Erik Paul is Honorary Associate in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He was tenured staff at Macquarie University and for 25 years lectured on issues of development, urbanisation, geopolitics and the politics of Southeast Asia. He is the author of Little America: Australia, the 51st State (Pluto, 2006) and Australia: Too Many People? (Ashgate, 2001).

Little America

Australia, the 51st State

By Erik Paul

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2006 Erik Paul
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2539-2

Contents

List of Tables, ix,
1 The New Imperalism, 1,
2 The US in Australia, 17,
3 A Corporate State, 48,
4 Politics of Greed, 81,
5 Australian Imperialism, 99,
6 Engagement with Asia, 138,
7 Confrontation with Asia, 166,
8 Conflict with China, 198,
9 The Americanisation of Australia, 219,
Bibliography, 229,
Index, 245,

CHAPTER 1

The New Imperialism

Current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate the supremacy of English-speaking peoples.

E. H. Carr

AUSTRALIA IN THE EMPIRE

Australia and the US have much in common. Both were born out of British invasions of the new world and the brutal dispossession of indigenous land and culture to form new nation-states. While their histories diverged for many generations, there has been a marked convergence in recent decades with Australia increasingly an adjunct to US foreign policy and more like the US in shaping its politics and civil society. Binding the similarities in economic and political culture is a shared messianic crusade to save the world from chaos and evil and a vision of a new world order promising prosperity and peace.

The Americanisation of Australia is an important phenomenon which is changing what Australia is about in ways the country relates to the world and transforms its economy and society. Why is Australia so close and so much like the United States? At the core of this issue is Australia's modern imperial history and the construction of a colonial mentality of dependency on protection from a powerful patron. Aus- tralia's nation-state is a modern creation of the British Empire and the expansion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. From the beginning, Australia's nation-building has been sustained by a series of confrontations with Asia moving from colonial consolidation and Cold War to a new world of globalisation and war against terrorism.

Australia's modern history as a nation-state has been shaped and constructed by its relations with non-Europeans. Captain Cook's landing on the shore of what is today Sydney marked the beginning of more than 200 years of 'aggression, injustice and inhumanity towards the Aboriginal people of this land' (Coombs 1980). The dispossession of their land and culture began with the raising of the British flag and by 1830 the entire continent and the islands of Norfolk and Tasmania had been taken in the name of Britain. Aboriginal armed resistance in the interior of the continent continued into the 1920s. Torres Strait islands were taken by Queensland's colonial government in the 1870s, and in 1883 Queensland annexed what is today the southern half of New Guinea.

Invasion raised the question of proprietorship and the legitimacy of taking a continent from its inhabitants, which in turn engendered fear that people in the region, particularly Chinese, would take the land from British settlers. Asian migrants came in large numbers and their success in working the land and business enterprise brought them into conflict with Anglo-Irish settlers. In the 1880s non-Europeans were in a majority in tropical Australia. 'Asians made up half of the settler population in the Northern Territory and Western Australia and more than half in Darwin, Broome and Thursday Island' (Reynolds 2003:xv). Competition for resources formed the basis for the intense level of racism against Asians during that period. Architects of the white-Australia policy such as Isaac Isaacs manipulated the crowds with his call to free Australia 'for all time from the contaminating and degrading influence of inferior races' (Reynolds 2003:160).

Fear of invasion by Asia's 'yellow hordes' was legislated for in the 1896 New South Wales Coloured Races Restriction Bill, the first of many colonial laws, which barred entry to 'all persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the Continent of Asia, or the Continent of Africa, of any island adjacent thereto, or any island in the Pacific or Indian oceans' (Yarwood 1964:11). Alfred Deakin, who played a leading role in the creation of the continent's federation, tabled the commonwealth's first piece of legislation, the Immigration Restric- tion Bill of 1901, which he said was to uphold the purity of the 'British race' and to 'exclude alien Asiatics as well as the people of Japan' (Meaney 1999:18).

The act of federation led to new waves of dispossession and deportation. Asian settlers were encouraged to leave and thousands of islanders were deported after 1904 under the Pacific Island Labourers Act. Racism had become the foundation of Australia's identity. An anti-Asian mentality justified the taking of the continent and aggression against its Aboriginal population. Race supremacy legitimised the conquest. It brought to a quick end the existence of a vibrant multicultural society in northern Australia. As a result tropical Australia 'stagnated. It became a backwater – increasingly mono-cultural, socially conservative, provincial – which is the way it was seen by outsiders during much of the twentieth century. It also became more racist than it had ever been in the past' Reynolds 2003:187).

