John Pilger:Murdoch may be a convenient demon, but the media is a junta

  Australia is the world's first murdochracy. US citizen Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the metropolitan press. He has monopolies in state capitals and provincial centres. The only national newspaper is his. He is a dominant force online and in pay-TV and publishing. Known fearfully as "Rupert", he is the Chief Mate.

But Murdoch's dominance is not as it is often presented. Although he is now one of the West's accredited demons, thanks to his phone-hackers, he is but part of a media system that will not change when his empire is broken up. The political extremism that is the concentration of the world's wealth in few hands and the accelerating impoverishment of the majority will ensure this. A Melbourne journalist, Paul Chadwick, one of the few to rebel against Murdoch, described this as "akin to a small group of generals who sit above the main institutions... a junta in all but name".

Consider the junta's rise. In the US, at the end of the second world war, 80 per cent of newspapers were independently owned. By 1987, most were controlled by 15 corporations, of which six dominate today. Their ideological message is a mantra. They promote global and domestic economic piracy and the cult of "perpetual war". This is currently served by a "liberal" president who pursues whistleblowers, dispatches drones and selects from his personal "kill list" every Tuesday. In Britain, where the propaganda of big capital also dominates, the historic convergence of the two main political parties is rarely news. Tony Blair, a conspirator in the greatest crime of this century, is promoted as "a wasted talent". In all these agendas, notably the promotion of war, the Murdoch press often plays a supporting role to the reputable BBC. The Leveson inquiry has shown not the slightest interest in this.

In Australia, there is the Order of Mates. A struggle for the mantle of Chief Mate is currently under way. From out of a vast Aladdin's Cave of mineral wealth, comes Gina Rinehart, said to be the richest woman in the world. The daughter of iron ore billionaire Lang Hancock, Rinehart and her fellow mining oligarchs all but got rid of Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2010 when he proposed a modest tax on their huge profits. Rinehart believes Australia's media is basically communist, especially the Fairfax group of which she has now acquired almost a fifth of the stock.

Fairfax publishes the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and this week announced the sacking of 1900 employees, including senior editors. The papers are to be shrunk in size. Such a "bloodbath", it is said, will deny Australia the last of its "independent press". In fact, like the Murdoch press, both titles have long been the voice of deeply conservative colonial and bourgeois power in a country whose rapacious past, inequities and racism are routinely suppressed, along with any sustained critique of a glorified militarism that has made Australia, in effect, a US mercenary.

"Give me tits, tots and pistol shots," declared long-gone Sydney newspaper proprietor Ezra Norton. Although Norton's guidelines remain intact today, the "independent" press prefers a set menu of "free market" journalism: personality politics and its skulduggery, shopping, the joys of private education, the vagaries of real estate and war-patriotism. There are honourable exceptions, of course, but going against the media/political cronyism requires not only courage but a publisher.

As in Britain and the US, the most insidious power is public relations. Leading Australian journalists travel to countries such as Israel on sponsored freebies. The day Fairfax announced it was sacking a fifth of its workforce, an executive of a PR firm whose accounts include McDonald's, wrote, "I believe these evolutions will result in improved PR campaigns, with stories running across multiple platforms... Great news for our clients." Described as "insensitive" and "harsh", her honesty had touched upon the transformation of western societies by the "invisible" power of PR and lobbying. In 2003, Fairfax senior executive Mark Scott, said, "Smart clever people are not the answer. What you want are people who can execute your strategy and Fairfax's strategy to create editorial to support maximising revenues from display advertising."  Rupert or Gina could not have put it better.

30 June 2012

John Pilger:Up, up and away: how money power works Down Under

Qantas boss Alan Joyce on right.

One of my first jobs as a junior reporter was to meet flights bringing famous people to Australia. Growing up in a country far from everywhere (except, as my father would say, "where you come from"), I was led to believe that Australia's honour was at risk unless a well-known person from Over There said something flattering about us, preferably the moment they arrived at Sydney airport. There was a designated list of attributes they could comment on. These were: the weather, the beaches, the harbour, the harbour bridge, the happy people, the beer. When an exhausted Elizabeth Taylor stepped off her piston-engined flight from California and faced the mandatory barrage of questions, she replied: "Where am I, for Christ's sake?"

