"And then they came for me" - why decent anti-racist Australians must Vote 1 Green and Put Labor Last

The extreme right wing Australian Government is variously complicit in an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (9,000 avoidable Aboriginal deaths annually out of an Indigenous Australian population of 0.5 million), Afghan Genocide (4.5 million post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths, Australia is part of the war criminal US Alliance) and the Tamil Genocide (scores of thousands killed, 0.3 million in concentration camps, Australian persecution of Tamils and other assistance to the genocidal Sri Lankan authorities).

Australia has racist laws and regulations grossly violating the human rights of Aborigines and of Afghan and Tamil refugees fleeing the Afghan Genocide and the Tamil Genocide. "And then they came for me" - this is why decent, anti-racist Australians must Vote 1 Green and Put Labor Last.

Australia has a compulsory preferential voting system in Federal elections. This means that you must vote or be fined and that when you vote you must number all the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate does not gain more than 50% of the vote then the preferences of the other candidates (starting with the least supported) are progressively distributed until a winner is obtained.

Currently the major parties are the conservative Liberal Party-National Party Coalition (the Opposition; about 45% of the vote), the Australian Labor Party (in Government; about 45% of the vote) and the Australian Greens (whose preferences favour Labor; about 10% of the vote).

The Federal Parliament has 2 Houses, an unrepresentative Senate (76 senators, 12 from each of the six states and 2 from each of the mainland territories, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory; the various state populations range from 0.5 million for Tasmania to about 5 million for New South Wales) and a democratic House of Representatives (150 members from electorates having roughly the same population). The government is formed by a majority in the House of Representatives. The Head of State is the Governor General representing the Queen of Australia and of Great Britain.

40 years ago the anti-war, pro-environment, anti-racist, democratic socialist Australian Labor Party (ALP) represented the trade union movement, the workers and the liberal intelligentsia whereas the extreme right wing “Big L” Liberal Party represented small and big business and the extreme right wing National Party (formerly the Country Party) represented the farmers and White rural communities.

However after the US-complicit coup in 1975 that removed the twice democratically-elected, reformist, Whitlam Labor Government from power, Labor got the message of “all the way with the USA” and progressively shifted to a more and more pro-war, neoconservative and anti-union position.

The once-progressive Australian Labor Party (ALP) has in recent years become Another Liberal Party (noting that a "big L" Liberal in Australia means pro-war, anti-liberal, democratic fascist), an Apartheid Israel-supporting Labor Party and indeed an Apartheid Labor Party.

Unfortunately today there is currently little distinguishing the 2 major parties (collectively known as the Lib-Labs). Labor is nominally associated with a dwindling and mostly right wing union movement but has adopted similar pro-war, pro-US, neoconservative and anti-environment policies to those of the Liberal –National Party Coalition. Good comparisons would now be with the pro-war Tories and pro-war Labour in the UK and the pro-war Republicans and pro-war Democrats in the US.

Traditional anti-war, anti-racist, pro-environment, pro-human rights Labor voters now have nobody to vote for except the anti-war, anti-racist, pro-environment, pro-human rights Greens.

However, because of the preferential voting system, and assuming the rough current electoral support pattern indicate above, a Greens voter who votes #1 Green and places the appalling Coalition last is effectively voting for equally appalling Labour. Big business, rednecks, the Christian Right, warmongers, racists and environmental rapist, corporate climate criminals are laughing all the way to the bank.

Accordingly, the big moral decision for decent Australian voters is whether to bite the bullet and recognize that returning a racist ALP (aka an Apartheid Labpr Party or Another Liberal Party) to Government is simply no longer an option i.e. they should Put Labor Last in the hope that a chastened Labor Party will return to traditional Labor values in opposition.

