Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Wanna know the truth? This isn’t about an Islamic terrorist. This is about a guy who’s as nutty as a fruitcake who wanted to check that the Queen is really inside that coffin. He reckons she isn’t dead, you see, and he wants to go to Windsor Castle to speak with her. Maybe he thinks he’ll find Elvis there as well.
Poor Stellar. She’s a shiver looking for a spine to run up
Man tried to check Queen was in coffin, court told
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
With Matt the Insane the Apocalypse is always just around the corner
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
By Maria Pia Paganelli A Book Review of Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, by Strother E. Roberts. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019
What do beavers in Connecticut have to do with sugar in Barbados? A lot, it seems. So much, actually, that, if I may push the argument that Strother Roberts makes in Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy, Caribbean sugar would not have been possible without New England beavers. And given that by the end of the 18th century, taxes on sugar were the highest source of revenue from imported commodities for the exchequer, beavers played a fundamental role in the British Empire.
How so? Because, as Strother Roberts explains, of the interconnections of markets that the British Empire created.
Sugar in the 17th and 18th century was too profitable not to use all the possible land in the Caribbean islands to produce it. Which meant that everything else that was needed to live and work there had to be produced elsewhere and imported, from flour and meat, to working animals and enslaved workers, even including the ships and the barrels that carried sugar to its consumers in the north and across the Atlantic. These imports for the West Indies came from the Connecticut Valley, home of the beavers.
Roberts tells an impressive story of economic incentives, which brought together the different parts of the British Empire on the Atlantic coast. The interdependency of the North American colonies, the West Indies colonies, and the metropole, is a commercial interdependency that in its turn depends on the interdependency people have with nature and the local ecological environment. The imperialism that Roberts describes is thus an imperialism that extends to the environment.
It did not help that, at the time, there was the belief of a causal relation between climate and civilization. “Civilized” societies and mild climates came together; “civilized” societies would emerge when “savage” climates and landscapes had been “civilized.” So by making the landscape of New England more like the landscape of England, the Puritans hoped that the harsh climate of New England, with its very hot summers and very cold winters, would become closer to the mild climate of England.
The English wanted to reproduce England, with its cultivations, its animals, its luxuries, its fireplaces. They wanted to create, indeed, a “new” England. According to Roberts, they succeeded only in the 19th century:
“In a sense, the early nineteenth century saw New England truly become a “new” England. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England had commanded an empire of goods that ultimately saw raw materials from the colonies flow to the metropole and manufactured goods flow out […] In the nineteenth century, New England became the manufacturing center of a new American Empire”.
Before that, New England had to feed its hunger for British-ness with trade. New England was peopled with English newcomers and with indigenous communities—all with a desire for English goods. The English wanted English luxuries, and the indigenous peoples wanted English weapons and metal objects.
Here is where the beavers come into play. First, beaver fur was not only warm and soft, but it was very fashionable in Britain in the 17th century. The Connecticut Valley was an ideal home for beavers. For centuries, these little engineers built dams and ponds in the Connecticut River. Indigenous communities would hunt them and sell their fur to the British colonists, who in turn would sell them to the metropole to feed the local fashion. In return, indigenous nations got their English weapons and the Puritans their English luxuries.
Within a century, the beavers were decimated, their dams collapsed, and their ponds drained. They left lush meadows, fertile land, and no habitat for mosquitoes carrying malaria. They also left a decreased biodiversity, increased flooding and terrain erosion, and indigenous communities with severe food scarcity problems. Indigenous lands were sold to the English to pay for indigenous debts. Indigenous men increasingly joined indigenous women as workers in English farms and households, vanishing from historical records.
In possession of excellent land, the English wanted to replicate England. They thus disregarded the native features that contributed to that fertility. Indigenous peoples would use fire to regenerate land. The English were instead skeptical of fires, as not practiced in the old continent. Rather than corn, they wanted to grow wheat. But New England soil was not suitable for wheat. Rye would have worked better, but rye bread was darker than the white wheat bread typical of the old England, so rye was not a welcome substitute.
Only the Connecticut Valley proved to be a good new home for the old grain. And so by the end of the 17th century, the Connecticut Valley fed not only New England but the West Indies too, as the West Indies fed sugar to England. The trade went through the ports of Massachusetts, where sugar and molasses were made into rum, then exported to Africa as part of the slave trade directed to the West Indies. “Without this intraempire trade, it would likely have been impossible for the settler economies of either the West Indies or New England to have grown at the rate which they did” (78-9).
But Connecticut farmers could not rely on wheat alone. Indigenous peoples had a mixture of crops that did not deplete the nutrients of the soil; the English instead not only plowed their field, exposing nutrients to erosion, but grew only wheat, with decreasing yields. Diversification became necessary, and it came with flax, flaxseeds to be more precise. To produce linen, flax needs to be harvested before it matures to produce seeds. So some plants need to be spared for seeding. The Connecticut Valley soil would not yield a good quality harvest, but it could grow a lot of seeds. Ireland did have the soil to produce excellent fiber. And so Connecticut specialized in the production of flaxseed, exported the seeds to Ireland where high quality cloth would be produced and then exported back to New England.
“New England consumers thus completed a great circle of imperial commerce, sporting linens produced abroad with English or Irish labor, woven with Irish flax that was grown from Connecticut Valley seed. […] [When the clothes wore out, they would sell] the rags of Irish linen to be recycled by a regional paper mill. Finally the linen rag paper produced would provide the medium upon which local newspaper would print new advertisements by merchants seeking flaxseed for export (93). Ships returning from Ireland would carry back English manufactures and salt. Salt was needed to preserve meat sold to feed colonial cities and the enslaved sugar workers of the West Indies. By the 1670s Massachusetts alone had a fleet of over seven hundred merchant vessels going along and across the coasts of the Atlantic. Sailors in these ships needed to be fed, too”.
The English, in their quest to create a new England, imported English animals. To protect them, they exterminated the local predators. To feed them, they replace local grasses with English ones. The result was the destruction of the major sources of proteins for the indigenous peoples.
Cattle affected water quality both when alive and when slaughtered. Grazing near water meant trampling on and destroying root systems that would hold soils together. Fat, bones, hair, and residues from the leather industry washed into waterways, deoxygenizing the waters, resulting in the decimation of certain fish.
But by the late colonial period, the Connecticut River was the main trade avenue that made the ports of Connecticut become the most important centers for exporting live animals as well as pork and preserved meats. Live animals in the sugar plantations were used to power the sugar mills and to transport sugar for export and imports for consumption to and from the plantations and the ports.
The harsh work and the heat caused early death for most animals. Acquired in the most productive time of their life, they were worked to death, and then replaced with new imported ones. The same logic was used also for human labor.
“The calculus of the market encouraged sugar planters and their agents to rely on importing draft animals, rather than breeding them locally. Successfully breeding livestock in the numbers required to keep the plantation system running would have meant shifting land and labor away from the production of staple crops. In many ways, the decision to import draft animals rather than breed them locally, paralleled the inhumane logic by which plantation managers approached the slave trade (179). The profitability of the market for animals, as well as the reliance on manure for agriculture, increased the incentives for deforestation”.
The lack of records of woodlots in early times testify to the abundance of wood. But within about fifty years the natural supply of wood was significantly decreased. It did not help that the cold of the harsh New England winters could not be mitigated by the English style fireplace, which consumed an immense amount of wood and produced poor results. So the new inhabitants chose to sacrifice their wooded land to produce more marketable products and relied on regional markets to get firewood.
Valley timber made its profitable way to the West Indies, raising conflicts between the local settlers and the Empire. The British Navy engaged in conservation policy for naval timber, and with the 1691 White Pine Acts, reserved all white pines in New England with a diameter over twenty-four inches to the Crown and the Royal Navy, for ship-building purposes. “By 1760, one out of four merchant ships active within the British Empire had been constructed in New England” (137). Taxation on exported timber was also established under the pretense of conservation. For Roberts, it was more likely that exported timber was taxed as a good source of revenue instead.
