Gideon Polya, “White Australian Denial. Iraq, Aborigines & Greenhouse”, MWC News, 2 December 2006, partly cached by Google.
White Australian Denial. Iraq, Aborigines & Greenhouse
A LEADING Australian political journalist recently very accurately put his finger on the extraordinary pragmatism and finance-linked selfishness of the White Australian electorate (after observing that only one Australian soldier had died in Iraq, apparently by accident): “In the absence of bodies coming home in bags from Baghdad there is no way that this conflict is going to be a major determinant of how Australians vote.”
Unfortunately this view of this very experienced journalist has been absolutely correct up to the present. Thus the outspoken former Labor Opposition Leader Mark Latham has made exactly the same assessment in his controversial, post-retirement and “searingly honest” tell-all "The Latham Diaries" (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005). In the last paragraph on the last page of the book, a final point #6 on how the Labor Party can to win the next election stated: "And, finally, stay away from Iraq - this is not a vote-switching issue."
But how far does such cynicism go? How ignorant, greedy, stupid, dishonest, immoral and racist IS the White Australian electorate?
Before attempting to answer these questions it is important to note that (a) there is compulsory voting in Australian elections except for the very old – even those overseas need to offer an explanation for not voting to avoid a fine; (b) racist, lying, corporate mainstream media keep the truth about horrendous excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories from ordinary Australians, although the awful truth is slowly emerging; and (c) it appears that most Australians despise our politicians in general.
What follows below is a summary of what Australians mostly should know from reading major newspapers such as “The Age” in Melbourne or accessing international Alternative media (e.g. MWC News). “The Age” in particular has an outstanding cartoonist Michael Leunig who, like myself, is deeply concerned at the horrendous loss of life in US-UK-Australia-occupied Iraq (current post-invasion excess deaths 0.9 million) and keeps this continuing crime before his audience. I don’t have much of an audience in Australia – a Google search for Gideon Polya will bring up only about 250 URLs within Australia but elicits 35,000 around the world (thanks to ethical media such as MWC News I have been able to tell the world of the latest horrifying estimates of excess deaths due to US-Israeli state terrorism) (e.g. see MWC News).
The recent publication in a top medical journal The Lancet by a top US medical epidemiology group of their estimate of 655,000 post-invasion (0.7 million) excess deaths in Occupied Iraq has given added strength to Michael Leunig’s humanitarian pen as well as providing some added reassurance to me because there are horrifying laws potentially constraining free speech in Australia. Thus last year in a submission on proposed draconian Sedition Laws to a Senate Inquiry a top linguistics scholar Dr Stephen Morey named Michael Leunig, Professor Chomsky (US), Professor Bello (Philippines) and MWC News’ Dr Gideon Polya as most likely to run foul of these laws that provide 7 years in prison for saying things that the government of the day doesn’t like (see submissions #84 and #112 ).
What White Australia still tolerates includes:
the cost accounting estimate of the cost of the War on Terror to Australia is $20 billion (not including interest or tens of billions of dollars of lost wheat sales to Iraq and noting that the accrual costing will be vastly greater);
the AWB scam (the Australian Wheat Board company scammed US$250 million in bribes from the UN Oil-for-Food program in Sanctions-crippled Iraq) has trashed our international commercial reputation – Australian government, corporations and bureaucracy are seen as corrupt at worst, incompetent at best; the human cost of the AWB scam is estimated at up to 21,000 Iraqi infant lives;
The latest expert medical epidemiology/biometric estimates published in the top medical journal The Lancet are of 0.7 million post-invasion excess Iraqi deaths - however taking this same data and using the death rate in impoverished but peaceful neighbours Jordan and Syria as a baseline yields an estimate of 0.9 million post-invasion excess deaths (however Bush, Blair and Howard baldly deny this data);
the Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and with which Australia is intimately involved are associated with 3.6 million excess deaths (see: MWC);
rampant, politician-, Zionist- and media- promoted anti-Arab anti-Semitism , xenophobia and Islamophobia have resulted in ACTUAL horrendous abuse applied to 0.3 million Australian Muslims and 0.5 million Australians of Lebanese origin (thus 25,000 Australian citizens of Lebanese origin were shelled and bombed for a month in 2006 while both the Australian Government AND the Labor Opposition offered full support to the perpetrator, Israel (see MWC News);
racist Zionist, US, UK, monopoly media and Australian Bush-ite Coalition “terror hysteria” has led to laws grossly violating human rights in Australia – thus Muslims are severely threatened (draconian penalties for all kinds of suspected or actual infringements e.g. up to life imprisonment for a charitable donation getting into the hands of proscribed organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah) whereas Zionists are permitted to serve in the illegal army of occupation, break international law, support US-Israeli state terrorism and fund illegal, criminal and genocidal dispossession of Arab Palestinians (i.e a free rein for anti-Arab anti-Semitism in word and deed) (see MWC News);
vote-winning xenophobia has resulted in the abusive, traumatizing, human rights-violating indefinite imprisonment of Muslim refugees (mostly in remote concentration camps and including such imprisonment until recently of Children);
while US, UK and Australian experts have warned of the increased terrorism threat due to the Bush Wars (baldly denied by the US, UK and Australia Governments), Australia – next door neighbour to the biggest Muslim country in the world – is still committed to a Bush-ite course of anti-Arab anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and ugly abuse of Muslims at home and violent, war criminal mass murder and mass paedocide of Muslims in the Muslim world abroad;
Australia is in the grip of its worst ever drought but the Bush-ite Government refuses to sign Kyoto and disputes the urgency of the global warming crisis; Australia is the world’s worst per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) polluter and is the world’s biggest coal exporter; Australian and US greed is endangering the whole Planet;
the Bush-ite Government has turned the industrial relations clock back a century with draconian Industrial Relations (IR ) Laws that cripple unions and disempower and impoverish workers;
the “annual death rate” of Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians; roughly 0.5 million out of a total population of 20 million) is 2.2% (2.4% in the Northern Territory) as compared with 0.4% (what it SHOULD be), 0.7% (for White Australians) and 2.5 % (for SHEEP pre-drought in paddocks on Australian sheep farms); 20% of Indigenous Australians have diabetes, aboriginal life expectancy is about 20 years less than for White Australians and it has been asserted by a top Australian diabetologist that the diabetes epidemic might result in the extinction of Indigenous Australians this century (see MWC News ).
The Australian Labor Opposition under that great friend of neocon America, Mr Kim Beazley, has been timid, ineffectual and deeply morally compromised its support for US-Israeli state terrorism (USIST). This weekend the Labor Party is in a flurry for a last-ditch attempt to replace Beazley with more effective leaders before the 2007 election. His opponents are articulate right-winger Kevin Rudd and his off-sider Julia Gillard.
Kevin Rudd has declared (as reported by “The Age”, Melbourne, Saturday December 2 , 2006): “This is the most important election for Labor in a generation. Australia in our view … has reached a fork in the road. Labor must win this next election, because if we don’t win, the damage done to this country becomes too great to repair.” I agree.