This was understandable but ill-advised. Readers of the Australian press were warned that Taylor and her accompanying husband Mike Todd, the Hollywood producer, were problem people who did not appreciate their good fortune in being among us. Todd's "dwarf-like and grizzled" appearance and the size of the bags under his wife's eyes became the subjects of particular tabloid scorn. Their stay was brief.

It was the first scheduled jet flight that drew us closer to the rest of humanity. This momentous occasion gave me my first front page story in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, which declared solemnly, "A new era in civil aviation has dawned...". The inaugural aircraft was a Boeing 707 of the national airline Qantas, an acronym for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services. Founded in the outback town of Winton, Queensland in 1920, Qantas is today the world's oldest continuously operating airline and, along with the great cricketer Don Bradman and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, occupies a place in the nation's affections. Most important, it is the only major international airline in the jet age never to have lost an aircraft in a fatal accident. Perhaps wary of holding such a distinction to fortune, Qantas advertising never mentions it.

In recent years, however, the safest airline has had close calls, including an Airbus A330 that went into a sudden dive in 2008 and injured up to 74 people, a Boeing 747 engine that blew up after leaving San Francisco in 2010 and a new A380 whose engine shattered over Singapore later that year. These, and a series of less serious incidents, have all happened since the airline was taken out of public ownership and handed to global banks. The largest shareholders include J P Morgan, HSBC and Citicorp, which are also among the top shareholders of Australia's major banks and largest mining companies. The national airline, like the Australian economy, is mortgaged: the product of a bi-partisan political system dominated by rapacious business.

It was an article of faith that the world's only island-continent, flanked by the two greatest oceans, needed a long-haul airline - until the asset-strippers took control. What followed is a cautionary, universal tale. Last October, without warning, the Qantas Chief executive, Alan Joyce, ordered the grounding of the airline's global fleet. More than 68,000 passengers were stranded in 22 countries, and the entire Qantas workforce was locked out without pay.  Joyce later admitted that tickets had been "mistakenly" sold for flights that Qantas management would never take off; the grounding had been planned well in advance.

This unprecedented action was the climax of a plan to crush the unions, Murdoch-style, and to take much of the company "off-shore" into Asia. A subsidiary airline based in Asia would employ fewer staff and pay them less, including pilots and engineers, in conditions once unknown to the world's safest airline. For a decade, the company has been building wholly or partly owned domestic and regional airlines on this cut-price basis while closing Qantas routes.

The fleet grounding was presented in Australia's mostly Murdoch-owned capital city press as the inevitable result of an intractable industrial dispute. In fact, the unions were negotiating with Qantas, and the domestic network was not in dispute at all - yet its workforce was also locked out without pay. As if on cue, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stepped in, using powers under the Labor government's Thatcher-like industrial laws known as Fair Work Australia (FWA), which allow employers to lock out their employees without notice and requires none of the ballots and processes forced on unions.

Gillard ordered an emergency sitting of the FWA arbitration court which effectively ruled in favour of the company, cancelling the lock-out yet stopping the workforce from taking action against the coming destruction of their jobs. The Transport Workers' Union offered only vocal resistance. As in Britain and America, the unions have long been tamed, co-opted and policed by their own leaderships. Gillard's workplace relations minister is Bill Shorten, a former union boss whose political ambitions and boasts of close ties to business elites are highlighted in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. 

The day before he announced the grounding and lock-out without pay, Joyce received a pay rise of 71 per cent pay. He now takes home A$5 million a year. Last year, Qantas recorded a before-tax profit of A$552 million, having doubled its net profit and increased its revenue. In February, the company announced that, as a result of a sharp fall in this year's profits - caused, not surprisingly, by the grounding of the fleet and the consequential loss of business - it planned to cut 2,500 jobs, including maintenance engineers and pilots. The catch-22 caused barely a political ripple and Qantas management was congratulated in the media for its "courageous stand". According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the loss of revenue is "a case study in Australia's ability to cope with globalisation". In a choice of words Qantas passengers might find unsettling, the paper said the airline had to "compete or die".

22 March 2012

John Pilger:Julia Gillard’s rise marks the triumph of machine politics over feminism

 

In 1963, a senior Australian government official, A.R. Taysom, deliberated on the wisdom of deploying women as trade representatives. "Such an appointee would not stay young and attractive forever [because] a spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years [whereas] a man usually mellows." 

