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US influence on Australian Politics
It is rife in mainstream Australian politics, especially in the
ALP, for senior figures to becompromised by US connections, writes
Julian Assange.
Tony Abbott says we need to protect our sovereign borders. I
couldn't agree more. But the real
threat comes not from a few destitute refugees, but rather from
the infiltration of Canberra by theUnited States government and its
overfed corporate allies.
In standing for Senate office, I see it as among my most
important tasks to challenge and expose
this toxic degradation of Australia's democracy and
independence.
All countries need a strong defence to maintain their
sovereignty and self-determination and to
ensure they are not imposed upon by others. But are our
interests best served by subordinatingAustralia's military,
diplomatic and natural resources to US agendas? Even former prime
minister
Malcolm Fraser now says that Australia has become too beholden
to US interests. This is not just amatter of military and
intelligence capacities; it also runs to economic and corporate
policies.
When it comes to subordinating Australia's independence to the
United States and its big business
partners, the ALP and the Coalition are barely distinguishable.
Both are abject in their servitude to
Washington, and both vie in their eagerness to give US big
business protectionist sweet dealsthrough secretly-negotiated
so-called Free Trade Agreements. And they are not averse to
back-
tracking on environmental and other legislation to appease their
US allies. For example, a US cablepublished by WikiLeaks, and
reported by Fairfax, revealed that under secret US pressure the
Labor
government neutered a navigation law designed to protect the
Great Barrier Reef from oil spills.
Are secretly negotiated trade deals really in the public
interest? In 2010, the ProductivityCommission told the Gillard
Government that there was little evidence to suggest Australia's
sixfree trade agreements have produced "substantial commercial
benefits". And it is well known that
well over 70 per cent of the profits from the Australian mining
sector flow overseas.
In fact these agreements are far from free. They are binding
instruments of geopolitical realpolitik
negotiated in secret, which add many layers of regulation that
privilege super-sized internationalcorporations with large and
aggressive legal teams, at the expense of most Australian
businesses.
ISDS tribunals are a case in point. And if the Coalition have
their way there will be more suchagreements to come. Why is it that
Australians know so little about the extremely serious Trans-
Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently under negotiation by our
government? Because it is being
negotiated entirely in secret. Everything is kept from the
public, so how can we ensure the interests
of Australians and their businesses are being adequately
represented?
It is rife in mainstream Australian politics, especially in the
ALP, for senior figures to be
compromised by US connections. Take Bob Carr, for example, our
current Foreign Minister, who
was sucked into the US system back in the 1970s when he was
feeding information to the USembassy about the Australian union
movement. He admits that while working with the unions in his
20s he met with the US embassy.Well, what does a New South Wales
union man have to do withthe United States embassy? Or consider
Mark Arbib, formerly a member of the Labor cabinet and
one of the primary power-brokers that put Gillard in place in
the coup against Rudd. In US cables
released by WikiLeaks, he is described as a key source for the
US Embassy throughout his politicalrise. The Kissinger Cables
released by WikiLeaks this year also reveal the extent of Bob
Hawke's
attempted political subversion by giving the US political
intelligence on the Whitlam government.
Who do these people really represent when they get into
Canberra? Do they represent theelectorate? No, naturally enough,
they represent the networks to whom they owe their positions
and
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influence, which in the case of Bob Carr include the US Embassy
and the Macquarie Bank. No one
is in any doubt about where the unelected senator Bob Carr will
go after this election: he'll beparachuted into a high-paid US
consulting job or he'll go back to helping the Macquarie Bank
make
deals with the government.
It's hardly any different for most of the ALP and Coalition
leadership. As soon as they see their
political ship going down, they start using what influence they
still have to do favours for their
mates, selling off Australia's heirlooms as fast as possible,
and making sure there's another ship usually a big corporate vessel
to jump onto.
Over recent decades Australia has clearly had difficulty
securing its sovereignty in relation to
Washington. The refusal of the Rudd government to talk about the
mass violation of the privatecommunications of Australians -
including those stored at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple,
Skype, Yahoo and others drives home the point.
The purpose of our military is to preserve our
self-determination, not to subordinate our country tothe futile
wars and obsessions of a declining foreign power. We need to
increase the autonomy of
our military and intelligence agencies so they work for
Australian interests rather than for the
foreign networks of compromised politicians like Bob Carr.
Australia must always be in a positionwhere it can say no, and mean
it.
This is the reality of Australia's politics which must be
stopped. We must bring people to Canberra
who have proven themselves to be incorruptible, so they can
clean it out.
Julian Assange is the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
He is contesting the 2013 federal
election on the WikiLeaks Party's Senate ticket in Victoria.
