It is still twelve months till the start of the sporting program for the Sydney Olympics. But the Olympics embarrassment program is well under way, and the participants are all on steroids.
At a public meeting in London earlier this year, expatriate feminist Germaine Greer pleaded with the world's black athletes to use the Sydney Games for an "expression of solidarity" with Aborigines. Comparing Australia to apartheid-era South Africa, she said she was ashamed to have been born here, and vowed not to return until the Federal Government agreed on a treaty with Aborigines that would recompense past injustices. Unfortunately however, she does not seem to take her vows seriously, as she visited Australia a few days ago.
At the beginning of this month, the Human Rights Commissioner, Chris Sidoti, took his organisation to new levels of partisanship by saying that the Olympics should be exploited to highlight human rights abuses in Australia. Mr Sidoti announced his support for the campaign that Charles Perkins and other indigenous activists are organising to shame Australia during the Games, with tours to show visiting foreign media and dignitaries the Third World conditions under which many Aborigines live.
Mr Perkins should hope that visiting journalists, especially those from Asian countries, have not done any homework on his own background. He is not the ideal choice for the public face of a campaign against injustice and racism, because throughout the 1980s he was complaining about Asian immigration in a truly objectionable way.
In one interview Perkins said "every third face in the street is Asian ... The humanitarian aspect of the boat people is all bullshit". He concluded with the comment "who cares if I'm called racist?" In another, he called for an indefinite ban on migrants from South East Asia, and urged "an AIDS-type campaign" to promote public awareness of the issue -- an ugly and reckless analogy that no non-Aboriginal public figure would ever be allowed to get away with.
Perkins is an old mate of John Pilger, the Sydney-born publicist for radical causes and passionate supporter of the communist regime from which the South East Asian boat people were escaping. Pilger recently wrote that in the late 1960s, "when I went beyond the Australian frontier for the first time and saw that which I had never imagined, Charlie was my guide". It must have been an amazing trip, because by that time the frontier no longer existed.
But Pilger has never allowed facts to spoil the feelings of outrage he is trying to create. He is repaying Charlie's favour of long ago with his own massive contribution to the Embarrassment Olympics, Welcome to Australia, a TV special which was shown in Britain at the end of August. It will grace our screens later this month, and Pilger hopes that it will eventually go to viewers in over thirty countries.
Welcome to Australia has led to calls in the English press for a boycott of the Sydney Games. This reaction is hardly surprising. According to Courier-Mail commentator Gerard Henderson, who has already seen the program, it features Macquarie University Professor Colin Tatz stating that Australia has been "at" genocide in "a much more consistent and systematic way" than what occurred in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union.
This is a demented assessment, making the numerous other fictions and slanders that Pilger peddles seem rather tame by comparison. And Pilger is quite shameless -- in a warm-up article published in the English paper The Guardian shortly before his TV program went to air, he blithely stated that "nigger hunts" to massacre Aborigines continued until well into the 1960s.
He also made the false and mischievous claim that the Howard Government had legislated to effectively remove the common law rights that the High Court recognised in the Mabo decision. For good measure he added that "the prototype of the One Nation Party was the "One Australia Policy" espoused 10 years ago by John Howard", obviously forgetting his mate Charlie Perkins' role as a kind of curtain-raiser for Pauline Hanson and her party.
Nevertheless, one of the great strengths of this nation is that even people who despise Australia can write what they like with little fear of any legal or physical harassment. No official obstacles will prevent anyone, whether foreign or home-grown, from doing their damnedest to malign Australia during the Sydney Olympics -- or at any other time.
In fact, the strongest impediments to open and candid reporting of indigenous issues could come from the remote Aboriginal communities that the foreign media may visit. As the editor of The Canberra Times, Jack Waterford, has commented, a number of these communities impose restrictions on journalists that "are more onerous than those enforced by the military in war". They are required to sign an undertaking "agreeing to absolute censorship, forever, of anything" they might write about what they observe.
However, some good could come from the Embarrass Australia campaign. It could provide the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation with just the opportunity it needs to convince sceptical Australians that it accepts that reconciliation has to be a two-way street. Instead of jumping onto the Perkins-Pilger bandwagon, the CAR could prepare an alternative information program for the media.
While not shying away from depicting the realities of Aboriginal disadvantage, CAR's program would make clear the enormous efforts and resources that Australian governments and people have devoted towards addressing the issues over the past few decades. It could acknowledge the intractability of the some of the problems. It would also stress the many genuine achievements of Australian society.
And in the interests of real balance, it could even point out that some Aboriginal activists who have been very vocal in condemning the rest of Australia have proved to be far more interested in enriching themselves through shady deals than in assisting their own people -- just as happens in many parts of the Third World. In an Olympic year, perhaps even pigs might fly.
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