Australian politics and the English language

It was Julia Gillard who began the retrogression in Australian politics on the question of Israeli breaches of international law. Only under pressure from her cabinet did Prime Minister Gillard in 2012 reconsider her intention to oppose a UN resolution to upgrade Palestine’s status in the General Assembly. Gillard’s preferred position would have seen Australia marginalised within a US-led, stridently pro-Tel Aviv minority of the international community. (Gillard apparently had no qualms about the Vatican’s holding of the same ‘non-member observer status’ that Palestine were seeking, and eventually won. Perhaps she needed reminding that the ‘non-observer status’ was created specially for the Vatican – a single-religion enclave that was unilaterally dreamed into existence by fascist Italy in 1929 and undoubtedly has far less of a claim to increased UN recognition than Palestine.)

There is no need to rehearse here Bob Carr’s condemnation of the influence Melbourne’s ‘pro-Israel lobby’ allegedly had on Gillard while she was PM. She was a politician of strong, if often seemingly contradictory, personal convictions; an atheist in an unconventional relationship who did not support gay marriage, a woman vocally proud of her British heritage but at the same time a fierce supporter of the Australia-US alliance. It is, I suspect, the latter that had the most to do with Gillard’s favoured position on the Palestinian vote than any undue (and unproven) influence of Jewish-Australian lobbyists.

Which brings us to the present government, led by the even more determined and altogether more paradoxically US-enamoured anglophile Tony Abbott. Last week, the Abbott government quietly announced it would no longer be using the word ‘occupied’ when referring to Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. George Brandis told a Senate estimates hearing that to characterise the settlements in this way was ‘judgmental’, ‘pejorative’ and ‘unhelpful’. Why is this shift in language significant? Because, as George Orwell knew almost 70 years ago, it is, like all political language, designed to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’.

The UN, the International Court of Justice and the International Committee of the Red Cross are all in agreement: the establishment of settlements in territories that have been occupied – what other word is there for it? – by Israel since the Six-Day War is illegal under international law. It is no more pejorative or judgmental to say this than it is to say that Ronnie Biggs was a thief. On the other hand, we know that the Coalition has form in the area of pointedly dissembling language. It has routinely used incorrect and prejudicial language to paint asylum seekers as criminals. This is a government that understands all too well Orwell’s belief in the power of language to shape our perceptions of reality. Our leaders insist upon these tiny revolutions in the language when they suddenly glimpse a reality that holds no further political mileage for them.

The pure wind that blew through the Senate hearing last Thursday had the goal of making murder respectable. The military occupation of the Palestinian territories has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. The notorious saturation bombing of Gaza that began in December 2008 claimed the lives of over a thousand civilians alone. Daily, the occupation guarantees the humiliation, oppression and bullying of countless Palestinian men, women and children. Israel’s night-time terror raids go on, as does the detention of children who may, or may not, have thrown stones at heavily armed and armoured Israeli soldiers. Not only does Brandis’ announcement fly in the face of reality – it flies in the face humanity.

Moreover, it should not be seen as an aberration, only an isolated case of overzealous pro-Americanism, but rather as part of the Abbott Government’s wider project to soft-peddle gross human rights violations when it is politically expedient to do so. The combined commentary of Abbott and Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop on the Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath has been consistently mendacious. In November last year at Colombo’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (which was boycotted by countries including India and Canada), Abbott dismissed Sri Lanka’s complicity in war crimes with a Rumsfeldian ‘sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen’. Bishop, meanwhile, wanted us to see the Sri Lankan situation ‘in context’, and to forget that the country’s sitting president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is accused of the massacres of Tamil civilians and captured Tamil Tiger militants. None of this, of course, has anything to do with the necessity of having Rajapaksa on side in order for the Abbott Government’s refugee policy to remain intact.

The UN has already rebuked us over our breaches of refugee convention. We are now, I think, at serious risk of becoming an international pariah, not only far out of step with global political consensuses on any number of critical human rights issues, but with reality itself. Is there anything we won’t deny, downplay or rechristen in the name of a short-term political fix? 

The Five Stages of Conservative Broken Promise Denial

1.     Deny that any promises made pre-election by the Abbott Government have been broken. (From the man himself, December 2013: ‘There have been no broken promises and there will be no broken promises under this government.’) It helps, when referring to the new taxes the Abbott Government has or is going to introduce and which represent clear breaches of pre-election commitments, to refer to them by any other name: levy, excise, impost, Bette Midler.

2.     Accept that one or some promises may have been broken, but claim that the ‘mess left by Labor’ necessitated it. (Source: everybody on the right).

3.     Accept that promises have indeed been broken, but that it’s not really a big deal when the Coalition does it. (‘Election promises,’ Institute of Public Affairs stalwart Chris Berg tells us, ‘are there for the breaking.’)

4.     Accept that many promises have been broken, but the only one that actually mattered was that the Abbott Government would ‘fix the budget.’ (Cue Tony Shepherd, chairman of the Commission of Audit: ‘They did make one iron-clad promise: to return the budget to a sustainable surplus. And in my view that trumps all.’)

5.     Lather, rinse, repeat.

Selected links:

Abbott's new world record: 25 broken promises in 150 days

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/abbotts-new-world-record-25-broken-promises-in-150-days,6145

Election promises are there for the breaking

http://ipa.org.au/news/3091/election-promises-are-there-for-the-breaking

Has Tony Abbott gone mad?

