By Dr George Venturini  

Apartheid, anyone?

Choices are open to the 40 per cent who complete secondary schooling in the private sector. It means, though, that state high schools are left to cater for a less affluent 60 per cent. Despite excellent exceptions, these schools achieve significantly lower rates of entry into university. This leads to a further discrimination: the richest 25 per cent of schools release almost two in five students in the top quartile of achievement; the poorest 25 per cent have one in five.

And that is not the end: students from wealthy family can secure a university place by paying full fees. And what is a student who just missed out on a publicly funded place to make of the entry of full-fee-paying students who scored say up to 10 points lower, in the case of some law degrees, and up to 20 points for less lucrative arts qualifications?

Public-private disparities in education are the most critical perpetrators of disadvantage through the generations, but are not the only ones.

Of course, no one can reasonably expect that people will not use the advantages that money brings to benefit themselves and their children. Australia is a market-based society. Money is everything and is responsible for ‘natural’ divisions. No exception to such iron rules may be even thought of.

At the same time, it is rarely considered that when wide-ranging disadvantage is  reinforced from one generation to the next, the notion of a ‘fair go’ begins to look pretty tenuous, self-serving for those on the right side of the tracks, and in the end totally hypocritical.

One enters into the realm of political rhetoric on social justice. The latter is a concept difficult to grasp and organise into a programme of action. Here comes the game played by the two parties of ‘the system’, muddling though the difficulties of gaining the confidence of a part of the electorate without offending the other, which could very well be more powerful. It is not hard to understand why so many ‘ordinary’ Australians are disenchanted with politics and regard the two major parties as ‘out of touch’ – ‘all the same’ perhaps?

The projection of a future which looks an awful lot like a country of two classes goes unremarked. The plebs prefer the illusion of comforting myths, easy slogans, simple – often non sequitur – expressions of profound ignorance. Better still, the two classes may settle down for a sickened and sickening atmosphere better expressed in a famous quote by Amos Bronson Alcott: “To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.” Alcott was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, reformer and educator. He was a transcendentalist, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and, perhaps more famously, the father of Louisa May, the author of the  novel Little Women in 1868.

It may be hard to accept that the vaunted spirit of ‘fair go’ is nothing but a myth.

And if one accepts that, nothing can be out of reach. Most tools of public life in Australia are designed to proceed with myths, tales, common places.

Another common insidious ‘value’ necessary to become ‘a real Australian’ is the acceptance that there is freedom of religion.

That freedom is predicated on the assumption that Australia is a secular society  –  another myth in everyday’s life. Not only is Australia a secular society, but the common ethic which united Australians is founded on the tradition of the ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’. This cold ‘value’ has the result of excluding almost half of the Australian population, as noted. One who does not live by that tradition is not a good Australian.

In fact, the situation is more complex.

Australia is a religiously diverse country and, although it has no official religion, the frequent reference to the so-called ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is considered an omnibus blanket to cover all sorts of things, and not always welcome. In public life in particular one observes frequently a ‘special kind of hypocrisy’, for instance: the various governments of Australia refer to the Christian God in their ceremonies, as do the various Australian Courts. And on the same line, Christian symbols appear on public buildings, such as universities, not to mention publicly-paid-for hospitals bearing the name of persons connected with the Christian religion and/or the name of this or that ‘royal’ celebutante.

On taking her/his chair every day in Parliament the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate deliver the following Christian prayer:

“Almighty God, we humbly beseech Thee to vouchsafe Thy special blessing upon this Parliament, and that Thou wouldst be pleased to direct and prosper the work of Thy servants to the advancement of Thy glory, and to the true welfare of the people of Australia.

Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil; for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

So much, one would comment, for the ‘values’ of ‘respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual’ and ‘freedom of religion’.

Most interesting, the text would conform with Catholic tradition, but rather with the Anglican liturgy.

A big parenthesis may go well at this point: in 2016 there were 3,101.200 Anglicans in Australia = 13.3 per cent of the population. Anglicans were a minority within a rather slim majority of Christians: Catholics, 5,291.800 (22.6 per cent) and Other Christians 3,808.600 (16.3 per cent).

Christianity remains the predominant practice in Australia, though this is diminishing, changing and diversifying. At the Census 2016, 52.1 per cent of the Australian population acknowledged to some variety of Christianity. Over the fifty years since 1966 the proportion of the population who self-identify as Christian, combining all Christian denominations, has fallen from 88.2 per cent. In 2016, 30.1 per cent of Australians declared “no religion”; a further 9.6 per cent chose not to answer the question. The remaining population is a diverse group which includes Muslims – 2.6 per cent, Buddhists – 2.4 per cent, Hindus – 1.9 per cent, Sikhs – 0.5 per cent, and Jews – 0.4. Result: Christians 52.1 per cent, Others 47.9 per cent.

Apart from all that, there are in Parliament persons clearly of the Jewish faith and several of the Muslim, in addition to those who cannot be classified because, among other reasons, they believe that what faith they may have, if any, is nobody’s business. Correct, but not sufficient; there have been several attempts, mainly by the Greens ‘to scrap’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January 2014, to ‘letting go of the Lord’s prayer’, A.B.C., 17 January 2014, with renewed attempts in the federal Parliament as well as in state Parliaments – but all in vain. As an on line entry put it: “The Lord’s prayer in Parliament – what the hell?”, propertychat.com.au, 4 March 2016. Precisely.

But there are more serious aspects of Australia’s dependency on foreign symbols.

Consider for instance the flag. On the top corner of the Australian flag there is a Union Jack. Now, that symbol combines aspects of three older national flags: the red cross of St George for the Kingdom of England, the white saltire of St. Andrew for Scotland, and the red saltire of St. Patrick to represent Ireland. Ireland is now an independent republic and it is only a source of sorrow that six counties be occupied by Britain, and conveniently called Northern Ireland.

The last thing Australia should do is interfere with that problem. Trouble is that the present Australian flag suits the Englanders and their fantasies. The original union of England and Scotland goes back to 1606, and the addition of the Irish saltire goes back to 1801, both dates largely preceding the formation of Australia in 1901.

None of such moral ruins has (should have anyway) anything to do with Australia.

Symbolism it is, yes, but a matter which could be of painful concern to sentient ‘new Australians’, those who may prefer to be participants than lazily settle down as spectators.

Symbolism surrounds the opening of every session of the federal Parliament. Thus, a publication of the Parliament of Australia provides the history of the mace.

And that goes back a long time.

As a symbol, the mace is purely a monarchical one. It was back in medieval times that the Royal Serjeants-at-Arms were distinguished by their power of arrest without a warrant. To an increasing extent, their maces – originally ordinary weapons of war, similar to a club – became their emblems of authority. Authority?

Maces were stamped with the Royal Arms; and in an age in which few men could read or write, the Serjeants effected their arrests by showing their maces and not by producing any form of written warrant.

The evolution of maces from weapons of war to symbolic representations has seen the flanged head decrease in size into an ornamental bracket, while the butt end, which carried the Royal Arms, has expanded to accommodate larger and more ornate Royal Arms and an arched crown surmounted by an orb and cross. As a result of the expansion of the butt end, maces began to be carried upside down with the crown uppermost.

The mace of the Australian House of Representatives is the symbol not only of the Royal authority but of the authority of the House. Because it is held that “the authority of the Speaker and of the House are indivisible”, the mace also symbolises the authority of the Speaker.

When the Speaker is in the Chair, the mace lies on the Table, with the orb and cross surmounting it pointing to the government side, that is, to the Speaker’s right.

The Serjeant-At-Arms is custodian of the mace. Bearing the mace upon the right shoulder, the Serjeant-at-Arms precedes the Speaker when the Speaker enters and leaves the Chamber at the beginning and the end of a day’s sitting.

The fable surrounding the mace is so old that there is a view – taken seriously by the monarchists – that the House of Representatives may not be properly constituted unless the mace is present on the prescribed brackets in the Chamber!

The magic surrounding the mace is enhanced by the practice of travelling with the Speaker on formal occasions – such as when s/he appears to the presence of the Governor-General after election, when the House goes to the Senate to hear the Governor-General’s opening speech, and on the presentation to the Governor-General of the Address in Reply to the opening speech. On these occasions, the mace is covered with a cloth or left in an antechamber before entering the Governor-General’s presence.

The symbolism reaches a paroxysmal, divine point of loyalty of the subjects: being the symbol of the Royal authority, the mace becomes unnecessary in the presence of the authority itself. How un-free can monarchists be?

Beyond the theatricality which seems to enchant the plebs there is a more insidious way of ‘moving forward’ – as the jargon dictates – by looking backward.

Preserved for veneration much as a religious relic, there is in Parliament House in Canberra a copy of the 1297 version of the Magna Carta preserved in a lightbox style window.

The Magna Carta, or ‘Great Charter’, dates back to 1215. It is seen by some, mainly persons with eyes on the back of their head, as an important step in the development of democracy and the British Parliament, and has influenced the creation of founding documents such as the 1689 British Bill of Rights and the 1901 Australian Constitution.

The first version of the Magna Carta, written in 1215, was a peace treaty between King John of England and his barons. It was a ‘deal’; in modern jargon one could regarded it as establishing a ‘principle’: that all people, including the king, had rights and responsibilities under the law. This anyway is the favourite interpretation, convenient to people in power- without-responsibility in Australia.

Prior to the Magna Carta, King John had absolute power as a feudal monarch. He gave the barons their titles and estates (the land, boys!) in return for their loyalty. King John was an untrustworthy partner and a cruel tyrant, who expected the barons to give him money and troops to fight a long and pointless war with France. The barons had to tax their people harshly to pay for the war and force men from their estates to fight in the ongoing conflict.

By 1215 the barons were fed up with the king’s behaviour and many rebelled against him. They seized the Tower-Of-London and demanded the king listen to them. In June, in a meadow at Runnymede, the king and the barons met and agreed on the terms of the Magna Carta. As was common practice, the document was copied out, fixed with the king’s seal and sent to all parts of the kingdom to be read out to the people, many of whom were illiterate.

In return for the barons pledging loyalty to King John, the Magna Carta limited the king’s power, with most of the document detailing the rights of the barons under the feudal system. However, it also described what is commonly referred to as ‘the rule of law’, including the important point that the king was subject to the law, like all others. Individual rights and liberties were defined, with one of the most notable sections reading:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”

No historian, no constitutionalist, no political scientist and most certainly no professional politicians in the Westminster System, no one who was not paid for her/his opinion would dare to interpret without blushing that document as a charter of rights for everybody – a foundation of the Australian ‘values’.

In fact, almost immediately after signing it, King John ignored the Magna Carta and broke his agreement with the barons. King John tried to butcher the authors of Magna Carta. (‘King John Tried to Butcher the Authors of Magna Carta,’ free.org, 15 June 2015).

He died in 1216 and his nine-year-old son, Henry lll, became the king. As he grew, his guardians made three more editions of the Magna Carta, in an attempt to win back the support of the barons. Some changes were made, but many of the original ideas stayed the same, perhaps just simply ‘ideas’.

In 1225 King Henry lll, at the old age of eighteen, issued the fourth, and heavily revised, version of the Magna Carta, in return for a kingdom-wide grant of tax. As his father had before him, the king fought with the barons. In 1264 Simon de Montford, a baron, overthrew the king and became the ruler. De Montford believed that the king’s power should be limited. He called together knights and some non-noble representatives from across the kingdom to meet in a parliament. Although it would be many years before parliament met regularly and included commoners in its ranks, the idea of the modern English parliament might have germinated then.

In 1265 de Montford was killed on the battlefield by King Henry’s son, Edward, who succeeded his father as king in 1272. Throughout the 1200s, the Magna Carta was increasingly quoted as laws were made and petitions were prepared against the unfair use of power.

Edward l ordered that an Inspeximus – from Latin, and to mean: “we have inspected”. It was the first word of ancient English charters confirming a grant made by a previous king. The word opens the edition of the Magna Carta reissued in 1297. In that edition King Edward declared that the Magna Carta would from then on be a part of common law and that any court judgements which went against it would be “undone and holden for naught.” This is the official Australian view, and from it the preceding information is taken.

Preserved at Parliament House, Canberra is a copy of the 1297 version.

Some comments seem appropriate.

As recently observed by Professor Tom Ginsburg, who teaches international law and political science at the University of Chicago, the Carta’s “fame rests on several myths.”

”First, it wasn’t effective. In fact, it was a failure. John was a weak king who had squandered the royal fortune on a fruitless war with France. Continually raising taxes to pay for his European adventures, he provoked a revolt by his barons, who forced him to sign the charter. But John repudiated the document immediately, and the barons sought to replace him. John avoided that fate by dying.”

His young son reissued the Magna Carta, without some of the clauses. It was reissued several times more in the thirteenth century. But the original version hardly constrained the monarch.

A second myth is that it was the first document of its type. Writing in 1908, Woodrow Wilson called it the beginning of constitutional government. But in fact, it was only one of many documents from the period, in England and elsewhere, codifying limitations on government power.