On International Women's Day 2012, such primitive views are worth recalling; but what has happened to modern feminism? Why is it so bereft of its political, indeed socialist roots that any woman who "achieves" within an immoral system is to be admired? Take the rise of Julia Gillard as Australia's first female prime minister, so celebrated by leading feminists such as writer Anne Summers and Germaine Greer. Both are unstinting in their applause of Gillard, the "remarkable woman" who on 27 February saw off a challenge from Kevin Rudd, the former Labor prime minister she deposed in a secretive, essentially macho backroom coup in 2010.

On 3 March, Greer wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald  that she "fell in love with" the "matter-of-fact" Gillard long ago. Omitting entirely Gillard's politics, she asked, "What's not to like? That she's a woman, that's what. An unmarried, middle-aged woman in power - any man's and many women's nightmare".

That Gillard might be a nightmare to the Aboriginal women, men and children whom this quintessential machine politician has abused and blamed for their impoverishment, while implementing punitive and racist measures against their communities in defiance of international law, is apparently not relevant. That Gillard might be a nightmare to refugees detained behind razor wire, children included, in places that are "a huge generator of mental illness", according to Australia's ombudsman, is of no interest.

That Gillard has pledged to keep Australian soldiers in Afghanistan indefinitely and that the overwhelming majority of those killed or wounded has happened during her period as prime minister, is beside the point. Gillard's feminist distinction, perversely, is her removal of gender discrimination in combat roles in the Australian army. Thanks to her, women are now liberated to kill Afghans and others who offer no threat to Australia, just like their comrades in "hunter-killer" units currently accused of massacring civilians.  In ending the "cultural and other taboos that have kept women from combat roles in the past", wrote Summers, Gillard has ensured that "Australia will again lead the world in a major reform".

The devotion of this new "feminist icon" to imperial war is impressive, if strange. Referring to the dispatch of Australian colonial troops to Sudan in 1885 to avenge a popular uprising against the British, she described the forgotten farce as "not only a test of wartime courage, but a test of character that has helped define our nation and create the sense of who we are". Invariably flanked by flags, she makes her point well.

And the point is that celebration of this kind of politician, regardless of gender, has nothing to do with feminism. On the contrary, it is complicity in some of the wickedest crimes of our age. It was Margaret Thatcher who ordered the sinking of the Belgrano, with the loss of 323 young Argentinean conscripts, and rejoiced. It was the outspoken British feminist MP Harriet Harman, along with other Labour feminists known as "Blair's Babes", who supported the invasion of Iraq and stood cheering one of its principal war criminals.

In the west, "glass ceilings" remain the issue-of-choice of bourgeois feminism. How many women who "make it" in politics speak out against the machine, reaching down to women left behind? How many resist the addiction of vanity to power and the media? How many use their platforms, to analyse and expose the psychopathic militarism and its industries of death and lies that contaminate our political, cultural and media life and are the source of so much violence against women in stricken, faraway countries, if not against women at home? Who spoke out against Julia Gillard's junket to Israel in the wake of the massacre of 1400 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and her unctuous support for their killers? Where in the coverage of politics are the principled voices of women such as Medea Benjamin, Arundhati Roy and the bravehearts of the Rawa women in Afghanistan?

Hillary Clinton was applauded by famous feminists for her support for the west's invasion of Afghanistan to "liberate women from the Taliban". No matter that this was never the reason; no matter that tens of thousands were killed and maimed as a consequence. In her 2008 campaign for the White House, Clinton, supported by feminists such as Anne Summers, boasted that she was prepared to "annihilate" Iran.

Here in Australia familiar distractions apply: the same insidious corporate PR aimed mostly at women and the young that says personal identity is the limit of politics; the same organised forgetting of people's history and any notion of class and our servitude to an undemocratic elite.

Yet, Australian feminism has an especially proud past. With New Zealanders, Australian women led the world in winning the vote. During the slaughter of the first world war, Australian women mounted a uniquely successful campaign against a vote for conscription. A poster declared illegal in several states was headed "The Blood Vote" and showed a defiant woman placing her vote in the ballot-box rather than, "that I doomed a man to death".

On polling day all but one of Australia's political leaders urged a "yes" vote. They lost. A majority followed the women. Such is true feminism.

