend
Great Big New Tax
Stop The Boats
Faceless Machine Men

This is powerful but limited. Scary bed-time stories only give children nightmares, not adults.

The Australian electorate has become more progressive over the years (the Lib/Nats core constituency is the Over 55′s), but the great unwashed middle will still flock to a safe pair of economic hands and Rudd was scaring the horses.

In one week Gillard has defused the RSPT and the Asylum Seeker issue. I am confident as the campaign contnues she’ll keep the masses calm and give out enough soft-left Dogwhistles to stop leakage on that side too.

Thinking By Proxy

Abbott’s only worthwhile idea in his opening election statement was that to give Local Communities more say over the spending of school funds, but that’s just a focus group grab in response to the BER.

How a Rhodes Scholar can be so vacant is flamin’ alarming. That scholarship committee needs to review its selection process.

Abbott’s backup attack lines are an interesting species of polly-strategem. They involve accusing Labor of things it hasn’t yet done so that when and if they do occur he can say ‘I told you so’. Two examples:

ALP will run a filthy campaign
ALP will attempt to promise/spend their way to victory in the campaign. (Surely what Howard did in his last two victories and also attempted in 2007).

Textor-Crosby-Milosevic

Abbott’s pre-election campaign was similar brew of weirdness and cunning: endless footage of himself semi-naked, clad in lycra while participating in Triathlons and giving the camera a generous dose of full-frontals with the voice over saying ‘I promise action for Australia’. I mean the message is as subtle as a Vegemite Suppository administered by crowbar. The only footage I have seen which approximates it is Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, filmed doing enthusiastic free weights as Sebian tanks smashed through Croatia.

Does this kind of thing really win votes ? Or is it just an excuse for Abbott to drop his daks in public. I dearly hope its the latter.

So Abbott’s dead meat I reckon.

All JG has to do is keep the ship steady and say a couple of moderately interesting things and Abbott will be out of his depth competely.

I will predict white-eyed, spittle-foam desperation verging on the hysterical.

Paul Kelly: The Innocent Extremist

Here’s a piece I wrote as a personal response to an article by Paul Kelly which was critical of Mark Latham’s viewpoints on the Australia – US Strategic Partnership.

At the time Latham was Opposition Leader and having a good run. At that point he was regarded as a serious threat to unseat John Howard as Prime Minister.

Latham made a speech to the Lowy Institute which prompted a full-barrell assault from Kelly using the most hypocritical of logic.

In my view Kelly revealed himself at that time as a Howard/Liberal partisan. Usually Kelly is very considered and equitable in his comentary but just occasionally, when he smells blood in the water, he drops his guard and shows his true allegiances.

This was one occasion when he did so:

Paul Kelly: The Innocent Extremist

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-large of the Murdoch-owned “The Australian” newspaper is an Australian patriot and strongly pro-American. Befittingly, he is a member of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, a selective association of high-profile business and political leaders and journalists. Kelly has a vision for an Australia which is militarily capable, economically dynamic and secure from foreign threat. He wants Australia to take positive steps to maintain its middle-power status, achieve real and increasing influence in international affairs and guard against the slide which has, in his view, seen New Zealand fall to the bottom levels of influence amongst Western nations.

For Kelly the primary determinants of a nation’s strength and influence are population, GNP and technology (especially military technology) supplemented by participation in regional and global economic and political forums. Underpinning all this for Australia in Kelly’s strategic model of Australia’s international political economy is a close relationship with the USA. This special relationship provides Australia access to advanced military technology and influence-by-association.

Kelly does not emphasis a direct guarantee of security as a product of a close bilateral relationship with the US, rather stressing that insider access to sophisticated US military technology makes Australia capable of military self-reliance. Self-reliance incorporates Australia’s capacity to defend itself in its own right and ability to act as a metropolitan power within the Australia-US ANZUS alliance, itself located and operational within the logic of a US hegemonic world order.

Kelly therefore describes a layered approach to the way in which Australia should approach its foreign policy. He believes Australia should pursue multilateralism through the UN alongside regionalism within ASEAN simultaneous with honouring and protecting the bilateral US alliance. He sees these bilateral, regional and multilateral layers as synergistically reinforcing each other producing an Australia capable of playing a constructive role in world affairs.. For example, close bilateral relationship with the USA gives Australia credibility with and thus potentially greater entrée into ASEAN and the ears of regional leaders most importantly China and Japan, but influence in ASEAN and regional nations simultaneously makes us more useful to the USA as a holder of insider influence within Asia. This expert status on Asian affairs gives rise to the possibility that Australia may successfully advise the USA on wise Asian policy and (non) interventions.

While Kelly advocates that Australia participate fully within the UN and maximize its opportunities for influence there, he sees the WTO as the more important world body. Kelly believes that thorough-going adoption of the WTO “free-trade” proscriptions will vitalise Australia’s economy, drive up our GNP and hence increase Australia’s international standing in a far more direct way than the slow and patient accumulation of influence through constructive negotiation.