Consider, for instance, the history of Iceland. There, in 930 c.e. the ruling chiefs established an assembly called the Alþingi – correspondent to the classic Norwegian Althing. It was a parliament, convened each summer at Þingvellir – an early form of Senate, where representative chieftains – Goðorðsmenn or Goðar – made and amended laws, settled disputes and appointed juries to judge lawsuits. Laws were not written down but were instead memorised by an elected lǫgsǫgumaðr – ‘Lawspeaker’. The Alþingi is viewed by many as the world’s oldest existing parliament. Importantly, there being no central executive power, laws were enforced only by the people.

Iceland enjoyed a mostly uninterrupted period of growth in its so-called commonwealth years, between 874 and 1262 c.e.

A third myth is that the document was a ringing endorsement of liberty. Even a cursory reading of the translation into understandable English reveals a number of oddities. One clause prevents Jews from charging interest on a debt held by an underage heir. Another limits women’s ability to bear witness to certain homicides. A third requires the removal of fish traps from the Thames.

In fact, Magna Carta was the result of an intra-élite struggle – class war? – in which the nobles were chiefly concerned with their own privileges. When they referred to the judgment of one’s peers, for example, they were not thinking about a jury trial. Indeed, in 1215, the jury trial – as it is known at present – did not exist; guilt was often determined by seeing how suspects reacted to physical ordeal. The reference to one’s peers meant that nobles could not be tried by commoners, who might include judges appointed by the king.

Why then all the fuss about the Carta? Well, the veneration of the relic  began  in the early seventeenth century, when members of the English Parliament and the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke revived the document in their struggle with the Stuart monarchs. They argued that free Englishmen had enjoyed a set of rights and privileges until they were disrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066. In their view, Magna Carta embodied these rights, so it was held up as a model of a glorious past and part of an ancient constitution. Consistency and objectivity did not seem to enjoy great popularity.

Throughout the tumultuous seventeenth century, Magna Carta was invoked by opponents of whoever was in power, leading Oliver Cromwell famously to refer to the document as “Magna Farta.” In the eighteenth century, parliamentary sovereignty replaced monarchical absolutism, but Magna Carta continued to be invoked by reformers, now focused on Parliament rather than the king. (T. Ginsburg, ‘Stop Revering Magna Carta’, The New York Times, 15 June 2015).

On both sides of the Atlantic the Carta is venerated by a kind of priesthood – and understandably so; why, it is old, it is English and, because no one other than philologists has read the original, which by modern standards in incomprehensible English, it is easy to invoke to fit contemporary needs.

George Henry Brandis, Q.C., since May 2018 His Excellency The Honourable George Brandis Q.C., the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, was very fond of referring to it, and in the process of  ridiculing, while Attorney-General of the Abbott and Turnbull governments, any attempt at providing Australia with a Charter of Human Rights because Australia has had the good fortune of ‘inheriting from mother England’ the Magna Carta. Even admitting that George Brandis might have never read the Carta in its original version, such ‘good fortune’ leaves Australia as the only country of English language without any form of Bill of Rights. The common law, said Brandis is sufficient to uphold and protect human rights. It is the classical case of ipsedixitism – an unsupported dogmatic assertion.

Many Americans – and some of their vassals – are not alone in revering Magna Carta. Mohandas K. Gandhi cited it in arguing for racial equality in South Africa. Nelson Mandela invoked it at the trial that sent him to prison for 27 years. Americans, and Australians for that matter, are not the only ones, it seems, willing to stretch old legal texts beyond their original meaning. Like the Holy Grail, the myth of Magna Carta seems to matter more than the reality.

Continued Wednesday – Comedy without art (part 3)

Previous instalment – Comedy without art (part 1)

The Climate Change sceptics have been quite excited about the publicity attached to the passing of Clive James, who has been celebrated as a sceptic in the IPA publication Climate Change: The Facts 2017, but at the same time the sceptics have been angered by the ABC which has not made Clive’s scepticism widely enough known.

In 2016 Clive wrote a poem, Imminent Catastrophe, expressing Climate Change scepticism, published in The Times, London.

In his essay in the IPA publication, Mass Death Dies Hard, 2017, Clive tells us that he does not know anything about the mathematics of “modelling of non-linear systems,” but he does know, he says, about the mass media and ‘the abuse of language’.

He later goes on to say that when the Attorney General of the USA proposed that Climate Change sceptics be suppressed by law, he decided he would be a ‘dissenter’. So dissenting became his thing.

Where would he find sceptic dissent? From other dissenters/sceptics? By adding some dissent/scepticism of his own?

And would he also be very knowledgeable about the IPCC science about which he is so sceptical so that he could oppose the claims of the IPCC?

Looking at the opening lines of the poem Imminent Catastrophe we see:

“The imminent catastrophe goes on,

Not showing many signs of happening.

The ice the North Pole that should have gone

By now, is awkwardly still lingering.”

In his essay Mass Deaths Die Hard, he elaborates by claiming that the melting Arctic has the “miraculous capacity to go on producing ice in spite of the instructions of Al Gore.”

The sceptics deride Al Gore in particular because he made some high-profile statements about ice melting in the Arctic. Wikipedia, discussing predictions made by non-scientists, tells us about Al Gore:

Former US Vice President, when speaking at the UN’s COP 15 meeting in December 2009 said “Some models suggest that there is a 75% chance that the entire North Pole ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free with-in the next 5-7 years.” Dr Wieslav Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey, California, whom Gore used to source, disagreed with Gore’s forecast and told The Times: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at”, and clarified his forecast calling for “a six year projection for the melting of 80% of the ice,” but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

So, is Gore the right person to listen to about melting Arctic ice? He was a non-scientific politician – and we know that politicians are not always to be believed, entrapped by ideology as they so often are. Why criticise Gore when so many real scientists expect Arctic sea to clear by 2040. Does that not concern sceptics as much as Gore’s mistaken prediction?

And are sceptics also entrapped by ideology? See for example, these claims by Watt’s Up With That: ‘The polar ice melt myth’, May 2019:

“…a more accurate view* of sea ice can be had from satellite images taken every day at the poles since 1981.These images show that between summer and winter, regardless of the degree of summer melting, the sea ice completely recovers to its original size the winter before for almost every year since the pictures were taken. The sea ice has been stubbornly resistant to Al Gore’s predictions. In fact the annual average of sea ice has been essentially the same since satellite observations began in 1981.”

Is this the kind of place where Clive James found his melting ice claim for the poem?

NASA tells us this:

“Arctic ice meets its minimum each September. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 12.85% per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average … The 2012 sea ice extent is the lowest in the satellite record.”

How can there be this kind of discrepancy in the reporting of observable events?

The same WUWT site mentions Professor Chris Turney. It claims that Turney was sailing in 2013 in an expedition to prove that Antarctic sea ice was undergoing catastrophic melting only to have his ship trapped in sea ice such that he could not be rescued by modern ice breakers!

Another site, (blog.heartland/2014/Antarctic-trip-too-far-chris-turney) features James H Rust, professor of nuclear engineering and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.

Rust refers to an interview by Emma Alberici where Turney explains he was “…trying to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might already be shifting weather patterns in Australia”. And Turney says windswept sea ice trapped the ship.

But Rust claims:

“Nowhere in Turney’s article [of explanation later] was it mentioned that global warming in the Antarctic was to be studied. No one seemed to pay attention to how Mawson sailed to shore at Commonwealth Bay in 1911, while sea ice prevented Turney from sailing closer than 65 kms off Commonwealth Bay shore in 2013. Is this a proof of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels causing global warming?”

What is this proof Rust is asking about? See how it is fixed in the heads of sceptics/deniers that if there is global warming then there cannot be ice in the Antarctic. Yet they are also happy to claim that there is no melting of sea ice in the Artic, when there is.

Joanna Nova, Australian sceptic/denier, makes an appearance in this same site, criticising the ABC – and Turney:

“The ABC PR machine covers for their embarrassment [over the ship stuck in ice] – lest anyone think that climate scientists might be clueless. In the ABC’s world an “Australian Research Team” with “60 scientists” left because “scientists believe there is evidence of climate change”. After they got stuck in ice they didn’t predict, and looked like partying fools on an ill-prepared junket, the magic wand of the ABC-apologia stopped using the term “climate” and underwent a magical transformation to become a “Russian Passenger Ship”.

See the ridicule and obfuscation employed by Nova. Oh yes. It was just a Ship of Fools! ‘Ill-prepared’! And the article goes on to add more distraction with examples of people who made long journeys and failed. Totally irrelevant.

Elsewhere Turney explains what happened to the Australian Mawson Centenary Expedition of 2013-14.

He says:

“…huge gaps in knowledge remain across the region investigated by the original [Mawson] expedition. To tackle these questions we spent the last two years building a team of experts keen to work with individuals outside their area of expertise. Meetings were held and questions honed. We decided, for instance, that among many other things we would investigate the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its impact on the global carbon cycle and the potential for records of past climate change using tree ring and peat sequences on the subantarctic islands…

“Today Mawson’s Huts lie behind 65 kms of sea ice, the result of a 2010 collision between an enormous berg known as B09B and the Mertz Glacier Tongue. As a result of this clash, B09B lodged itself on the seabed of Commonwealth Bay, changing the circulation dramatically.

“Climate Change was part of our programme, but the Australasian Antarctic Expedition is much more…

“Unluckily for us, there appears to have been a mass of thick, multiyear sea ice on the other side of the Mertz Glacier; years after the loss of the Mertz Glacier Tongue. There was nothing to suggest this event was imminent…

“(It seems) we had inadvertently followed the footsteps of the Edwardian Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose ship had become caught in pack ice in 1915.”

Turney also tells us that they did find a way to get to Mawson’s Huts and that earlier in the season the research ship Aurora Australis was also stuck in ice.

We see how ideologically twisted the sceptic/ denier version is, so lacking in relevant details and intent only on ridiculing Turney and his expedition, trying to muddle the so-called “debate”.

Tony Eggleton, in his book on climate change (CUP, 2013) writes about loss of ice.

“From the satellite data alone, by the end of the summer of 2011 the Arctic sea ice cover had declined by 40% from its 1979-89 average.” (page 99)

And about the Antarctic: re several teams of researchers –

“All found an overall mass loss, though the annual amounts estimated ranged from 30 to 250 cubic kilometres.

“Another analysis of ice loss in just the Amundsen Sea catchment estimated about 40 cubic kilometres of ice was lost in 2009. From the perspective of ‘that’s not much’, using the larger figure (250 cubic kilometres a year) it would take 120 000 years before all the Antarctic ice melted. From ‘that’s a lot’ perspective, enough ice melted in 2009 to make an ice block one kilometre wide and one kilometre high, stretching the distance between Canberra and Sydney.” (page 101)

We see how far from understanding the sceptics/deniers are, with their woolly thinking, their ideological confusion and their irrationality. There is no coherent denier science.

Clive James was mistaken to try to borrow from the sceptic/deniers and to use them for his dissenting. Their way of thinking is at a far remove from the kind of thinking we would expect of Clive James. We might be forgiven if we thought Clive James’s writing is a satire/parody of sceptic denial.

What would Clive have made of the present catastrophe, the burning of his beloved Australia?

And all that discussion arising here in this post after looking at just four lines of his poem. There could have been more! We could look at more details of Clive James’s writing in his essay and then at some of the statements made by individual denier/sceptics elsewhere in the IPA publication.

By Dr George Venturini 

6. Comedy without art

“Commedia dell’arte, (Italian: “comedy of the profession[als]”) Italian theatrical form that flourished throughout Europe from the 16th through the 18th century. Outside Italy, the form had its greatest success in France, where it became the Comédie–Italienne. In England, elements from it were naturalized in the harlequinade in pantomime and in the Punch-and-Judy show, a puppet play involving the commedia dell’arte character Punch. The comical Hanswurst, of German folklore, was also a commedia dell’arte character.

The commedia dell’arte was a form of popular theatre that emphasized ensemble acting; its improvisations were set in a firm framework of masks and stock situations, and its plots were frequently borrowed from the classical literary tradition of the commedia erudita, or literary drama. Professional players who specialized in one role developed an unmatched comic acting technique, which contributed to the popularity of the itinerant commedia troupes that travelled throughout Europe. Despite contemporary depictions of scenarios and masks and descriptions of particular presentations, impressions today of what the commedia dell’arte was like are second hand. The art is a lost one, its mood and style irrecoverable.” (‘Written by the Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, commedia dell’arte’, www.britannica.com).

Australia is quite a different place from what was put together by Englanders in 1901.

Australia has grown from a population of estimated 750,000 Indigenous People in 1788, to one of 3,765.000 non-Indigenous in 1901, to one of 23,401,892 people – of whom 649,171 Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders – on census night, 9 August 2016, and estimated 25 million late in the evening of 7 August 2018.

At the 2016 census, 26 per cent of the Australian resident population, or 6,163,667 people, were born overseas. The distribution by place of birth is as follows, and only countries with 50,000 or more are listed hereafter:

Due to several waves of immigration, the European component of the population is declining as a percentage.

The Australian population hit 23,401,892 on census night 2016.

Until the second world war, the vast majority of immigrants came from the British Isles, and a majority of Australians have some British or Irish ancestry. These Australians form an ethnic group known as Anglo-Celtic Australians – an absolutely bloody mis-nomer. Anglo-Celtic may serve the lazy Englanders, but has nothing to do with the truth.

