How the Murdoch Press Keeps Australia's Dirty Secret

Friday 13 May 2011

by: John Pilger, Truthout

An Aboriginal Australian in Sydney, Australia. (Photo: tunnelarmr)

The il­leg­al eavesdropp­ing on fam­ous peo­ple by the News of the World is said to be Rupert Mur­doch's Water­gate. But is it the crime by which Mur­doch ought to be known? In his native land, Australia, Mur­doch con­trols 70 per­cent of the capit­al city press. Australia is the world's first Mur­dochra­cy, in which smear by media is power.

The most end­ur­ing and in­sidi­ous Mur­doch cam­paign has been against the Ab­origin­al peo­ple, who were dis­pos­sessed by the ar­riv­al of the British in the late 18th cen­tu­ry and have never been al­lowed to re­cov­er. "Nigg­er hunts" con­tinued into the 1960s and be­yond. The officially-inspired theft of childr­en from Ab­origin­al famil­ies, just­ified by the rac­ist theo­ries of the eugenics move­ment, pro­duced those known as the Stol­en Genera­tion, and in 1997 was iden­tified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shor­test life ex­pec­tan­cy of any of the world's 90 in­digen­ous peo­ples. Australia im­prisons Ab­origines at five times the rate South Af­rica did dur­ing the apartheid years. In the state of Wes­tern Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Polit­ical power in Australia often rests in the con­trol of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natur­al gas are in Wes­tern Australia and Northern Ter­rito­ry - on Ab­origin­al land. In­deed, Ab­origin­al "pro­gress" is all but de­fined by the min­ing in­dust­ry and its polit­ical guar­dians in both Labor and co­ali­tion (con­ser­vative) govern­ments. Their faith­ful, strident voice is the Mur­doch press. The ex­cep­tion­al, re­form­ist Labor govern­ment of Gough Whit­lam in the 1970s set up a royal com­miss­ion, which made clear that soci­al just­ice for Australia's first peo­ple would only be ac­hieved with uni­vers­al land rights and a share of the nation­al wealth with di­gn­ity. In 1975, Whit­lam was sac­ked by the gover­nor gener­al in a "con­stitution­al coup." The Mur­doch press had tur­ned on Whit­lam with such venom that re­bel­li­ous jour­nal­ists on The Australian bur­ned their newspap­er in the street.Continued