Kelly believes the Unites States is a far better guarantor of international security than the “fragile” UN which “need[s] … U.S. security policy leadership” but is eager that the US remains within it. He wants the USA to work within the UN for two reasons. First, without the US, global institutions would be “crippled” leading to a breakdown in worldwide political and economic structure and stability; Secondly and patriotically, Kelly sees it in Australia’s interest that the US work within the UN since if the US turned its back on the UN to intervene unilaterally and arrogantly in world affairs, Australia’s regional standing with South-East and East Asia would be compromised.

This follows because of Australia’s strong, perhaps over-strong, identification as a US agent within East and South-East Asia. Kelly identifies a worst-case scenario for Australia in regard to arrogant US unilateralism for Australia where Australia could be barred or expelled from Asian regional forums if Australia is seen merely as an agent of US global power, the US’s “deputy sheriff”. Kelly supports America’s status as global hegemon and organiser of the global trade regime, but he wants the USA to be a “prudent hegemon” (Kelly, Australian for Alliance, The National Interest, Spring, 2003) working within the UN and sensitive to regional alliances and sensibilities.

Ultimately, however, Kelly always preserves and valorises the US prerogative for unilateral military intervention and places the onus on the UN to accommodate and legitimise US unilateralism.

“This is not an argument against all [US unilateral] military action. It is an argument for more attention to the tone of U.S. policy, and for legitimizing military action by law and through coalitions whenever possible.” (Kelly, Australian for Alliance, my emphasis)

Kelly believes that UN accommodation and legitimisation of US hegemonic power is the only way that the UN can survive as a credible organisation. The rights of the US to be global hegemon and take unilateral actions in its own interests are not questioned. Writing in the Weekend Australian (7-8/9/02) Kelly said:

“If the US does return to the Security Council, that will become a decisive moment in world history. It is when the main powers must decide whether they will allow the US to solve its problems within a UN framework or whether they confirm for the US that the unilateralists were right all the time and that it [the US] must commit to a new go-it-alone phase.”

Kelly is so pro-US that he is even somewhat antipathetic toward Western Europe which he sees as being prisoner to a consensus model of international affairs to the detriment of decisive and warranted interventions.

Australia therefore does not want an America so imprisoned by the search for consensus that it is paralyzed from taking military action….Indeed, nothing would cause more dismay in Australia than seeing the European Union prevail within [the UN and other multilateral] institutions at the cost of those institutions’ ultimate viability.

Kelly’s overall views lead him to advise the US to tread carefully in the world, surely to wield hegemonic power but prudently and constructively so as to encourage open world trade and, therefore, mutual weal. But Kelly also believes that the US is entitled to act unilaterally where warranted. In relation to Al-Qa’aida, Kelly is clear that US action is not only warranted but necessary.

In Kelly’s view the “transforming impact of September 11” , when Al-Qa’aida smashed those aircraft into the World Trade Centre, has changed the world. To Kelly, Al’Qa’aida represents a barbaric movement at war with civilisation itself. September 11 in Kelly’s view was “an attack on universal values” . Negotiation with this atavistic force is “folly” since “appeasement would usher in a new dark age” . Al-Qa’aida must be destroyed. In these circumstances the US is legitimised by moral imperative to act as the “prudent hegemon” to preserve order and peace.

In this transformed world Kelly notes a transformed mood of the US towards its allies. America now expects more action and more obedience from its allies.

“The US is less interested in historical allies and more interested in allies that perform, a point John Howard knows. Its sense of being the “indispensable nation” is in play again. Driven by both fear and resolve, the US is making harsher judgments about its friends.”

In Kelly’s view the US’s unswervable determination to intervene in Iraq makes it impossible to ignore the US call to arms since to do so would imperil the ANZUS alliance so crucial to Australia. It would amount to national suicide to ignore US the at a time when it is willing to demote non-performing allies, in particular who fail to provide political support for non-UN authorized intervention through participation in America’s Coalition of the Willing.

Thus Kelly speaks of Australia being “hostage” to the US “regardless of the quality of the arguments the President makes or fails to make” that Latham’s call to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq is not only wrong but “chilling” because it will “enrage the Bush administration” and is “at odds with the US political spectrum from George W. Bush to John Kerry”. Surely, Latham is “asking for trouble from Washington”. In Kelly’s view Australia has “no choice but to join an Iraq war” “anything less would imperil the 50-year US alliance” and he believes that Australians understand this instinctively knowing it to be “the Australian way of war”.