The number of overseas-born Australians coming from England has steadily declined over the years, while one has seen increasing arrivals from China and India, particularly since 2006. In the 2016 Australian census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were: English, 36.1 per cent; Australian, 33.5 per cent; Irish, 11.0 per cent; Scottish, 9.3 per cent; Chinese, 5.6 per cent; Italian, 4.6 per cent; German,  4.5 per cent; Indian, 2.8 per cent; Greek, 1.8 per cent, and Dutch, 1.6 per cent.

At the 2016 census 47.3 per cent of people had both parents born in Australia and 34.4 per cent of people had both parents born overseas. And on this subject one should not dismiss the effect of the recent ‘bleedings’ of parliamentarians, due to their dual subject-ship – citizenship in some, rare cases – and the other which will undoubtedly developed from that insipid, mouldy, thread-bare, moth-eaten piece of paper which is the Constitution of 1901. Consider the little problem that present members of Parliament, who so often mouth about multiculturalism – of which they know little-to-nothing – may have from the ‘new reading’ of sections 42 in relation to section 44.

Now, by s. 42 “Every senator and every member of the House of Representatives shall before taking his seat make and subscribe before the Governor-General, or some person authorised by him, an oath or affirmation of allegiance in the form set forth in the schedule to this Constitution.” And the Schedule offers: “I, A.B., do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen [Elisabeth II], Her heirs and successors according to law. So help me God!” or “I, A.B., do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen [Elisabeth II], Her heirs and successors according to law.” Any republican around?

Section 44 (i) provides that any person who: “is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power;

… shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.”

Every consideration about a candidate’s personal faith, political or religious, could cause some problem. Perjury comes to mind. Perhaps, just perhaps, these two provisions are clashing. Queen Elisabeth II – yes, of course, also ‘Queen of Australia’ – could be regarded as a ‘foreign power’ no matter how much the soi-disant ‘Mountbatten’ (actually Battenberg, from the town of Battenberg, Hesse) (Windsors) crowd may try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, which is an effluent of the Haus Wettin, itself a lair of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings who once ruled territories in the present-day German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

And the more one reads about Buckingham Palace’s interest in Cayman Islands and other tax havens the more one sees the alien.

It seems fair to presume that people who have experienced the questionable ‘blessings’ of imperial or colonial domination – whether of a political or socio-economic nature – would welcome the final liberation from the condition of subject and the opportunity to belong to a republic. There is no magic in that; there are only guarantees which are contained in a truly modern constitution. Anyone heard of Finland, younger than Australia?

The experience of people coming from overseas may be different, but there is no reason to suspect that, in a truly open, informed, participatory society, people born in countries such as China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Italy, South Africa, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Germany, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, United States, Lebanon, Ireland, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Iraq, Thailand, Pakistan, Fiji, Ian, Singapore, Nepal would not appreciate the advantage of a modern, democratic, secular and peaceful republic.

There is still hope that the opportunity could attract even people from Australia, England, New Zealand and Scotland. It would make, at present, a balance of about seven million new-arrivals to seventeen million of mother-country-subjects.

First things first

The title is deliberately offensive, but not of the First Nations – as they later came to be known.

When the English invaders arrived on 26 January 1788 the estimated 750,000 Indigenous People did not exist – official. They were later mistaken as fauna, disposed of with the gun, poisoned with unwanted foreign food, killed when possible, massacred repeatedly, or chained up, rounded up in lagers to be Christianised, catalogued, classified with reference to their colour, blood, size and appearance, registered as objects – and always with the design and hope that they would die out, and when that seemed not the case that they be ‘improved’ in missions, ‘civilised’ so as to appease the succeeding waves of other occupiers, and more recently ‘advised’, consulted – up to a point and to the extent, convenience and comfort of the occupiers, introduced to ‘responsible government’, and in May 2017 once again deceived by the latest manager of the post-colonial show. The ignorant rustic clowns, and some learned but morally deaf leader said that, “No, that was not the way.” The Indigenous People should try again and, for the time being, improve their show. When they debased themselves to propose a double sovereignty – one to the Old Culture and the other to the modern representative of the original invaders – they were not even told thank you for that. What they were told is that their proposed “ ‘voice to Parliament’ was impractical and offensive” to the ‘establish order’; the Westminster System as transplanted in Australia in 1788!

Making the subjects

So, how does that 25-plus per cent of newcomers become Australian? By acquiring ‘Australian values’, that is how. More insidiously, how would a person – an intending visitor or a new resident – go about to apply for a ‘selected visa’?

And what are those ‘values’? Well, the Australian Government decides.

To begin with, “Applicants for a permanent or provisional visa must:

read the Life in Australia book, then sign or accept the Australian values statement.” (Australian Values Statement, immi.homeaffairs.gov.au).

And those ‘values’ include:

• respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual
• equality of men and women
• freedom of religion
• commitment to the rule of law
• parliamentary democracy
• a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces mutual respect, tolerance, fair play, compassion for those in need and pursuit of the public good
• equality of opportunity for individuals, regardless of their race, religion or ethnic background.

These ‘values’ may be expressed in different ways by different people while still maintaining the same meaning. They are not unique to Australia, but have broad community agreement and underpin Australian society and culture. So, anyway, says the Australian Government.

The ‘values’ statement is included with most visa application forms either as a question or as part of the declaration.

So, on the appointed day a newcomer may join a multitude of others – some of them holding a little Australian flag, as a visual symbol of patriotic fervour – and take an oath or make an affirmation similar to the one previously indicated.

Does that include an oath to the Constitution, that horse-and-buggy piece of paper approved by the Imperial Parliament in London and designed to satisfy the interests of the former colonials, skilfully divided from each other in repetitive states and theoretically united in what would better serve a confederal system, born-old and now over one hundred years of age?

As already seen, the text of that document is such that no sentient person would take it seriously as a foundation-pact even for a theatrical troupe.

It is doubtful if a newcomer would fully comprehend the consequences of accepting ‘parliamentary democracy’ as a defining ‘value’, particularly if s/he erroneously were to understand by that ‘one head, one vote, one weight’ in the electoral process purported to set up, arrange and sustain that form of democracy.

Most of those ‘values’, collectively and separately considered, are not worth the time.

The truth telling, it is almost impossible to disagree with Donald Horne, when he wrote: “A large part of Australians’ values are measured in money. Describe our economic life and you describe a large part of our culture.” (Death of the lucky country, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic. 1976, at 62-63).

It is hard to believe that in Australia there is ‘freedom of religion’ with or without ‘equality of opportunity for individuals, regardless of their race  (that word, again!), religion or ethnic background’ in the light of a clear prejudice   from the leaders up-there  to the populace out-there – against people of the Muslim faith, for instance, as cultivated by the very Australian Government.

The national identity projected by the government is wrapped up in an egalitarianism which clashes with a growing sense of inequality and the patent danger of a permanent division of the country into two classes.

‘The average Australian’, the ‘mainstream’, ‘middle Australia’ and the over-used ‘fair go for all’ are expressions of a collective illusion cultivated and propagated by public persons and commentators to persuade the plebs that the Australian is a classless society.

The fundamental distinction and chasm between two groups of Australians begins with education. And by that one should understand the liberating force which may draw one out of the lowliest circumstances. So the value of a good start at school is almost incalculable. While most children attend state primary schools, students from high-income families are often already ahead of those whose parents can afford only to send them to a single, subsidised preschool year. By secondary school the natural desire of higher-income families to pay for the-best-schooling-money-can-buy has resulted in a drift to private schools with superior resources and facilities and better teaching conditions. Learning? that is a different, often incidental matter.

It does not matter that the pupil is totally indifferent to the advantage guaranteed by possession of money. Nor does the paying family care, usually because the only distinction of it is the possession of that money.

What matters are the externalities, sublimated in the uniform preferably completed by the boater. Nowadays boaters are rarely seen except at sailing or rowing events, and what average Australian family can afford that luxury? The boater is more suitable for  period theatrical and musical performances – barbershop music, for instance – or as part of old-fashioned school uniforms, particularly popular in the late 19th century and early 20th century and still a nostalgic re-evocation of ‘home’ for incurable Englanders.

The wearing of the boater class-ifies a pupil and gives him (mostly it is for boys) a sense of belonging to an exclusive club – the Anglosphere? – with components such as Harrow ‘at home’, or Shore and  Knox in Australia, or Maritzburg, Parktown and Wynberg in South Africa. The boater signifies separation and commands respect from the plebs.

Continued Saturday – Comedy without art (part 2)

Previous instalment – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 8)

In response to the tragedies our country was suffering – and still suffering – before Christmas we notified AIMN readers that:

We here at The AIMN would like to help in some small way, therefore we have decided that all donations received on Christmas Day and Boxing Day will be forwarded on to the Australian Bushfire Appeal.

We were overwhelmed to receive $753 (which we rounded up to $800) and we thank those who donated to The AIMN.

Then came a stumbling block: Who to help? Any number of charities came under the umbrella of the Australian Bushfire Appeal and we couldn’t decide which one to donate to. In the meantime, disaster after disaster kept breaking our hearts.

Eventually we decided to donate the money to SAVEM (South Australian Veterinary Emergency Management) because of their work with injured koalas on Kangaroo Island, where half of the population of 50,000 koalas had perished.

Why did we choose them above others? It was this report that we found from July last year; Kangaroo Island koalas may save the koala species that decided it for us. The report explained that:

South Australia’s Kangaroo Island koalas have been found to be free from the disease that is threatening koala populations around Australia, particularly in Australia’s north-east where populations are declining dramatically.

Scientists led by the University of Adelaide have discovered that, unlike every other large population in Australia, Kangaroo Island koalas are free from infection by Chlamydia pecorum. This bacterial infection is the most significant disease causing death in koalas, and a key factor in koalas being under threat in north-eastern Australia.

(You might like to also read: Rescuers are warned not to take koalas off fire-ravaged Kangaroo Island because they are the only ones in the country without chlamydia).

We hope that the reasons for our decision to donate to SAVEM are supported by those wonderful readers who donated to our appeal.

The graph below comes from Tony Eggleton, “A Short Introduction to Climate Change”, Cambridge University Press, 2013), Fig. 12.4, page 200.

The caption in part says: “Gentle slopes in this graph from 1896 to 1930, and again from 1955 to 2000, suggests more-or-less average climatic conditions. Sharp rises in fire extent from 1939 to 1952, and again after 2000, might reflect rising temperatures in the preceding years.”

In the Weekend Australian recently, Gerard Henderson has named a number of years when Australia has had wild-fires. Following are those years and the size of areas (hectares) of burning, listed in Wikipedia.

I851 Black Thursday Vic. 5Mha

1939 Black Friday Vic. 2Mha

1983 Ash Wednesday SA, Vic 418,000ha

2009 Black Saturday Vic. 450,000ha

2019 – NSW, Q, SA, Tas, Vic, WA 5.9Mha and continuing

Henderson writes that there have been wild-fires in Victoria before. But he goes on, “But until now, there has been no suggestion that the state’s future would be one of continuing apocalypse. Yet this is the message of the self-declared progressive media as it seeks to blame others for natural tragedies.”

So what is the view of the self-declared right-wing/denier/septic media? We have had wild-fires before (“natural tragedies” – Henderson) and we will again, and the UN downward pressure will not work because we need “better technologies” (Angus Taylor) – and anyway we will meet our self-designated emissions target “at a canter” (Scott Morrison) and Australia emits a little more than 1% of world carbon emissions (Henderson) so we cannot influence Climate Change.

Anyone questioning the right-wing view is a clown, says Henderson – a comparison also employed by Clive James in his sceptical writing on Climate Change.

Yet it is quite clear, when we look at the graph above and the figures for areas burnt by wild-fires over time, that we are heading for an apocalyptic if we allow those trends to continue. We have been warned by the IPCC for a long time that Climate Change is real, driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, with now some 30,000 wild-fires burning across the world, global temperatures rising, ice melting, nature adversely affected, people dying from heat effects at a rising rate…

Sceptics try to persuade us that Global Warming is a hoax. But there is no coherent science of denial – just a lot of specious claims, often contradicting each other. For example, Ian Plimer says that CO2 has nothing to do with Climate Change, but the late Bob Carter says CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

Sceptics are often paid by people with vested interests to write as sceptics in order to confuse the climate “debate”. But when we look at the data of the kind provided above, we see the futility of their denial and contrived scepticism. When we read their sceptical writing we see the illogical and contradictory nature of their “arguments”. When we look at the real world we see what the IPCC has been telling us for a long time now.

Wild-fires in Victoria 1896-2010

By Dr George Venturini  

After the allegations of AW.B.’s misconduct became public, A.W.B. suffered “financial harm” (including a loss of market capitalisation and trade, legal costs, class action settlements, redundancy costs and restructure costs) and “intangible or immeasurable harm” (including a “shattered” reputation, loss of corporate knowledge and employee morale, and reduced credit ratings).