8 March 2012

The Greens: new politics or deputy administrators? By Tim Anderson

It might be tempting to simply defend The Greens from recent attacks by the Murdoch Media, one of the most ferocious, neo-fascist propaganda machines in the world today. Yet the Murdoch gang has drawn attention to a real split within the Green on some matters of substance and approach.

I suggest it is a better time for those of us sympathetic to The Greens to examine some of the dangers in their own internal trajectory. I say this because I believe (1) left debates should not be determined by the corporate media (who, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out the 1960s, have less power in telling us what to think than in what to think about), and (2) that the party has seen a major and mostly unremarked change in recent years.

The division within The Greens, it seems to me, has a lot to do with whether the party is about trying to create some ‘new politics’, to use their parliamentary positions to introduce new ideas, or whether it will be content to function as ‘deputy administrators’ of the existing system, reforming and amending law and policy.

The latter approach, led by Bob Brown, seems to assume that greater acceptance by the big powers (the corporate media, the major parties, investor groups) will enable them to consolidate their electoral position and create a vehicle to ‘moderately’ influence various aspects of policy and practice. We could call this a sort of ‘centre-left realism’.

This is similar to the approach that the Australian Democrats used, from the centre-right; but remember what happened to them? At the peak of their 'success' in amending major policies (such as on workplace relations and the consumption tax) they were seen as a type of deputy to the party from which they had split (the Liberals).

What new and distinct political ideas did the Democrats present in their final years? They certainly didn’t capture a disillusioned electorate’s imagination. The Democrats rapidly disappeared almost completely from the electoral scene, after 25 years as the third force in Australian politics.

A similar problem lies in the ‘deputy administrator’ approach, seen most obviously in Green support for Labor’s ‘carbon tax’ proposal. There are three problems here: first the substance of this proposal is deeply flawed; second, it represents a strategic surrender of initiative by The Greens on what should be a leading green issue; and third, backing this ‘carbon package’ represents a major departure from ecological principle.

Let me explain these points.

The traditional Labor-Liberal fight over the ‘carbon tax’ has probably confused things. Behind and dominating both major parties is a small, powerful group of investors which has a very clear strategy. Their approach does not have to do with ‘beliefs’ on climate change. The coal companies, to take the obvious example, probably have far better information on human-made climate change than the average person.

However, just as the tobacco companies were the first to get on top of the dangers of smoking, the coal companies (and others) know about the problem but are determined not to pay for any change in policy. They will resist as long as they can and then they will eventually back some sort of ‘market mechanism’ (as Al Gore, the pseudo-hero of the climate change story, had planned for them at Kyoto). The Liberal Party, if and when it is in government, will also back some sort of trading system, in due course.

Labor’s ‘carbon tax package’, contrary to Liberal Party hype, is not really about tax. That is just a preliminary step. According to PM Gillard’s statement, the carbon tax ‘will be replaced by an emissions trading scheme from July 1, 2015 … Price ceiling and floor to apply when trading starts.’

The package is aimed at creating yet another neoliberal scheme which will allow companies to milk yet another fictitious bubble economy. And The Greens have joined in.

Why are they doing this? Somewhere in the middle of The Greens’ otherwise quite reasonable policies on climate change (which include public investment in renewables, removing subsidies for coal companies, new standards and regulation in favour of sustainable industries) there was indeed reference to ‘market based’ mechanisms. But joining in the Labor package meant that the initial tax and the future trading system took centre stage. The Greens allowed their ‘tail’ to wag their ‘dog’, on this matter.

How have they explained this decision, to subordinate good policies to a neoliberal scam? Bob Brown has already complained that the initial tax was ‘too low’ to fund items on his wish list. The bulk of the ‘carbon tax’ money seems to have been snaffled up in corporate compensation – well surprise, surprise.

We have seen this all before, many times. Costs get passed to consumers, large corporations get most of the public subsidies and the possibility of ‘price signals’ influencing the investment decisions of these companies is minimised. Very little, if any, technological change.

Senator Christine Milne tried to mention the other measures, but by reference to the central ‘market’ logic:
- ‘once a carbon price is in the market’ investors will understand the need for wider change
- ‘Starting with a rising fixed price gives us the chance to get Australia moving, sending a signal to the market, while keeping the flexibility to lift our ambition significantly as soon as we can get political agreement…’
- limits of international trading were needed ‘once the carbon price was set by the market’

So her idea seems to be that once they have ‘sent some signals to the market’, The Greens will seek to regulate and harmonise this ‘market’ with their other policies. But ‘markets’ (i.e. large financial companies) do not like such backtracking.