For Kelly the parameters of Australia’s freedom in foreign policy engagement are delimited by the mood and dictates of the United States. This is why “September 11 has created a new strategic challenge for America’s allies”. America is demanding more of its allies and Australia is beholden to deliver even where other relationships, whether regional security or trade, are imperilled. ,12

The tension between Australia’s relationship with the US and our regional relationships and security is a special concern of Kelly which he discusses regularly in his columns and speeches. For some time Kelly insisted that Australia’s participation in the Iraq invasion should be contingent on sanction through the UN in view of the danger of alienating Indonesia, the single most significant Islamic nation in Australia’s orbit. Kelly’s view, shared by a respectable cohort of Defence commentators, is summarized as follows

“Australia’s security will be determined by its ability to promote the dominance of moderate over radical Muslims in Indonesia. Accordingly we cannot afford to generate resentment among Indonesian Muslims by siding with the US in any invasion of Iraq not sanctioned by the UN.”13

But Kelly’s commitment to the UN is skin deep. Writing a few months after the preceeding article appeared Kelly made explicit that the value of the UN is that it provides “a cloak of respectability” for US unilateralism sufficient to deflect “anti-Americanism”. Even if “anti-Australian sentiment” generated by participation in US military ventures “fans hatred among [Indonesian] Muslim radicals…this is not a conclusive argument against Australia’s participation in Iraq or other U.S.-led coalitions if such participation is justified on its merits”. 14

It can be seen then that Kelly’s support for the US is near total and his support of the position that Australia should militarily support the US on-demand is likewise near total. The only hypothetical brake Kelly would pull on Australian participation in US-led military ventures is when that participation would compromise Australia’s inclusion in regional economic forums or severely harm Australia’s trade with China. At that point Australia’s support for the USA could only be “declaratory” as in a hypothetical US war with China over Taiwan.15

Even so, in the real world Kelly is prepared to tolerate major disruptions to Australia’s trade in order to appease the US. On July 29 2002, The Australian Finiancial Review noted with concern that Iraq halved a one-million tonne wheat order, perhaps jeopardizing the $829 million per year wheat contract with Australia’s second-largest wheat customer. This Kelly dismissed as a “short-term commercial cost” in support of the bilateral relationship.16

Kelly, then, notwithstanding increased security risk to Australia, marginalisation of the UN and hence international law, the damage of trade and regional relationships and his concession that “[the Iraq] war is not essential but war by choice of the US”17 is in favour of the invasion of Iraq and Australian involvement in it.18 It is, apparently, “justified on its merits” which can only be the need to avoid imperilling the ANZUS alliance.19 The only element that Kelly remains true to in his so-called layered approach to Australian foreign policy is the bilateral relationship with the US. Everything else is discardable. This tells us the truth about what Kelly really believes. Despite his projection of a moderate, layered, foreign policy viewpoint, Kelly’s views,in truth, are better presented as “All the way with LBJ”.

Intertwined with his nuanced public views on the relationship between Australia, the US, the UN and Asia, Kelly reproduces many of the statements from the Howard, Blair and Bush governments which argue for continued involvement in what Kelly knows is a US war of choice. Kelly has repeated for example, that Western nations must stay on to rebuild the Iraq they destroyed in order to prevent the legacy of a failed state (“A Misinformed Curtin Call”. March 31, 2004), that to withdraw from Iraq will encourage terrorist action against the West (“Jihadists keen to repeat Spanish effect”, March 24, 2004), that “Iraq is a decisive theatre in the war on terrorism” (“Howard Plays The Man”, April 3, 2004), that Australian involvement in Iraq does not increase Australia’s security risk – contradicting himself on many previous occasions – (“Spanish-style backlash for PM?”, March 17, 2004), that French and German caution in the UN is an impediment to effective world security and that Al-Qa’aida represents a vandal’s attack on civilisation itself which the West would be as foolish to ignore as Rome the Visigoths (see note 9)

Given his significant agreement with government propaganda some wonder if Kelly is shifting politically to the right following a trend in accordance with perceived management directive of the Murdoch newspaper group. In support of this one can also note an apparent hardening or contradiction of Kelly’s previously held views: that Australian involvement in Iraq does not increase security risk, that American militarism must be legitimized by the UN and that the Australia-Indonesia relationship must balance the Australia-US relationship

In my opinion Kelly’s fundamental political viewpoint has not shifted much, if at all, for years. While his columns shed crocodile tears for the UN and the negative effects of US unilateralism on Australia’s regional relationships, Kelly’s heart lies firmly with the US. In his pieces which explore the meaning of his support for the UN, Kelly is quite straight-forward that he expects the UN to be subservient to his preferred hegemon, free even from the “paralyzing” effect of other Western democracies. Kelly’s published opinion has hardened as the US demands on its allies harden. This is to be expected within Kelly’s framework of pre-suppositions about the world. Quite likely, Kelly’s support of the US is independent of that of Murdoch’s.

What is initially unexpected from Kelly though, is the energy and negativity of his reaction to Mark Latham’s recently enunciated views on Australian foreign policy. In reviewing Latham’s speech to the Lowy Policy Institute For Foreign Affairs, “Labor And The World”, Kelly branded Latham “radical on the US alliance”, representing a “generational leap beyond The Hawke-Keating-Beazley era” which “was genuinely pro-American”. Kelly said Latham instead sees “an America for which [he and the ALP] has scant regard” representing the”visceral hatred” of the ALP towards America.20

Latham was in fact very complimentary to the US which he described as “a great and robust democracy and committed Labour to “the Alliance with the United States” which he described as “a Labor legacy of which we are very proud.” noting that “[The Alliance] has been strong in the past. And it will be strong in the future”

Far from being a radical, Latham utilised language that marked him as being unopposed to the prudent use of US hegemonic power noting that “[The US] has assumed the ultimate responsibility: global leadership for the purpose of global cooperation and security.” He is comfortable in using the US-sourced term for its current foreign policy “the war on terror” which Latham believes “will be long and sustained.” since “the dangers terrorism presents have to be addressed on many fronts”. Latham is not opposed to “humanitarian intervention or pre-emption under Article 24 of the UN Charter”, one of the pretexts for the American invasion.

