Newspeak? It is Washington’s new “Indo-Pacific” strategy, that is driving the current “Century of Mateship” propaganda exercise out of Canberra. Australia’s foundation and development as a collection of British colonies is being barefacedly elided in favour of the Orwellian contention that: “Australia and the United States are mates. Australia and the United States have been mates for 100 years. Australia and the United States will always be mates.”
NEW ZEALAND’S RELATIONSHIP with Australia is under
considerable strain. Though they have yet to state their position openly,
Australia’s leaders are clearly less than enthusiastic about the tradition of
“automatic entry” for New Zealand’s economic migrants. It is certainly
difficult to read the Australian Government’s denial of non-emergency health
care, higher education and social welfare benefits to Kiwi citizens as anything
other than a pretty strong signal of Australia’s rising impatience with the
ANZAC myth of eternal “mateship”.
Indeed, if the programmes currently featuring on Sky TV’s
“History Channel” are anything to go by, there is a concerted effort underway
to attach the “mateship” label to Australia’s relationship with the United
States. Under the rubric of “One Hundred Years of Mateship” Australian
documentary-makers are advancing the far-from-convincing argument that the
Commonwealth of Australia – one of the British Empire’s most important economic
and strategic “dominions across the seas” – and the United States of America
have been bosom buddies from the moment they clapped eyes on each other across
the battlefields of the Western Front in 1918.
It is rare in the English-speaking nations of the twenty-first
century to witness such a blatant attempt to re-write history. Up until the
Second World War, elite Australia’s attachment to British imperialism was as
fervent as it was unquestioning. The Aussie working-class, much of it Irish and
Catholic, may have had little cause to love the English and the Scots-Irish
Orangemen from Ulster, but its dangerously radical opinions were vigorously
rejected by the “respectable” settlers of New South Wales, Victoria and South
Australia. For these sons and daughters of the Empire, “Mother England” was the
source of all economic, military and cultural power. The USA and its teeming
millions were impertinent upstarts – not “mates”.
That all changed, of course, when a squadron of Japanese
navy bombers, almost nonchalantly, sank the two great British battleships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, off the Malaysian coast on
10 December 1941 – just three days after Japan’s surprise attack on the
American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour. The fall of “impregnable” Singapore,
which followed soon after, on 15 February 1942, brought home to Australians
just how far away Mother England really was and forced them to shift their
strategic gaze eastward to the United States. Every Australian understood that
if the Japanese were going to be defeated, it would not be by the British, who
had proved to be a busted-flush, but by the Americans. For most Aussies, therefore,
the Yanks were more than their “mates” – they were Australia’s bloody saviours!
Post-World War II, however, the case for US-Australian
“mateship” grows progressively stronger. The two countries have fought
alongside each other in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The view from
Canberra is unequivocally that of a steadfast ally upon whom Washington can
rely without the slightest hesitation or doubt. The Liberal Party Prime
Minister of Australia, John Howard, confirmed this subaltern status by
describing his country as America’s “deputy-sheriff”.
Howard’s Liberal successor, Malcolm Turnbull, has developed
this relationship to the point where Australia now sees itself as a
geostrategic bridge between the Pacific and Indian oceans. The Australian landmass
is thus being presented to Washington as not only an unassailable thoroughfare
for American power, but also as a barrier against the further extension of
Chinese influence into either ocean.
It is this, Washington’s new “Indo-Pacific” strategy, that
is, almost certainly, driving Foxtel’s “100 Years of Mateship” propaganda
exercise on the History Channel. Australia’s foundation and development as a
collection of British colonies is being barefacedly elided in favour of the
Orwellian contention that: “Australia and the United States are mates.
Australia and the United States have been mates for 100 years. Australia and
the United States will always be mates.”
Which just leaves New Zealand, Australia’s former “mate”,
positioned strategically off the lucky country’s eastern seaboard like an
unsinkable aircraft carrier which has, unaccountably, pushed all its fighter aircraft
into the sea. An unreliable aircraft carrier, whose unreliable crew has, for more
than 30 years, been bloody rude to Australia’s best mates – the Americans. A
crew which insists on taking shore leave in Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne
where it spreads its downright subversive views about the rights of indigenous
people and nuclear disarmament and practical feminism and need to do something
big and meaningful about climate change among Australia’s dangerously
persuadable citizens.
Right-wing Australia would like nothing more than to close
its borders to these damned annoying Kiwis. Unfortunately, that would involve
tearing up the Australian-New Zealand Closer Economic Relationship and toppling
New Zealand into a full-scale economic and social crisis.
Now, there are some Aussies who’d like to say “tough luck,
Kiwi” and walk away. Fortunately for New Zealand, however, there are wiser heads
in the discussion who warn that a New Zealand in the grip of a life-or-death
struggle for survival might feel it had no choice but to extend the hand of “mateship”
to its largest remaining trading partner. That if Australia goes on mistreating
Kiwis, then it just might wake up one morning to discover that unsinkable
aircraft carrier across the Tasman Sea bristling with Chinese bombers.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 3 August 2018.