Of course this trading system will lead to ‘offsets’ and international scams; who doubts it? They are already out there. Deforestation and oil palm monocultures are already attracting carbon credits in Indonesia; fictitious forests are being financed. Just do a Google search on REDD scams.

One serious consequence of this will be that, when the ‘carbon trading’ system is exposed as a corrupt and ludicrous ‘solution’ to climate change, The Greens will have to wear their share of the blame.

What is worse, while those scams were being created, the whole issue was not being addressed with new and distinct ideas. The neoliberals were given centre stage. This draws attention to the second problem set up by the ‘deputy administrator’ strategy. Despite the record numbers of Greens parliamentarians, there is a loss of voice. They have hitched their wagon to Labor, and it will take time to un-hitch.

John Kaye has boldly defended Labor’s ‘carbon tax-trading’ package as ‘a prelude to real action’; but ‘first steps’ down the wrong track should not be looked at so kindly.

If this scheme takes several years to unravel, they will be several years in which The Greens have not presented new and bold ideas, nor denounced the fraudulent ‘market mechanism’.

There is also a philosophical flaw in the ‘deputy administrator’ approach, a departure from ecological principle. Focusing ecological concerns around the price of some new, invented ‘commodity’ is the sort of reductionist and economistic nonsense that ‘small-g’ greens would have ridiculed not too long ago.

Rachel Carson, the great North American biologist, pointed out in the late 1950s the hollowness of attempts to solve social problems (e.g. crop disease, agricultural productivity) through single issue, quick fix solutions. Her book ‘The Silent Spring’ was a foundation stone of the new ecological science, warning of the need to consider the human and natural environment in its totality.

Now we are told that a commercial price on notional ‘carbon’ will help fix one of the most profound of our ecological crises. Yet, even if a carbon price could help scale down the high carbon-emitting industries, and scale it down in a timely way, a series of problems remain.

First, carbon emissions are not everything to do with global warming and climate change. There are other greenhouse gases. Second, climate change is not the only ecological problem. The exhaustion of fossil fuels is a related but distinct problem, which has its own demands. The problems of deforestation, desertification and water contamination similarly cannot be reduced to the simple functions of a ‘counter global warming’ agenda.

The Greens have undermined their high moral ground, and their independent position, by subjecting many of their important ecological policies to (let us say, kindly) the ‘uncertain future’ of a carbon tax. They have seriously undermined their platform to retain an independent voice and spruik new ideas which, to my mind, is the main point of any minor left party being in parliament.

What are the alternatives to this sort of ‘deputy administrator-ship’? Stay outside ‘constructive engagement’ with Labor (or any other administrator; the reader should know by now why I do not say ‘those in power’), and be called spoilers, or rat bags? Well yes, of course, that is the price of creating some new politics. Bob Brown knew it once, when he was being arrested in defence of Tasmania’s rivers and forests.

Imagine if The Greens had rejected the carbon tax and any sort of trading system, stood against the major parties and for their other decent policies: public investment in renewables, removing subsidies for coal companies, new standards and regulation in favour of sustainable industries. They would cop abuse for a few years but would get credit for changing the debate and ‘sticking to their guns’.

There may be a heavy price to pay for backing a major loser, giving up a distinct strategic voice and abandoning ecological principles. Surely this ‘deputy administrator’ approach deserves reconsideration?