In fact Latham’s foreign policy viewpoint maps very closely to Kelly’s own oft-repeated views. Latham described Labor foreign policy as being based on “three pillars…” support for the United Nations and multilateral institutions, our alliance with the United States and our engagement with Asia”. This is identical in tone to Kelly’s own layered approach. Like Kelly, Latham makes special reference to China in foreign trade calculations and again like Kelly, Latham carries special regard for an open economy based around WTO guidelines – in Latham’s words “Labor believes in multilateralism, most of all through the WTO”.21
Given that Latham’s views so well overlap with Kelly’s it is superficially unexpected that Kelly is so opposed to Latham’s viewpoint and so unfair in his characterization of Latham’s supposed “hatred” of the US. Latham’s mistake of course, and what makes him “chilling” to Kelly is that Latham really does seem to believe in a semi-autonomous, layered foreign policy for Australia not dictated by shifts in American mood or demand.

This makes Latham “dangerous”. He opposes the American doctrine of pre-emptive war – not the UN definition – which is the ideological lynchpin for the war on terror, does not support the Iraq invasion and favours a “Defence of Australia” military posture rather than an expeditionary force posture. Clearly Latham’s views carry the possibility that Australia will not provide troops for subsequent US pre-emptive invasions. This risks the rage of the Americans and a possible downgrading of the bilateral relationship. For Kelly this represents national disaster, hence his hostility toward Latham.

Kelly’s criticism of Latham extends to odd lengths. Kelly writes

“[Latham’s Lowy’s Institute speech] says nothing about the value of the US role in
the world or the US as a force for good. Nothing.”

By “a force for good” Kelly presumably means that the USA is devoted to foreign policy goals incorporating the furtherment of democracy and human rights around the world, the relief of suffering, humanitarian aid and so on. In contrast, in the same article Kelly considers China to be something less than a force for good and chastises Latham and the ALP for

“a touching innocence about China that seems devoid of
critical assessment.”22

But who is the innocent: Latham or Kelly? Is the US really “a force for good”? Since Kelly’s article on Latham was written in the broader context of Latham’s call to return Australian troops from Iraq I will restrict my comments to recent US policy and actions there.

Kelly is apparently unaware that the US actively supported the murderous Saddam Hussein during the period of his worst crimes including his mass killings of Kurds by gas attack.

Throughout the 1980’s the US provided military equipment to Saddam along with strategy advice and intelligence, acted decisively to prevent Iranian victory in the Iraq/Iran war, donated billions of dollars in financial aid, sold Saddam chemical agents including VX Nerve Gas and Anthrax and underwrote his Ballistic weapons programs. The CIA even calibrated Saddam’s Mustard Gas weapons for use against Iran.

The USA blamed Iran, not Iraq, for the notorious Halabja gas attacks knowing the truth to be different. Even after a U.S. delegation travelled to Turkey at the request of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in mid-late 1988 and confirmed that Iraq “was using chemical weapons on its Kurdish population” the State Department was urging closer relations with Saddam. In Sept. 1988 the Reagan administration overturned its own Senate’s “Prevention of Genocide Act” which would have made Iraq ineligible to receive U.S. loans, military and non-military assistance, credits, credit guarantees, and items subject to export controls. In Oct. 1989 President Bush signed National Security Directive 26 providing Iraq with a further $1bn in aid amongst further significant support. 23

The US was not in the least concerned about the mass killings of Kurds under Saddam. The US at the time was pro-Saddam in order to prevent the rise of Iran as a regional hegemon. The Kurds were completely expendable in the face of the Iranian threat to the greatest strategic asset in the world, namely, Middle East oil.

The US committed numerous atrocities during the first Gulf War including cluster bombing in civilian areas, deliberate withholding of medicines and medical equipment from hospitals, destruction of civilian water supplies and the use of radioactive weapons.24

Contrary to US and British claims, the No-Fly zones instituted after the first Gulf War were not designed to protect the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs, Turkish troops and aircraft regularly entered the northern no-fly zone covering Iraqi Kurdistan to bomb and kill while the US and British stood aside.

