tijaco

Jack Lang. Gough Whitlam. Kevin Rudd. What next?

In a period of seemingly forgotten Australian history, we came as close as we ever have to civil war. It was the Great Depression in Australia and the federal Labor Party and Jack Lang’s New South Wales Labor Party were at odds. With loans being paid back to the British, Lang preferred to defer interest on those loans and engage in Keynesian economics – an innovative feat at the time – with those funds. At a time when the federal government was only a few decades old, the most populous state’s Premier had far more sway in political debate than they may have now. Jack Lang’s refusal to release funds upon the federal government’s order led him to his dismissal. On the night of his dismissal, Lang’s police force was told to be prepared. On the brink of civil war, Lang decided to keep the peace and walked away from the fight, fearing the bloodshed of a battle with a newly formed national military. British imperial interests rose above Australian sovereignty.

Decades later in 1975, Gough Whitlam was the next casualty, this time with a new empire involved. As was expertly chronicled in William Blum’s Killing Hope, ironically available on the CIA website, the US involvement in Whitlam’s dismissal is not often talked about in mainstream media. This would be because the US influence has never left. The United States’ problems with Gough were numerous. He threatened to pull troops out of Vietnam at which point the CIA considered him equivalent to the Viet Cong. His suspicion of Pine Gap took the US distrust even further – and he was right to be suspicious as they were spying on his own government from within his own territory. The third strike may have been his desire for Australia’s mines to be nationalised in order to fund his many programs that would support the working class. The United States has never taken well to a country taking control of their own resources, with the list of examples too numerous to even begin. And so, on 11th November 1975, only weeks after 'the big fella' Jack Lang’s death, Gough Whitlam was sacked and media narrative that Gough was running the country out of money began. The doings of the faded British Empire in this saga are yet to be revealed, with the letters from the Queen to the sanctimonious prick John Kerr to be revealed in the coming weeks. But do not let the media hype around these letters distract the eye from the US influence in the events of 1975, and don’t be fooled that this influence is a thing of the past. Why else would the red baiting around China be so prevalent in our media today?

Kevin Rudd’s situation is the one for which we have the least evidence, but the patterns have been established and he was the ideal candidate. A man happy to negotiate with China who, let’s not forget, are Australia’s biggest trading partner, was likely the first of his wrongdoings in the eyes of the US. Much like Gough Whitlam, a desire to nationalise the mines, or at least tax them at a reasonable rate, was a second shot. It was plenty enough. Perhaps the competence shown throughout the GFC and the popularity gained from it was a third – a man that popular is dangerous when he cannot be controlled. With a CIA-aligned Mark Arbib in close quarters, a hostile media at play and sharks circling for their own political gain, Kevin Rudd was ousted in 2010. Just four years later, we said goodbye to Gough Whitlam, his memory shaded in lies as the truth of his own ousting not yet widely told.

First we had Great Britain. Next, the United States with likely collaboration from the fading Brits. Third, the US seem to have done it on their own. Now we ask, who next? A keen political observer would see that China is the next world superpower. Whether they will be a true empire is a separate question. While Western empires from the Germans, the British to the United States, have always been quite open about their ambitions of conquering the world, China seems to be different. Perhaps a non-expansionist, economic empire is on the cards. The only counter examples are Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, but these are all regions that China has always considered to be part of China, and can be dismissed on that basis. There is little evidence for China being truly expansionist other than putting some African countries in debt traps, which in imperial terms is light work. While this could be the start of a seemingly unending cycle of expansionist empires rising and falling, the outcome is certainly far less clear than it would be under a Western power.

Whatever the future holds, Australia needs to learn its lesson and become a sovereign nation. With our renewable energy resources, in the next decades we will have the biggest opportunity of becoming truly independent since the squandered mining boom of the early 2000s. Will we learn from our mistakes and fulfil our potential, or fall back into the imperial trap?

References: * Neel + Jordan Podcast – Dumb Phrases * William Blum – Killing Hope * John Pilger – The British-American coup that ended Australian independence