White pine was among the most desirable building materials both in the colonies and especially in the tropical climate of the Caribbean, and thus a quite profitable resource for the colonists. Colonists threatened surveyors, and violence increased with enforcement attempts. It may not come as a surprise to learn that many of the surviving buildings from the 18th century were built with boards twenty-two or twenty-three inches wide.
Deforestation did bring changes to the climate, but not the ones hoped for. Deforestation caused both more droughts and more flooding when it did rain. And without the beavers’ dams, sediment would flush downriver causing severe impediments to oceangoing vessels at the mouth of the Connecticut River.
By the early 19th century, deforestation in the Connecticut Valley was such that lumber production had moved to the forests of Maine. With railroads, west-ward expansion, and industrialization, woodland was no longer profitable in New England, and reforestation expanded so much that “by the end of the twentieth century, the landscape would support more trees than any time prior to European colonization” (161).
The American Revolution disrupted a market that supported both New England and the sugar islands. With a smaller market, sugar profits declined and some land was converted to provisions.
The focus of the story that Roberts tells us, may seem limited in focus to New England and the Connecticut Valley during colonial times, but it is a precise analysis of how economic incentives, opportunity costs, and comparative advantages (without ever naming them explicitly), shape the relationship between humans and the environment. It is an historical account of how the seemingly universal desire for luxuries, which motivated the Puritans, the English in the old continent, as well as the indigenous nations, connected faraway people through trade, improved their living standards, reshaped nature, and brought millions of individuals into slavery.
This is a book worth reading.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Following reports that Hillsong leader Brian Houston has been stood down from his role for ‘acting inappropriately’ with women, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he’s never even heard of the guy.
“Sorry, Brian who?” Morrison said when quizzed on his relationship with the controversial religious leader today. “Nup, sorry, not ringing any bells. Wouldn’t know the guy if he was standing next to me on a stage at Qudos Bank Arena in front of 30,000 people at a Hillsong Conference in 2019, I’m afraid”.
Pushed further to recall detail of the decades-long friendship between the two men, Mr Morrison said he was coming up blank. “I mean, apart from referring to him in my maiden parliamentary speech, inviting him to travel with me to meet the President at the White House, and regularly calling him for ‘spiritual guidance’ whenever I’ve forgotten to respond to an epidemic or natural disaster, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of the guy.
“I mean, I’ve heard of the city in Texas obviously. Is that what you mean? No? Ok, I’ll have to ask Jenny then. Maybe she’s stood on stage with him at Sydney’s largest football stadium, saying a prayer for Australia”.
Morrison later responded to pressure to reveal further detail, saying he would set up an inquiry to determine whether he knows Brian Houston or not.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Scott and Jenny Morrison with Hillsong founder Brian Houston at the Hillsong Conference at Sydney Olympic Park in 2019
Desperate to avoid the toxic fallout from the resignation of his friend and mentor Brian Houston from Hillsong, Scott Morrison has told an astonishing lie today, claiming he hasn’t been to Hillsong for “15 years” when pressed on the scandal by journalists.
“I haven’t been at Hillsong now for over, about 15 years, I go to a local church,” Morrison said this morning, professing himself “disappointed and shocked to hear the news”.
But his efforts to dissociate himself from Hillsong are profoundly at odds with his enthusiastic support for Houston and Hillsong in recent years, as Crikey’s David Hardaker has documented.
Morrison’s most recent and high-profile visit to Hillsong was in July 2019 when the prime minister — triumphant from his surprise election win — and his wife joined tens of thousands of Hillsong worshippers onstage for the corporation’s annual conference (an event Morrison regularly attends) to discuss his faith and religious freedom. Morrison “prayed for Australia” at the conference.
Morrison was interviewed on stage — interrupted by wild cheering and applause from Hillsong devotees — by none other than Brian Houston himself.
Indeed, that conference attended by Morrison — held at Homebush in Sydney — was the occasion when Houston (affected, he claims, by alcohol and anti-anxiety medication) entered the hotel room of a woman and didn’t leave for 40 minutes.
Morrison has a history of lying when under political pressure, with many of his scores of documented lies coming in moments of stress — for example: lying that he’d told Anthony Albanese he was going to Hawaii, lying about his claim that the vaccine rollout “wasn’t a race”, and lying about harassment claims within Sky News when under pressure in relation to workplace issues in Parliament House.
The disgrace of his friend and mentor Brian Houston, a relationship both Morrison and Hillsong were once happy to promote, is another moment of political pressure that has once again prompted a prime ministerial lie — the most blatant one of all.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Australia’s taxation system will be completely dismantled and replaced by a single request for funds on a GoFundMe.com page, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has confirmed.
The move comes following senior Coalition minister Peter Dutton’s decision to create a fundraising page for the Queensland floods in his electorate, rather than use federally available disaster funds collected through taxation.
“We had a look at what Pete did over in Queensland with the floods and we thought, that’s clever. If he can bypass taxation for disaster relief, there’s no reason why we can’t use the same process to collect funds for our healthcare system, education system, welfare spending, aged care facilities and national defence. It certainly cuts down on my workload,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the initiative would provide funding opportunities for schools, hospitals and communities. “It’s great. I’ve always thought – if only there was some sort of centralised organisation that could collect money from people across the country and then allocate that money according to needs. Wouldn’t that be great? And now Peter has gone and found the solution”.
Under the new system people will be encouraged to donate what they can, with an initial target of $250 billion. Treasurer Frydenberg said he would run an eye over the numbers once a year. “I’ll pay our wages, dish out a few grants to some mates, pay off the submarines and then whatever’s left over we can use for essential services”.
At the time of publication no members of the government had contributed to the fundraising effort.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
When Vladimir Putin visited Australia for the APEC summit in 2007, a journalist asked him "What do you think of Australia?
"I never think of Australia,'' the great horseman responded.
It was a cruel blow to our national pride, given the influence of Russian affairs on Australian history. We spent much of the later part of the 19th century regarding Russia as a likely invader. On that account there are still cannon at Watsons Bay in Sydney and at Port Phillip Bay, designed to repel Russian boarders. Putin's hero, Vladimir Lenin wrote learnedly in 1913 on the results of an Australian election more than 100 years ago, before concluding that the idea that the Australian Labor Party was socialist or a potential menace to capitalism was a joke. In another of his polemics he called for one of his ideological enemies, Karl Kautsky to be put in a cage and exhibited alongside the Australian kangaroo.
Putin was also obviously unaware that Australian soldiers had invaded Russia, at Archangel in the North, in Ukraine, still part of Russia, and in Siberia, 103 years ago, as a part of British forces against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Our forces included at least four navy vessels operating in the Black Sea, sometimes from Sevastopol. Two Australians won Victoria Crosses. To be fair to Putin, few people in Australia, even at the time, knew of our involvement. We left in early 1920 without having made much difference, and not many of the engagements would figure in the Russian official histories. Twenty years later, we were sending sheepskins to clothe Soviet soldiers fighting the Germans, eucalyptus seedings for re-afforestation, and after the war, a place of refuge for many displaced people - a substantial majority of whom proved to be fiercely anti-communist.
I doubt that Putin lost a great deal of sleep this week from the fierce denunciations of his invasion of parts of Ukraine by Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. He ought to have met Morrison at more recent G20 meetings, though it is possible that our Prime Minister made no more impact on his consciousness than he did on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel or the American President, Joe Biden, both of whom had to be reminded of his name.