Similarly, in the Southern zone, Iraqi troop movements were not prohibited, not even Iraqi military helicopters, only Iraqi jets. Hence, US and British planes circled overhead or stayed grounded while Saddam marched in with customary brutality to crush the 1998 rebellion. Entire towns were leveled, mass summary executions ordered and historic Shia shrines and mosques bombed. It is estimated that Saddam’s forces killed 100,000 Marsh Arabs in the five months ending September 1998. American troops were ordered not to prevent the mass killings. The extra concession to allow Iraqi military helicopters into the Southern No-Fly zone but not the Northern was obviously made to facilitate Saddam’s murderous rampage 25

The trigger for the latest US invasion of Iraq was the infamous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, not concern for democracy or human rights. The US Administration moved quickly to make political capital out of the sorrow and anger amongst the public to blame the attacks on Iraq in a knowing untruth and so justify their invasion.

Bush Administration claims in regard Iraqi WMD’s “’dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test,’ the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists commented, ‘but the more ridiculous [they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism.’ (Linda Rothstein, editor BAS, July 2003) But they served their intended purpose. Quickly a majority of Americans came to believe that they were present targets of Iraqi WMDs. Foolsd by their own government who knew otherwise, almost fifty per cent of Americans linked Saddam Hussein to the World Trade Centre tragedy. All this helped Bush and his insiders drum up support for the Iraq invasion. 26

In September 2002, Donald Rumsfeld repeated these untruths to the Senate Armed Services Committee:
Senator Mark Dayton: “What is it compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?”
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: “What’s different? What’s different is 3,000 people were killed.”
The CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack summarized the effectiveness of the Bush administration’s propaganda assault against its own people like so:
‘The real difference was the change from September 11th. The sense that after September 11th, the American people were now willing to make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming home to visit us here made it possible to think about a big invasion force.’ 27

Western power is not committed to democracy in Iraq. In calling for the “people of Iraq” to overthrow Saddam following the first Gulf War, President Bush was really calling for a military coup – another Saddam, but an obedient Saddam. This is admitted by the US itself and seconded by the British:
“We clearly would have preferred a coup. There’s no question about that,” – Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft Interview on ABC News, 26 June 1997 30
‘I don’t recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection ….We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein” – British Prime Minister John Major, ITN interview, 4 April, 199128
“..for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf.” – President Bush and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 2 March 1988

In summary the US is willing to countenance mass killings including the extermination of a half a million children32, use radioactive weapons, cluster bomb in civilian areas, destroy civilian water supplies, deprive civilians of medicines, sell Nerve Gas and Anthrax, build the Ballistic weapons program of a megalomaniac dictator, back military coups and lie to its own population and the world community. And that’s just in Iraq.
Latham has excellent reasons for not eulogizing the US as a force for good. It is Kelly that is the innocent, but I am not certain that this innocence is “touching”.

Kelly is a very influential journalist with access to a large newspaper readership and appears regularly as a mainstream commentator on national TV. His views on US, Iraq and Australia reach into every home. As such his views on the proper attitude of Australia politicians toward US policy (rhapsodic praise) have the potential to influence the entire polity. It is therefore alarming that Kelly’s naivety is so far removed from the truth about US realpolitik and imperial ambitions.

Kelly does not settle for a lack of criticism or even quiet agreement in regard to US foreign policy. The proper attitude for Australian politicians in regard to the USA in Kelly’s view is unrestrained applause. Latham didn’t describe the US as a ‘force for evil’ or less emotively, ‘an outlaw terrorist state’. He just didn’t say they were a force for good. Does Kelly expect Australian politicians as a matter of obligation or respect for the Australia-US alliance to repeat US propaganda verbatim regardless of what they may or may not believe?

Kelly is able to discover that China is sometimes worthy of criticism, presumably due to its repression of democracy in Tiannemen Square, in Tibet and of the Uighur of Xinjiang, but he is apparently not able to discover the facts about American invasion and support for repression in Iraq. This in incredible, if not frankly unbelievable, for a person of his experience and exposure to international affairs.

Paul Kelly is the radical on the Australia-US relationship, not Latham. It is Kelly who is prepared to risk increased security danger, trade reprisal, disrupt regional relationships, fan Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia, fight non-essential wars of choice and turn a blind eye to the death of hundreds of thousands to remain in the good graces of the USA.

This being so Paul Kelly is a dangerous man. Kelly knows, but will not directly state, that the US is committed to preserving its global political, economic and military supremacy through raw power35 as described in its National Security Strategy delivered in Sept. 2002 34. Since we are “hostage” to the US in its present mood in Kelly’s view and “have no choice” except to agree with our ally, Kelly is therefore committed to endless war as long as the US is prepared to wage it.

True, Kelly expects the direct costs to Australia to be very small.33 But as for the costs borne by Iraqis under aerial bombardment, showered by radioactive dust from American depleted-uranium warheads, for the children playing in ruined cities amidst unexploded cluster bomblets with their homes, hospitals and water supply smashed to oblivion – well they are irrelevant.

It can be expected that Kelly will use his position of influence within the electorate to continue to argue for loyalty to the US regardless of how many the US chooses to kill in advancement of its economic and political goals. He can also be expected to energetically argue against those, such as Latham, who will not stomach being associated with such slaughter.

