Australia: To Be Or Not To Be A Nation

The issue posed by the heading above is the most important question for all Australians. Looking back upon the year 2011, we the people of Australia have experienced many acts by those who can be considered as so-called Australian politicians acting out `on the world stage' their true feelings at the expense of the collective interests of the Australian people, our national interests.

It is bad enough for those unAustralian acts to be displayed on the home front, but to promote such acts on the world stage is surely tantamount to being anti­Australian. Do they do so because of their immaturity? Or are their behaviours the byproducts of overpowering egos competing for attention from the power­brokers in a decadent world we live in today?

The massaging of the already big egos of politicians in power can be heady stuff. In March this year Julia Gillard of the ALP, having being accorded the rare privilege of being the first female Prime Minister from a foreign country in history to address a joint U.S. Congress sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, obviously displayed the desired amount of obsequiousness to receives" a standing ovation from the American politicians present. The ovation apparently prompted her to offer Australia to her U.S. ally as "an anchor of regional stability" as a counterbalance to China, the rising star in what has been dubbed the start of the `Asian Century'. So our Prime Minister, instead of asserting the independence that a strong Australia is capable of, was in effect serving up on a silver platter an offer to the U.S. to locate a military base anywhere in Australia with which to projecting American military prowess. This made crystal clear when she in her speech voluntarily joined the American condemnation of the Iranian move to keep open her nuclear option while remaining silent on Israel's Weapons-of-Mass Destruction of the nuclear kind. Any lingering doubt was dispelled by the news that broke in November of, yes, the U.S. plan to send 2,000 American troops to the Northern Territory as a first step establish a permanent military base at Darwin.

The situation smacks of the foolishness of our ruling politicians and of our immaturity as a nation. It was no that long ago when, on the eve of Gulf War II, in the climate of fear drummed up by the allegation of Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia promptly joined the President George W. Bush's the illegal invasion of Iraq as spear carriers for the U.S.A. First, we do not appear to have learnt anything from history, from our experience in World War II. Singapore was prepared as an impregnable fortress with the big guns facing the sea. Following the sinking in the South China Sea of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse by Japanese aircrafts three days after Pearl Harbor, the fate of the British was sealed when Japanese invaders appeared at the back door just across the Causeway in control of the water supply to the island after the Japanese troops had moved down the Malayan peninsula quietly on bicycles and outmanouvred the British, Gurkha and Australian troops stationed at various points of Malaya.Second, how will the 2,000 young marines (black and white) be `entertained' during all that spare time they have while they await for the call to military action on the northern front? The local histories of the civilians residing near the U.S. military bases in the post-Cold War era give us a dismal shape of the-things-to come best summed up by the following: That's the trouble: they are over-sexed and they are over here!

Whatever good social-welfare-wise the intervention by the Federal Government in the Northern Territory might have done to the aboriginal communities there since 2007 will not only be totally undone, but also will have more harm in the incidences of rapes, substance abuses, the breakdown of familial and communal lives to be inflicted on those least able to deal with the consequences: the aborigines in the Northern Territory. The American soldiers stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa, South Korea and the Philippines have permanently left more just scars on the physical environment of these areas they are based in. If we seldom read in the international news of these and other more devastating consequences (including bastardy and rapes) of the impact of the U.S. military bases on the otherwise stable civilian communities of the Japanese on the island of Okinawa, the Koreans in South Korea and the Filipinos in what used to be the Clark Airbase in Subic Bay, the Philippines, it is because, as The Nation magazine of July 1, 1996, reported, covering up sexual assault is Pentagon policy. Then there is the additional cover provided by that American invention of 'extraterritoriality' where a member of the U.S. armed forces, having committed a crime on non-American soil, must be turned over to the U.S. military police­consular official instead of being tried under the laws of the country in which the crime occurred in a foreign country.

 I would like to highlight a very bad experience when I had in the 6^h class at Rainbow public primary school in the early 1940s. Running parallel to the rear fence of the school were what used to be the thoroughbred horse sale

yards of Inglis & Sons Ltd. During the war the area was occupied not by horses but by thousands of American troops (black and white). Arriving one morning at school, I joined many other school children who gathered at an adjoining fence.' Much to my horror, I saw on the ground pools of fresh human blood left behind by the body of a black Marine that had been carried away minutes earlier. That scene was apparently typical - as depicted in episodes of Foyle's War of television fame - of the not too friendly relationships between black and white U.S. troops stationed in most areas that did not see `enemy action' during World War II.

I would imagine that the situation will be no different today where there are foreign military bases. Troops stationed at these American bases have no military function other than being held on reserve for deployment elsewhere in Asia as the need or opportunity arises for military intervention. Foreign soldiers with money to spend, even more leisure time to kill, and young local girls looking out for `a good time' make a volatile mix for trouble at any time in any place. Soldiers are, after all, trained to kill. The deep rooted racist animosity between the blacks and the whites can easily overflow from the stiff competition of these soldiers for female favours into deadly violence in an otherwise socially harmonious Australia. The Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa is only one of the 73 to 91 (depending on who is counting) American military bases on Japanese soil and is the largest U.S. facility in East Asia. Like their peers elsewhere, the American troops at the Yongsan Army Garrison in Seoul, the headquarters of US military operations, and 100 other separate military installations around South Korea spend their days mostly dozing in their tanks and their evenings in the Korean brothels that encircle these bases.

The invitation by the Gillard Government to station foreign troops in Darwin appears to be yet another a knee-jerk reaction executed without much thinking through which is just like her flip-flop on the live cattle export to Indonesia that has now led to the Indonesian Government's decision to reduce the intake by half ... with negative consequences for Australian cattle exporters in the long term.

This is surely a sign of the immaturity of our politicians. It is one sure way to invite trouble, trouble of a racial kind that we need as little of (or `as much of as the case may be) as a hole in the head. It is a sign of maturity of any government to find long-term solutions to prevent trouble, not create short-sighted situations that will either cause or aggravate problems where none existed before. This is especially true of a place like Darwin where, instead of putting up with the discomforts that come naturally with its tropical climate by taking a dip in the pool or the sea, the current typical way for the residents and visitors to deal with the tropical heat and the high humidity is not only to imbibe an ice-cold alcoholic brew but also to drink like a fish!

A concerned 83-year old Aussie,

H.C. Jagers