This was not for want of strident assertion of Australia's interests, at least as interpreted by Morrison. But the volume of our international declarations is in inverse proportion to the distance of the receiving capital from Hobart, particularly when the subject concerns things happening on the other side of the world. Scott Morrison tore strips off Russia, and it will be a long time before the Bear dares skulk back into his presence, assuming Morrison's prime ministership survives the May election.
Thank heavens for Morrison, because he was getting little help from his Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, whose "quiet diplomacy" went largely unheard and who attended many meetings in Europe without earning her travel allowance. Her silence sits alongside the fact that other statespeople and diplomats are never much interested in anything she (or for that matter, Scott Morrison) has to say.
What is said, usually, will echo, or sometimes eagerly anticipate, the US or Britain, even when our own interests, or perspective from a hemisphere away ought to be different. As it happens, long and concerned meetings of our national security cabinet were able to produce a sanctions package against Russia that is almost identical to, if slightly weaker, than that of Britain. That is, when it comes into operation, because Australia has given everyone affected ample time to make other arrangements.
Our quiet diplomacy passing unheard
Some think there is a general principle in the conduct of Australian foreign policy, on both sides of the political divide, that one can be the more strident the further the recipient is away, the less there is at stake and the smaller the intention of actually doing anything to back up one's fighting words. It might be said to follow the maxim of Neville Chamberlain after his betrayal of Czechoslovakia during the 1938 Munich Crisis: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here [in Britain] because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!"
On this account, politicians are mostly more interested in and knowledgeable about what is happening in Britain than among any of our neighbours, including China, Korea, Japan and India. Leftists expel each other over different attitudes to Israel, or once, Russia, Timor-Leste and the Baltic states. Once the right wing of the Liberal Party was united only around unswerving support for South Africa, fanatical support for Rhodesia, which is to say white supremacy. Now some are in thrall to Trumpism.
One can be derisive about the noisy resolution of Morrison, and his efforts to craft the Ukraine crisis into the narrative about Anthony Albanese being too weak and inexperienced to be put in charge during this crisis. After all, there is nothing - not one thing - that Australia is saying or doing, even in the way of sanctions, which will have the slightest impact on the determination of Putin. If sanctions are to have any effect in reversing or bringing the invasion to a halt, Australia's contribution is as a piece of string in the thick rope intended to strangle Putin, perhaps literally.
We could do more if we wanted. The Australian economy is about 87 per cent the size of Russia's even if Russia has a landmass twice as big, a population six times the size, a defence budget (only) twice Australia's, an armoury of nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, ships and submarines, which could easily overwhelm Australia. That is, if it ever occurred to Vladimir Putin, who does not have us high on his list of priorities.
But if Australia has little capacity to affect outcomes, even as a loyal ally of the West, we have good reason to think that an invasion of Ukraine could affect its vital interests, regardless of the depth of Putin's spiritual attachment to a country that was a creation of the Soviet Union, without a long history of independence from Russia.
The best examples are ones of cold realism, having little to do with the unalienable rights of self-government and freedom of alliance of Ukraine citizens. War in Ukraine has the potential to get very nasty, and very quickly.
Although the Western neighbours seem determined that only Ukraine blood be shed in defence of its freedom, they are eagerly supplying munitions, missiles, and intelligence designed to do maximum damage to the Russians, just as the US supplied weapons to its friend Osama bin Laden and the mujaheddin when Russia invaded Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, when Russia supplied military services to the Syrian regime so as to defeat an American intervention designed to cause regime change in the last decade.
The Western strategy is based on deep doubts about whether Ukraine can survive, and determination not to be there when the balloon goes up on that . But it hopes its supplies and assistance can prolong the conflict and bleed the Russian effort. America hopes Russia will end up in the sort of quagmire that US and NATO interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were in over the past two decades.
Russia has the bomb and Putin a big emotional investment in winning
But it could get worse than that. Russia has nuclear arms, and in any conflict, particularly in its own backyard, people must make calculations about whether Russia might use them if things went bad, particularly in eastern Ukraine (which is Russian-speaking, and never particularly subservient to Ukraine speakers to the West). Russia might well judge that reverses in the Crimea and the Black Sea would affect its vital interests. Putin's rhetoric justifying his interventions, and his clear statements that Ukraine must remain in the Russian orbit, not as a member of the European Community or NATO, suggest that he is prepared to gamble his all, in a total rather than a limited war. He has certainly seemed indifferent about risks to Russian energy supplies to Europe, or to the trade income he desperately needs to modernise and further develop his economy. His is an emotional cause, not a merely pragmatic one, and that must be taken into account.
It is likely that his war aims boil down to two things. First, a promise by Ukraine that it will not ally itself with NATO or Europe, or do anything against Russian security interests, even if it is to retain its right to look West for its economic and cultural development. Second, it seems clear that he wants to continue to control, through proxies, most of the Russian-speaking eastern side of Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula and its access to the Black Sea.
Claims that his interventions are to preserve order, or protect Russian-oriented populations are spurious, and he has no case at all in international law for his spectacular breach of the peace. International law may allow a grudging and limited right of intervention across borders to protect groups with close affinities to one's own population - as India did with East Pakistan, or Bangladesh, in the 1970s. Likewise, America's invasion of Iraq with allies, but without United Nations sanction, is a precedent for crossing borders to stop misbehaviour, genocide or (as with alleged weapons of mass destruction) serious threats to the regional peace.
Putin points out, rhetorically and angrily, that Ukraine was a part of Russia for 1000 years, until a somewhat artificial division of the Soviets into a quasi-federal system 100 years ago. The Viking rulers of Kyiv were called the Rus, from which the very word Russian comes. He claims there was a quasi-legal understanding that an independent Ukraine would remain within the Russian orbit, and not become a launching pad from which Russia's traditional enemies could attack Russia itself. But these are points for diplomacy and politics, not justifications for unilateral war.
Conflicts of this type have a great capacity to get out of control. It was a local assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia, over essentially local disputes, (and the Tsar's mobilisation as a result) that brought on the long and bloody World War I, as well as the communist revolution in Russia. Recent Russian conflicts with former Soviet republics in the Caucasus have been sparked by chance events. The risk of a breakout could come from instabilities in the Hindu Kush, the Middle East, the Balkans, the nervousness of former Iron Curtin nations such as Hungary and Poland, as well as old wounds in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, or even opportunism or overreach by old NATO countries. The risks are enlarged whenever Putin sees the hand of the old enemy - the US - behind the conflict. He is, however emboldened by his knowledge that he has much shorter lines of communication, and the likelihood that America will face humiliation and failure if it gets directly involved. All the more so if American rhetoric and threats can be shown to be bluster, and the limits of American power are made obvious.
Albanese bravely and boldly avoiding conflict
If the conflict were to spill over Ukraine's borders and involve its western neighbours, they will claim treaty rights to NATO support. One can assume the players are well aware of the dangers, but not all can control events even if they want to. An all-out war has every potential to become a world war, and even if Asia could exclude itself, it might well drag in Australia.
Whatever happened would be catastrophic for world trade, world growth and hundreds of millions of civilians. Australia has every reason to engage itself, as loudly as it can, in efforts to hose the conflict down. It has no reason to hold back on criticism of Russia's illegal act, but so doing is only for our own good feeling, not for a censure that sticks or is even remembered. We might, were we differently disposed, be in a position to present our good offices to help mediate a solution. Small hope of that, however, when we are regarded as but a delegate for Washington, or, perhaps worse, Boris Johnson.
Meanwhile, relations with China remain tense, despite overtures from the Chinese, including invitation by the new Chinese ambassador to discuss particular grievances. As things stand, Morrison is trying to frame an election around the idea that only he is strong and courageous enough to stand up to Chinese bullying. A "weak" Labor, he says, would sell Australia out. Incapacity to stand up to this slur has made Albanese adhere strictly to Morrison's policy, automatically endorsing whatever Morrison says, even though Morrison has not consulted about a common front. The invasion of Ukraine, and the nervousness that provokes, adds to Morrison's opportunities to demand that the population, including Labor, fall in behind him. Labor, at least, is cravenly doing so.