Kelly apparently attended the recent Cancun conference for Murdoch editors and commentators addressed by Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condaleeza Rice. A directive to present the US as “a force for good” sounds like just the sort of “editorial guideline” one would expect to appear in an internal memo or media briefing paper. Unfortunately the results of Kelly’s appalling ”innocence” impact disgracefully on Australian’s ability to make informed voting choices about our association with US foreign policy and hence the practice of our democracy.

The Touching Innocence Of Paul Kelly

The Touching Innocence Of Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly’s piece in The Australian, 10 April-2004 entitled “Damage In Isolation” contains an odd criticism of Mark Latham’s foreign policy speech to the Lowy Institute made on the 7 April previous. Kelly writes

“[Latham’s speech] says nothing about the value of the US role in the world or the US as a force for good. Nothing.”

By “a force for good” Kelly presumably means that the USA is devoted to foreign policy goals incorporating the furtherment of democracy and human rights around the world, the relief of suffering, humanitarian aid and so on.

In contrast, in the same article Kelly considers China to be something less than a force for good and chastises Latham and the ALP for “a touching innocence about China that seems devoid of critical assessment.”

But who is the innocent: Latham or Kelly? Is the US really “a force for good”? Since Kelly’s article on Latham was written in the broader context of Latham’s call to return Australian troops from Iraq I will restrict my comments to recent US policy and actions there.

The US actively supported the murderous Saddam Hussein during the period of his worst crimes including his mass killings of Kurds by gas attack.

Throughout the 1980’s the US provided military equipment to Saddam along with strategy advice and intelligence, acted decisively to prevent Iranian victory in the Iraq/Iran war, donated billions of dollars in financial aid, sold Saddam chemical agents including VX Nerve Gas and Anthrax and underwrote his Ballistic weapons programs. The CIA even calibrated Saddam’s Mustard Gas weapons for use against Iran.

The USA blamed Iran, not Iraq, for the notorious Halabja gas attacks knowing the truth to be different. Even after a U.S. delegation travelled to Turkey at the request of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in mid-late 1988 and confirmed that Iraq “was using chemical weapons on its Kurdish population” the State Department was urging closer relations with Saddam In Sept. 1988 the Reagan administration overturned its own Senate’s “Prevention of Genocide Act” which would have made Iraq ineligible to receive U.S. loans, military and non-military assistance, credits, credit guarantees, and items subject to export controls. In Oct. 1989 President Bush signed National Security Directive 26 providing Iraq with a further $1bn in aid amongst further significant support.

The US was not in the least concerned about the mass killings of Kurds under Saddam. The US at the time was pro-Saddam in order to prevent the rise of Iran as a regional hegemon. The Kurds were completely expendable in the face of the Iranian threat to the greatest strategic asset in the world, namely, Middle East oil.

The US committed numerous atrocities during the first Gulf War including the following:

• Cluster bombing in civilian areas
• Deliberate withholding of medicines and medical equipment from hospitals
• Destruction of civilian water supplies
• Use of radioactive weapons

Contrary to US and British claims, the no-fly zones instituted after the first Gulf War were not designed to protect the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs, Turkish troops and aircraft regularly entered the northern no-fly zone covering Iraqi Kurdistan to bomb and kill in the Northern zone while the US and British stood aside.

Similarly, in the Southern zone, Iraqi troop movements were not prohibited, not even Iraqi military helicopters, only Iraqi jets. Hence, US and British planes circled overhead or stayed grounded while Saddam marched in with customary brutality to crush the 1998 rebellion.

The consequences were devastating. Hussein’s forces levelled the historical centres of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene. The extra concession to allow Iraqi military helicopters into the Southern No-Fly zone but not the Northern was obviously made to facilitate Saddam’s massacre of the Marsh Arabs. (Peter W. Galbraith, “The Ghosts of 1991”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10874-2003Apr11?language=printer”)

The trigger for the latest US invasion of Iraq was the infamous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, not concern for democracy or human rights. The US Administration moved quickly to make political capital out of the sorrow and anger amongst the public to blame the attacks on Iraq in a knowing untruth and so justify their invasion.

Many of the charges about supposed Iraqi WMD’s “dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test,” the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists commented, “but the more ridiculous [they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism.” (Linda Rothstein, editor BAS, July 2003).

The propaganda assault had its effects. Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. (Noam Chomsky, “Preventive War ‘the Supreme Crime’: Iraq invasion that will live in infamy”, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4030)

In September 2002, Donald Rumsfeld explicitly tied the need to invade Iraq to the 9/11 bombings in this testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Senator Mark Dayton: “What is it compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?”
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: “What’s different? What’s different is 3,000 people were killed.”

Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got enormous media exposure in late 2002 for his book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” During a typical CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he had come to see a “massive invasion” of Iraq as both desirable and practical:

“The real difference was the change from September 11th. The sense that after September 11th, the American people were now willing to make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming home to visit us here made it possible to think about a big invasion force.”