The scandal would eventually see the end of A.W.B. A.W.B.’s share-price had continued to suffer, and the cartel was taken over by Agrium Inc. in December 2010 and delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange. On 1 January 2018 Agrium announced that it had agreed to merge with PotashCorp, in a new behemoth  called  Nutrien, which would become the largest producer of potash and second-largest producer of nitrogen fertiliser worldwide. It has 1,500 retail stores and more than 20,000 employees. It is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, with a market capitalisation of US$34 billion as of January 2018.

A.S.I.C. had called for Mr. Flugge to be fined the maximum $200,000 and banned from managing a company for ten years. It had began its civil case against Mr. Flugge ten years before, but the case was put on hold while it pursued criminal charges, which were dropped in 2010.

The finding might have cost Mr. Flugge anywhere up to $200,000.

The Court also disagreed that Mr. Geary knew the payments to Iraq were contrary to United Nations sanctions and dismissed all proceedings against him, saying that A.S.I.C. had “not proved he has acted anything other than reasonably.”

Unlike the chairman, Mr. Geary had not been put on notice about A.W.B.’s possible misconduct in relation to the inland transportation fees as he was not present at the Washington meeting.

Mr. Geary was expected to be awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs (P. Durkin, ‘ASIC loses AWB case against Trevor Flugge a decade after Oil-for-Food,’  The Australian Financial Review, 15 December 2016).

A.S.I.C. had put the civil cases against Mr. Flugge and five other former A.W.B. executives on hold in November 2008 to wait for possible criminal charges, but in a shock decision in mid-2010 it was revealed that the criminal aspects of the long-running A.W.B. investigation had been abandoned.

A.S.I.C later re-ignited the civil penalty cases over the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in “transport”, “discharge” and “sales service fees” to Jordanian-based trucking company Alia, revealed later to be a front for the Iraqi government.

In a limited victory A.S.I.C. had won two of the civil cases in 2013 against former managing director Andrew Lindberg, who would pay a penalty of $ 100,000, and against former chief financial officer Paul Ingleby, who would pay a penalty of $ 40,000. But cases against former directors Michael Long and Charles Stott were dismissed.

On 15 February 2017 the ‘corporate regulator’ sought on appeal to overturn the Supreme Court decision clearing Messrs. Geary and Flugge of knowing about the ‘kickbacks.’ (Asic appeals verdict AWB directors did not know about Iraqi bribes, The Guardian, 15 February 2017 and Australian Associated Press).

In a brief statement A.S.I.C. said that the matter was expected to return to Court on a date to be fixed and it would not make any further comment.

On 14 March 2017 the Court was to hear arguments about what penalties should be imposed on Flugge, who was facing a fine of up to $200,000 and disqualification from managing a corporation.

On 10 April 2017 Mr. Flugge was fined $50,000 and banned from managing a corporation for five years for failing properly to investigate $ 23 million in ‘kickbacks’ paid to Saddam Hussein’s régime.

The Supreme Court of Victoria ordered that Trevor Flugge, the former chairman of A.W.B. Ltd., pay a fine of $50,000 and be disqualified from managing corporations for five years. These penalties were imposed in consequence of the Court’s finding that Mr. Flugge had breached his duty of care by failing to make adequate inquiries about the propriety of certain payments by A.W.B. to the Iraqi Government.

True, the Court found that Mr. Flugge had acted honestly, nevertheless it denied his application to be relieved from liability on the basis that the breach of duty was “not a minor or accidental breach of duties that could be excused.”

A.S.I.C. had brought similar proceedings against five other directors and executives of A.W.B. The proceedings against two of those individuals had been discontinued and another two had been settled. (E. Younger, ‘AWB’s ex-chairman fined $50k over Iraq food-for-oil scandal,’ abc.net.au, 10 April 2017).

* * * * *

Some information that a careful search might have made available to the Cole Inquiry is still accessible. A search produced: AWB – What the Middle Man Knew, Journeyman Pictures.

The transcript is of extraordinary interest and anyone who wishes to pursue the sound basis of this libretto could do so, freely.

The interviewee is Otham Al Absi. He was the agent of A.W.B. in Jordan.

The transcript begins as follows:

“Reporter: Thom Cookes.

It’s been 23 years since a serving Prime Minister has been called before a Royal Commission to explain himself. Not only John Howard, but his Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministers were all required to tell the Cole inquiry exactly what they knew about the $295 million paid in kickbacks by the AWB to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.

John Howard, Australian Prime Minister [is seen and heard as saying]: “I did not know, my ministers did not know, and on the information that I have been provided and the advice I have received from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, I do not believe that the Department knew that AWB was involved in the payment of bribes.” Emphasis in original]

Tonight, a key player in the scandal tells Dateline that he had been meeting with the Australian Government Trade representative in Jordan since the mid’’90s. His company, Alia, was a money launderer for the AWB, allowing it to funnel hundreds of millions in illegal payments in breach of United Nations sanctions.

Reporter: Do you believe that the Australian Ambassador and the Australian Embassy in Jordan, they knew the relationship with AWB that they understood that?

Interviewed was Othman Al Absi: Yes, yes. Because the Austrade – there is a company name here is Austrade, belong to the Embassy – they know about us.

Reporter: Right from the beginning, the relationship?

Othman Al Absi: Yes, yes. And there is a guy – Ayyash, Ayman Ayyash – although I don’t remember the first name, he sit with us, he came to our office here, and we sit in some restaurant in Amman with the AWB – it was a dinner or something – so they know about us and we know this guy from Austrade.

Reporter: And this is right from the beginning of the relationship, this is when you were first setting it up, or this is some later time?

Othman Al Absi: No, it was since 1995, ’96, something like that.

Ayman Ayyash was the Austrade representative in Jordan from 1994 to 2003. Austrade is the trade agency of the Australian Government.”

And the transcript goes on:

“Reporter: Right from the beginning, was the company a joint venture with the Iraqi government?

Othman Al Absi:  Yeah, that’s right. It was a joint venture between Ministry Of Transport of Iraq and our Sheik al-Khawam because at that time there is embargo and it’s very difficult, communication, and they need some people from outside Iraq to work in transportation and especially in maritime. So this is the idea came off.

Reporter: And it was well known – from what I understand – right from the beginning, that it was a joint venture with the Iraqi government – there was no secret about that?

Othman Al Absi: It’s not secret. It’s registered in Ministry of Trade in Jordan, and there is nothing to hide.

Alia has also emerged as one of the major front companies used by the Iraqi government to rort the oil-for-food program, set up when trade sanctions were imposed after the first Gulf War. And according to the UN investigation, between March 2000 and December 2003, around $1 billion flowed into accounts held by Alia at this branch of the National Bank of Jordan. Nearly $300 million of this were illegal payments from AWB disguised as either “after sales fees” or as bogus transport services that were never supplied. After taking a cut of between 0.25% and 1%, Alia transferred the money to an Iraqi government account at the al-Rafidain bank in Amman. Othman al-Absi doesn’t dispute this money flow.

Othman Al Absi: As agent for AWB, I will receive that money officially through our bank in Jordan, and also this money, officially to al-Rafidain Bank, transfer it in Amman, Jordan, in account of Water Transportation Company of Iraq. It’s not to any personal account, it’s for a government account.

Reporter: So you’re not concerned with what those fees were for?

Othman Al Absi: I’m concerned that this is a fees, but fees for what, for whom? All what I know it is for government of Iraq, that’s what we know. And in that time, because there are more than 200-300 companies they have a contract with Ministry of Trade, with Ministry of Transportation, with any ministries in Iraq, and they do the same procedure, so nothing to hide in that time. So where was the United Nations in that time? Why nobody said, “What you are doing?” or “What’s that?” Because, as what I told you, it was official.

According to Mr. Al Absi, his company was on the guest list to the Australian Embassy in Amman.

Othman Al Absi: The Embassy here in Jordan, they know us and they invite us as a famous company in Jordan, and they invite our chairman to the home of the Ambassador around two times, and they know about all our activities and our working. So we don’t feel that it must be through official channel because all what we hear in that time – AWB also it’s a part of the Government.

Reporter: So did you think you were dealing with the Government, in one sense, with the Australian Government?

Othman Al Absi: That’s what we felt. Because when any government gives the license to export the wheat to just one company, that means there’s a relationship between the Government of Australia and this company.”

Mystery!

Here is how the transcript continues:  

[It had already been confirmed that Ayman Ayyash was the Austrade representative in Jordan from 1994 to 2003. Of course, Austrade is the trade agency of the Australian Government.]

Reporter: And for that reason you felt that you were essentially dealing with the Australian Government?

Othman Al Absi: Yeah, we are dealing with the Australian Government and everything is official, and everything is in the right way, let’s say. That’s what happened.

According to Mr. Al Absi, this is not the first time that he has told of his early links with Austrade. In February this year, he was interviewed by an Australian Government solicitor.

Reporter: What did the Australian Government want to know, what did they want to talk to you about?

Othman Al Absi: About the same issue – about the relation between AWB and our company, and about the transferring that money and lots of questions. And we gave them a statement about all the questions they need.

Mr. Al Absi told Dateline that he had informed the Government solicitor about his meetings with the Austrade representative, Mr. Ayman Ayyash. But none of this made it into this statement tendered to the Cole Royal Commission. 

So what else can Alia Transportation, the mysterious Jordanian conduit in this scandal, tell ? When Dateline interviewed Mr. Al Absi there was a reminder of the strong ties between his company and the AWB.”

Later on the interview recorded Dr. Labib Kamhawi. He is the managing director of Cessco, a Jordanian company supplying the oil and gas industries.

“His company was also identified by the U.N. inquiry as having made illegal payments to the Iraqi government in breach of sanctions. He claims these “taxes” were an unavoidable cost of doing business with Iraq.

Dr.  Labib Kamhawi: But I’m talking about the tax itself, I mean, and the tax itself was not a secret, no. If it was a secret, it was the worst-kept secret on Earth.

Reporter: So, you believe that the extra charges that Iraq was imposing were totally out in the open? Everybody knew about this, there should be no surprise about this?

Dr. Labib Kamhawi: It was mandatory on everybody and it was not a secret. And it was a tax, OK, which every contract had to pay. And the money went to the Iraqi government. This is not the responsibility of the business community, it is the responsibility of the United Nations to make sure that its regulations were observed, that its sanctions were observed.

According to Dr. Kamhawi, Jordan had to break the sanctions regime simply to survive.

Dr.Labib Kamhawi: We cannot afford this luxury in Jordan, you have to understand this. If we do what we are told to do, we die. We cannot afford it.

Reporter: What do you mean if you do what you were told to do?

Dr. Labib Kamhawi: For example, “Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t export, don’t, don’t, don’t.” It’s not really a luxury. If we don’t sell to Iraq, then we sell to somebody else.

Reporter: There is no other choice ?

Dr. Labib Kamhawi: Absolutely.

Dr. Kamhawi’s company, Cessco, is just one of the more than 2,000 identified by the United Nations inquiry as having made illegal payments to the Iraqi government. The list is a who’s who of international business. But the granddaddy of them all, accounting for 14% of all the kickbacks paid by suppliers to Iraq, was the AWB. In 2004, when the United Nations announced its inquiry into the oil-for-food program, Alexander Downer wrote to the AWB to offer his support, and to:

Alexander Downer, Letter: … “congratulate AWB Limited in its impressive performance in securing exports to Iraq. This reflects… the close co-operation between AWB Limited and the Government. The Government remains committed to working closely with AWB Limited “in pursuing export opportunities in Iraq.” ” 

That close co-operation appears to have evaporated. But according to Othman Al Absi, the Australian trade agency on the ground in Jordan was well aware of the links between Alia and the AWB right from the beginning.

George Negus: Dateline attempted to contact Ayman Ayyash, the former Austrade representative in Jordan, but he didn’t return our calls. Some of our written questions to DFAT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra remain unanswered. Late this afternoon, officers from the Cole Royal Commission into the Oil-for-Food scandal came here to the SBS studios and subpoena-ed Thom’s interview, much excitement. The inquiry gets under way again in Sydney tomorrow. (© 2013 Journeyman Pictures, Journeyman Pictures Ltd. 4-6 High Street, Thames Ditton, Surrey, KT7 0RY).

* * * * *

And what of three cabalistas protecting the racket?

Following the Coalition’s defeat at the 2007 federal election, Mark Anthony James Vaile AO resigned his position as Nationals leader and moved to the backbench. On 19 July 2008 Vaile announced his forthcoming resignation from Parliament; he submitted it on 30 July. In September 2008 Vaile was appointed to the board of Virgin Australia Holdings. Vaile is also the independent chairman and a non-executive director of Whitehaven Coal Limited, chairman of the Regional Infrastructure Fund of Palisade Investment Partners, a specialist independent infrastructure manager, a non-executive director, appointed by the Australian Hotels Association of HOSTPLUS, an industry superannuation fund, a non-executive director of Servcorp, a director of the Singapore-listed Stamford Land Corporation, and chairman of 123 Childcare, an education provider in the People’s Republic of China. Trade’s Vaile now amply and successfully represents foreign business.