In the right circumstances, one might have thought that an alternative leader, leading a party that sees the world differently, could wonder aloud if Australia might move gently away from non-stop contrived economic and political conflict, mostly through insult. The aim would be the reopening of trade talks and cultural links, as well as ordinary mutual politeness and respect. It need not involve any retreat from Australia's criticism of China's human rights record, or its mistreatment of the Uighurs, actions in Hong Kong or intentions with Taiwan.
China may have the front door closed, not least because Australian representatives have gone out of their way to attack it. But it is signalling that there are open doors to the side, that Australia need not (nor should not) eat crow, and that it now needs again many of the goods and services it once took from us. It's an opportunity we should not forego, least of all in an election battle of the hairy chests. After all, it was our closest allies, particularly the US, which rushed in to supply the goods we used to supply. As Australia so often does, our stand on our rights and our dignity shot only ourselves in the foot, without advancing our actual interests.
It would be so easy to do the same in Ukraine. We know that nothing we can conventionally do - such as imposing minor sanctions - will make a jot of difference to the outcome. Why do we not experiment with independent actions that help lower the temperature, create flexibility or prepare to help the casualties and civilian victims on both sides. It could be an Australian way. It has happened before - in Cambodia and Namibia for example without anyone being called weak or a traitor.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Dutton has become even more unbalanced in the way he is pushing the issue, more or less by insisting that only his government is hairy-chested to stand up to China.
Dutton is not merely promoting his own personal interests here; he is trying to save a government, not least given Morrison’s ineptness with most of the planned campaign points.
I was once talking to a very senior political appointee from the US State department, and made a sardonic reference to the “special relationship”. He commented that he had heard this phrase recently, when Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister had been in Washington, asking for some favour under the Old Mates Act. One of the Americans to whom she was speaking had said, “Mrs Thatcher, you talk of a special relationship, and we get it. World War I. World War II. A common language and all that. You are our friends. But when we sit down to decide where our interests lie, we think of the needs and interests of Great Britain as often as you, in the British Cabinet, while working out your own national interests think of the particular needs and interests of the people on the Isle of Wight.”
If this were true of Britain, what did it say of Australia? China could understand both the principle and its implications, but says it remains puzzled that we seem unable to be more assertive of our own interests, and needs, particularly when they diverge from America’s. Our close friendship, and the fact that Australia was usually America’s most reliable ally gave us some moral credit in the bank. On China, in particular, our own mineral trading relationship gave us insights into Chinese thinking and interests that would not normally have occurred to analysts in the US. When, sometimes, we wanted American favours, we were asking little more than the sort of favours being given to particular special interests in the US — and without the loss of any American skin.
Our mateship, moreover, might have enabled us to act as a go-between when relationships between China and the US were dominated by spite or long-standing grudges. Our interventions could be disinterested — simply helping two of our partners to see a way through a conflict — or interested — in attempting to broker a compromise which also served our own interests. All the more so given the triangular nature of the trading partnerships, whereby Australia supplied China with raw materials, (at a net profit to us) which China manufactured into goods it sold to the US (with an export surplus to China) while we spent much of our surplus in buying American intellectual property.
I do not doubt that Australia has diplomats and analysts of skill who understand very well the difference between Australian national interests, the American national interest, and the broad interests of the western alliance. But I fear that their more calm, cautious and sober voice is being drowned out by a more hysterical element positively slavering for more tension in the relationship, perhaps to the point of armed hostilities. Some of the hysterical soolers can be described as lobbies and cults, out to identify and punish Australian deviants who cannot see just what has objectively changed in recent times. It is not new that China is authoritarian, and ruthless in suppressing domestic consent. It is not necessarily true that the tone of threats to Taiwan has recently increased. It is true that China’s conduct in persecuting Uighurs is disgraceful — perhaps genocidal — but Australia and the west was (still is) long indifferent to the fate of Tibetans, or democracy activists, including once, those in Tiananmen Square, now in Hong Kong. No group more indifferent over the years than folk of the ilk now located in the Australian Strategic Policy institute, funded by the weapons industry.
Shrill as such lobbies are, they are more than matched by government politicians, particularly in recent months. The noise is orchestrated by the Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton, who has long been attempting to ramp up a national security emergency as one of the most important election campaign points. Dutton is not merely promoting his own personal interests here; he is trying to save a government, not least given Morrison’s ineptness with most of the planned campaign points. As Morrison’s strategies have foundered, Dutton has become even more unbalanced in the way he is pushing the issue, more or less by insisting that only his government is hairy-chested to stand up to China. By comparison, Anthony Albanese and his side would be wimps — even appeasers. He says.
Labor is too cowardly to enter the defence, foreign policy and national security debate
There is a convention, of sorts, that political parties do not seek to divide the nation on broadly similar foreign policies lest the divide weaken the country, and its resolve over its national interests. Sometimes that convention is extended to saying that politicians should not criticise their own country’s foreign policies while abroad. I’m not sure that either is an inviolable principle — one that should be regarded as more important than the interest in a robust public debate, one in which the public is embraced within what consensus emerges.
Labor’s foreign policies are, on most matters, identical to those of the coalition. This is not because of a meeting of minds. Labor has been largely excluded from the debate, unable to introduce other facts and perspectives. Not unable because it is stupid, but because it believes it will be “wedged” as “unpatriotic”, or “wimps” or treasonous if it says anything that is not in lockstep with the government. So scared is Labor of this that it assents to hard-line policy positions coming from the extreme right without subjecting it to its own analysis. That a number of Labor spokesman — including Penny Wong and Kimberley Kitchen — are fiercely anti-China helps with this hostage situation. Likewise, Labor has its own home-grown authoritarians comfortable with the development of the illiberal surveillance state, and happy to adopt any rationale whatever for it. Yesterday’s terrorist as today’s paedophile. For tomorrow the threat to the state will come from anti-vaxxers without masks.
Labor’s policies on China are not more dangerous for Australia than those of the coalition. Neither is likely to influence the approach China takes, although an Australia more determined to engage might well find that we gained in both influence and reputation, including among neighbours as flabbergasted by our role as American messenger boys as China is.
But if China wants to wage ideological war on Australia, or to use this nation as an example of a nation suffering for not adapting to change and to geographical and military fact, it might well prefer that it be confronted with a country as reactionary, obdurate and inflexible as possible. For much the same reason that Donald Trump preferred to deal with dictators than democratic countries where policy had to follow political process and general consent. With corrupted public administration, and increasingly less transparency over public and private transactions. More and more like China, in fact.
This might not put Australia at greater risk of invasion; that would still probably not be worth the effort. But it might make Australia’s decline and ultimate collapse, of its own failings, more inevitable.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
A set of newly-uncovered drawings show ancient Egyptians discussing how Wordle has totally jumped the shark since it was bought by the New York Times.
One drawing depicts an Egyptian man showing his friend how he correctly guessed four out of the five hieroglyphics on his first go, but then wasted the next five guesses trying to pick the fourth hieroglyphic. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” he shouts.
The story continues in a second picture, in which the man claims he’s not going to play Wordle anymore. “Is it just me? I swear it’s got harder since it was sold to the New York Times. I mean, what even is that word. Is it a word?”
His friend replies, “I know, right? And is this going to be a thing now where the fourth hieroglyphic could be literally a hundred different things? It’s so shit. They’ve gone and taken the one little joy I have in my day and messed with it. Fuck the New York Times”.
He also complained that the Times had started removing words that it deemed offensive. “Apparently they’ve removed the word ‘slave’. Cancel culture gone mad”.
