Is Australia Sending Us A Message?

The Friendly Face Of Australia: In a newspaper advertisement published across the Middle East, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell bluntly informs seaborne refugees that they will not make Australia home. So visceral is Australia's fear of "boat people" that it has proved willing to erode its own and its Pacific neighbours' democratic rights in order to "defend the borders". Not even the strong historical relationship with New Zealand has escaped the Australians' exclusionist madness.

 

THE NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT puts the number of Kiwis incarcerated in Australian detention centres at 184. Seventy-five of those detained deportees are being held in the isolated detention facility on Christmas Island. This lonely spec of Australian territory rises out of the Indian Ocean 2,608 kilometres north of Perth and 2,748 kilometres west of Darwin. If everybody had their own, Christmas Island would be part of Indonesia – from whose shores it is separated by just 500 kilometres.

 

That’s the whole point, of course. Christmas Island’s proximity to the Indonesian coast made it the obvious forward staging point in Australia’s long-running battle against refugees making for Australia in boats.

 

These “boat people” bring out the very worst in Australians. A visceral hatred of “Asians” that erupts from somewhere deep in the Aussie psyche. A primal fear, perhaps, of being over-run and destroyed – just as the First Peoples of Australia were over-run and destroyed by the progeny of Mother England. Australia’s bad conscience is projected onto these terrified human-beings. “Real” Australians see hordes of “illegal migrants” headed for the Lucky Country, and imagine it being swamped under a tsunami of unwanted brown and yellow flesh.

 

Not that there’s any shortage of dark primal secrets for the Aussie psyche to project. Like the genteelly named “Sunday Hunts”. Those still unacknowledged campaigns of genocidal murder that, in grim historical anticipation of the Nazis best efforts to render Eastern Europe “Juden Frei”, emptied the squatters’ sprawling estates of unwanted Aboriginals. Remembering, too, the “Blackbirders” of the early 1900s. Those sea captains and their brutal crews who raided the islands of Melanesia, carrying off hundreds of men and boys to slave in the sugar plantations of Northern Queensland. Oh yes, there’s much more than just the “White Australia Policy” to lay at our Aussie “cousins’” door.

 

It would be funny if it wasn’t all so squalid and so sad. A nation founded on the brutal policy of exiling another nation’s “criminal classes” to a far off land on the other side of the world, rounding up their own “convicts” and exiling them to another country of which they know next to nothing. Forty years ago, to be descended from a convict was something an Australian would happily boast about. Proof that even the most wretched of human-beings has something worthwhile to pass down the generations. That the only thing distinguishing the Squatters from the Convicts was that the former’s crimes almost always went unpunished.

 

But that’s not the way they look at things in Australia’s electorally decisive suburbs. They don’t want to know about their country’s history, and see nothing worth celebrating in its egalitarian traditions. Tragically, the suburbs’ grasping materialism, withered social values, unreconstructed racism and xenophobia has become the Royal Road to electoral success. This brutal fact has made cowards out of virtually the entire Australian political class. To the point where “stop the boats” has become the touchstone of electability for both the Liberal and Labour parties.

 

The big problem with this bi-partisan “stop the boats” policy, is that it is utterly incompatible with democratic norms and values (not to mention in complete contravention of a multitude of international laws and treaties). It’s why the “boat people” had to be moved to places offshore where the protection of Australia’s laws was no longer available. Hence John Howard’s “Pacific Solution” – a sort of “blackbirding” in reverse.

 

Papua-New Guinea’s Manus Island presented less of a problem for the Australian authorities than the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru. As a former colony of Australia, Papua-New Guinea has yet to free itself from the corruption choking practically every institution inherited from its colonial masters. Nauru, on the other hand, is a powerless and impoverished statelet for which not only Australia, but the UK and New Zealand, have long-standing responsibilities. Australia’s corruption of Nauru would be harder to hide.

 

Is it merely coincidence that the arrival of the first Kiwis at Christmas Island coincided with New Zealand’s insistence that the independence and probity of Nauru’s justice system (which New Zealand funds) be fully restored? Australia knows that its Pacific Solution cannot exist alongside functioning courts and democratic institutions. Has New Zealand’s courageous defence of the rule of law in Nauru thrown a spanner in the works? Is the rising number of detained Kiwi citizens some sort of message?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 October 2015.

Poisoning Nauru: How Australia Is Destroying A Pacific Neighbour’s Democracy, While New Zealand’s Government Looks On.

Silencing All Opposition: Matthew Batsiua, one of five opposition MPs expelled from the Nauruan Parliament for challenging the increasingly dictatorial regime of President Baron Waqa, is arrested for leading a protest demonstration against its latest crackdown on free speech and the Internet. While Australia, in the name of its brutal "Pacific Solution", is poisoning Nauru's democratic institutions, New Zealand looks on in silence.

 

CORRUPTION IS LIKE POISON. Once inside your system it immediately starts attacking your defences. Eventually, if nothing is done to counteract its effects, it kills you. The tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, situated approximately 4,000 kilometres north of Auckland, has been corrupted by Australia. Slowly but surely, its democratic institutions are being poisoned.

 

Some would argue that it all began a hundred years ago when the Australians turfed out the Germans at the beginning of the First World War. At the war’s end, Nauru was declared a League of Nations “mandate” under the joint control of the British, Australian and New Zealand governments. In reality, however, Nauru has always been an Aussie-run operation.

