The other day, one of my favourite cinemas closed down. The boards went
up on the art-deco Valhalla in Sydney, one of the world’s best at
putting out powerful, political documentaries. The lack of fuss might
have seemed surprising in a city whose iconic Opera House is said to
embody modern Australia’s pride in the arts. On the contrary, the
closure reflected a more general shutting down.
The Valhalla was
certainly an anomaly in an Australia so entrapped by the cult of
“marketing” that an executive of the Sydney Morning Herald can declare
“the answer” is “not smart and clever people” but “people who can
execute your strategy”. On 9 February, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development in Paris proclaimed Australia the least
regulated and most privately owned economy in the western world. This is
a country owned and run by businessmen.
The most vivid example
is the press. Rupert Murdoch controls almost 70 per cent of principal
newspaper circulation. With the exception of the multi-ethnic Special
Broadcasting Service and the radio network of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, the rest of the media reflect Murdochism and a
market ideology imported wholesale from the United States. The
remarkable culture wars of the neo-conservative prime minister, John
Howard, exemplify this.
Howard believes that “business and sport”
are society’s prime movers. The country’s once-respected scientific
research laboratories, the CSIRO, have been instructed to take on
business sponsors. Almost alone among nations, Australia last year
abstained rather than vote for a modest United Nations proposal that
members should defend “diversity” in their own cultures – against
rapacious great power. When Australia’s leading playwright, David
Williamson, likened Howard’s privatised “aspirational” Australia to a
cruise ship sailing to the “sobering destiny” of an environmental
disaster, his speech was “called for” by the prime minister’s office and
a vicious campaign was orchestrated in the Murdoch press.
With
no political opposition to speak of, Howard’s conquests have been in
cultural life, with historiography thrown in. Siding with an unchanging
clique of far-right commentators, he has effectively stifled debate
about Australia’s bloody colonial past while deriding the “black armband
theory of history”: that is, the truth of a genocidal racism that
continues to devastate the Aboriginal people. His patriotic, or “put out
more flags”, campaign is pure George W Bush. Schools have been ordered
to erect flagpoles, and on “Australia Day”, 26 January, which
“celebrates” the “settlement” of another people’s country, flags are
distributed and often displayed with gormless aggression.
This
was never part of Australian life; Americans wrapped themselves in their
flag, but not we Australians. We saw it as a respectful reminder of
those who had gone to fight and die in Australia’s mostly catastrophic
imperial wars, who “did their best”. The Howard regime has changed all
this. The little leader wears a plastic flag in his lapel, just like
Bush, and puts his hand on his heart, just like Bush, and reinforces a
race-based society, just like Bush. While the neglect of New Orleans is
Bush’s symbol, the contempt shown the first Australians is Howard’s.
On
“Australia Day”, I made my way through the flags to Redfern, an
Aboriginal area in the inner city, and celebrated what black Australians
call Survival Day. Their first “Day of Mourning and Protest” was held
in 1938 on the 150th anniversary of the white invasion. Over a thousand
Aboriginal men and women attended that first civil rights gathering,
after having been refused use of Sydney Town Hall. A long and painful
campaign for freedom and justice had begun, and endures, like an
invisible presence.
In Redfern Park on Survival Day, the flags
were black, red and gold: colours of indigenous skin, the earth and the
sun. The only report I could find of Redfern the next day was of a minor
fight, which was no doubt fed to the papers by the police. Should the
word “Aboriginal” enter the public arena it must be associated, where
possible, with “no-hopers”.
In Howard’s Australia, the ultimate
“no-hoper” is a sick, terrified, deeply troubled and abused young man
called David Hicks. Hicks was a drifter, which was once an Australian
type known as a “swagman” and a “larrikin” and lauded by our bush poets
and balladeers. In the 1990s, Hicks became a Muslim and drifted through
Kosovo, then on to Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by the Americans
and sent to their concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Not a shred of
evidence exists that Hicks fought for al-Qaeda, or is a terrorist. He is
a drifter. Yet he is to face one of Bush’s “military commissions”, for
which torture is used to extract confessions, and there is no right to
cross-examine witnesses, no presumption of innocence and no standard of
proof “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Even three of the hand-picked US
military prosecutors have withdrawn, arguing that the commission is
rigged to secure convictions. Many of Australia’s leading jurists agree.
The
Howard government has said, in so many words, that David Hicks can rot.
He is a no-hoper, un-American, unaspirational. Put out more flags.
First published in the New Statesman – www.newstatesman.co.uk