A reduction ad absurdum proves the Put Labor Last case. Many of my friends cannot bring themselves to Put Labor Last because that will means returning a Coalition candidate and like myself, my friends have never ever voted Coalition because of Coalition racism and pro-war policies. However they would no doubt concede that their patience is not unlimited, that Labor does not have a blank cheque and that at some point of Labor infidelity to Humanity they would Put Labor Last. Thus one hopes that if Labor had a Nazi-style policy of, for example, stripping all Jews of their property and confining them in Concentration Camps then my traditional Labor and Green friends, cognizant of the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) would surely Put Labor Last. Surely they would? Surely?

However the Apartheid Labor Party has already crossed what is a line in the sand for decent, anti-racist, pro-Humanity Australians - it has passed laws and adopted policies that specifically exclude Northern Territory Indigenous Australians from the protection of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act brought in by the reformist Labor Government under Gough Whitlam.

Northern Territory Indigenous Australians have been specifically excluded by race-based legislation from seeing, buying, transporting, consuming or trading things available to all other Australians; their welfare payments are retained by the Government in a race-specific fashion; they can be expelled from their homes, communities and their sacred land on the say so of Government officials with no recourse to law; their land can be seized by the Government for long-term leases; their children (like Welsh children in the 19th century) are ethnocidally forced to endure nearly all instruction in a foreign language (English) ; and they must surrender their Sacred Land to the Government in return for housing, health and other benefits provided without any such strings to both poor and extremely rich White Australians.

Unlike the upfront German Nazis, who at least had the courage to declare their psychotic racism, greed and hatred, the extreme right wing but politically correct racist (PC racist) Lib-Labs assert they do these appalling things out of “love” for Indigenous Australians, that they are doing these things because of “special circumstances”.

While European anti-Jewish anti-Semites used canards of asserted Jewish crimes against children (e.g. “drinking the blood of Christian children”), the Lib-Labs have similarly justified their violation of Aboriginal Human Rights in terms of false claims of asserted Aboriginal sexual abuse of children. Yet if one reads the “Little Children are Sacred report” one discovers that the expert authors were unable to quantitate such abuse.

There is no doubt from the shocking anecdotal accounts in the Report that from a qualitative perspective Aboriginal Child Sexual Abuse is occurring and must be urgently stopped. However the Report (p57) states that “it is not possible to accurately estimate the extent of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory” and the only quantitative estimate offered in the Report is that “70% of all female Aboriginal prisoners in New South Wales jails had suffered sexual abuse as Children” (Report, p5). No doubt a high proportion of White female prisoners had similarly traumatic histories.
Importantly, the Report refers to studies in the USA indicating that 25% of females and 10% of males experience childhood sexual abuse (Finkelhor, D. (1994), Current information on the scope and nature of child sexual abuse”, Future of Children, 4(2), pp31-53) and in Australia indicating that 34% of females and 16% of males experienced non-penetrative abuse with 12% females and 4% of males reporting penetrative child sexual abuse (Dunne, M.P., Purdie, D.M., Cook, M.D., Boyle, F.M. & Najman, J.M.(2003), Is child sexual abuse declining? Evidence from a population-based survey of men and women in Australia, Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 27 (2), pp141-152).

In keeping with the creeping racism and fascism in Australian society, 90% of Australians went along with this Lib-Lab racism at the last election by voting for the Lib-Labs (the Liberal-National Party Coalition and Labor). Even gullible, turn the other cheek, alarmingly conciliatory anti-racists might be persuaded that the egregious deprivation of Northern Territory Aborigines of their human rights is a “once off” or "altruistic" but events have overtaken them as outlined below.

The Australian Labor Government has recently announced that it will jail without trial and “suspend” for at least 6 months the human rights of its Afghan refugee Subjects who have fled what outstanding anti-racist scholars such as Professor Ali Khan (Kansas, USA) refer to as the Afghan Genocide (post-invasion violent deaths 1.1 million, post-invasion non-violent excess deaths 3.4 million, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 2.4 million, refugees 3-4 million plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees generated under Obama war policies in NW Pakistan) (see “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/afghan... ).