Western power is not committed to democracy in Iraq. In calling for the “people of Iraq” to overthrow Saddam following the first Gulf War, President Bush was really calling for a military coup – another Saddam, but an obedient Saddam. This is admitted by the US itself and seconded by the British:

“We clearly would have preferred a coup. There’s no question about that,” – Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft Interview on ABC News, 26 June 1997

‘I don’t recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection ….We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein” – British Prime Minister John Major, ITN interview, 4 April, 1991

“..for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf.” – President Bush and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 2 March

In summary the US is willing to countenance mass killings including the extermination of a half a million children, use radioactive weapons, cluster bomb in civilian areas, destroy civilian water supplies, deprive civilians of medicines, sell Nerve Gas and Anthrax, build the Ballistic weapons program of a megalomaniac dictator, back military coups and lie to its own population and the world community. And that’s just in Iraq.

Latham has excellent reasons for not eulogizing the US as a force for good. It is Kelly that is the innocent, but I am not certain that this innocence is “touching”.

Kelly is a very influential journalist with access to a large newspaper readership and appears regularly as a mainstream commentator on national TV. His views on US, Iraq and Australia reach into every home. As such his views on the proper attitude of Australia politicians toward US policy (rhapsodous praise) have the potential to influence the entire polity. It is therefore alarming that Kelly’s naivety is so far removed from the truth about US realpolitik and imperial ambitions.

Kelly does not settle for quiet agreement or even a lack of criticism in regard to US foreign policy. The proper attitude for Australian politicians in regard to the USA in Kelly’s view is unrestrained applause.

Latham didn’t describe the US as a ‘force for evil’ or less emotively, ‘an outlaw terrorist state’. He just didn’t say they were a force for good. Does Kelly expect our pollies as a matter of obligation or respect for the Australia-US alliance to repeat US propaganda verbatim regardless of what they may or may not believe?

Perhaps as Editor-at-large of The Australian Kelly is beholden to his employer, Rupert Murdoch, to toe his line in political articles. Did Kelly attend the Cancun conference for Murdoch editors and commentators addressed by Bush’s National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice ? A directive to present the US as “a force for good” sounds like just the sort of “editorial guideline” you’d expect in an internal memo or media briefing paper. Unfortunately the results of this appalling ”innocence” impact disgracefully on our ability to make informed votes and hence the practice of our democracy.

PostScript
Turning now to the actual use of the phrase “the price is worth it,” we come to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s reply to Lesley Stahl’s question on “60 Minutes” on May 12, 1996:

Stahl: “We have heard that a half a million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And–you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Sources:

Paul Kelly, “Damage in Isolation:, The Australian, April 10, 2004, http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9233174%255E12250,00.htmlLast Accessed, Apr-21-2004-04

Eric Herring, “The No Fly Zones in Iraq: The Myth of a Humanitarian Intervention*, via http://uk.geocities.com/dstokes14/Eric/eric.htm, Last Accessed 15-Apr-2004
Sarah Graham-Brown, “No-Fly Zones: Rhetoric and Real Intentions”, http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/2001/0220nofl.htm, Last Accessed Apr-15-2004
Norman Solomon, “Exploiting Anxiety: The Political Capital of 9/11”, http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon09112003.html, Last Accessed Apr-15-2004
Peter W. Galbraith, “The Ghosts of 1991”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10874-2003Apr11?language=printer”, Last Accessed 15-Apr-2004

Center For Co-Operative Research, “US Support for Iraq in the 1980s”, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/globalissue/usforeignpolicy/iraq1980scontent.html, Last Accessed 15-Apr-2004-04-15

Noam Chomsky, “Preventive War ‘the Supreme Crime’: Iraq invasion that will live in infamy”, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4030, Last Accessed 15-Apr-2004

George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam”, Time 2 March 1998, posted on http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm, Last Accessed Apr-15-2004

Rahul Mahajan, :”’We Think the Price Is Worth It’: Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects- there or here”, http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/iraq.html, Last Accessed Apr-15-2004

Was Keating Clueless On Employment ?

One Million Unemployed

The Liberal/National Party Coalition in Australia has two great indictments on the former ALP Treasurer and Prime Minister, Paul Keating. The first is ’17% Interest Rates’ and the second is ‘One Million Unemployed’. Here’s Peter Costello long-term Lib. Treasurer in 2007 stringing the insults together into his party-preferred summary of Keating’s anti-achievements

I love seeing Paul Keating out on the media. And I would say: Paul, keep it going, remind people of what it is like under a Labor Government. And you saw all of the old vitriol coming out and it reminds people of a million unemployed, 17 per cent interest rates, a budget deficit of $10 billion, Commonwealth debt at $96 billion

- Interview with Virginia Trioli 702 ABC, Sydney Friday, 26 October 2007

Was Keating clueless on Employment ? Could he have done better ? What do he do wrong ?

Keating The Chiropractor

The high profile Blogger and academic John Quiggin scores Keating low on Employment, claiming Keating had no focussed Employment Policy apart from a brief period following the 1993 election with the program Working Nation and even that ran for only a short time before being overtaken by other priorities.

See Quiggin in his article from 2000 ‘Unemployment: Still Hoping For A Miracle ?’