A third picture shows a different man posting his one-row Wordle result on a wall, with the caption, “Pretty easy one today. I don’t know what all the fuss is about”. A comment below his post describes the man as a dickhead.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
The Reality: Actually, folks, it's Scotty Smirk and Mirrors that Beijing is barracking for! I can't say "is rooting for" 'coz in Australian English "rooting" has a particular meaning that it doesn't have in American English. There's a time-honoured technique of gaining new members to a political party that involves seduction and "oh but will you respect me in the morning?". In Australia we call it "root and recruit". Gareth Evans was a keen practitioner of the art. Ask Cheryl! Of course the Liberal Party these days have refined "root & recruit" to "rape & recruit" - built-in deniability a speciality - and they're so skilled at it that a boofhead blokey adherent can target his mark and rape her in a senior minister's suite of offices a couple of doors down the hallway from the PMs office and not only can the PM claim not to know about it, he can even claim not to realise that rape is a "thing" until his wife gives him a lesson in Morality 101.
So who is Beijing's preferred candidate for PM if it isn't Albo? Why it's Scotty from Marketing of course. Scotty Word Salad himself!
EXCLUSIVE: Beijing backs Morrison for PM
A CCP propaganda outlet praising the PM has raised questions as to whether Morrison is Beijing's 'man in Canberra'.
The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda outlet The Global Times has published a series of articles endorsing Liberal Party leader Scott Morrison, Crikey can reveal.
The government-owned publication, which stridently promotes the Chinese Communist Party line, has praised* Morrison’s “deep understanding and unambiguous perception” as well as his “Confucian wisdom”.
Further, the Times has commended** Morrison’s “reason and judgement” in his staunch defence of backbencher Gladys Liu in the face of attacks from “bloodthirsty anti-China hawks”, leaving the Liberal leader open to accusations that Beijing see him as their man in Canberra.
Raising further questions about whether Morrison is a puppet for the regime in Beijing, footage has emerged of the Liberal leader urging a closer relationship between Australian and China.
Giving a speech titled “the beliefs that guide us” at Asia Briefing LIVE in 2018, Morrison enthusiastically promoted Australia’s “vitally important relationship with China”, and, even more ominously, hints that he intends to meet with Communist Party agents:
Trade, tourism and educational exchanges are at record highs. Australia values and honours these tens of thousands of daily interactions between our peoples. We are committed to deepening our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China, and I look forward to discussing how we do that with China’s leaders later this month.
The footage is sure to cause further embarrassment to the Liberal Party, emerging within days of their attempts to downplay the historic ties between their party and the leadership in Beijing. Former party leader Tony Abbott — who has lavished Morrison’s leadership with praise — was caught saying “China is a very good friend of Australia and it’s a friendship which is getting stronger all the time,” and, as Crikey revealed earlier this week, even invited Communist Party figures into Parliament. Suggesting possible Chinese influence, Abbott refused to condemn China’s actions in the South China Sea www.globaltimes.cn/page/201506/925410.shtml
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
You don’t want context or detail? In our part of the world “Asia” as a generic bogeyman and particularly China have figured prominently in our discourse. We’re the country of the White Australia Policy which was the first law enacted by the newly minted and newly constituted federal Parliament in 1901 with the specific aim of keeping this country white and British. It remained the keystone of this country’s immigration policy for the next 70 years. “China” as a bogeyman, aka the “Yellow Peril”, has always had a certain resonance Down Under so if you come here casting aspersions on the motives of people who dissent from the conservative line on “China” and who see “Asia” as somewhere for Australia to organise our security IN rather than FROM, don’t think you’re the first person ever to accuse what Matt characterises as the “woke left” (which is Mattspeak for anyone who isn’t to the right of Genghis Khan) of being the Manchurian Candidate embedded within Australian society doing the work of “Beijing”. We’ve got national elections coming up in May and already we have the Australian Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton - who definitely is to the right of Genghis Khan - road testing the Manchurian Candidate slur against the Labor Leader of the Opposition. It’s a measure of the desperation of the Morrison government that they’d resort to this tactic. Scott Morrison wants Putin’s Russia to invade the Ukraine and he wants Xi’s China to invade Taiwan because that will transform the Australian elections, which nobody outside Australia gives a shit about, into a khaki election with lots of photo ops with the troops.
I put up that parliamentary speech from 1965 giving the Labor response to the deployment of Australian troops to Vietnam as a concrete example of how yellow peril racism has a long history in this country of being weaponised for the political advantage of conservatives against progressives. You’re not saying anything new. Yellow peril racism was bullshit then - and called out as such - and it’s still bullshit today. We’ve had a lot of practice in calling it out.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian says she simply cannot remember if she accepted a lucrative offer from Optus to take up a role as managing director of one of its divisions.
Asked about reports she had signed a contract with the organisation last week, Ms Berejiklian said that was a long time ago. “You’re expecting me to remember what I did hundreds of hours ago. I’m sorry, I have no recollection of taking that job. It may have happened, but I cannot say for certain”.
Pushed further, she said it wasn’t inconceivable that she may be starting a new job on Monday. “I don’t have any reason to suspect that I did sign a four-month contract with Australia’s second-largest telecommunications provider, but I cannot rule out completely the possibility that I did,” she said.
Berejiklian stressed she had been approached by many different companies recently and it was impossible to remember which ones she’d agreed to work for. “I can only tell you what I remember. And I don’t remember agreeing to an executive level salary with one of Australia’s largest companies, I’m sorry.”
Asked if she would be turning up for work at the Optus Macquarie Park head office on Monday, Ms Berejiklian said, “I have no knowledge of that”.
Her public relations team released a statement on the matter which read, “When it comes to ‘on phone matters’ Ms Berejiklian will not convict herself by committing to unsubstantiated statements without some sort of evidence”. A confused Optus representative said the company will approach the public watchdog ICAC to help clarify that Berejiklian was indeed hired by the company.
More on the matter after Peter Van Onselen leaks some texts.
AND IN FURTHER BREAKING NEWS …
Wagga Wagga households mysteriously receive two years free internet from Optus
Residents from the NSW regional town of Wagga Wagga have been told they won’t need to pay for their broadband connection for the next 24 months, thanks to a mysterious offer from Optus. It is unclear why the unusually generous offer has been made. It is not available to residents in other areas of the country.
Also making news today, former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has confirmed that she has taken a job at telecommunications giant Optus. She will hold a senior executive role within the Sydney-based company, starting Monday.
In a statement today, Ms Berejiklian said she is looking forward to delivering great service for the people of Wagga, NSW, Australia.
An Optus spokesperson said they were thrilled to have Berejiklian on the team and that the three-week ‘conflict of interest’ induction course is simply part of standard company practice.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
What can I say to that....you RW really want war on China and bugger the consequences...
And you leftist commie puppets want to be China's simp bitch boy.
You'd rather give the Country away than have to fight to defend it.
This is not the first time the Labor Party and progressive people generally have had their motivations and their patriotism misrepresented and traduced by their opponents. In 1965 the then Liberal prime minister Sir Robert Menzies announced in the closing minutes of an adjournment debate late at night with no notice given to the Labor opposition, with the leader of the opposition absent in Sydney on legitimate business, that Australian troops would be deployed to South Vietnam. The original deployment was small - 800 troops - but this would grow tenfold over time with conscription being reintroduced of 20 year old men. That was squarely my generation. During the rest of the 1960s the issue of conscription for military service in Vietnam would politicise an important cohort of Australian youth and win them to the Labor cause. It was my introduction to Labor politics.
