Notes From An Imperial Outpost Down Under

Bravest woman in Australia, Senator Fatima Payman (scroll down to read more).

Because of my focus on resistance to imperial domination it’s been really interesting to see this from a flipped perspective i.e. from Down Under. Some of my anecdotal impressions may be of interest to readers.

Liberals are the same everywhere, except here they’re called Labor and Liberals are the conservatives (don’t ask). For example, they love to hate bad guys on the other team while making excuses for the bad guys on their team. And most of the focus is on personalities. So, if Trump and former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison have a meeting in the U.S., this is of great negative interest. (Morrison is a religious fanatic infamous for vacationing in Hawaii while bush fires swept Australia a few years ago.)

Excuses for bad guys on the Labor team are she’s not so bad, he seems like a decent bloke, he’s a good speaker, etc. Similar to defenses of the UK royal family such as, the former queen was a good sort who really cared about people. 

The royals happened to come up because Charles’ tampon-themed official portrait was unveiled back in the UK while I was here.

Further parallels include a devotion to lobbying elected officials who clearly don’t represent their constituents -- unless you consider the coal mining industry a constituent -- and a consistent failure to connect dots like warfare with climate crisis, or erosion of civil liberties with billionaire-sponsored government. And mum’s the word on the proto-WW3 military alliance AUKUS which I only heard mentioned once on the news in passing when Trump and Morrison were seen together.

You will search in vain for mention of Aussies Julian Assange, or Dan Duggan. There was a little bit on Army whistleblower David McBride being sentenced to 5 years in prison for revealing war crimes in Afghanistan for which no one has been punished.

That said, corporate news in Australia has a much more international focus than in the U.S. where Mark Twain once observed that wars were God’s way of teaching Americans geography. I saw lots about the revolt of the indigenous Kanak community in New Caledonia, one of France’s few remaining colonies, located in the South Pacific region. France is trying to impose new voting rules there such that French residents get a vote in local elections. The Kanak’s aren’t having it and have shut the roads and airport down.

Nightly reports on the color revolution in Georgia and on the Ukraine war depicting victimhood at the hands of the dastardly Russians but without a hint of the fact that Ukraine has already lost and just won’t admit it. We saw Putin received with fanfare by Xi in Beijing, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduced in a Kyiv nightclub inexplicably playing “Rockin' in the Free World,” a song he clearly doesn’t understand. (We did not see him eating neo-Nazi pizza.)

Coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza each day interviewed Palestinian refugees but without a whisper of Australia’s role. That is until extensive coverage of the "scandal" of a Labor member of Parliament saying her conscience was bothering her and asking PM Albanese on Nakba Day how many more deaths it would take before he condemned genocide. 

https://youtu.be/fqBFopusBzc?si=yv601M8vuE1Yb8Nt

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” concluded Senator Fatima Payman, an Afghan Muslim immigrant who was the first to wear the hijab in Parliament when her term began in 2022. 

Warmongering Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong joined 55 other senators in condemning the phrase as allegedly “antisemitic.” No one appeared to remember that Zionists coined the phrase back when they still called the land they coveted Palestine. TV news reported one Jewish organization in Australia objected while another organization lauded Payman’s statement (sorry, I cannot remember which was which).

Nightly reporting on students protesting genocide in both Australia and around the globe continued throughout my stay. Actually, protests of all sorts got a lot of coverage including Israelis protesting the Netanyahu government. 

Australian protests receiving coverage demanded more protection for domestic violence survivors, more crackdowns on teenage crime sprees, and reinstatement of a book about same-sex marriage that was removed from a local library.

One person interviewed for that story noted that they don’t want to see U.S.-style culture wars breaking out in Australia. Good luck with that.

Domestically, the high cost of living and related dearth of affordable housing were themes familiar to this USian. How will corporate overlords keep Australia from having the revolution it needs to reorient public policy toward meeting people’s needs? Foment civil strife, probably.

Or they could just let nature take its course and hope to reap the benefits of socialism with Chinese characteristics.