White Australia ignores the Awful Truth

AUSTRALIA will be going to Federal Elections later this year. The contest involves the extreme right wing, militant, Bush-ite conservative, Liberal (!) Party-National Party (farmer’s party) Coalition Government led by Prime Minister John Howard and the Opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) led by a religious right, right-wing, extremely pro-American Kevin Rudd.  The minor parties – the Australian Greens and the Australian Democrats – have good records in relation to the Environment, Global Warming, Industrial Rights and Peace. Realistically, decent Australians opposed to lying, war, industrial bullying, racism, man-made global warming and environmental vandalism hope that the Labor Opposition will win Government and help bring Australia back to a rational and humane course.

However there is a fundamental problem in Australia of UNTRUTH in public life through media and politician lying by commission, lying by omission, spin-based untruth ("slies") and blatant, knee-jerk, bald denial of expert scientific and medical opinions. The Coalition is appallingly guilty but unfortunately the Labor Opposition is also guilty of spin and avoidance of unpleasant truths. A brief list of Bi-partisan FAILURES in relation to Truth  follows below  - noting that, Truth versus Lies aside, all the matters listed should be Major Issues in a decent democratic Australia but are largely ignored by the Major Parties and by the cowardly, racist, holocaust-ignoring Mainstream Media. Of course many of the issues below are ALSO issues for Canadians, Americans, the British and the Europeans in general. For carefully-researched  articles on MWC News detailing and documenting many of these matters see: MWC NEWS ).

1. Excess deaths in Iraq: top US medical epidemiologists - from the world's top and Nobel Laureate-containing Bloomberg School of Public Health at the top US medical university Johns Hopkins, published peer-reviewed in the top medical journal The Lancet and endorsed by 27 top Australian medical experts - estimated 655,000 post-invasion excess deaths (as of July 2006) , corresponding to 0.9 million (May 2007) and about 1.0 million (May 2007 if a Syria/Jordan mortality baseline is used for comparison). YET the Government says "No" and even the Opposition asserts "61,000".

2. Coal and greenhouse gas pollution: data from the official US Energy Information Administration (EIA) on oil-, gas- and coal-derived carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution indicates that the total annual CO2 pollution from oil, gas and  coal is 27,043 million tonnes. For a world population of 6,450 million (2005) this corresponds to an annual per capita CO2 production of 4.2 tonnes per person per year. For Australia the annual per capita CO2 production is 19.2 tonnes but Australia is also the world’s biggest coal exporter. If we include the CO2 from Australian coal exports in the picture, then the figure becomes 40.3 tonnes per person for Australia as compared to 20 (the US), 20 (Canada), China (3.7) 1.0 (India), 0.7 (Pakistan) and 0.25 (Bangladesh). In 2006 an Indian (West Bengal) island -Lohachara Island - that was once home to 10,000 people finally disappeared. YET, while the ALP Opposition is "greener" than the Coalition, it is resolutely committed to Coal (Australia is the biggest Coal exporter in the world) i.e. locking Australia in as a nation of selfish, PC racist Climate Criminals imposing Climate Genocide on deltaic Third World and Developing countries such as Bangladesh.

3. Universities and Abolition of Fees: University education in Australia used to be FREE – but no longer, due to BOTH Major Parties.  Australia needs a complement of research-informed scholars (for industrial, security, health and other national interest reasons) but why should 17-21 year old university students have to pay for it? Further (and I am talking from 40 years of experience and indeed PRESENT academic experience) high quality TEACHING with maximal student access and by research-informed scholarly experts can be delivered (e.g. by Accredited Remote Learning, ARL) for 10 times lower cost than the   present on-campus cost. YET both the Coalition and Opposition are committed to the Public Fiction and to University Fees.

4. State Education: the State Education Systems in the various States do their best with limited resources but ordinary Australian taxpayers - and more particularly their Children - are being grossly short-changed.  This is the worst-kept Bipartisan secret in Australia YET both the Coalition and the ALP Opposition insist on the lavish funding of private schools.

5. Common School curricula: both the Coalition and the ALP Opposition want "common National curricula" in Maths, English and History in Australian Schools and yet the examples above show that both parties are in practice committed to anti-arithmetic  spin and lying by omission. Just imagine that both Major Parties had a de facto policy of removing mention of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million victims) from the national curriculum - YET  I suspect (from delivering lectures on the subject) that only about 1% of Australians are aware of the man-made, WW2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India that claimed 4 million lives, was associated with horrendous sexual abuse of starving women and girls, may have been due to a deliberate “scorched earth” British defence strategy against the Japanese  - and has been largely "rubbed out" of British (and Australian) history.

6. Further to #2, and renewable energy sources: solar energy incident on the earth  is 10,000 times greater than the energy currently used by Man. Applying the lowest environmental impact factor of 2 (see Australian expert Dr Mark Diesendorf) to the cost of fossil fuels, we find that solar and wind (indirect solar) are ALREADY competitive with coal. It is estimated that even without such an environmental impact factor, based on "economies of scale" commercial "non-silicon thin-film photovoltaics (PVs)" from the ETH, Switzerland will be competitive with coal in 5 years and Indian mass-produced "silicon thin-film PVs" will be competitive with coal within 10 years; optimal, large-scale  wind farms in California are already competitive with coal. YET both Government and Coalition are committed to Coal.

7. War crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan: from UN Population Division and the latest medical literature data from Johns Hopkins University, post-invasion excess deaths in the Bush War on Terror total 3.4 million. Taking the 2006 Johns Hopkins data but using a Jordan/Syria comparative baseline of 4 deaths per 1,000 per year  (as opposed to a baseline of 5.5 deaths per 1,000 per year for pre-invasion Iraq after 12 years of crippling Sanctions) gives an annual excess death rate of 9.3 per 1,000 i.e. 9,300 per million  and post-invasion excess deaths totalling 9,300 x 27 x 4 = 1,004,400 i.e. 1.0 million as of March  2007. Further, the UN estimates that there are 4 million Iraqi refugees and WHO estimates that  the “total annual per capita medical expenditure” in Occupied Iraq is merely $64 - as compared to $23 for Occupied Afghanistan, $2,389 (Occupier UK), $2,874 (Occupier Australia) and   $5,711 (Occupier US) (2003 figures). The latest UN  data indicate 2.4 million post-invasion excess deaths in Afghanistan, and that there are 3.7 million Afghan refugees.  The latest UNICEF data indicate 370,000 Occupied Afghan children and 122,000 Occupied Iraqi children are dying each year or 1,300 daily or ONE PER MINUTE - 90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance war crimes involving non-provision of life-sustaining requisites unequivocally demanded of Occupiers by Articles 38, 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Civilian Persons in Time of War. YET both the Coalition and the ALP Opposition are committed to the ongoing Afghanistan atrocity which amounts to an Afghan Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention.

8. Forests and wild nature: a recent study published in the prestigious US scientific journal Science estimated that the benefits from the preservation of remaining wild nature would exceed the cost of doing so by a factor of OVER 100 - YET both the Coalition and the Opposition are committed to wanton destruction of our forests.

9. Opiate-related drug deaths - Australia's Centre for Drug Research (Curtin University) estimated that 7 million people die from drugs globally each year - about 5 million from tobacco, 1.8 million from alcohol and 0.2 million from illicit drugs (0.1 million opiate-drug related). It is estimated that about 0.55 million people have died globally from opiate drug-related causes since the US invasion of Afghanistan - largely due to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from a few percent of world share in 2001 to 76% by 2002 and a current 90% of world market share. This has cost the lives of about 0.5 million people globally, including 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans. YET the Coalition and the Opposition support US policies in Afghanistan.