Alexander John Gosse Downer AC, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2007, resigned from Parliament on 14 July 2008. He set up a boutique consultancy firm, Bespoke Approach, through which he became consultant to Woodside Petroleum – erroneously mentioned as Lakes Oil (P. Cai, ‘Downer joins Lakes Oil as Rinehart board appointee’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February 2013 – where Rinehart is of course Gina Rinehart).

In time, Downer took up the position of United Nations envoy to Cyprus with the U.N. Secretary-General to help revive the peace process; the appointment took effect on 14 July 2008.  He also held a number of board appointments, including the Advisory Board of British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt & Company, Merchant Bankers Cappello Capital Corp., the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Huawei in Australia. It did not matter that Huawei Technologies, a Chinese telecommunications equipment maker, was to be unofficially banned from tendering for the National Broadband Network for security reasons. He resigned the U.N. position in February 2014 to be ‘sent home’ as His Excellency The Honourable Alexander Downer, AC, Australian High Commissioner to the Court of St. James, more closely to consort with ‘the Hanover’, ‘the Hun’, ‘Charlie’, Andy – all of ‘The Firm’.

John Winston Howard, OM, AC went on to oraculate as Holy Man of the ‘natural party of government’.

Continued Wednesday – Comedy without art (part 1)

Previous instalment – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 7)

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 22

There are now reportedly more ‘non-military’ government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. While Americans may have to face several increasing obstacles in order to own a gun, the government is arming its own civilian employees to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorising them to make arrests, and training them in military tactics. (T. Coburn and A. Andrzejewski, ‘Why does the [Internal Revenue Service] need guns?’, wsj.com, 17 June 2016).

Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armour, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and liquified petroleum gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, Interanl Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.

Why do police need armoured personnel carriers with gun ports, compact sub-machine guns with 30-round magazines, precision battlefield sniper rifles, and military-grade assault-style rifles and carbines? Of course, they do not!

In the hands of government agents, whether they are members of the military, law enforcement or some other government agency, these weapons have become routine parts of America’s day-to-day life, a byproduct of the rapid militarisation of law enforcement over the past several decades. Over the course of 30 years, police officers in jack boots holding assault rifles have become fairly common in small town communities across America.

Does this sound like a country under martial law? While it still technically remains legal for the average citizen to own a firearm in America, possessing one may end up being stopped, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without having committed a crime, shot at and killed by police.

One does not even have to have a gun or a look-alike gun, such as a ‘BB’ gun, which is a guns designed to shoot metallic ball projectiles called BBs, in one’s possession to be singled out and killed by police.

As J. W. Whitehead writes: “There are countless incidents that happen every day in which Americans are shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, or challenge an order.

Growing numbers of unarmed people are being shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something – anything – that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.”

And Whitehead supports his position by listing many examples of police over-reaction.

So much abuse passes for policing in America today, and it is only getting worse. In most cases, police could have resorted to less lethal tactics, could have acted with reason and calculation instead of reacting with a killer instinct. Indeed they could have attempted to defuse whatever perceived ‘threat’ caused them to fear for their lives enough to react with lethal force.

That police instead chose fatally to resolve these encounters by using their guns on fellow citizens speaks volumes about what is wrong with policing in America today, where police officers are being dressed in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.” (S. Stoughton, ‘Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem,’ Harvard Law Review, 10 April 2015).

And Whitehead concludes: “”Remember, to a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. … Violence begets violence: until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting a culture of violence, we will continue to be a nation plagued by violence in our homes, in our schools, on our streets and in our affairs of state, both foreign and domestic.” (J. W. Whitehead, ‘Who inflicts the most gun violence in America? The U.S. Government and its police forces,’ Information Clearing House, 14 August 2019). Mr. Whitehead is the author of Battlefield America: The war On the American people, New York, N.Y. SelectBooks 2015.

Neo-Nazis are now selling the New Zealand shooter’s racist screed for $4 on Telegram. The manifesto which inspired El Paso is now a hardcover book.

Before a mass shooter killed 51 people and injured 49 others in two Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019, he released an 87-page racist screed – titled The Great Replacement – which quickly found its way onto 8chan before New Zealand authorities could shut it down.

Now, while the shooter remains in gaol, his writings are being sold as a hardcover book for $ 4 a copy on the anonymous messaging service Telegram by a neo-Nazi in Ukraine who hopes to spread the ideology off the Internet and across the Ukrainian-speaking world.

The shooter’s manifesto, cited as inspiration for the mass shootings at El Paso and at the Poway synagogue in California on 27 April 2019, as well as an attempted attack on a mosque near Oslo in Norway on 10 August 2019, was written in English and has been translated into a number of other languages, but the publisher of this version claims it is the only hard copy out there. By the end of August 2019 advertisements for the book started showing up on Ukrainian right-wing channels across Telegram.

The book is being sold by the administrator of a Ukrainian far-right channel on Telegram with more than 1,000 subscribers, called ‘Brenton Tarrant’s lads.’ The administrator goes by the name ‘Hitler Himself.’

The channel went on air on 17 March 2019, two days after the Christchurch shootings. It openly glorifies the manifesto and the shooter with various white-power memes, videos, and images explicitly encouraging violence against Jews and people of colour. The channel also features original lyrics and links to songs found on SoundCloud – a European online audio distribution platform and music sharing website based in Berlin, Germany which enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio, all of which aims to expand the ‘white power movement’.

“I do not make money on this. If someone doesn’t have shekels to spare – take the layout and print this out on your own, not a problem,” the channel administrator wrote. “The idea is to give paper versions to everyone in a row, on birthdays, wedding anniversaries and baptisms of children. In the first place, the inhabitants, to open their eyes to our cruel world.”

The latest posts on the Telegram channel include PDF attachments of a letter that the Christchurch shooter was able to send out of a high-security prison in New Zealand to someone in Russia. It praises Russia and encourages violence.

The producer of The Great Replacement hardcover and administator of the channel refused to be interviewed, saying that he was not interested in answering questions to a “kike journalist” who worked for a “lie-production factory.”

The New Zealand manifesto has been cited as inspiration for a number of recent mass shootings. The latest in a succession of extremists to reference the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto was a Norwegian white nationalist who attempted to start a massacre in a mosque on 10 August 2019 in Oslo.

That was just a week after Crusius, the killer in El Paso, wrote in his own manifesto: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And he proceeded to kill 22 people. The young man who opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California on 27 April 2019 also made reference to the New Zealand shooter, and cited the 27 October 2018 Tree of Life – or L’Simcha Congregation synagogue shooting in a neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – and Hitler, of course.

All three aggrieved ‘white nationalists’ believe in the process of ‘white replacement’, or the idea that all white people are being ‘replaced’ by immigrants from non-white countries, either by birth rates or immigration, and that some entity or organisation has deliberately planned for this replacement to take place. Invariably, the ‘white nationalists’ place the blame on Jews.

Anders Behring Breivik , since 2017 legally Fjotolf Hansen, the Norwegian who killed 77 people in Oslo in 2011 and left a 1,500-page screed expressing a fear of ‘white ethnic replacement’ by migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, is cited as the Christchurch shooter’s biggest inspiration. But besides inspiring the manifesti of ‘white supremacist’ shooters, the rambling document has been quietly spreading through ‘white supremacy’ and neo-Nazi Internet communities around the world.

The administrator of the Christchurch shooter’s channel, shortly after setting up the channel and congratulating his white brothers, outlined his intentions: “I was inspired by the Brenton Tarrant manifesto to create this channel, after reading which I decided to translate it and spread the manifesto and everything related to it.” he wrote.

The first mention of a planned printed version of the book came on 14 May 2019. Shortly after, the administrator explained that he had found a publisher willing to print it. By the third week of June, the first samples of the Ukrainian translation of ‘The Great Replacement’ had been printed. The administrator claimed that the organisation was not interested in profiting from the sales but just wanted the manifesto’s ideas to be spread.

An advertisement for the hard copy of the book

By the end of June, pictures of the book placed next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, drawings of swastikas, and semi-automatic rifles began to surface on the channel.

The administrator of the Telegram page uploaded a picture of books with the hard-copy version of The Great Replacement in Ukrainian standing in front of a poster of Hitler and adjacient to Mein Kampf

Once, the administrator uploaded a photograph of “the happy owners of the first copy” of the Ukrainian version. The photograph features seven men dressed in what looks like military attire, each holding a hardcover copy, and some holding their hands up in the Sieg Heil! salute.

On another occasion, the administrator boasted that a foreign reader had just ordered the book. On 9 August 2019, he announced that he had sent eight copies out in one day.

Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website of very questionable reputation, also found advertisements for the hard copy on another Ukrainian Telegram channel belonging to Karpatska Sich, a group of fighters who presently define themselves as “a right-wing nationalist movement whose fighters are united by the common ideas of the national revival of Ukraine and a powerful traditionalist Europe.” The Karpatska Sich was formed in November 1938, and collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war. It remains a ‘nationalist’ formation.

“We urge all sincere nationalists to purchase the only available Ukrainian translation of the manifesto of the hero of national resistance, Brenton Tarrant,” the group posted after the El Paso massacre. “He, along with like-minded men, launched a desperate attack on aliens in New Zealand in their temple, which resulted in the murder of many dozens of uninvited aliens.” (V. Kipnis, ‘Neo-Nazis are selling the New Zealand shooter’s racist screed for $ 4 on Telegram’, The manifesto that inspired El Paso is now a hardcover book,’ VICE, 20 August 2019).

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 21

Might is Right! Sieg Heil!

“Trump is not an anomaly of a morally bankrupt nation, but rather an emblem,” and “The U.S. is less of a nation than a collective, psychotic episode,” So wrote Phil Rockstroh, a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard.

“Within day-to-day life in [America], a cultural aura exists that shifts, mingles and merges between a sense of nervous agitation and displaced rage, in combination with a sense of weightlessness. The fragmented quality of daily life imparts an insubstantial, unreal quality wherein the citizenry of the capitalist/consumer empire of hungry ghosts drift through a nadascape comprised of ad hoc, fast-buck-driven, suburban/exburban architecture and the ersatz eros of constant, consumer come-ons.

Yet beneath the nebulous dread and nettling angst of it all, there exists the primal human imperative for connection and social communion i.e., authentic eros. The most lost among the lost in the ghostsphere of the collective mind attempt to animate the realm of shades with libations of blood. The gods of the capitalist death cult demand no less.”

More to the point, the poet asked:

“Where does an impulse to possess an unlimited number of firearms fit into the scheme of things? A firearm’s heft, for one.”

And he explained: “The weapon’s substantial feel, when held and hoisted, serves, provisionally, to mitigate a psychical sense of weightlessness. The act of engagement eases nervous agitation. Gun reality offsets the weightless content of media reality. Focus is achieved when one aims the weapon on a target. Nebulous dread transforms into adamantine purpose. The presence of an Angel of Death will focus the mind. The ground, for the moment, feels solid beneath one’s feet. Hence, there arrives a craving, in the sense of addiction, to hoard the object that provides relief; in addition, massive quantities of ammunition must be stored as emotional ballast.

The mystifying, rankling, uncontrollable criteria of this weightless Age and the white noise of uncertainty seem to yield to the clear and decisive crack of a rifle shot. Relief is imagined in the concomitant carnage. The late British author Rebecca West captures the phenomenon in her book, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:” (The book, subtitled A Journey through Yugoslavia is a travel book, written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941 in two volumes by Macmillan in the United Kingdom and by The Viking Press in the United States. It probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of then Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions which rule the country’s history as well as its daily life. It is a Penguin Classic, reprinted in 2007).

West wrote: “Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

The existentialist philosopher continued: “Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, choose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half will live out the latter on a collective basis. During the blood lust on display at President Donald Trump’s rallies, the mob finds a collective comfort zone in catastrophic longings. The domestic landscape of paranoia works on behalf of the profiteers of perpetual war, perpetrators of the U.S.-created deathscapes overseas, and vice versa, in a self-resonating feedback loop of carnage. [Emphasis added]

In our era, in which, the U.S. empire is in decline and the white supremacist order is giving way, Trump’s frightened legions feel as if their identity is under siege. Seal off the nation’s borders. Construct an unscalable wall. Create a cordon sanitaire to protect and preserve racial purity. A strong authority figure is craved to set the world back in order. The phenomenon could be termed, Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) – a pathology manifested in personality types who have been traumatized by the authoritarianism of the U.S. socio-political milieu but who seek to assuage their hurt and humiliation by identification with the very forces responsible for their torment. It’s the stuff of a cultural nervous breakdown. [Emphasis added]

To that end, according to its own laws, the nation’s citizenry, sufferers of mental distress, should be restricted from purchasing a gun. Yet without a doubt, the most disturbed of all are the nation’s political class, those responsible for gun legislation. There is compelling evidence that they present a clear and present danger to themselves and others. The political class is a menace to society; they make decisions, more often than not, based on delusional thinking, that are responsible for harm on a massive scale. They should be subject to institutional-style restraint, within the confines of the most heavily secure, lockdown ward in an asylum for the criminally insane. [Emphasis added]

Although the so-called mentally ill, as a rule, are not any more inclined to commit violent crimes than are the general population of capitalist dystopias. The U.S. was founded in genocidal violence and the fortunes of its ruling class’ are protected by the state sanctioned violence of the police and are bloated by the violence inherent to imperialist shakedown operations. [Emphasis added]

It comes down to this: In our emotionally brutal era, those deemed mentally ill are suffering from capitalism. The pummeling stress and boot-in-the-face, hierarchy-inflicted humiliations inherent to the system inflict trauma on large swathes of the citizenry.