The tent embassy: fact v fiction, black v white by Chris Graham

There is perhaps no event in the last few decades that better sums up the divide between black and white Australia than the debacle that engulfed the Embassy celebrations. It had everything: media misreporting; white political mischief; black political disunity; police violence; frustrated activists. And it had the odd rat-bag, black and white. If nothing else, the debacle that engulfed the Tent Embassy celebration has once again exposed to the rest of the world the racist underbelly of a very ignorant nation. But first the facts, because a lot of people have formed opinions on the Embassy based on media reporting. And that is almost always a bad idea. The Embassy celebrations kicked off with a large march through the streets of Canberra. It was loud and proud – by some margin the most inspiring march I’ve been to. It was a festival atmosphere and a celebration in every sense of the word. There was virtually no mainstream media present, certainly nothing comparable to the pack that would descend on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy a few hours later. The rot began to set in shortly after lunch on January 26, when one of Julia Gillard’s senior media advisers, Tony Hodges, phoned Kim Sattler, a union official – and an Aboriginal woman — who was visiting the Tent Embassy. According to the official version of events Hodges told Sattler that Tony Abbott had just been interviewed by media about the Embassy, and he expressed the view that it was time to move on. But what Sattler passed on to Embassy activists was something else altogether. Audio of the exchange between Sattler and young Central Australian Aboriginal leader Barbara Shaw, reveals that Sattler says Tony Abbott has just told the press the Tent Embassy should be “pulled down”, not that it’s time to move on.  It’s a pretty subtle difference, but Shaw relays that message – pulled down — to the crowd, word for word. Shaw then directs people to The Lobby Restaurant, a few hundred metres from the stage. The rest, as they say, is history. Or in this case, the whitewashed version of history. Several hundred protestors descended on the restaurant. A small handful of them began banging on the glass walls on two sides of the building. The crowd was chanting ‘Shame’ and ‘Racist’. The object of their anger was Tony Abbott. Anyone who has seen the footage can understand that Abbott, Gillard and in particular their security minders had reason to be concerned. Protestors were furious at what they’d been told Abbott had said. After half an hour, Gillard’s security detail is captured by a Channel 9 news crew informing the Prime Minister that they’re becoming increasingly concerned for her safety, and have decided it’s time to go. The subsequent images of Gillard being bundled out of the restaurant are startling. Gillard looks terrified as she’s rushed to her vehicle, surrounded by her personal security team and police, including one with a riot shield. Not surprisingly, the story made headlines around the world. The fact that Gillard stumbled and lost her blue suede shoe in the process only added to the colour. Also not surprisingly, the vision sparked widespread outrage among average Australians – news sites that offered the opportunity for comment on the issue were inundated. Overwhelmingly the responses from readers were negative. The coverage from the ABC – supposedly the moderate national broadcaster – best sums up the unfolding media circus: ‘Gillard puts on brave face after riot rescue’. It’s a pretty compelling headline. It’s also complete bunkum. The ‘riot’ – at a glass-walled restaurant, mind you – saw not one pane of glass cracked, let alone broken. There were no arrests and no injuries. It was a loud, angry protest. Nothing more. Of course, it did have the potential to get out of hand, but all protests do. It’s worth noting, the only damage to the Lobby restaurant was to a door – the one which Gillard is rushed through as she exits the building. And who caused the damage? Police. The National Capital Authority, which owns the building, inspected the Lobby the day after the protest, and confirmed to Embassy organisers that the AFP had broken the door in its haste to leave. Not only was there no riot, but there was never any actual threat to Gillard’s safety, nor that of Abbott. As footage that emerged after the media had already written the script clearly showed, the only people pursuing Gillard and Abbott when they were rushed from the building were police, journalists and photographers. There were no protestors within coo-ee, and certainly none chasing down a terrified Prime Minister nor an Opposition Leader, who can be clearly seen smirking and smiling as he’s rushed to the car. But that’s not such a newsworthy story. So instead, we got this, from Channel 9: “They made for the safety of a getaway car. The only thing between them and an angry, raging mob were police with shields. “The Prime Minister, cradled by an officer, lost her shoe, stumbled slightly in the mayhem, the moment of terror, captured here on Julia Gillard’s face. “Tony Abbott was pushed to the waiting car. “When she got to the vehicle you can see Julia Gillard shoved inside. “And in a sign of the danger, the rare sight of Mr Abbott bustled in beside her.” The media reporting gave the widespread view that Gillard had somehow been attacked, as the comments on news sites consistently showed. But in defence of the Channel 9 journalist, he did get one aspect of his story right: he noted that AFTER the