A week after Menzies’ announcement, the Leader of the Labor Opposition, Arthur Calwell, rose to deliver Labor’s reply to the deployment of Australian troops to Vietnam. Here is the full text of Calwell’s speech. Read it. Read all of it. It powerfully demolishes the spurious arguments the Menzies government advanced to justify the deployment and exposes as bullshit the portrayal of China as the bogeyman White Australia should be afraid of …
Speech by Arthur Calwell, Leader of the Opposition, to the House of Representatives.
Mr CALWELL (Melbourne) (Leader of the Opposition) – The Government’s decision to send the First Battalion of the Australian Regular Army to Vietnam is, without question, one of the most significant events in the history of this Commonwealth. Why I believe this will be explained in the course of my speech. Therefore, it is a matter for regret that the Prime Minister’s announcement was made in the atmosphere that prevailed around the precincts of this Parliament last Thursday. When one recalls that even two hours before the Prime Minister rose to make his statement it was being said on his behalf that there was no certainty that any statement would be made at all, it can hardly be said that the Government’s handling of the matter was designed to inspire confidence or trust.
However, I do not wish to dwell on that unhappy episode. The matter before us is far too important to allow anything to obscure or confuse the basic issue before us. The over-riding issue which this Parliament has to deal with at all times is the nation’s security. All our words, all our policies, all our actions, must be judged ultimately by this one crucial test: What best promotes our national security, what best guarantees our national survival? It is this test which the Labour Party has applied to the Government’s decision. We have, of course, asked ourselves other related questions, but basically the issue remains one of Australia’s security. Therefore, on behalf of all my colleagues of Her Majesty’s Opposition, I say that we oppose the Government’s decision to send 800 men to fight in Vietnam. We oppose it firmly and completely. We regret the necessity that has come about. We regret that as a result of the Government’s action it has come about. It is not our desire, when servicemen are about to be sent to distant battlefields, and when war, cruel, costly and interminable, stares us in the face, that the nation should be divided. But it is the Government which has brought this tragic situation about and we will not shirk our responsibilities in stating the views we think serve Australia best. Our responsibility, like that of the Government, is great but, come what may, we will do our duty as we see it and know it to be towards the people of Australia and our children’s children. Therefore, I say, we oppose this decision firmly and completely.
We do not think it is a wise decision. We do not think it is a timely decision. We do not think it is a right decision. We do not think it will help the fight against Communism. On the contrary, we believe it will harm that fight in the long term. Wc do not believe’ it will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen the suffering of that unhappy people so that Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them. We do not believe that it represents a wise or even intelligent response to the challenge of Chinese power. On the contrary, we believe it mistakes entirely the nature of that power, and that it materially assists China in her subversive aims. Indeed, we cannot conceive a decision by this Government more likely to promote the long term interests of China in Asia and the Pacific. We of the Labour Party do not believe that this decision serves, or is consistent with, the immediate strategic interests of Australia. On the contrary, we believe that, by sending one quarter of our pitifully small effective military strength to distant Vietnam, this Government dangerously denudes Australia and its immediate strategic environs of effective defence power. Thus, for all these and other reasons, we believe we have no choice but to oppose this decision in the name of Australia and of Australia’s security.
I propose to show that the Government’s decision rests on three false assumptions: An erroneous view of the nature of the war in Vietnam; a failure to understand the nature of the Communist challenge; and a false notion as to the interests of America and her allies. No debate on the Government’s decision can proceed, or even begin, unless we make an attempt to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, this is the crux of the matter; for unless we understand the nature of the war, we cannot understand what Australia’s correct role in it should be.
The Government takes the grotesquely over-simplified position that this is a straightforward case of aggression from North Vietnam against an independent South Vietnam. In the Government’s view, such internal subversion as there may be in South Vietnam is directed and operated from the North; that is to say, the Communist insurgents – the Vietcong – are merely the agents of the North, recruited in the North, trained in the North, instructed by the North, supplied from the North and infiltrated from the North.
The Government then takes this theory a little further by cleverly pointing to the undoubted fact that just as Communist North Vietnam lies north of South Vietnam, so Communist China lies north of North Vietnam. Thus, according to this simplified, not to say simple, theory, everything falls into place and the whole operation becomes, in the Prime Minister’s words ” part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans”. And by this reasoning, the very map of Asia itself becomes a kind of conspiracy of geography against Australia. But is this picture of Chinese military aggression thrusting down inexorably through Indo China, Malaysia and Indonesia to Australia a true or realistic one? Does it state the true nature of the Chinese threat? Does it speak the truth of the actual situation in Vietnam? Does it tell the truth about the relation between China and North Vietnam? I believe it does not. I propose to show that it does not. If it is not true, then the Government is basing its entire policy on false premises, and I can imagine no greater threat to the security of this nation than that.
Let us first examine the case of South Vietnam itself. It is a gross and misleading over-simplification to depict this war in simple terms of military aggression from the North. That there has long been, and still is, aggression from the North and subversion inspired from the North, I do not for one moment deny. But the war in South Vietnam, the war to which we are sending this one battalion as a beginning in our commitment, is also a civil war and it is a guerrilla war. The great majority of the Vietcong are South Vietnamese. The object of the Vietcong in the war – this guerrilla war – is to avoid as far as possible direct entanglement with massed troops in order that by infiltration, subversion and terrorism, they may control villages, hamlets, outposts and small communities wherever these are most vulnerable. This, like all civil wars and all guerilla wars, has been accompanied by unusual savagery. This war has a savagery and a record of atrocities, with savage inhumanity dairy perpetrated by both sides, all of its own. We cannot condemn the atrocities of the one without condemning those of the other. We of the Labour Party abhor and condemn both, as we condemn all atrocities. I repeat: The war in South Vietnam is a civil war, aided and abetted by the North Vietnamese Government, but neither created nor principally maintained by it. To call it simply “foreign aggression” as the Prime Minister does, and as his colleagues do, is to misrepresent the facts and, thereby, confuse the issue with which we must ultimately come to terms.
The people of Vietnam may, therefore, be divided into three kinds: Those who support the present Government and are actively anti-Communist; those who are Communist and of whom the Vietcong are actively and openly engaged in subversion; and those who are indifferent. I have not the slightest doubt that the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people of Vietnam fall into the last category. They watch uncomprehendingly the ebb and flow of this frightful war around them, and as each day threatens some new horror, they become even more uncomprehending. And because this is so, our policy of creating a demo.catic anti-Communist South Vietnam has failed. That failure can possibly be reversed, but it cannot be reversed by military means alone. Ten years ago, antiCommunism was fairly strong in Vietnam. For some years, the late President Ngo Dinh Diem did represent and organise resistance against Communism. When he had support, he was brought here, feted, and seated in honour on the very floor of this chamber. When his regime, becoming increasingly corrupt and irrelevant to the needs of the people, lost that support, he was murdered. Not a word of regret, of sorrow or sympathy was said by members of the Australian Government in memory of him whom they once hailed as the saviour of his country, though, indeed some of the Government extremist supporters outside this Parliament charged President Kennedy with having approved his murder, and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, with actually planning it.
What support has the present Government, the eighth or ninth regime since the murder of Diem 18 months ago? It has no basis of popular support, lt presumably has the support of the Army, or the ruling junta of the Army. It will fall and be replaced when it loses the support of the ruling junta, or when that junta itself is replaced by another. That has happened eight or nine times in the past year and a half. The Americans have supported four of the governments of South Vietnam and have opposed the other four. There is not one jot or tittle of evidence to support the belief that is being sedulously fostered in this country that the local population cares one iota whether it happens again eight or nine times in the coming 18 months. The Government of South Vietnam does not base itself on popular support. Yet this is the Government at whose request, and in whose support, we are to commit a battalion of Australian fighting men. And we are told we are doing this in the name of the free and independent Government and people of South Vietnam. I do not believe it, and neither does anybody else who considers the matter with any degree of intelligence.