Epidemic levels of middle-aged U.S. citizens are dying with needles in their arms. The inherent and internalized white supremacy of the societal order has been exacerbated by Trump’s self-serving, reckless agitprop and acts in a drug-like manner causing dopamine levels to rise in those experiencing emotional torment due to humiliation-caused despair. Demagogues such as Trump are aware and exploit the manner in which despair can be mitigated by the emotional displacement of rage. [Emphasis added]

Fascist insignias rise when the hopes and aspirations of the working class lie shattered across a capitalist economic wasteland. Hoisted torches provide the illusion that dark despair has been banished. The fascist mob becomes possessed by a belief that they, en masse, can ascend into the precincts of heaven by scaling a mountain of corpses comprised of outsider groups.”

Rockstroh moved on to consider “Fascism as [a] Psychoactive Drug.”

“Fascism – he said – acts as an anesthetic to the wounds delivered by capitalism. It is also a psychoactive drug; its incantatory rhetoric and imagist psychical material provides an intoxicating, crude allure. [Emphasis added]

Capitalism is borne on manic wings. The economic elite move from corporate skyscrapers and high-rise rooftops in order to travel by helicopter, where upon landing, they board private, luxury jets, then, whereupon landing again, they are transported by helicopter to corporate skyscrapers and high-rise rooftops. Touching the Earth is a fleeting experience. The ruling class have lost touch with ground-level verities. In a classical sense, such displays of hubris were understood as the progenitor of madness. The gods first elevate those they drive mad.

And, yes, race-based fears and animus are in play. Racism engendered mass murder has been coming to pass since armed Europeans trudged ashore in the Americas, with their blood-sodden religion and their murderous craving for gold and land. Of course, the racist demagoguery of the Bloated Orange Tub of Nazi Goo oozing into and agitating the limbic systems of violent cretins during homegrown Nuremberg Rallies and his compulsion to blitzkrieg the pixel-sphere with Der Stürmer tweets is fomenting racist mayhem that includes bacchanals of blood. U.S. mythos is rancid with the reek of the corpses of the innocent slaughtered by white men brandishing firearms. Mass murderers have been and continue to be enshrined as heroes, from Wounded Knee to Afghanistan. [Emphasis added]

The nation was established by gun-enabled genocide and the intimidation of African slaves held at gunpoint on capitalist plantations. The truth has never been faced e.g., the suppression of the Nixon tape in which Ronald Reagan displayed his racist mindset.

The U.S. citizenry thanks the soldiers of its racist wars of aggression for their “service.” The origins of perpetual shooting sprees can be traced to the heart of darkness of the nation and its concomitant white supremacist creed. The killings happened long before the rise and election of the Tangerine Tweet Führer. Of course, the racist shit-heel Trump has exacerbated the situation. He deserves all scorn cast his way. It is obvious his capacity for malice does not possess a governor’s switch. [Emphasis added]

Trump is a two-legged emblem of the hypertrophy at play in late U.S. imperium. Gun-inflicted violence is steeped into the blood-stained fabric of the U.S. (sham) republic. Withal, Trump is not an anomaly; he is an emblem. Gun-strokers are no more going to shed their mythos than liberals and progressives are going to shed theirs that the U.S. is a democratic republic, governed by the rule of law, and progressive reforms will be implemented by its High Dollar owned and controlled political class that will serve to turn around the trajectory of the blood-built and maintained U.S. empire.” [Emphasis added] (P. Rochstroh, ‘Bodies on the ground and the rise and rise of the economic elite’, Information Clearing House, 15 August 2019).

But there is another problem, as John W. Whitehead noted: “It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.” In the words of Celisa Calacal, a Filipina freelance journalist based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Mass shootings are a problem in America and, although they are getting deadlier, they seem not getting more frequent. And yet, while mentally ill individuals embarking on mass shooting sprees are a problem in America, tighter gun control laws and so-called ‘intelligent’ background checks fail to protect the public from the most certain perpetrator of gun violence in America: the United States government.

Consider this: five years after police shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old man in Ferguson, Missouri, there has been no relief from the government’s gun violence. This is what one has learned about the government’s gun violence since Ferguson, according to The Washington Post: “If you are a black American, you have got a greater chance of being shot by police. An unarmed black man is four times more likely to be killed by police than an unarmed white man. Most people killed by police are young men. Since 2015 police have shot and killed an average of 3 people per day.” (J. Fox, J. Jenkins, J. Tate and W. Lowery, ‘What we’ve learned about police shootings 5 years after Ferguson,’ The Washington Post, 9 August 2019).

More than 2,500 police departments have shot and killed at least one person since 2015. And while the vast majority of people shot and killed by police are armed, their weapons ranged from guns to knives – even to toy guns.

Clearly, the American government is not making Americans any safer. Indeed, the government’s gun violence – inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained Special Weapons And Tactics teams, militarised police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later – poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter.

There is more: “mass shootings … have claimed the lives of 339 people since 2015… [D]uring this same time frame, police in America have claimed the lives of 4,355 citizens.” (M. Agorist, ‘US police have killed over 1,200% more citizens than mass shooters since 2015’, The Free Thought Project, 15 July 2019).

Curiously enough, in the midst of the finger-pointing over the latest round of mass shootings, Americans have been so focused on debating who or what is responsible for gun violence – the guns, the gun owners, the ‘domestic terorists’, the Second Amendment, the politicians, or America’s violent ‘culture’ – that they have overlooked the fact that the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government has done more collective harm to the American people and their liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.

Violence has become the American government’s calling card, starting at the top and trickling down. The government even exports violence worldwide, one of the United States most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world for too long now. (B. E. Sawe, ‘World’s largest exporters of arms,’ World Atlas, 6 June 2019). Controlling more than 50 per cent of the global weaponry market, the United States has sold or donated weapons to at least 96 countries in the past five years, including the Middle East. (T. C. Frohlich, ‘Countries Buying the Most Weapons From the US Government’, 247wallst.com, 15 March 2019). Saudi Arabia was the top customer of the American arsenals followed by Australia. The United States also provides countries such as Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Iraq with grants and loans through the Foreign Military Financing programme to purchase military weapons.

At the same time that the United States is supplying nearly half the world with deadly weapons, profiting to the tune of $36.2 billion, its leaders – President Trump at the front – have also been lecturing American citizens on the dangers of gun violence and ‘appeared to be’ working to enact measures which would make it more difficult for Americans to acquire certain weapons.

Talk about an absurd double standard! On one hand there is plentiful talk about getting serious about gun violence while on the other the government makes not a step to scaling back on its weapons. While gun critics continue to clamour for bans on military-style assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and armour-piercing bullets, the United Sates military is providing them to domestic police forces.

Under the claim to a military ‘recycling’ programme, which allows local police agencies to acquire military-grade weaponry and equipment, more than $4.2 billion worth of equipment has been transferred from the Defense Department to domestic police agencies since 1990. (M. Shank and E, Beavers, ‘America’s police are looking more and more like the military’, The Guardian, 7 October 2013). Included among these ‘gifts’ are tank-like, 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, M.R.A.P. vehicles, tactical gear, and assault rifles.

Continued and concluding tomorrow … (Part 23)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Denis Bright  

As 2020 gets underway, it must not be assumed that populist conservative corporate values have smothered generations of commitment to fair wages and working conditions in Australian workplaces. Where shortcomings exist, unionised workers themselves with support from favourable media coverage should be able to note the good, bad and the ugly in Australian corporate life.

On New Year’s Day 2020 special arrangements were made to compensate wage and salary earners at three key venues that I visited in Brisbane.

Office Works and Woolworths offered a day’s extra leave to compensate workers for their public holiday commitments. Aldi offered penalty rates and at UQ Sport, gym and pool attendants were paid penalty rates of 250 per cent.

Developments in anti-discrimination law offer fringe benefits for the advancement of social justice in the workplace. At a time when most employers still have a preference for non-union labour, trade unions can and should strive to regain majority support as in the teaching, health and transport sectors.

The Harvester Judgement from the High Court in 1907 made Australia a pacesetter in the development of fair wage employment (Waltzing Matilda and the Sunshine Harvester Factory):

In the Harvester Decision, Justice Higgins of the Arbitration Court decided that 7 shillings a day, or 42 shillings a week, was fair and reasonable wages for an unskilled labourer. This became the basis of the national minimum wage system in Australia. It was a ‘living’ or ‘family’ wage, set at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’. Additional amounts were paid to more skilled workers, for example an additional 3 shillings to a fitter or other tradesperson. These additional amounts were known as ‘margins’. In the Harvester Decision, a fair and reasonable wage for more skilled employees was for example 10 shillings a day for ‘journeymen’, or tradesmen.

In Ex parte H.V. McKay (the Harvester Decision), Justice Higgins of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court decided to determine what ‘fair and reasonable’ wages were using the following test:

I cannot think of any other standard appropriate than the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community. [p.3]

Decades later at the Transfield Factory in Sydney on a visit to Australia in 1986, a youthful-looking Pope John Paul II called for a renewal and a revitalisation of the Harvester Traditions.

Image from transfield.com

Fortunately for Australia, your most cherished traditions place great value on equality and mutual support, especially in difficult times. The word “mate” has rich and positive connotations in your language. I pray that this tradition of solidarity will always flourish among you and will never be looked upon as old-fashioned.

In juxtaposition, some irresponsible corporate managers are hell-bent on fostering the erosion of fair and cherished Australian values in the retail and distribution sectors.

The practice of working for under-award cash wages continues in some small venues where wage theft is regarded as responsible business management to avoid taxation responsibilities, insurance payments to work cover and state payroll taxes.

As a trade-off, irresponsible employers offer some token perks to casual employees. These might include rough accommodation on farms or perhaps part-payment in food which was not used that evening in the restaurant. The selling line for this corruption was the incorporation of family values as a substitute for workplace laws or even a misapplication of the parable about workers in the biblical vineyard which had nothing to do with pragmatic industrial relations in the modern sense.

Customers have the right to quiz employers if they suspect that sloppy and even corrupt practices are occurring at their favourite retail or service outlets.

A century back  Sigmund Freud noted that people under siege would often project their insecurities on vulnerable people in their midst.

In today’s new corporate era small business entrepreneurs in corporate malls might ignore macro-problems like exorbitant rent levels imposed by shopping centre managers or national leaders hell-bent on stripping Australians of their commitment to fair wages and working conditions to focus on the challenges posed by customers from less advantaged suburbs.

Guest workers in Australia could easily assume that such corporate values are the vulgar manners of the mainstream society.

Here Felipe from Sao Paolo in Brazil waits in the shade at Petrie Terrace in Brisbane for his next pizza delivery.

It is disappointing to see new arrivals in Australia working as contractors for multinational food distribution networks for piecework payments which should have been extinguished with the demise of those satanic coal mines and mills in Britain’s first industrial revolution.

The inappropriateness of petit corporate values does not take a break for the holiday season. Everyone can communicate about our daily Australian adventures

I enjoy visiting the Southpoint Shopping Complex in Grey Street, South Brisbane which is one of Brisbane’s new Transport Oriented Developments (TODs) It is adjacent to the platform at Southbank Station. This is a half-billion-dollar property investment with retail outlets, food venues, bars and hotel facilities. It also incorporates some heritage buildings which have a new lease of life for this digital age.

Image: Real Commercial

Because South Point is near transport hubs for buses, trains, the adjacent TAFE College and local private and public state high schools, the centre attracts customers from a wide southside catchment.

Woolworths is clearly the anchor point of the retail outlet. Here casual and permanent employees work in a convivial atmosphere. Their welfare and industrial awards are protected by a high level of union membership with the Shop and Distributive Union (SDA).

One of the more persistent questions to the security guards at Woolworths is about access to the toilet facilities in the adjacent food court.

Contrary to international hygiene practices, the toilet facilities were initially kept closed at weekends. Now, these facilities have been closed for weeks with the lame excuse that maintenance of facilities is still in progress to justify an abandonment of conventional hand-washing practices.

As site managers, at South Point, the multinational conglomerate Knight Frank Australia Holdings Pty Ltd claims a right to open their public toilets only at their discretion as it is a privately owned facility which can over-ride conventional health standards for the consumption of food from takeaway outlets who pay their fair share of rent to the management centre.

Customers are directed by security guards to use the toilets on Platform One at Southbank Station which is less than readily accessible when escalators are out of order and there is no signage to a lift to the station level.

All this seems rather trivial for a major multinational rental agency with vast global resources with an annual turnover that exceeds one trillion Australian dollars from Knight Franks vast commercial, agriculture, real estate and philanthropic sectors.

This philanthropy apparently does not extend to the maintenance of hygienic hand washing in the food court at South Point. Corporate giants at other inner-city venues across Brisbane seem to survive financially while still maintaining clean and adequate toilet facilities.

Corporate advertising from Knight Frank conceals a mean streak in corporate character which surveillance cameras, security guards and regular police visits should be able to handle.