Prime Minister’s vehicle left, the violence began. One of the most memorable images from the ‘riot’, at least from the Aboriginal perspective, is footage captured by a news crew of a police officer punching an Aboriginal man – dressed in traditional costume and carrying a spear – in the face). It can be seen 15 seconds into this clip. The images were replayed around the globe – BBC World News, for example, used the footage over and over again during its coverage of the event. Alternative footage, captured by an embassy activist, sheds new light on this officer’s behaviour, and what led up to the assault. Shortly after Gillard’s vehicle has left, the protestor’s footage shows the officer unleash a barrage of abuse – and blows – at protestors and media. At 1:05 he comes into the shot screaming “Media f**k off or get out. Get out media, get out”. He turns his attention to a cameraman from SBS and yells, “F**k off c*nt,” before manhandling a sound technician. The exchange clearly shows the officer as the aggressor. At 1:17 the cop starts yelling, “Move rear, move rear. Move f**king rear,” as he continues to push and swing at protestors, before finally hitting one of them in the head (at 1:28). At 1:30,a second cop stars in the video, with wild eyes and a huge grin on his face, nodding his head and willing protestors to take him on, all the while pushing and manhandling them. As soon as one protestor yells “Get him on camera”, the cop seems to realize he’s being filmed, wipes the smile off his face and steps back from the crowd. The camera pans back to the red-headed officer, who is now in full-swing, literally. He’s screaming “Get back off the road idiots” as he pushes more protestors. You can hear one off camera respond, “Little f**king big man. Little big man, pushing people eh?” It draws the attention of the officer, who responds by pushing him in the chest. The protestor replies, “Hey, you push me, I’ll spear you brother.” The cop pushes him again, and you see the protestor push the cop back. The cop looks down at his own chest – an act which people widely interpreted to mean he was spat on (he wasn’t) - then hits the protestor in the head. You can’t actually see the hit – it’s slightly off camera. But it’s of such force that you can certainly hear it. The news footage BBC ran shows it nearly knocked the protestor off his feet. What follows is one of the more ironic images from the demonstration. Tiga Bayles, an early Embassy activist and a former Queensland Father of the Year, steps into the frame and blocks the cop, saying ‘No, no, no, it’s alright’. Other protestors – including the first man assaulted — also surround the cop to prevent further attacks. It’s not often you see groups of peaceful protestors having to step in to try and calm a police officer down. The cop keeps pushing and swinging until a female protestor puts her hand on his shoulder (at 2:04) and says, “You are inciting, you are inciting.” Like his colleague earlier, the cop’s demeanor changes completely – he seems to realise that everything he’s just done has been captured on film. He stops yelling, and starts pleading, “I’m just trying to get you off the road.” Seconds later, Sergeant Chris Meagher – a community liaison officer who spent the five days working cooperatively with Embassy officials — can be seen walking into the shot, and removing both officers from the front line of the confrontation. A protestor can be heard yelling, “This officer here is way too pumped up. The officer in the middle, this one right here.” You can hear someone reply, “Yeah, we got him.” And remember, all of this occurred AFTER Gillard has left the scene. The supposed threat has gone. So why the police violence? A measure of how pumped up the red haired officer was before confronting protestors is captured in this video.  It shows him mistaking one of Gillard’s personal security team for a protestor, and then elbowing him in the head as Gillard’s car speeds away. Officially, the Australian Federal Police are happy with the conduct of officers. Unofficially, the officer’s conduct is under review, with the possibility of ‘retraining’, particularly in relation to his dealings with media. Hysterical commentary aside, the media reporting before, during and after the event was typically very poor. It was also laced with a thousand missing facts. One of them is that Michael Anderson, one of the original founders of the Tent Embassy was approached by Kim Sattler and told that the Prime Minister’s office was on the phone, and wanted to speak to him. He didn’t take the call because he was in the middle of a radio interview. The point being, it wasn’t a simple case of the PM’s office relating Abbott’s whereabouts to a third party, who then passed the information on to the Tent Embassy. Gillard’s office actively sought to provide the information directly to the Tent Embassy. That puts quite a different complexion on events from those advanced by Gillard – that Hodges had merely passed on the information to a colleague, who then blabbed it to the Embassy.Media commentary has also missed the stark shift in Gillard’s rhetoric before the details of her media minder’s involvement emerged, and her rhetoric after. A few hours following the event, Gillard played the role of ‘no big deal’ in a clear pitch to try and capitalise on widespread outrage against protestors, and sympathy for the way she was supposedly treated. “I am made of pretty tough stuff and the police did a great job,” Gillard said on the evening of protest. It was a brand of spin that worked – a