|
A Postcard from Darwin
written for Washington's Institute for Policy Studies
Foreign Policy In Focus, 3 September 2012
When the first contingent of 250 US Marines flew into Darwin last April they were greeted on the tarmac with a personal handshake by Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and welcomed to the city by the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Paul Henderson (also ALP).
When the Marine's rotation finished last month, US ambassador Bleitch and four star Marine general Amos came to Darwin to do a PR jig and celebrate its success; a success measured, it seems, as the absence of riots and major crime.
But there was another notable absence: crowing ALP politicians.
It was two weeks out from the NT elections and, with the tides of fortune turning against the ALP all across the land, the ALP electioneers had turned cautious.
In April they had been buoyed up by a poll of the Lowry Institute, a right wing think tank, which claimed 73% of Australians supported Marines being based in Darwin. But now they were not quite so certain.
Only days before this PR stunt, a kite flying report to the US Congress had recommended a US naval base be built for a nuclear carrier task force at Stirling, near Perth in Western Australia. Opposed by both the WA Premier and ALP leader of the Opposition, such was the national repugnance that overnight Defence Minister Smith changed his language from "nothing definite but maybe in the future" to "definitely not! No US bases!"
The US Marines in Darwin, he claimed, do not constitute a base. Rather it is a "joint rotational facility" at an existing Australian Army base. Which makes the Marines sound as harmless as an inter-service waltz club or maybe a circle of pot smokers.
The Marine (not a) base issue dogged Henderson through the election campaign. Why no parliamentary debate about Darwin becoming a garrison town for 2,500 Marines or more, he was asked? And for the next 100 years if Obama's promises are to be believed. Why no consultation with the Darwin people? .
Also dogging Henderson was the jet noise of Operation Pitch Black, a US-led air war game involving 94 war planes from 6 nations, taking off and landing at the Darwin RAAF Base which is a mere 5 km from the city centre and surrounded by suburbs.
For the four weeks in the lead up to the elections, jet noise was a hot issue in the letters columns. The deluded and the deaf named it the sound of freedom; the awakened and the worried named it the sound of war and, more particularly, the sound of preparation for war with China.
From the outset the Henderson campaign had dropped all reference to its ALP origins. He was Henderson of Team Henderson. But there was no hiding the ALP weasel words about the US Marines. With every attempt to explain the US base away, Team Henderson bled credibility .
With a 5.1% swing, the Terry Mills' Country Liberal Party, which had been so fractious and dippy in opposition that even the local Murdoch daily newspaper had predicted its defeat, won the election.
Mills had been no less loyal than Henderson when it came to saluting the US-Australia alliance but he had added a genuine personal note of concern.
On a recent visit to Indonesia, he told his audiences, he had been surprised by the number of Indonesians who had expressed concern about the presence of the US Marines in Darwin and alarm at the supine acquiescence to it by Australians generally. And now in office he is determined to build fraternal ties between Darwin to Jakarta independently of the feds.
Four years ago all the eight states and territories of Australia had ALP governments and the loss of the last on them bodes ill for the already unpopular Gillard ALP government in Canberra.
Led by Kevin Rudd, ALP had been swept to power in 2007 on the wave of electoral revulsion with PM Howard, the man who had committed Australian troops to the Iraq and Afghan wars against the will of the people in the biggest protests ever.
As with the Obama victory, many expected a wind down of the wars. But in much the same way as Obama made the Bush wars his own, Rudd not only upped combat troops in Afghanistan from 1100 to 1550 but also increased defence spending by an astounding 40%. After Gillard deposed Rudd in 2010 she in turn made Rudd's militarism her own.
Though the polls consistently show that about two in three Australians want the troops home, Gillard has stubbornly stuck with the Nato script: training forces out in 2014, but special forces to stay indefinitely. Not even the five Australian soldier deaths of last week could sway her loyalties to the US war and her determination to be unpopular.
Now her worries are compounded by the blowback on the Darwin US Marines base which will dog her in the run up to November 2013 federal elections.
As a sign of how sensitive her campaign managers have become about the issue of US bases and the prospect of US joint command of troops at Australian bases, last week a major turning point in the history of the US alliance was let go by uncelebrated.
An Australian major general, Rick Burr, was appointed deputy commander of US Army Pacific Command which includes 60,000 soldiers, almost twice the size of the Australian army, with an area of interest from Hawaii to the western border of India, and from the Antarctic to Mongolia.
Seems the high flying military are up there in cloud cuckoo land planning for endless war and expecting to get away with the public purse under the cover of Murdoch media spin.
But voters are showing they have a contempt too deep. Now PM Gillard is facing the prospect of not only being driven from public office but also, like the reviled PM Howard before her, of losing her seat and being driven from the Parliament.
The domestic cost of unquestioning submission to the demands of the US-Australian military alliance is proving to be the maginalisation of the ALP and the opening of a new era of political volatility.
Graeme Dunstan
3 September 2012
| 