Times are tough for some sections of corporate Australia. Knight Frank Australia Holdings Pty Ltd suffers from falling real wages. The company’s revenue growth and commercial returns have tapered recently. A fee must be paid to gain access to greater details with strategic block-outs on the corporate profiles available to the general public:

The state government comes in for unfair criticism for apologists for the toilet closures throughout December 2019 at Southbank.

Corporate pressure is being placed on the Palasczszuk Government to install electronic gates at Southbank Station. This would involve an outlay of several million dollars to control the arrival of Train People from less affluent Southside suburbs. The rhetoric is similar to Peter Dutton’s concerns about Boat People to swamp the good fortunes of an affluent nation. It is a short step from abandoning our refugee responsibilities to applying this rhetoric against Trainloads of Bogans from Logan, a local authority to the south of Brisbane.

The financial resources of the Palasczszuk Government are being stretched to the limit to complete the cross-river rail project without any subsidies from the federal LNP for a six billion dollar construction project at a time when GST sharing with the state and territories are likely to be moderated in a slowing economy. There is no holding back on federal subsidies for the complementary Brisbane Light Rail Project being developed by the LNP controlled Brisbane City Council.

Perhaps this exercise in citizens’ journalism will encourage everyone to observe and participate to take control of the remnants of social justice from our corporate elites who are becoming more outrageous with every new year of LNP control in Canberra.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 20

Between the two editions of The dangerous case of Donald Trump, books on Trump have been published by the shelf-load.

One of them, particularly interesting carries the title of Fantasyland, and it explains: How America went haywire: A 500-year history, Random House, New York, N.Y. 2017).

Published on 5 September 2017, it is by Kurt Andersen, a journalist and satirist, well-known for having coined the notable insult “short-fingered vulgarian” for Donald Trump. (J. Kelly, ‘How Donald Trump Became the Short-Fingered Vulgarian’, Vanity Fair, 7 March 2016).

If, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus claims that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake, the premise of Andersen’s ravenously exhaustive book is that United States history is a nightmare from which its citizens, at least those privileged to be smart and rational, have never been able to awake.

Over the course of five centuries, from the Pilgrims at Salem to Phineas Taylor Barnum, an American showman, businessman and politician, who is remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and more recently to Scientology and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the reader is presented with a ‘new history’ of what was and is happening to the United States, up to and including President Donald J. Trump at Washington.

With good reason, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.

The question for anyone who still cared remains: “Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America?

Another psychiatrist weighed in. Also published on 5 September 2017, Twilight of American sanity: A psychiatrist analyzes the age of Trump, Morrow/HarperCollins, New York, N.Y. is by Allen J. Frances, formerly a professor at Cornell University Medical College and since chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. A past leader of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM – ‘the bible of psychology’ – Dr. Frances is regarded as the world’s leading expert on psychiatric diagnosis, and “one of the world’s most prominent psychiatrists” (The Atlantic, June 2017) for his ability to analyse the American national psyche, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress, and finally to make sense of present day America and charting the way forward.

“It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one-off, an exception – not a reflection on us or our democracy,’ writes Frances. “But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul. … What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind’s future? Trump is a symptom of a world in distress, not its sole cause. Blaming him for all our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent. Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society – if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is.” This is Frances’ main thesis.

Dr. Frances explores at length the many societal delusions which have given rise to Trump. The delusions include a false belief in fast, easy solutions to complex problems, such as global warming: “God will fix it”, guns: “They do not kill people – people do”, dwindling resources: “There will be a high-tech fix”, and so on. Exploiting this societal sickness, Trump, a “skilled snake-oil salesman selling quack medicine…won power because he promised quick, phony cures for the… real problems burdening the significant segment of our population left out of the American dream.” As far as unyielding unemployment – in the so-called ‘rust belt of America’, for instance –   Frances writes that “most of the jobs were lost to automation, not globalization, and sadly they will never return.” In the election campaign, Trump, a lifelong con man, displayed the common touch, while Hillary Clinton proved “remote and inaccessible, assuming she could rest comfortably on her long lead and past laurels.” Frances makes no secret of his deep abhorrence of Trump: “we have placed the future of humanity in the hands of someone indifferent to facts, proud of scientific ignorance, and ready to act deceitfully on whim and spite.” Still, while Trump “doesn’t qualify for a mental disorder…he does present with one of the world’s best documented cases of lifelong failure to mature.” He is “a distillation, mouthpiece, and terrifying living embodiment of all the worst in human nature and societal delusion.” In a final ray of hope, Frances envisions the possibility of a rational post-Trump world informed by progressive populism. For the time being, Frances worries that Trump has “a particular gift for bringing out all the worst irrational thinking and impulsive actions in his followers.”

While this essay was being revised once more, three events occurred, by sheer and yet significant coincidence  on the same day: 14 November 2019.

The first was the news that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch had reported – on the basis of over 900 emails between the editors of the right-wing news organisation, Breitbart and President Trump’s senior advisor for policy Stephen Miller – on the deep connections Miller has to racist ‘white nationalists’, and on how Miller has promoted ‘white nationalist’ publications and conspiracy theories of right-wing, fascistic tendency.

Miller, born in a Jewish family, happens to be connected with anti-Semitic groups. As a speechwriter for newly elected Donald Trump, Miller helped write Trump’s inaugural address. He has been a key advisor since the early days of the Trump’s presidency. An immigration hardliner, Miller was a chief organiser of President Trump’s travel bans, of the Administration’s reduction of refugees accepted to the United States, and of President Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Miller has prevented the publication of internal administration studies which showed that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues. Miller reportedly played a central role in the resignation in April 2019 of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, whom he believed was insufficiently hawkish on immigration. (White Nationalists are running the White House, therealnews.com, 14 November 2019).

Next came the news that a 16-year-young person, later identified as Nathaniel Berhow, had stormed into Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, just before classes began, killed two students and injured at least three others with a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol before turning the gun on himself. He did all that on his birthday. It seems that he survived and was taken to a hospital where he was in ‘grave condition’. A classmate described Berhow as a ‘quiet kid’. “You wouldn’t expect anything like that from him,” he added. (J. Cowan, N. Borel-Burroughs and J. Fortin, ‘Student kills 2 at California High School,’ The New York Times, 14 November 2019); (G. Fonrouge and K. Garger, ‘Santa Clarita high school shooter identified as Nathaniel Berhow,’ nypost.com, 14 November 2019).

On 14 November 2019 the much expected work by Jeff Sparrow: Fascists among us: online hate and the Christchurch massacre, Scribe Publications, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia was released.

Continued tomorrow … (Part 22)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Dr George Venturini  

In 2005 the Cole Inquiry heard that between 1999 and 2004 the A.W.B. had systematically paid almost AU$300 million in illicit fees and ultimate ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

A.S.I.C. had placed the civil cases, which had been initiated in late 2007, against Mr. Flugge and five other former A.W.B. executives on hold in November 2008 to await for possible criminal charges but in a shock decision in mid-2010, it was revealed that the criminal aspects of the long-running A.W.B. investigation had been abandoned.

A.S.I.C. re-ignited the civil penalty cases against the six men over the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in “transport”, “discharge” and “sales service fees” to Jordanian-based trucking company Alia, which payments turned out to be ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime.

In 2013 A.S.I.C. had won two rather unimportant civil cases against former managing director Andrew Lindberg – who was sentenced to pay a penalty of $100,000, and against former chief financial officer Paul Ingleby – who was sentenced to pay a penalty of $40,000.

Cases against former directors Michael Long and Charles Stott had been dismissed. A search of the public records revealed the ‘corporate regulator’ had spent an estimated $15 million on the A.W.B. prosecutions at that time.

A.S.I.C. had not gained the best result with Justice Robson over the A.W.B. cases, after he dismissed one of the ‘corporate regulator’ two cases against Mr. Lindberg, while ruling that the agreed $40,000 fine against Mr. Ingleby was too tough – a decision which was over-ruled on appeal.

A.S.I.C. was bound to prove that Mr. Flugge, an experienced director, knew or ought to have known that A.W.B. was breaching the United Nations Security Council Resolutions – and it failed. (P. Durkin, ‘Former AWB chairman Trevor Flugge finally faces court’, The Australian Financial Review, 11 October 2015).

The Iraqi wheat-‘kickbacks’ scandal was set to reignite headlines again in 2016.

The mid-2000s scandal involving Prime Minister Howard, Foreign Minister Downer, and Trade Minister Vaile did not seem ‘to go away’.

It was thought at mid-2009 that the reason why Australia had slipped down the international anti-corruption rankings was because of the A.W.B. Oil-for-Food scandal.

Transparency International keeps on lamenting that many governments simply are not putting enough effort into curbing bribes. Some years ago the organisation evaluated the efforts member countries were making to uphold the O.E.C.D.’s Anti-Bribery Convention. Australia did come out in the bottom category, criticised for carrying out little or no practical enforcement against bribery offenses by national businesses operating overseas. That was a category shared by 21 O.E.C.D. countries, as diverse as Brazil, Canada and Turkey. Only four countries were in the top tier, cited for active enforcement, with eleven in the middle with moderate enforcement. In such a climate there was a risk that, unless enforcement both improved and became more uniform across countries, the Anti-Bribery Convention could become irrelevant. A Convention like this cannot afford to fail, otherwise it becomes one of those international conventions which are more valuable on paper than in practice. That would not have disturbed Australian governments after the Royal Ambush. Today, practically no significant international treaty or convention ratified by Australia is abided by.

Especially over the decades prior to the Convention, multinational corporations have helped bribery and corruption become a much worse problem especially in developing countries. As the multinational corporations, especially American and European, went abroad to countries which were vulnerable, the scale of the bribes increased – greedy officials would demand more from foreign investors.

This was particularly a problem in the resources sector, and distorted several national economies.

The Transparency International reports look at how many foreign investment corruption cases have gone to court, year by year – and how many have resulted in convictions. While not specifically including bribes, Australia’s biggest overseas corruption case around 2009-2010 was the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal and the Australian Wheat Board. Six cases were at the time in the civil courts, but none had yet resulted in convictions – and even the moderate recommendations from the Cole Inquiry into the affair had not been followed up. The lack of results had placed Australia in the bottom group. Countries like the United States and Germany, which have both prosecuted several cases, served as a clear contrast in the top category.

Clearly the A.W.B. scandal would not go away, no matter what the Howard Government would do. It was the prevailing opinion that, apart from that scandal, the government itself was incompetent, dishonest and corrupt. It has been proven so in relation to its accountability and other processes following the discovery of restricted  and secret intelligence reports and communications between various Australian embassies, trade officials, the United Nations, Australian public servants and the Australian Prime Minister, the then Minister for Trade, who was also Deputy Prime Minister, and the Foreign Minister and their Departments in relation to the A.W.B. scandal.

New evidence and supporting material had come to light during an independent investigation into claims that Members of Parliament were holding ‘dirt files’. The ‘dirt files’ claims had been proven in the process of the investigation, and a substantial amount of material related to the A.W.B. scandal as well as documents related to other issues had been discovered. Much of the A.W.B. material was held by various Australian agencies and had not been brought to the attention of the Cole Inquiry into the bribes ultimately flowing to the Saddam Hussein’s régime.

The available material showed that, in fact, senior Government ministers were told on a number of occasions that the A.W.B. was providing bribes to Saddam Hussein’s régime, contrary to the provisions of the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme. Copies of confidential and secret diplomatic cables, memoranda, e-mails and other material were found showing that both the then Minister for Trade as well as the Foreign Minister, had received numerous detailed intelligence and other briefings very early on into the scandal. They did nothing. The Foreign Minister noted in one secret memorandum to the Australian Embassy in Jordan that: “No-one will ever find out anyway.”

Image from Independent Australia

The then Minister for Trade was also advised on a number of occasions as to what was going on. Prime Minister Howard was also briefed on the matter by the various agencies including the Office of National Assessment, as well as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Australia’s international spy agency.

The same Howard Government which had kept silent over what it knew of the Oil-for-Food scandal set out ‘to detect, investigate and prevent corrupt conduct’ through the newly formed Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, A.C.L.E.I., with an Office of the Integrity Commissioner.

The Commission was established by an Act of Parliament in 2006, and placed under the responsibility of the Home Affairs and Justice Minister. A.C.L.E.I.’s role is to detect, investigate and prevent corruption in the Australian Border Force, Australian Crime Commission, Australian Federal Police (including A.C.T. Policing), Australian Transaction Reporting and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), CrimTrac Agency, prescribed aspects of the Department of Agriculture, Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the former National Crime Authority. Other agencies with a law enforcement function may also be added by regulation. A.C.L.E.I’s primary role is to investigate law enforcement-related corruption issues, giving priority to serious and systemic corruption. The Integrity Commissioner must consider the nature and scope of corruption revealed by investigations, and report annually on any patterns and trends in corruption in Australian Government law enforcement and other Government agencies which have law enforcement functions. Accordingly, A.C.L.E.I. collects intelligence about corruption in support of the Integrity Commissioner’s functions. A.C.L.E.I. also aims to understand corruption and prevent it. When, as a consequence of performing her/his functions, the Integrity Commissioner identifies laws of the Commonwealth or administrative practices of government agencies which might contribute to corrupt practices or prevent their early detection, s/he may make recommendations for these laws or practices to be changed. Any person, including members of the public and law enforcement officers, can give information to the Integrity Commissioner. Information can be given in confidence or provided anonymously.