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/has-tony-abbott-gone-mad-20140511-zr9io.html

The Commission of Audit in a nutshell: ideology over evidence

http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2014/may/05/ideology-over-evidence-commission-audit-nutshell

Savaging dissent: on the right's refusal to get March in March

Photo: the author

It is now over a week since more than 100,000 Australians took to the streets in nationwide protests, collectively dubbed March in March, against the Abbott government. I joined a crowd of around 5,000 in Adelaide, the first city in which preparations have already begun for a follow-up, the similarly alliterative March in May, to be held a few days after the federal budget is delivered. No doubt, for the nation’s progressives, there will be much to discuss and decry.

The reaction of the mainstream media to last weekend’s protests has been absorbing. Initial, properly journalistic coverage by the ABC and Channel 9 boded well but the flavour of the commentary to come was encapsulated early by a misleading Channel 7 report, which characterised the Adelaide event as an unsavoury scrap between the protestors and members of the notorious Street Church. For much of the protest I was just a few metres from where the preachers had dug in with their hateful, deliberately confrontational placards and can happily assure Channel 7 that the overwhelming response of the protestors was to ignore them.

To ignore was, also, the first response of the right wing commentariat to the marches, but their unexpectedly large turnouts made that posture look, at best, out of touch and, at worst, spineless. It is a measure of the Abbott government’s success in reenergising the culture wars that when the conservative press found its voice on the subject (and there really was only one voice) it was a hysterical one, outraged and shrill, full of the same missionary zeal with which the right’s culture warriors prosecuted their case for an insular and safely homogenous nation during the reign of John Howard.

This piece by Malcolm Farr, National Political Editor for news.com.au, was typical, but his sniffy disdain was surpassed by a feverish Andrew Bolt who labelled the protestors ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, and the aptly named Tory Shepherd whose cliché-riddled smear job appeared to blame the protestors for her failure to comprehend their messages. (The diatribes were not, it should be pointed out, limited to News Corp; Jacqueline Maley’s report for the Sydney Morning Herald would have run without controversy in any of the Murdoch tabloids).

Two criticisms were common to all of the denunciations: that the protestors’ signs were disrespectful and offensive in the same way the ‘Ditch the Witch’ and ‘Bob Brown’s Bitch’ signs had been during the 2011 anti-carbon price rally Convoy of No Confidence, and that March in March was not a legitimate protest but an incoherent ‘grab-bag’ of grievances.

There is no question that a handful of the placards I saw in Adelaide were in extremely poor taste. Some contained allusions to Nazism, and one man had stupidly inverted the ‘Ditch the Witch’ business with a Julie Bishop-riding broomstick. But – and it’s a big but – the obsessive trawling for images of this minority of protestors by the denunciators illustrates how well behaved and civil the vast majority of protestors were. Most of the placards were impersonal, related to policies, not politicians, and many were ingenious.

I would also ask these commentators to consider Stephen Fry’s wonderful hypothetical hospital in which psychological treatment is given for those who claim to be deeply offended by words but who are unmoved by violence, repression and injustice. The real stories on the day did not come from t-shirts with the word ‘fuck’ on them, but from students, single mothers, Indigenous Australians and working men who are suffering as a direct result of the Coalition’s policies.                    

The second major criticism, that the rallies were somehow invalid because the protestors raised multiple issues, is harder to address because it is harder to know what is meant by it. It may be that the obvious response – so what? – is the most correct. The same criticism was levelled at the Occupy movement which has gone on being wilfully misunderstood by conservatives in the US long after it has become abundantly clear to everybody what the issues are and what is at stake.

Noam Chomsky has likened Occupy to the ‘large-scale popular activism’ that helped to ferment the right political atmosphere for the New Deal legislation of the 1930s. The New Deal, famously, was not about one issue but the ‘three Rs’: relief (for the poor and jobless); recovery (of the economy); and reform (of the financial system to prevent another depression). Were the ordinary Americans pushing for these reforms unworthy because their platform for change was a broad one? Why the surprise at the fact that the Abbott government’s attacks on welfare, the unions, the environment and asylum seekers have catalysed a heterogeneous movement?

What the right will not admit is that their real issue with March in March is that so many Australians – not ‘urban elites’, socialists or hippies, but a stunningly diverse coalition of ordinary men and women – turned up. Andrew Bolt thought it ‘arrogant’ of Labor to dismiss the Convoy of No Confidence which drew a mere 1000 people (and was possibly an Astroturf job anyway) but has said nothing about Tony Abbott’s cheery ridicule of the more than 100,000 people who marched last weekend. If the organisers of March in March made one mistake, it was to borrow the ‘no confidence’ furphy from a corrupt, crackpot campaign that nobody except The Australian thought amounted to more than a hill of beans.

It is too soon to ask too many questions about March in March of the soul-searching variety. Like Occupy, it has shown itself to be a consciousness-raising exercise but it is not yet time to consider any lasting impacts. Visible already, on the other hand, are the ranks of commentators, both right and left, who have chosen not to grapple with the significance of the first rallies or the genuine issues they broached in favour of viciously distorting the character of the protests.

It has all been, as John Birmingham recently lamented, yet another demonstration of why so many Australians have turned their backs on a traditional media that is writing itself into irrelevancy via the mediocrity of its reporting, the oneness of its perspective, and the falseness of its claim to be either willing or able to speak truth to power anymore. On this last point, it may be that only the people are now capable of doing this in a grossly lopsided and fiercely partisan media landscape.

See you on the streets in May.