The Prime Minister points to increasing support from North Vietnam as being a totally new factor in the situation. I agree that the pace of North Vietnamese aggression – and that is the only term for it – has increased, though estimates as to its extent vary considerably. The Prime Minister speaks of 10,000 infiltrators last year. The American White Paper on the subject put the figure at 4,000-odd certain, and 3,000 more estimated – at the outside 7,300. And yet I am bound to say that the evidence of that White Paper does not seem to bear out its own assertions. The thesis of the White Paper was that the war in Vietnam could be fully explained in terms of Northern aggression. Yet the report of the International Control Commission, quoted in the White Paper, listed, as having been captured from the Vietcong between 1962 and 1964, three rifles of Chinese origin, 46 of Russian origin, 40 sub-machine guns and 26 rifles of Czech origin, and 26 weapons of all kinds of North Vietnamese origin. Other weapons are in proportion. All this for a force of some estimated 100,000 men who have waged war successfully for years against 500,000 troops.
Now this does not seem to me to support the theory that in past years the efforts of the Vietcong were mainly dependent on supplies from the North. And even if we accept the view that Northern support has substantially increased in recent months, it cannot lend any credence to the belief that the Vietcong effort will collapse if this new, increased support is cut off. The more the Government relies on the theory of increased Northern support, as a basis for its actions, the more difficulty it must have in explaining away the successes of the Vietcong in the past when, as it maintains, Northern support was comparatively small. If it believes that it is simply a question of aggression from the North, and that all will be solved when that aggression is stopped, then it is deluding itself, and is trying to delude the Australian people as well.
Against the background of these facts, we can judge the true significance of the Australian commitment. The Government will try, indeed it has already tried, to project a picture in which once the aggressive invaders from the North are halted, our men will be engaged in the exercise of picking off the Vietcong, themselves invaders from the North and stranded from their bases and isolated from their supplies. But it will not be like that at all. Our men will be fighting the largely indigenous Vietcong in their own home territory. They will be fighting in the midst of a largely indifferent, if not resentful, and frightened population. They will be fighting at the request of, and in support, and presumably, under the direction of an unstable, inefficient, partially corrupt military regime which lacks even the semblance of being, or becoming, democratically based. But, it will be said, even if this is true, that there are far larger considerationsChina must be stopped, the United States must not be humiliated in Asia. I agree wholeheartedly with both those propositions.
But this also I must say: Our present course is playing right into China’s hands, and our present policy will, if not changed, surely and inexorably lead to American humiliation in Asia. Communist China will use every means at her disposal to increase her power and influence. But her existing military machine is not well adapted to that objective. It is not so at this moment and it may not be so for the next ten years. Therefore, she chooses other means. Yet we have preferred to look at China mainly in terms of a military threat and thus have neglected to use other, far more effective weapons at our disposal, or, because of our p re-occupation with the military threat, we have used those weapons badly and clumsily. We talk about the lesson of Munich as if we had never learnt a single lesson since 1938.
Pre-occupied with the fear of a military Munich, we have suffered a score of moral Dunkirks. Pre-occupied with the military threat of Chinese Communism, we have channelled the great bulk of our aid to Asia towards military expenditure. Preoccupied with the idea of monolithic, imperialistic Communism, we have channelled our support to those military regimes which were loudest in their professions of anti-Communism, no matter how reactionary, unpopular or corrupt they may have been. Pre-occupied with fear of Communist revolution, we have supported and sought to support those who would prevent any sort of revolution, even when inevitable; and even when most needful. Pre-occupied with so-called Western interests, we have never successfully supported nationalism as the mighty force it is against Communism. We have supported nationalism only when it supported the West, and we have thereby pushed nationalism towards Communism. Pre-occupied with the universality of our own Christian beliefs, we have never tried to understand the power of the other great world religions against Communism.
Each of those pre-occupations has worked for our defeat in Vietnam, and is working for our defeat in Asia, Africa and South America. And herein lies one of the greatest dangers of the Government’s decision on large-scale military commitments. It blinds and obscures the real nature of the problem of Communist expansion. It lends support and encouragement to those who see the problem in purely military terms, and whose policies would, if ever adopted, lead to disaster. Here is the real risk of the world nuclear war feared by the Minister for External Affairs (Mr. Hasluck). In his speech to the South East Asia Treaty Organisation yesterday he said the third world war could break out tomorrow in South Vietnam. If the idea of military containment is unsuccessful, as I believe it will surely prove in the long term, as it has already in the short term, it will contribute to that spirit of defeatism and impotence in the face of Communism. That is the greatest enemy we have to fear.
We are not impotent in the fight against Communism. We are not powerless against China, if we realise that the true nature of the threat from China is not military invasion but political subversion. And that threat, if we believe for one moment in our own professions, and in our own principles, we can fight and beat. But to exhaust our resources in the bottomless pit of jungle warfare, in a war in which we have not even defined our purpose honestly, or explained what we would accept as victory, is the very height of folly and the very depths of despair.
Humiliation for America could come in one of two ways – either by outright defeat, which is unlikely, or by her becoming interminably bogged down in the awful morass of this war, as France was for ten years. That situation would in turn lead to one of two things – withdrawal through despair, or all out war, through despair. Both these would be equally disastrous. What would be the objective of an all out war? It could only be the destruction of the North Vietnamese regime. And what would that create? It would create a vacuum. America can destroy the regime, but it cannot conquer and hold North Vietnam, and into that vacuum China would undoubtedly move. Thus, if that happened, we would have replaced a nationalistic communist regime – in a country with a thousand years history of hostility towards China – with actual Chinese occupation, and either we would have to accept this disaster or face the even greater disaster of all out war with China.
This is the terrible prospect which people like the Prime Minister of Britain, the SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations, the Prime Minister of Canada and Pope Paul have seen, and which they are trying to avert. They all are true friends of the United States of America, and they do not want to see America humiliated. That is why they have called for negotiations – negotiations while the United States remains in a position of comparative strength, negotiations while she is in a position to influence terms. Yet at the very time when the great weight of Western opinion calls for a pause, Australia says there must be no pause for reflection, no pause for reconsideration. The role of Australia should have been to support the call for negotiations and help those who were working towards them. Nobody underestimates the difficulties and dangers of negotion. That is why we understood and sympathised with American efforts to secure a stronger base for negotiations.
By its decision, the Australian Government has withdrawn unilaterally from the ranks of the negotiators, if indeed it was ever concerned about them. Our contribution will be negligible, militarily. But we have reduced ourselves to impotence in the field of diplomacy. We should have been active in the field of diplomacy for a long time. But we have done nothing in that field of affairs. It is true that President Johnson’s cautious call for ” unconditional negotiations ” at Baltimore has been rejected by Hanoi and Peking. But if we accept the Prime Minister’s assurance that the decision to send a battalion to Vietnam was taken “several weeks ago “, then that rejection had nothing to do with the Government’s decision. For on the Prime Minister’s own claim, the decision was made before both the President’s offer and its rejection by the Communists. This goes far to explain the Prime Minister’s abrupt and brutal denunciation of the principle of negotiations three weeks ago. It explains his elaborate attempts to refute the bishops. Australia’s aim should have been to help end the war, not to extend it. We have now lost all power to help end it. Instead, we have declared our intention to extend it, insofar as lies in our power. We have committed ourselves to the propositions that Communism can be defeated by military means alone and that it is the function of European troops to impose the will of the West upon Asia. These are dangerous, delusive and disastrous propositions. The Prime Minister pays lip service to President Johnson’s call for a massive aid programme, financed by all the industrialised nations, including the Union of Soviet Socialist Re publics. But it is clear that the right honorable gentleman’s real thinking, and that of his Government, run only along the narrow groove of a military response.