 

No one would have cared (other than the Nauruans, who weren’t consulted) had it not been for the fact that this tiny dot (just 21 square kilometres!) on the equator had, over thousands of years, accumulated hundreds-of-thousands of tons of top-quality bird shit.

 

Nauru’s phosphate deposits were among the purest in the world, a fact which conferred upon the hapless island territory the dangerous status of “strategic possession”. Ruthlessly extracted for use as fertiliser, Nauru’s phosphate deposits would, between 1920 and 1980, transform New Zealand’s farms into some of the most productive agricultural units on earth.

 

The Nauruans were not permitted to get their hands on this crucial resource until the late 1960s. For a few fat years the newly independent republic of Nauru waxed affluent on its rapidly dwindling guano deposits. Briefly, its citizens enjoyed one of the highest per capita incomes on earth. And then, suddenly, it was gone. Leaving Nauru as little more than, in David Lange’s memorable phrase: “a clapped-out quarry”.

 

What was Nauru to do? In 1991 it had $1.5 billion in its Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust – a not insignificant capital base for 10,000 citizens looking for a fresh start. Tragically, by 2001, corruption and mismanagement had reduced the Trust’s resources to barely $100 million. With its levels of expenditure now well in excess of its income, Nauru was broke.

 

And then along came the Tampa and its hundreds of rescued asylum seekers. Little Johnny Howard responded by unconscionably exploiting Australia’s most visceral racist impulses. That created an urgent political need to get the whole festering problem off Australian soil. What Howard and his Liberal Party were looking for was a nation state that was not only willing to “accommodate” Australia’s unwanted asylum-seekers, but to also put a dampener on the enthusiasm of interfering human-rights lawyers, UN rapporteurs, and investigative journalists. Thus was born the “Pacific Solution”.

 

The detention of the Tampa refugees was arranged with indecent haste, but the transformation of Nauru into an hermetically-sealed island of unaccountable state power was bound to take a little longer. Nauru had a perfectly serviceable democratic constitution. It belonged to the Commonwealth and was a member of the Pacific Forum. It had a respectable and responsible judiciary made up of (mostly) Australian judges. Its small, Australian-trained, police force was reasonably competent and honest. On the debit side, the country was broke, and just about everybody lucky enough to have a job worked for the Nauruan government. Politics and public administration was the country’s Achilles’ Heel. To corrupt Nauru, all Howard (or any other Australian prime minister) needed was a fistful of aid dollars – and 10 of its 19 MPs.

 

It has taken 14 years, off and on, but the poison is clearly working. Nauru’s decision to host Australia’s concentration camps for asylum seekers has eroded every constitutional check and balance essential to the survival of democratic institutions.

 

The first casualty was the Nauruan judiciary. In January 2014 the Chief Justice of Nauru, Geoffrey Eames, was expelled from the country, along with the Australian magistrate, Peter Law. With them went the rule of law in the tiny republic. The administration of justice is now in the hands of persons answerable only to the politicians. Opponents of the Government can no longer rely on the courts for protection.

 

The police force, too, has fallen under political control. Its inevitable involvement in the oppression of the asylum seekers has fatally compromised its personnel as impartial enforcers of the law. The Nauruan Police have abandoned their role as the the citizens’ protectors to become the Government’s enforcers. In collusion with the private security personnel responsible for keeping “order” at the refugee detention centres, police officers are increasingly regarded as people to be feared; thugs who can break the law with impunity.

 

The reason so little news of these derelictions filters out of Nauru is due to the ruthless censorship applied by the state-owned and operated television and radio stations. Attempting to report such matters would instantly cost any local journalist his or her job. It’s no easier for foreign journalists. President Baron Waqa and his Cabinet have imposed a mandatory, non-refundable $8,000 “bond” on every journalist attempting to enter the country. If that doesn’t dampen their enthusiasm, the Nauruan immigration authorities can always arrange for them to be put on the next plane to Sydney or Auckland. Oh, and just in case young Nauruans might feel tempted to organise and communicate through social media, the Government has shut down Facebook.

 

Not surprisingly, with the Judiciary subverted, the Police corrupted and the news media gagged, Baron Waqa and his allies decided in June of last year that it was time to put the finishing touches to their 21 square kilometre dictatorship. This involved the suspension of all those members of the Nauruan parliament who refused to go along with Waqa’s increasingly lawless regime.

 

Last week, several hundred Nauruans, led by one of the suspended MPs, Matthew Batsiua, attempted to protest the Waqa Government’s ever more draconian attempts to shut down free speech and the Internet. As they approached Parliament House, the Nauruan Police (aided by security officers from the camps) waded into the crowd and a number of protesters were hurt. Batsiua, along with the opposition MPs Sprent Dabwido (a former President of Nauru) and Squire Jeremiah were later arrested and remain in custody. Another opposition MP, Roland Kun, was physically hauled off a plane due to depart for Wellington and has had his passport cancelled. The Waqa regime is apparently concerned that he will inform the outside world about what is happening in Nauru.

 

The silence of the Australian Government in the face of this “Lord of the Flies” descent into lawlessness and brutality is readily understood. Prime Minister Tony Abbott needs the Pacific Solution and he is fully aware that it cannot be made to work in a democratic country where the rule of law holds sway.

 

More difficult to understand, and harder to forgive, is the silence of our own government. The Nauruans and their phosphate may have made New Zealand rich, but that does not appear to have inspired a reciprocal determination on our part to keep them free.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 25 June 2015.