Australia's important military role in the British Empire was to expand and protect its territorial and commercial integrity. Australia sent troops to New Zealand to fight the Maoris' attempt to keep the British out of their islands. Then came military expeditions to the Sudan and South Africa, and to China to put down a native rebellion against European presence and the British policy of creating an addiction to opium amongst the Chinese. Later during the West's major civil war (World War I), Australia intervened in Turkey and Egypt, and added German northeast New Guinea to its growing empire. These were all preliminaries to the coming Pacific battles and mass killing of World War II.

Japan was modernising and rising to the challenge of Western imperialism. New ideologies about liberty and class struggle in the region were contesting Western presence and exploitation. Japan's territorial aggrandisement and commercial and military expansion challenged Anglo-American hegemony in a series of power plays among imperial players. The treaties between Japan and Britain in 1902 and Japan and the US in the Taft-Katsura agreement of 1905, were attempts to negotiate an understanding about the division of spoils in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan could keep Korea and Taiwan as long as it did not interfere with Anglo-American colonies and regional commercial interests. Imperial geopolitics put the contestants on a collision course and Australia was irremediably drawn into preparations for war. Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invited the US Great White Fleet to visit Sydney in 1908 as a sign that 'England, America and Australia will be united to withstand yellow aggression' (Macintyre 1999:142).

During WWI Prime Minister Billy Hughes warned Australians that should Germany win the war 'this lonely outpost of the white man's civilisation will be deprived of its scanty garrison and left open to cheap Asiatics, reduced to the social and economic level of Paraguay or some other barbarian country' (Victoria 2002:3). After the war, Hughes voted against Japan's motion for 'racial' equality in the League of Nations and made sure that trade in the newly acquired German New Guinea would be monopolised by Australia and free of Japanese and Chinese traders or migrants. In the 1930s Australia's restrictions on non-British imports brought retaliation against its wool export to Japan. Australia's discrimination against Japanese migrants became a source of anger and anti-Western sentiment in Japan which was manipulated to advantage by nationalistic and militaristic domestic forces (Walker 1999; Meaney 1996).

Preparation for war against Japan unfolded in the 1930s with the inclusion of Australia in the defence of the British Empire. Britain withdrew from the Anglo-Japanese alliance and reconfigured Singapore island as a naval fortress, partly to protect Australia's north, and the US built up its forces in colonial Philippines against Japan's southern expansion. Imperial confrontation gained momentum with the rise of nationalism and demands for independence in the region. Communism was a growing political force in many parts of Asia and a threat to colonialism and to Japan's militarist culture. In Australia, fascism was mobilising larger sections of society. Japan went to war on the slogan of 'Asia for the Asians' while the West called for an end of fascism in the name of liberty and freedom. With the fall of British Singapore and the surrender of some 16,000 troops, Australia was at war with Japan. The arrival in 1942 of General MacArthur in Darwin, to take command of all Australian forces, marked the beginning of Australia's role as an adjunct to the US empire.

Australia's confrontation with Asia after WWII was an integral part of the Anglo-American alliance against communism. The Cold War was another hegemonic war between the US and Russia which expanded throughout the world largely because it became entangled with anti-imperialist movements and wars in many territories occupied by Western forces. In Asia the rise of nationalism and demands for independence destabilised the entire region, and Mao Tse Tung's Communist Party victory in 1949 raised anew Australia's fears of an Asiatic invasion. Communism was the new enemy, another disease which, like the plague, had to be fought off throughout the Asia- Pacific region to save white Australia from destruction. Australia's new axis of evil went from China to the whole of Southeast Asia.

From the late 1940s, Australian military units intervened in Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Korea, New Guinea and in Malta to defend British power in Egypt. In 1954 Australia joined the US, NZ, Britain and France in the Southeast East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) to secure Western colonial interest in Indochina, Thailand and Pakistan. Other treaties signed in the 1950s such as ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-US) further incorporated Australia in the Anglo-American alliance to regain control of the Asia-Pacific region. A watershed was the Vietnam war. Australia started by sending advisers in 1962 followed by a full-scale military intervention in 1965. At the time, Australia was collaborating with the US push for a regime change in Indonesia. Covert operations by intelligence agencies enabled General Suharto's military takeover and contributed to the massacre of large numbers of Sukarno supporters and other outcasts. Under Suharto's rule, close to 100,000 political prisoners were detained without trial for many years in Indonesia's gulag.