Herald/Neilsen poll released a week after the Embassy debacle showed a six point rise in Gillard’s popularity, despite the involvement of her office in the leak. There’s a very good analysis of the poll – and the embassy debacle’s affect on it – by Phillip Coorey. It is Gillard’s highest rise in the polls since taking office. But the morning after the event, Radio 2GB was reporting allegations that Gillard’s adviser had staged the whole event. Realising she was firmly back in the frame – but this time at risk of losing public sympathy – Gillard went on the offensive. The target was the Embassy protestors, who had suddenly become “violent”. “The people who initiated those violent acts, the people who were involved in those violent acts are responsible for the violence that was there,” Gillard told media (indeed they were, and we all look forward to the police officers responsible being charged). In the course of her press conference, Gillard referred to violence seven times. Of course, she never actually saw any (unless you count her tripping over one of her security advisers and losing her shoe as violence), because as Channel 9 accurately reported, it occurred only after Gillard had left, and then, as the footage showed, only at the hands of police. Gillard’s attempts to fit the blackfellas up when it’s clear her office had set out to orchestrate the entire incident is disgraceful. It goes not only to her credibility and her fitness to hold office, but it speaks volumes about her ethics, her cowardice, and her willingness to play politics with the nation’s most disadvantaged people. And then there’s Tony Abbott. It was Abbott’s comments, after all, that sparked the whole debacle. Granted, he did not call for the Tent Embassy to be “torn down”, although that was how media reported his comments. Australian Associated Press paraphrased his comments, noting that the embassy should be “pulled down”. Like a game of Chinese whispers, media then embellished it further until finally it was reported Abbott wanted the Embassy “torn down”. The AAP story was posted on news websites around the nation. It remained uncorrected for two hours (and is now the subject of an internal AAP investigation). But having been asked on the very day Aboriginal people were celebrating 40 years of resistance what he thought about it all, Abbott could have elected to say nothing, knowing what an important day it was for Aboriginal people. Instead, he chose to twist the knife that he has plunged into the back of Aboriginal people on countless previous occasions. Imagine the reaction if Aboriginal people came out on, say, Anzac Day and told Australians it was time to “move on”? The events that followed his comments have also taken the focus off the full text of what Abbot actually said. Apart from calling for the Embassy to “move on” Abbot said: “Look, I can understand why the Tent Embassy was set up all those years ago. I think a lot has changed for the better since then. We had the historic apology just a few years ago, one of the genuine achievements of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. We had the proposal which is currently for national consideration to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution. I think the Indigenous people of Australia can be very proud of the respect in which they are held by every Australian.” A couple of points Tony. Firstly, the Tent Embassy was set up “all those years ago” because Aboriginal people were demanding national land rights, a treaty and sovereignty. Call me a cynic, but last time I checked, there is still no treaty, still no national land rights, and still no recognition of sovereignty. Indeed, the Aboriginal are still demanding precisely those things 40 years later. Secondly, you and your party opposed the National Apology during your 12 years in office. Thirdly, you’re refusing to offer bi-partisan support on Constitutional Recognition if it involves amending the legislation to remove the power of your parliament to discriminate against Aboriginal people. As to your comment about “the respect in which they are held by every Australian”, you’re clearly not familiar with the myriad of Australian race-hate pages on Facebook, not to mention the views of the extreme right wing of your own party. Have you not met Wilson Tuckey, a man whose nickname ‘Ironbar’ came from him flogging an Aboriginal man in a pub? Have you not heard of Pauline Hanson, or David Oldfield? Abbott’s comments are clearly complete nonsense. Indeed they are Howard-esque in their ignorance (who can forget the former Prime Minister refusing to accept racism was a factor in the Cronulla riots, or predicting that the $2 billion NT intervention would cost “some tens of millions”). Abbott, however, is rather blessed when it comes to media analysis. Don’t hold your breath for media to revisit and analyse Abbott’s original remarks or Gillard’s deceit. And don’t wait for the media to correct the public record about the riot that never happened. And don’t expect media to scrutinise the use of the nation’s most disadvantaged people as a political football by both major parties, and as a metaphorical football by overzealous cops. History has already been written. In the words of Abbott, it’s time to “move on”. Tomorrow — the tent embassy incident and what it means for grassroot activism v boardroom blackfellas… * Chris Graham is the Managing Editor of Tracker Magazine. He is a Walkley Award and Walkley High Commendation winner, and has twice won the Human Rights Award for his reporting on Indigenous affairs.