The despatch of a battalion of Australian troops to South Vietnam is the outcome of that thinking. By this decision, we set our face towards war as the correct means of opposing Communism, and declare against the social, economic and political revolution that alone can effectively combat Communism. The key to the future of IndoChina is the Mekong River delta and valley. The Communists understand this well. But imagine the thundering reply we could give to Communism if, under the auspices of the United Nations, we were to join in a vastly increased programme for the reclamation and development of the Mekong. The work has started, and it goes on, despite the war. But how much more could be done if we were really determined to turn our resources from war to peace. This surely is the key to the door of hope which President Johnson spoke of in his Baltimore speech. But this Government has closed the door and thrown away the key.
I cannot refrain from making an observation about Australia’s trade with China. It is obvious that the Government’s decision, and particularly the grounds upon which the Government justifies its decision, raise in a particularly acute form the moral issue connected with this trade. The Government justifies its action on the ground of Chinese expansionist aggression. And yet this same Government is willing to continue and expand trade in strategic materials with China. We are selling wheat, wool and steel to China. The wheat is used to feed the armies of China. The wool is used to clothe the armies of China. The steel is used to equip the armies of China. Yet the Government which is willing to encourage this trade is the same Government which now sends Australian troops, in the words of the Prime Minister, to prevent ” the downward thrust of China “. The Government may be able to square its conscience on this matter, but this is logically and morally impossible.
Finally, there is the question of Australia’s immediate strategic concern. It is only a few weeks since both the Prime Minister and the Minister for External Affairs spoke of the need for priorities, and they both made it plain that our first priority was the defence of Malaysia. A short time ago, the Government informed the United Kingdom and the Malaysian Governments that it was not possible to spare another battalion from our already strained resources. Now they have found a battalion for service in Vietnam. Thus, our troops are involved on several fronts. We are the only country in the world fighting on two fronts in South East Asia. America is committed to Vietnam. Britain is committed to Malaysia. Australia, with its limited resources, with its meagre defences, has obligations in Vietnam, Malaya, Borneo and New Guinea. The commitments are apparently without end, in size and in number.
How long will it be before we are drawing upon our conscript youth to service these growing and endless requirements? Does the Government now say that conscripts will not be sent? If so, has it completely forgotten what it said about conscription last year? The basis of that decision was that the new conscripts would be completely integrated in the Regular Army. The voluntary system was brought abruptly to an end. If the Government now says that conscripts will not be sent, this means that the 1st Battalion is never to be reinforced, replaced or replenished. If this is not so, then the Government must have a new policy on the use of conscripts – a policy not yet announced. Or, if it has not changed its policy, the Government means that the 1st Battalion is not to be reinforced, replaced or replenished from the resources of the existing Regular Army. Which is it to be? There is now a commitment of 800. As the war drags on, who is to say that this will not rise to 8,000, and that these will not be drawn from our voteless, conscripted 20 year olds? And where are the troops from America’s other allies? It is plain that Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan, for example, do not see things with the clear-cut precision of the Australian Government.
I cannot close without addressing a word directly to our fighting men who are now by this decision, committed to the chances of war: Our hearts and prayers are with you. Our minds and reason cannot support those who have made the decision to send you to this war, and we shall do our best to have that decision reversed. But we shall do our duty to the utmost in supporting you to do your duty. In terms of everything that an army in the field requires, we shall never deny you the aid and support that it is your right to expect in the service of your country. To the members of the Government, I say only this: If, by the process of misrepresentation of our motives, in which you are so expert, you try to further divide this nation for political purposes, yours will be a dreadful responsibility, and you will have taken a course which you will live to regret. And may I, through you, Mr. Speaker, address this message to the members of my own Party – my colleagues here in this Parliament, and that vast band of Labour men and women outside: The course we have agreed to take today is fraught with difficulty. I cannot promise you that easy popularity can be bought in times like these; nor are we looking for it. We are doing our duty as we see it. When the drums beat and the trumpets sound, the voice of reason and right can be heard in the land only with difficulty. But if we are to have the courage of our convictions, then we must do our best to make that voice heard. I offer you the probability that you will be traduced, that your motives will be misrepresented, that your patriotism will be impugned, that your courage will be called into question. But I also offer you the sure and certain knowledge that we will be vindicated; that generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless Government wilfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labour Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity, and in the interests of Australia’s security.
Let me sum up. We believe that America must not be humiliated and must not be forced to withdraw. But we are convinced that sooner or later the dispute in Vietnam must be settled through the councils of the United Nations. If it is necessary to back with a peace force the authority of the United Nations, we would support Australian participation to the hilt. But we believe that the military involvement in the present form decided on by the Australian Government represents a threat to Australia’s standing in Asia, to our power for good in Asia and above all to the security of this nation.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Labor whipped up this issue? Huh??? You’re saying it was the Labor Opposition that kept federal parliament sitting until after 4am while it tried to ram through legislation on this issue?
You don’t really have a grip on reality do you Toots.
Here’s a few little factoids for you:
1. Scott Morrison is the Prime Minister. Not Anthony Albanese. Albo is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
2. The prime minister is the head of the government and as such gets to call the shots on what business gets debated in the parliament.
3. It was Scott Morrison who kept the federal parliament sitting until after 4am debating his religious discrimination bill.
4. It was defeated just as the first grey light of dawn appeared in the Canberra sky because when it came to the vote, five Liberal MPs crossed the floor to vote with the Labor opposition and the cross benches to deny Morrison the numbers.
5. So the situation is that Scott Morrison inflicted a divisive culture war in an attempt to wedge the Labor Party and only ended up wedging himself and damaging the government.
6. Governments don’t like being defeated on the floor of parliament. It tends to indicate to the voters that they can’t get stuff done. That they’re not in charge. Scott Morrison weakened his own position as prime minister in the eyes of his own Coalition colleagues. They’re pissed off with him.
7. Scotty Smirk and Mirrors would be delighted that you blame the shitstorm he created and mismanaged on the Labor Opposition. You’re one of his useful idiots in voter land who’d believe anything.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Outrage backlash tantrums are more Mad Matt’s style. He does them so well and has had so much practice that they’re best left to him.
It’s a satirical piece from a scurrilous online publication called “The Shovel” that loves to take the piss out of … well … everything. I enjoy it when it targets the conservatives - which it does frequently since they are in government nationally - and squirm when they target the Labor Party which they do from time to time. Labor is in government at the state level in 5 out of the 8 state/territory jurisdictions. I think kids who are trans cop enough of a bollocking from their peers and society generally. I think a bit of positive discrimination in their favour is not out of place.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.
pim
Absolutely Fabulously Incredibly Shit-Hot Member
Conservative Christian groups have called on the Government to scrap the Religious Discrimination Bill altogether, now that new amendments mean they can’t fuck around with the lives of vulnerable kids.
The groups had strongly supported the bill, right up to the moment when Independent MP Rebekah Sharkie successfully introduced an amendment that stopped the right of religious schools to discriminate against gay and transgender students. They are now calling for it to be dropped.
“Seriously, what’s the point of an anti-discrimination bill if it doesn’t give us the right to discriminate against people? it doesn’t make any sense” one angry Christian lobbyist said. “As Jesus said – God’s love is for almost everyone”.
Many had assumed the Christian groups would continue to support the bill, due to its protections of religious freedoms. But their latest stance shows that they were only interested in having the right to shit on gay school kids.
“Principals at Christian schools need to have the confidence that they can stand up in an assembly and pick on a gay or trans kid,” one lobbyist said. “There’s very little point for this bill otherwise”.
Welcome to where the weird and the bizarre hang out. Into vaccine denial? You’ll find friends here. Think that scientific evidence is a conspiracy? Are you never happier than when you’re bashing blackfellas? Make yourself right at home. This is Fruitcake Central.