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union Australia became a sheriff of the US new world order. Australia was the first country to join the alliance in the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq, and this was followed by sending troops to Cambodia to effect a regime change in 1993. In the late 1990s Australia became a major enforcer in controlling the 'arc of instability' to its north with operations in Papua New Guinea's (PNG) war against Bougainville, and, after Suharto's resignation in 1998, in the 'liberation' of East Timor from Indonesia. In 2002 Australia sent troops to Afghanistan and the following year took part in the US invasion of Iraq. In 2003 Australia's military went to the Solomon Islands to take over the administration of the country, and the following year began operations to resume control of the country's budget, courts and police force.

With the election of John Howard's conservative coalition in 1996, Australia became an integral part of the US-UK global geostrategy, and more assertive in its relations with the world and its region. A major regional task for Australia has been to advance the causes of market fundamentalism particularly in island states where Australia has a dominant economic position. Elsewhere in Asia, Australia has been engaged in strategies to weaken economic regionalism and promote an Anglo-American model of capitalism, particularly in the context of the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN). One ploy has been the formation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to counteract the economic power of the European Union and weaken proposals for an East Asian economic bloc dominated by China which would exclude Australia and the US.

Australia's policy to secure the 'arc of instability' – the crescent of islands to the north of the continent – has been a fixture of foreign policy since federation. In 1943, H.V. Evatt, the minister for external affairs, declared that Australia's security 'depended upon it controlling an arc of territory from northern Australia stretching some 2,400 km to encompass Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies, New Guinea and the adjacent islands' (Day 2001:230). In more recent times, control of Australia's problematic north led to the 'liberation' of East Timor in 1999, followed by military intervention in PNG and the Solomon Islands. Moreover, Australia put neighbouring countries on notice about the right to preemptive strikes to safeguard its national interests when in December 2002 John Howard stated on public and commercial TV that he was prepared to order attacks against terrorists in Asia (Barker 2002). Of particular concern to Australia is the growing strength of Islam in Indonesian politics and attacks against Christian minorities in the region.

Beyond the Pacific islands states and Indonesia, Australia is shaping the formation of an East Asian version of Europe's North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) with Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The construction of a regional security architecture aims to maintain political regimes friendly to the Anglo-American alliance and destroy movements which might constitute a threat to its economic and political security. However, the main game is to manage a regional balance of power and encourage unfriendly relations between China and Japan, and to confront China's emergence as a potential challenger to US hegemony. Australia has an important role to play in this global power competition with the militarisation of the continent functioning as part of the US global nuclear and missile defence strategy (Bush 2002).

Australia's symbiotic relationship with the US is part of the global expansion of capitalism and the transformation of society by the unremitting pressure of a market economy. Capitalism has been an important factor in the history of modern Australia – from the early years of primitive accumulation through dispossession of indigenous land and resources to the eager adoption of an American model of capitalism in more recent years. Australia needs a substantial share of Asia's growing wealth to sustain its living standards and liberal democracy but the security of this enterprise is based on US hegemony to safeguard Australia's markets and capital investments in the region. US power is the country's insurance policy for the security of some 20 million people on one of the richest and largest pieces of real estate in the world.

The expansion of capitalist activities in Australia has led to a shift of power from citizens to corporations and a neo-right political elite. In recent years there has been a marked decline in Australia's democracy and a rise in the suppressive powers of the state. To a large extent the process has been dictated by the adoption of a US model of economic and political culture. This is clearly exemplified with the dominance in the country's universities of US business and management values and practices, and the political weight of neoconservative think-tanks in Australia's political life. Another major factor in the Americanisation of Australia are the restrictions imposed over the years on the rights of employees. Government policy to control labour practices and relations has disempowered the union movement. Legislation passed in late 2005 will further control labour relations and shift more workers to the minimum wage. The University of Sydney's Professor Russell Lansbury, a leading academic in industrial relations, commented that the new legislation will further undermine employees' right to work and will promote greater social inequity (Lansbury 2005).

Civil society is changing dramatically because of the widespread privatisation of public assets and the expansion of market forces in education, government services and infrastructure. At the same time the role and power of corporations has altered the nature of Australia's politics and civil society. There are many aspects to this change seen in the pressure of advertising and consumerism encroaching in everyday life and that of corporate excision of urban space. Corporations are gaining control of shopping areas, gated communities, parklands, schools, museums and libraries, roads and airports, as well as large tracts of rural Australia. Australia's market democracy is fuelled by postmodern greed and the accumulation of more wealth. An obsession on making money, buying bigger cars and houses, and the production of waste has become a dominant character in social and economic life. The politics of economic growth and mass consumption has become national policy and advertised as the solution to rising problems of unemployment, poverty and environmental degradation. While rich Australians benefit from generous tax cuts there has been a marked decline in the quality of public education, transport and health.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Little America by Erik Paul. Copyright © 2006 Erik Paul. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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