How the Murdoch press keeps Australia’s dirty secret: John Pilger

By John Pilger 2011

News Corp papers across the world propagate the myth that prejudice has no effect on the lives of modern-day Aboriginal people.

The illegal eavesdropping on well-known 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 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper. 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 jailed black people 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 is in Western Australia and the 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 that made clear that social justice for Australia's first people would be achieved only with universal land rights and a share in the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor general in a "constitutional coup". The Murdoch press had turned on the prime minister with such venom that rebellious journalists on the Australian burned their newspaper in the street.

In 1984, the Labor Party "solemnly pledged" to finish what Whitlam had begun and legislate Aboriginal land rights. This was opposed by the then Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, a "mate" of Rupert Murdoch. Hawke blamed the public for being "less compassionate"; but a secret, 64-page report to the party showed that most Australians supported land rights. It was leaked to the Australian, whose front page declared, "Few support Aboriginal land rights", the opposite of the truth, thus feeding an atmosphere of self-fulfilling distrust, "backlash" and rejection of rights that might have distinguished Australia from South Africa.

In 1988, an editorial in Murdoch's Sun in London described "the Abos" as "treacherous and brutal". This was condemned by the UK Press Council as "unacceptably racist". The Australian publishes long articles that present Aboriginal people not unsympathetically but as perennial victims of each other, an "entire culture committing suicide", or as noble primitives requiring firm direction: the eugenicist's view. It promotes Aboriginal "leaders" who, by blaming their own people for their poverty, tell the white elite what it wants to hear. The writer Michael Brull parodied this: "O White man, please save us. Take away our rights because we are so backward."

This is also the government's view. In railing against what it called the "black armband view" of Australia's past, the conservative government of John Howard encouraged and absorbed the views of white supremacists - that there was no genocide, no Stolen Generation, no racism; indeed, white people are the victims of "liberal racism". A collection of far-right journalists, minor academics and hangers-on became the Antipodean equivalent of David Irving Holocaust deniers. Their platform has been the Murdoch press.

Andrew Bolt, columnist on Murdoch's Melbourne Herald Sun tabloid, is the defendant in a racial vilification case brought by nine prominent Aborigines, including Larissa Behrendt, a professor of law and indigenous studies in Sydney. Behrendt has been an authoritative and outspoken opponent of Howard's 2007 "emergency intervention" in the Northern Territory, which the Labor government of Julia Gillard has reinforced. The rationale to "intervene" was that child abuse among Aborigines was in "unthinkable numbers". This was a fraud. Out of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, four possible cases were identified - about the rate of child abuse in white Australia. There is an old-fashioned colonial grab of mineral-rich land in the Northern Territory where Aboriginal land rights were granted in 1976.

The Murdoch press has been the most lurid and vociferous in promoting the "intervention", which a United Nations special rapporteur has condemned for its racial discrimination. Once again, Australian politicians are dispossessing the first inhabitants, demanding leasehold of land in return for health and education rights that white people take for granted and driving them into "economically viable hubs" where they will be effectively detained - a form of apartheid.

The despair and outrage of most Aboriginal people is not heard. For using her institutional voice and exposing the government's black supporters, Larissa Behrendt has been subjected to a vicious campaign of innuendo in the Murdoch press, including the implication that she is not a "real" Aborigine. Deploying the language of its soulmate the Sun, the Australian derides the "abstract debate" of "land rights, apologies, treaties" as a "moralising mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus". The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia's dirty secret.

Previously published by New Statesman 12 May 2011