The bottom line in any comparative analysis of violent wrongdoing is consequential death. The current "annual death rate" for Occupied Afghan under-5 year old infants under the US Alliance is 7% - as compared to that of 4% (for Poles under the Nazis in WW2), 5% (French Jews under the Nazis and the Nazi-collaborator Vichy régime in WW2), 13% (Australian POWs of the Japanese in WW2) and 19% (Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe) (see “Polish Holocaust, Afghan Holocaust And Western Holocaust Denial”: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly... ).

To make it even worse, the Apartheid Labor Government has now also extended this race-based “suspension” of the Human Rights of its Subjects to include Tamil refugees fleeing the Australia-complicit the Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka ( scores of thousands of Tamils killed in civilian-targeting Sri Lankan military operations; scores of thousands of Tamil deaths due to deprivation; 300,000 Tamils denied human rights and currently imprisoned in highly abusive concentration camps; pro-war, war criminal Apartheid Australia is assisting the Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide by propaganda, Business As Usual (BAU) dealings with Sri Lanka, assistance to Sri Lankan military and police, and by criminalizing medical and financial support for Tamils through race-based application of draconian Anti-terrorism Laws).

For details of the Tamil Genocide see the writings of eminent US expert in International Law Professor Francis Boyle, notably “The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka . The global failure to protect Tamil Rights under International law” by Francis Boyle, Clarity Press: http://www.claritypress.com/Boyle-T... ).

The Australian Labor Government has recently announced that it will jail without trial and “suspend” for at least 3 months the human rights of its Tamil refugee Subjects who have fled what outstanding anti-racist scholar Professor Francis Boyle (Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Chicago, USA) calls the Tamil Genocide (see “Genocide-Complicit Apartheid Australia Jails Refugees
Fleeing Afghan Genocide And Tamil Genocide”, Countercurrents: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly... ).

Who’s next? Surely when it comes to race-based violation of human rights it should be one strike and they’re out - and three strikes and they’re out for sure. Decent anti-racist Australians should not wait to see who’s next.

Read below the 1946 poem attributed to anti-Nazi hero German Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

"They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up." (see “First they came”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came... ).

Well might many Australians similarly say as in the following paraphrasing of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem.

"They came first for the Aborigines,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an Aborigjne.

Then they came for the Afghans,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an Afghan.

Then they came for the Tamils,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Tamil.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

I have spoken up – but then, in addition to being an anti-racist humanitarian, I am obliged to speak up because the Nazis murdered most of my relatives in World war 2.

I have carefully documented Australian complicity in appalling genocidal atrocities (see “Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/muslim...) and have made formal complaints about such Australian complicit in genocide to the International Criminal Court (see “9 January 2010 Formal Complaint by Dr Gideon Polya to the International Criminal Court (ICC) re US Alliance Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Muslim, Aboriginal, Biofuel and Climate Genocides”: http://sites.google.com/site/muslim... ).

I have reported internationally on the race-based exclusion of Northern Territory Indigenous Australians, Tamil refugees and Afghan refugees from the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (see “Genocide-Complicit Apartheid Australia Jails Refugees Fleeing Afghan Genocide And Tamil Genocide”: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly... .

I passionately defended the Human Rights of Indigenous Australians in a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the race-based Northern Territory Intervention legislation (see Submission #35 by Dr Gideon Polya: http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/commit... ).

In my concluding paragraph I stated “The Nazis wiped my family from the face of Europe. I am married to a Black Australian. The Jewish Holocaust and the Aboriginal Genocide both instruct that there must be ZERO TOLERANCE FOR RACISM. I would urge all Senators to vote against this Bill. – a vote for this Bill is a vote against a non-racist Australia and the international reputation of this country. I have written this in the national interest.”

I would urge all decent Australians to speak up and to also do so via the ballot box. Apartheid Labor has repeatedly crossed a line in the sand for all decent, anti-racist Australians. Decent anti-racist Australians have no choice but to do their duty and to vote 1 Green and to Put Labor Last.