The main reason for pessimism is the fact that unemployment is at the bottom of the policy agenda, just as it has been for all but a few years in the past two decades. In the absence of a serious policy response, we are reduced to ‘hoping for a miracle’. (p.3)

The Working Nation program, [...] was introduced by the Labor government
in 1994, cut back in 1995, and slashed by the incoming Liberal–National coalition
government in 1996…(p.19)

Quiggin regards Keating as a technocratic, neo-liberal economist, who aimed merely to calibrate the economy so that it would function efficiently, thereby producing Employment as a natural by-product of health. If true that would make Keating’s approach to the economy rather like that of a Chiropractor, attempting to maximize the efficiency of the body’s nervous system and waiting for natural feedbacks to produce a vigorous equilibrium.

Mega An’ Me

I decided to find out more about what Keating did on Employment and started by borrowing ‘The Longest Decade’ by George Megalogenis from the local library. Lo and Behold, Chapter 1 summarized Keating’s Economic Project as Treasurer/Prime Minister and gave me an outline of what Keating did and its effects on the broad economy.

I enjoyed the chapter so much I have decided to blog The Longest Decade as a series of posts called ‘Mega An’ Me’…maybe.

Mega Loves Paul

From Chapter 1, I would say Mega loves Paul (Keating). He makes it pretty clear that he regards Keating as having done the hard work of reform and that Howard was the beneficiary of Keating’s brave reforms. Mega says:

“[Keating's] interest rates begat another recession…[but Keating] wanted praise for ending the speculative orgy of the 1980′s. At first we thought he was crazy [...] but history has validated [...] Keating [...] The decade that followed his recession (which began in November 1990) expired on 24 November 2007 [with the defeat of the Howard Government]“

The catch for Keating is that the longest decade still belongs to Howard.
- The Longest Decade, pp.9-10

Mega claims, I feel a little blithely, that most people did not feel any pain in Keating’s recession.

Neither number [17% interest rates or one million unemployed] happens to be mainstream.[...] In NSW only one out of 24 workers were retrenched… Three out of four households were on a fixed interest rate of 13.5%, the ceiling that applied before April 1986…Also the banks shielded the remainder by extending the term of the loan, so repayments did not rise…

Longest Decade, pp.12-13

…but there has to be some reason for that ALP vote in 1996 shrinking to post-Great Depression lows. People were feeling it. Pretty much only the rusted-ons stayed attached to the ALP in 1996.

As it is, Keating and Mega are supported in their views by Ian McFarlane, Reserve Bank Governor from 1996. Mega quotes McFarlane addressing the Australian Business Economists Annual Conference in 2005 as Governor Of The Reserve Bank, where McFarlane stated Keating’s recession should be regarded as a ‘policy triumph’ as it delivered Australia ‘a low-inflation, stable growth eceonomy’.

Is VIC There ?

Mega traces the pain of Keating’s recession squarely to Victoria. He notes that three-quarters of the job losses of the recession were sufferred in that State due to the reduction of tariffs on the automotive and other manufacturing industries. In Mega’s view those job losses were the price that Victoria had to pay for being ‘dragged into the global economy’ pp.18-19

One might also apply those comments to South Australia, another state that had Manufacturing Industry job losses at that time.

Mega supports his case (only VIC and SA suffered) by presenting results from the 1996 election that show the ALP losing 9 seats in Victoria, but picking up 5 seats in NSW and Qld combined. He could also have mentioned that the ALP was almost obliterated in SA, being reduced to only 2 seats out of 12.

Keating’s Interest Rates

Keating portrays his 17% interest rates as necessary evil required to finally conquer the inflation monster that had risen in the middle of every boom. Wage inflation was being controlled through the Accord, but Asset inflation notably house prices but running at 15% with the help of the newly deregulated financial sector. Keating pumped interest rates until they trumped asset inflation (Longest Decade pp.13-15)

Keating’s interest rates deepened the recession but they were the tool employed to kill inflation which allowed The Longest Decade of stable growth and therefore deserve to be lauded as a policy triumph.

So Was Keating Clueless On Employment ?

I’ll go with ‘Probably Not’. Mega and Keating spin a very plausible yarn on tariffs and the task of destroying inflation but Quiggin speaks in other articles of ‘paths not taken’ on employment policy. I would like to hear some of those other voices.

Mega also makes the point that the international economy was not vibrant in the early 1990′s which gives PJK some further excuses.

But the Coalition are shameless to criticise Keating for his reforms, since they voted for all of them. Have they ever explained what magic wand they would have waved over Victoria to prevent job losses in a manufacturing sector denied its tarrif barriers ?

Note to self: I do not really understand why it is necessary to destroy asset inflation unless maybe to forestall wage demands to cover said inflation.

Loose Ends

There are some other strands of this story to be covered such as Keating’s ‘jobless recovery’ inlcuding the changing technological profile of work and jobs which meant that lost blue-collar jobs could not be immediately replaced. Having peeked ahead I know these topics will be covered in due course.