Well Juvenal could ask: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? – “Who will guard the guards themselves?”

After all, who would know about a little bit of corruption work, promoted by ‘benevolent’ organisations such as the one rendered public by the Victoria Ombudsman in March 2011. And the innocent name? – The Brotherhood. The ‘brothers’ meet for lunch, to hear a guest speaker and then to engage in a bit of ‘networking’.

What the Ombudsman discovered about The Brotherhood confirmed the widely held conviction that its activities undermine the community’s confidence in public institutions.

Invitees from a list of up to 350 influential people had been attending the lunches every six weeks since the first one was held in 2003. The guests are all men, and the Chatham House Rule applies, i.e. “What is said in the room stays in the room.”

The host has been from the beginning the founder, a former policeman between 1988 and 1999, who had come to the attention of the Police Internal Investigations Department for, among other transgressions, assaulting a member of the public, and fined $200. He came to head two private companies. The founder started the lunches with the statement: “We are all members of The Brotherhood and we must assist each other.”

A whistleblower told the Ombudsman that “[the founder’s] motivation for the formation and maintenance of this group is to, amongst other things, provide an environment to facilitate unlawful information trading including confidential police information and other confidential information from government departments. This is in addition to gaining commercial benefits and inside information regarding contracts for tender.”

On the invitation list were two ‘Liberal’ State M.P.s, many current and former police officers including one with alleged links to an organised crime figure. A former Australian Wheat Board executive involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal was on it, too. So was the manager of a licensed table- top-dancing venue frequented by Victoria Police officers.

Some of the public servants attending maintained databases of sensitive information. It seems that a regular attendee, a senior Victorian Police officer, disclosed the identity of a prosecution witness in a high-profile murder trial, contrary to a Supreme Court suppression order. One member used his position at the Traffic Camera Office to annul over $2,000 worth of speeding fines accumulated by the founder and persons of his companies. The ‘operator’ denied any wrongdoing, but the case was recommended to police for investigation.

The example of The Brotherhood is not unique. The Ombudsman’s report cited the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption’s investigations into the ‘Information Exchange Club’ in 1992. This could be added to the mountain of damning reports and inquiries including Royal Commissions into various state Police forces over the decades. Nothing ever seems to happen. ‘Revolving door’ appointments involving positions on boards for retiring, previously highly placed politicians have become routine.

Of course, the preceding are just some examples of unlawful behaviour. The most notorious scandals of the last decade include: Trio Capital; the Commonwealth Bank financial planning scandal; CommInsure; the ANZ insider trading scandal; the bank bill swap rates fixing scandal, which now involves three of the big four banks; Storm Financial; Opes Prime; the Financial planning scandals at Westpac, NAB and Macquarie Private Wealth; the LM Investments; Bribery allegations against ASX boss Elmer Kunke Kupper; the ‘managed investment schemes’ (MIS) fiasco (Timbercorp, Great Southern); the Insider trading between an ABS bureaucrat and a NAB banker; and the Reserve Bank Securency scandal.

Perceptions of corruption in the Australian Government and public sector increased in 2018 for the seventh year running, surging eight points since 2015, and remaining in 2018 the same as in 2017 – in an annual index by Transparency International.

Since its inception in 1995, the Corruption Perceptions Index – Transparency International’s flagship research product, has become the leading global indicator of public sector corruption. The index offers an annual snapshot of the relative degree of corruption by ranking countries and territories from all over the globe. In 2012 Transparency International revised the methodology used to construct the index to allow for comparison of scores from one year to the next. The 2018 C.P.I. draws on 13 surveys and expert assessments to measure public sector corruption in 180 countries and territories, giving each a score from zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

The result puts Australia in thirteenth place globally for perceived openness, the country’s equal lowest ranking in the 23-year history of the report.

Australia’s 2018 score was 77, down from 85 in 2012. Denmark came in first with 88, with New Zealand second (87), followed by Finland (85), even with Singapore (85), Sweden (85), and Switzerland (85), Norway (84), Netherlands (82), Canada (81),  even with Luxemburg (81), Germany (80), even with United Kingdom (80). Somalia is the last (10), preceded by South Sudan and Syria (13) and North Korea and Yemen (14).

The former chair of Transparency International Australia, Anthony Wheatley, Q.C., has had occasion to say that Australia’s score was “the result of inaction from successive governments who have failed to address weaknesses in Australia’s laws and legal processes.”

Foreign bribery scandals such as those involving the Australian Wheat Board and Securency had damaged Australia’s reputation and legislation introduced into parliament in December 2015 was “long overdue”, he said.

Transparency International has also been calling for a federal anti-corruption agency; a nationally consistent and tighter political donations disclosure regime; and safeguards against dirty money from overseas bleeding into the Australian finance or real estate industries.

Muscular anti-foreign bribery laws and political donations reform were required to help arrest the slide. Mr. Wheatley said that addressing weaknesses in government would also raise the bar for the private sector.

The links between public institutions and big business interests – both mainstream and underworld – are becoming well known to the public, but one would be an optimist for thinking that anger at the seemingly endless stream of scandals is growing. It is pressure from the community which leads to the inquiries. It is in response to this same outrage that instrumentalities like the state-based Independent Commissions Against Corruption were established.

The demand on big business to abide by their State ‘rule of law’ is certainly justified; and the fight to bring business ‘operators’ to heel must continue. But so long as governments rule on behalf of corporations and the real power in society belongs to an oligarchy the battle will never be successful.

On 15 December 2016 the ‘corporate regulator’ lost its long-running case against former A.W.B. chairman Trevor Flugge and former executive Peter Geary on all but one allegation, more than a decade after the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal.

On that day the Supreme Court of Victoria heard that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission had succeeded in proving just one breach by Mr. Flugge.

Mr. Flugge was facing four allegations of breaching his director’s duties, while Mr. Geary faced thirteen allegations of breaching his executive duties.

A.S.I.C had alleged the two former executives breached their duties as directors in overseeing that some AU$229 million would flow as ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime between 1999 and 2003 in order to secure lucrative Iraqi wheat contracts.

A.S.I.C. claimed that Mr. Flugge had breached his duty of care under section 180(1) of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) by failing 1) to ensure A.W.B. did not breach U.N. sanctions; 2) to ascertain whether A.W.B. had sought and gained U.N. approval for the payment of inland transportation fees; 3) to make inquiries of A.W.B.’s senior management about the propriety of the payments; and 4) to ensure the A.W.B. Board and/or Board Committees were properly informed of, and responded appropriately to, the matters in issue.

A.S.I.C. also alleged that Mr. Flugge knew the fee payments were being made by A.W.B. to Iraq in breach of U.N. sanctions, that they were a sham, and, hence, they were improper. Accordingly, argued A.S.I.C., Mr. Flugge had breached his section 181 of the Corporation Act on the duty to act for a proper purpose and in good faith in the best interests of A.W.B.

A.S.I.C. later alleged – and the Court accepted – that in March 2000, Mr. Flugge attended a meeting with the Australian Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. during which attendees were informed that the United Nations had concerns about irregularities in A.W.B.’s contracts and dealings with Iraq under the Oil-for-Food programme.

In turn, Mr. Flugge submitted – and the Court accepted – that in mid-2000, Mr. Flugge and other members of the A.W.B. Board were informed by the managing director that the payments had been approved by the United Nations. The evidence also established that Mr. Flugge had told a number of other people that he had believed the managing director’s statements.

The Court, however, found that A.S.I.C.’s allegations were not proved.

Judge Ross Robson dismissed the claim, declaring that he was not satisfied that Mr. Flugge knew. But he did find that, had Mr. Flugge inquired into the issues raised by the United Nations, he would have discovered that it had not knowingly approved of the payments.

Judge Robson found Mr. Flugge’s reputation for honesty had not been tarnished by the civil case brought by the ‘corporate regulator’, which failed to prove he had known the payments contravened United Nations sanctions.

In handing down his judgement, Judge Robson said that, if Mr. Flugge had made inquiries, he would have uncovered the fraud and stopped the corrupt payments.

“It is relevant that Mr. Flugge has been left to face the accusations of A.S.I.C. almost alone, when many other A.W.B. executives have avoided being proceeded against,” he said.

“The Australian community, however, has every right to be profoundly disappointed in A.W.B.’s conduct and the ignominy that it brought on Australia and the damage suffered by its shareholders.

Nevertheless, the Court should be circumspect in not adding onto Mr. Flugge the sins of others within A.W.B. who have escaped being penalised.”

The Court held that, following the Washington meeting, Mr. Flugge was duty bound to make inquiries as 1) to whether the inland transportation fee payments were irregular, 2) why it was suggested they were irregular, and 3) why the United Nations would raise the issue of irregular fee payments if the U.N. had approved the payment of those fees. The failure to make these inquiries amounted to a breach of Mr. Flugge’s duty of care under section 180(1) of the Corporation Act.

The Court further held that Mr. Flugge’s reliance on the assurances of the managing director did not relieve him of his duty to make proper inquiries, noting that “a director is not excused from making his own inquiries by relying on the judgment of others.”

Additionally, the Court held that the duty to make inquiries is an ongoing obligation and so Mr. Flugge’s breach continued until he lost his position on the board.

Judge Robson said that the A.S.I.C. had failed to make out its case against Mr. Flugge, except for one breach of director’s duties by failing to investigate after being told that a controversial “inland transport” fee paid by A.W.B. to the Iraqi Government was in contravention of United Nations sanctions.

“The Court finds that A.S.I.C. has not established that Mr. Flugge knew that A.W.B. was making payments to Iraq, contrary to United Nations sanctions,” Judge Robson ruled.

“The Court finds that A.S.I.C. has not established that it was well known within A.W.B. that payments were not authorised by the United Nations. … The Court finds that in mid-2000, the managing director of A.W.B., Mr. [Andrew] Lindberg expressly informed the board, including Mr. Flugge of the payments and that they were authorised by the United Nations.”

“The Court finds however that A.S.I.C. has established that Mr. Flugge breached his duties as a director … in not inquiring into the issues raised by the U.N. and that if he had done so, he would have discovered that the U.N. … had not knowingly approved of the payments in the circumstances where neither Iraq nor the A.W.B. had any responsibility to deliver wheat within Iraq,” the Judge ruled.

Justice Robson found that Mr. Flugge had acted honestly, dismissing A.S.I.C.’s assertion that he had “sat on the board ticking off codes of conduct when … he knew of a ‘very big and dark secret’ … and that ‘worse than doing nothing about it, he positively encouraged management to get on and do this dirty work’. ”

“In the scale of breaches it was certainly not egregious, but it was not the sort of breach for which a director, knowing what Mr. Flugge knew, should be excused,” Justice Robson said.

“Even if Mr. Flugge had stopped the payments … there is every likelihood that A.S.I.C. would have taken proceedings against A.W.B. executives [and] Australia’s reputation internationally would have been tarnished, shareholder class actions may have been instituted and A.W.B. may have collapsed.”

Judge Robson said that Mr. Flugge had been of great service to Australian commerce, wheat farmers and the Australian community generally and had recognised that work in fixing penalties.

The ruling came close to a decade after the Cole Inquiry found that the A.W.B. had made the secret payments in full knowledge that they were in breach of U.N. sanctions.

Continued Saturday – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 8)

Previous instalment – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 6)

We’ve never found it harder to say “Happy New Year” than now. Given the heartbreak being felt across the country perhaps “Hopeful New Year” seems more appropriate.

We’re doing it tough. Thousands of others are doing it tougher. But readers of The AIMN share a common thread so succinctly summarised by Phil Pryor in his comment under 2019: The Top 5.

It’s been a hard year on the nerves and many are now frustrated, disappointed, depressed. We always need honesty, confidence, foresight, planning, positive and progressive attitudes, some hope. With a government from the top down consisting of dung, droppings, drainblocks and deviates, we feel stalled, dumped, betrayed.

That’s how the year ends, and as from today it is how the New Year begins.

We Australians are a resilient lot. It will get better because we will fight for what makes our country better. We can not control the elements but we can hold the powers that ignore them to account.

Over the last couple of weeks people have found their voice. In 2020 we will be shouting, and I suspect, taking to the streets even more. We want our country back and in 2020 we will make that known throughout the halls of Parliament. We will make Canberra rattle with our voices.

But all that’s in 2020.

Reflecting on The AIMN in 2019 … the year was a good one for us, easily surpassing the total number of hits we received in 2018.

In 2019 we had the 20 millionth visitor to the site since opening our doors on the 2nd of January, 2013. People are reading us! We also reached a Facebook membership of 20,000. And we look forward to a bigger 2020 thanks to our fabulous team of writers, our dedicated admin team, the loyal commenters and the growing number of readers.

You’ve all made The AIMN what it is today and we owe you our special thanks.

Oh, and we wish you a Happy New Year.

Michael and Carol.