To really understand the description of Australia as “the lucky country”, we first must look at its origin. The origins of that phrase came from Donald Horne’s 1964 book by the same name, and the actual quote “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck” tells a far different story to how the quote is used now, and Horne himself became annoyed with the way the term was used as a positive.
The term as it’s now used is really very difficult to argue for, I mean let’s start with this country’s Indigenous people. In 1788, British invaders came here for the sole purpose of taking over the land and creating a new chapter of the British Empire. The ensuing genocide committed by these intruders in the name of terra nullius killed somewhere from 60,000-200,000 Aboriginal people during the Frontier Wars between the Aboriginals and the English between approximately 1788 to the 1850s. The British also introduced new diseases like measles and tuberculosis, and in 1789, a deliberate epidemic of the disease smallpox wiped out 90% of the population of Darug tribe in Sydney in southern NSW. It was in this time that the only known full extermination in world history occurred: the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines, in which a population of 4,000 were massacred by the British. Flick forward to the modern day and the status of Aboriginal people in Australia is no less bleak, with 38% of Aborigines at working age unemployed, 48% uneducated and 1 in 3 Aboriginal men from the age of 15-44 can expect to be charged with a crime. While some have argued it is better than it used to be (and given the British treatment of Aborigines in early times, this woudn’t be difficult to achieve), even as recently as 2006, the Howard Government initiated a blatant military invasion disguised as the Northern Territory Intervention, which was a ploy to grab land and make lives miserable for thousands of Aboriginal people. This was spun by the corporate mainstream media to be positive. ABC’s Lateline even got Mal Brough, a minister at the time, to talk on their show about how there was paedophile rings running rampant in the NT, and that girls as young as five were being targeted. This was then substantiated by “an anonymous former youth worker from Central Australia” who was actually Greg Andrews, a friend of Brough’s. Of course these comments were easily proven to be false, but this was an excuse for a government to make lives for Indigenous people more miserable. Australia, the lucky country? Certainly not for Aborigines.
If our treatment of Aboriginal people isn’t bad enough, our government’s treatment of foreign immigrants is enough to make a person sick. First it was the White Australia policy that officially came into fruition with federation in 1901 and eventually demolished in 1973. This policy was an attempt by consecutive Australian governments, both Liberals and Labor to “maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture” which was actually a racist immigration policy hellbent in making sure that our country became a country dominated by people of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Edmund Barton, the very first Prime Minister of Australia, in 1901, even said in support of the policy “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman” proving from the very beginning of this country, equality of race was not going to be well supported by governments, particularly as this was a man from the Protectionist Party and supported by the Australian Labor Party. When this policy, signified by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was debated in Parliament, there was almost universal support from the MPs, many of whom were clearly paranoid about an invasion from Japanese or Chinese. This became our immigration until 1973, when it finally scrapped in its entirety and replaced by the Racial Discrimination Act, a watershed moment in the fight against racism. However, our immigration policy took a dreadful turn for the worse in 1992 when the Keating Government implemented mandatory detention for asylum seekers, a policy that has been extended by all governments since. The Abbott Government’s continuation and extension of this policy called “Operation Sovereign Borders” to stop the boats is just the latest human rights abuse in our immigration policy, and it has thousands of human lives at risk of death. They are punishing people for fleeing persecution from countries with tyrannical regimes, and putting them in gulag-style concentration camps in places like Manus Island and Nauru. Australia the lucky country? Not for immigrants.
The last of my examples of Australia not being the lucky country is perhaps the most pressing: the constant attacks on the working class by continuing governments. Ever since Federation in 1901, governments in Australia have made attack after attack on the working man. Workers being made to work in unsafe workplaces, unions oppressed and witch-hunted and poverty and inequality skyrocketing. Whether it was conscription during the Vietnam War, which sent many a young working man to die in a foreign country away from their family, or the recent comments by Joe Hockey in which he said there was “lifters” and “leaners” who were the two types of people currently in Australia, in which of course, the leaners, were the impoverished and working class people who either couldn’t physically work or were earning so little from their totalitarian corporation that they had to get money to pay for food, water and other essentials, the ruling class in Australia has found a way to attack the working class and make the lives of the people miserable. Since September 11, 2001, at least 495 workers have died on unsafe workplaces on the docks, in the mines and on the building sites. The only protection against unsafe workplaces that workers have in this country left are the trade unions and what’s happening to them? There’s a royal commission into trade union corruption. Now I know that union corruption is an issue, but compared to the issue of people not having a union or the benefits that trade unions have given the working person, like the 8 hour day, like the minimum wage and like holidays it is rather small. It is the working class people that built the infrastructure and the country that we call home, but for these people to be persecuted and forced into homelessness because of redundancies and staff cutbacks, is a birthstain on our nation’s history. The worst case of worker oppression was probably John Howard’s WorkChoices to attempt to rid Australia of unions and workers rights. Luckily it got beaten because workers and unions united together to beat this oppression. Australia the lucky country? Not for the workers.
If Australia isn’t a lucky country for immigrants, its indigenous people or its workers, who is it lucky for? I’ll tell you who: the businesspeople and capitalists who have pillaged this country for its wealth and resources while making huge loads of money and not paying any tax. The idea that this is a lucky country is delusional, utopian thinking, because the number of people who have been oppressed in this country over the years far outweighs the oppressors. We need to change the way Australia treats its people, both domestic and foreign. But in order to do this, we can’t just let the system run its course. The system of imperialist capitalism is the problem, a problem which enables these right-wing nut-jobs to control our lives and make lives for minorities miserable. As Socialists, we need to defend minorities from the system by taking it into our own hands to destroy the real reason why Australia isn’t the lucky country: capitalism.
The Paddy File 