Despite the Labour Party winning their recent election, Australia remains NATO’s aggressive pit bull in the Southern Seas, Declan Hayes writes.
Despite the Labour Party winning their recent election, Australia remains NATO’s aggressive pit bull in the Southern Seas.
No sooner had the Labor Party regained power but Penny Wong, their new Foreign Minister was, as this White House briefing clearly shows, off chasing the Chinese dragon, reading the QUAD’s riot act to Fiji and the various other minnow states that dot those vast tracts of oceans.
Next stop was Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, which has had the temerity to act as the independent nation that she is. When Honiara cut ties with Taiwan and switched allegiance to Beijing in November 2021, the CIA’s agents torched much of Chinatown, prompting Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to request help from Australia under the 2017 bilateral security treaty Honiara signed with Canberra. When that help was not forthcoming, Beijing stepped up to the plate.
China’s determination to protect all Solomon Islanders is important on a number of fronts. Beijing’s current pro-activism is in stark contrast to earlier Sinophobic rapes and murders in Indonesia by Australian backed extremists, which went unanswered. China is signalling that those days are now gone.
With the Solomon Islands jumping ship, that just leaves Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Holy See (Vatican City), Honduras, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tuvalu recognizing Taiwan. As several of these countries are in the South Pacific, Uncle Sam feels that its Australian sheep dog is not doing its job of keeping these lambs in order.
Penny Wong’s job is to kick the South Sea Islanders back into line by lying that Australia has their back, and that they must therefore know their place. Though Wong herself is a Malaysian Christian lesbian, who has had several children by IVF, God knows what her Buddhist family, the wider Chinese family or the good folk of the South Seas make of this very unique role model.
Australia, America’s pit bull, must muzzle several stakeholders here. One is the French they recently double crossed in their nuclear submarine deal. The next is the awakened Chinese dragon, which is casting off its century of shame by defending and promoting its international interests. Then there are the South Sea Islands which, in bygone days, were passed around from one imperial power to another, like so many colonial chattels, with coolies galore to exploit.
Honiara’s budding alliance with Beijing shows those days are over and all of Australia’s right on Buddhist-Chinese lesbians will not change it one whit. The Pacific, contrary to their imperialist bluster, is not Australia’s backyard and nor is it the sole preserve of New Zealand, the United States or any other Five Eyes imperialist power.
Australia and its Kiwi sidekick should get over themselves and grow up. They pretend to be a part of Asia but they regularly team up with their British and American masters to subjugate Asia and the South Seas. As long as they belong to the Five Eyes, AUKUS and the QUAD, they have as little credibility in this matter as do their mouthpieces in the BBC, the Brookings Institute, the Economist, ForeignPolicy and the Guardian when they spew NATO’s shibboleths on all this.
Australians speak about the tyranny of distance, how their remoteness from their British mother ship has warped their minds. They have used that as some sort of excuse to justify their overseas war crimes, which stretch from the Second Boer War, up to their Papua New Guinean, Vietnamese, Timorese, Iraqi and Afghan campaigns, where they have had a consistently unenviable record of murdering prisoners in conflicts they had no right to be in.
Like their British and American overlords, Australia’s appalling domestic and overseas track records do not worry them one whit and nor does their shameful political legacy, where Gough Whitlam, their one and only progressive leader, was summarily dismissed on the whim of the Queen’s representative in Australia.
Australia’s cultural cringe has not moved on since MI5’s 1975 dismissal of Whitlam. Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose own back story is as colorful as Penny Wong’s, is supposed to be the new broom that will sweep clean Australia’s problems, including their fascistic Covid lockdown response.
Despite his prior pronouncements on behalf of AUKUS political prisoner Julian Assange, expect no change there. You can disregard the musings of John Pilger and other Ossie fossils on this matter as Australia, which allowed Britain explode nuclear bombs in South Australia during the 1950s (“no one lives there, only some Abos”) is not an independent actor but is, as the Assange campaign under Australia’s previous government clearly showed, the vassal state she always has been.
The Assange campaign, like Australia herself, flies on only one wing. Countries like Russia and China cannot be approached for help as that might antagonize Israeli asset Priti Patel, in whose hands Assange’s fate now nominally rests. But that is the same stunt Penny Wong is pulling in the South Seas, whose people are being told to trust the good graces of the AUKUS, who have never been straight shooters.
Though Julian Assange’s case is a travesty of justice, so too is Australia chasing the dragon on behalf of her masters. The solution to these problems is power resting with the people, the people of China, Fiji, Guam, the Solomon and Marshall Islands and everywhere else Australia and her thuggish allies impose themselves. Solomon Islanders do not need Penny Wongs or Suzy Wongs as their role models. They need not lectures, but reliable partners, Belt and Road Initiative partners like China that can give them the bright future, free from the shackles and manacles of the past, that they deserve. As regards Australia’s Penny Wong, if she can do nothing for Julian Assange, then she can do nothing for the nations of the South Seas, who must put their faith not in Malaysian-Christian-Buddhist-Australian lesbians but in China and her straight talking partners.
