How the CIA took control of Australia in 1975

John Pilger writes a most informative article about how the US subdued and took control of the Australian government.

Any comments or thoughts would be appreciated.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55170.htm

It explains how and why Australia serves at the pleasure of Washington.

 

Whitlam was the worst PM we ever had, bar none.

Nothing he says here is all that revealing. Middle powers almost always ally with a superpower. Before the US it was Britain.

I am very critical of our relationship with the US. There are reasons to be critical. Google "Five Eyes". We are solidly in the global mass surveillance apparatus and this is going to be the biggest challenge facing freedom and liberty in the coming decades.

But it's almost worth it to **** Whitlam off, he was really that intolerable.

 

I visited Sydney and Bankstown back in 1971 and loved it!

I read the book about the CIA's Nugan-Hand Bank, so I know they were corrupting the country for years.

I loved the Netflix series "Rake" about lawyers in Sydney and Canberra. Great show!

 

From WW2 but especially the 60's and 70's certainly in the UK and from this it would seem Australia as well were the times when we worked hard to put into place the Universal Democracy we were supposed to have. The UK did not get involved in the Vietnam war because they were afraid of revolution...something the elite had been afraid of since the French Revolution. This guy sounds great and sounds like the sort of thinking which was going on at this time.

I have long found many of the things Australia gets up to unbelievable - like its treatment of refugees and its support for the US against Iran and its refusal to act intelligently towards climate change. I don't even think it sounds like the obvious Australian though they like most places have had people turning to the far right.

I have heard that the US was thinking of war if necessary in the 60's and 70's with the UK if it got too much social of the social democracy which was supposed to be going on at that time. Of course Thatcher did the job for them...but we heard the same when it looked like we were going to have a genuine socialist PM in Corbyn. I think it was Pompeo who promised if he managed to get in with all the slander which was going on, they would make sure he never could be PM. Make of that what you will.

Since coming online and getting the opportunity to look deeper at things I have discovered that Britain's Deep State is almost always hand in hand with the US when she is up to her shadier deals. This even seems to have been going on even while we the population were extremely critical of the US and is something I never heard about.

The US is a State for the Elite. It works to make the rich richer at the expense of not just the poor but the Middle Class. The most wealthy have managed to make money during the Coronavirus and it is the ordinary American who will suffer because of this. Now the US is screaming Far Right Authoritarianism at the top of its voice - and frankly that would be needed to keep in place what is happening. I think the protests are the most hopeful thing I have seen for a long time.

During my childhood and early adulthood we were working for Democracy. Yes, we officially were a Democratic Society, we had a vote every five years and at that time we had a Welfare State but we were working to make sure we had what was needed for our country to be democratic. Equal rights for all are an easy example of that.

Now certainly in the US it is in no way a Democracy. It is an oligarchy and those people have coming close to as much power as the old top of the aristocracy. Australia from your article also is not a democracy and the UK is not either. Although it is considered reckless to be heavy on the Press, the reality is that apart from alternatives on the net, we no longer have a free press at all and Australian Julian Assange is suffering as a fact of that.

I so remember in my early years how people knew how important it was to have a free press - how the Times workers knew what we were headed for as they went on protests and the police battened their heads. People went crazy if they thought that someone was getting a monopoly because they knew from Germany how this lends itself to fascism. Thatcher and Regan followed by Blair in the UK made sure Government became one of serving them not the people.

People though have thought they were free. We do have climate change to deal with as well as the decreasing income and massive long term unemployment which is expected - definitely in the US, almost certainly in the UK. I do not know about Australia.

The way out is for us to claim what we were supposed to have been for about one hundred years - Our Democracies and our right to choose how we live with equal rights for all. I think the current situation could be surprisingly creative. If not say hello to 1939 again.

 

What do you mean, the Queen is still our head of state... I doubt any Australian really believe we're independent... as long as life is good I'm not sure they care. Life is likely to become a lot worse in the near future, we'll see how blase they are about interference then. In the meantime China is hammering the crap out of us because they're too scared of America, and isn't that typical of a bully to kick the little guy because it fears the big guy. There's still politicians running around thinking they can fix things with China... clueless...I won't even begin on our financial system, we're 100% owned...and oh boy we're going to pay for that privilege.

 

There are still people who take Pilger seriously? Will wonders never cease. I respect my brain too much to waste time reading any more of his drivel, but I do know a bit about 1975. Of course, I have this crazy left wing perspective on the world that treats people outside the US & other assigned 'boogyemen' as if they are intelligent enough to act in their own nations for their own reasons. The Pilgers of the world treat everyone as cyphers or victims. I have also read some of the 'US overthrew Whitlam' stuff and none of it qualifies as evidence to anyone who prefers facts to imagination.

Just a warning: the following involves significant actual detail about the politics of Australia. It isn't a simple 'good guys/bad guys' fairy tale, and it assumes Australians actually act for their own reasons. If that is too difficult then it isn't for you.

For those unfamiliar with Australian history, the Whitlam years were tumultuous. They were preceded by 23 unbroken years of Conservative rule (the conservative party here is called the Liberal Party, but it really isn't). An entire generation of conservative voters & politicians thought that they ruled the nation by birthright. When they lost power they saw it as some catastrophic mistake that had to be remedied in order to save the nation.

Whitlam led a left wing reformist government. He wasn't as radical as he has been painted, but there were people in his government that were fairly radical. For all that, his reform platform was mostly pretty good & mostly pretty popular. Not everything was a great idea, but there were many, many great ideas. The problem is that 1) after 23 years out of power they tried to do everything all at once; and 2) the 1973 economic crisis hit. Economic management wasn't the government's strong suit, but even if it had been few western governments of any stripe managed that crisis well. If Labor had won power 3 years earlier (as it almost did), at the height of a commodities boom, the story would have been very different.

So, you have a conservative party that thinks anything but it in power is the end of the world, a reformist left wing government that scared the hell out of conservatives and an economic crisis. Add to that combustible mix one of the most ambitious and destructive politicians in Australian history. By the time he took power in 1975 Malcolm Fraser had already forced out his own party's Prime Minister and then another leader of the party. As opposition leader Fraser used every dirty trick he could to force Whitlam out of power. Aided by two conservative state Premiers who ignored 70+ years of convention to appoint conservatives to casual vacancies in the Senate (the party whose senators are being replaced is supposed to name the replacement) Fraser was able to deny the government money, creating a constitutional crisis. Fraser then colluded with the Governor General, himself a vain and self important man given to seeking prejudiced advice that confirmed his own worst instincts, to dismiss Whitlam. It was constitutional, but there were other alternatives that were equally constitutional but not taken. Whitlam did not need to be removed and should not have been removed, but it was all perfectly legal.

Fraser then called an election, which he won in a landslide. That last bit needs to be re-read once or twice. People had a chance to return Whitlam to power and they did not. They also did not in 1977 when he led the party to an election again. They could have, but they chose not to. That is called democracy.

So, how much of this required any sort of US intervention? Absolutely none of it. Not one little bit. Did Nixon want Whitlam gone? You bet he did. While Whitlam wasn't especially anti-US, there were people in the government, including deputy PM Jim Cairns (well, he wasn't deputy by 1975, but for much of the government) who were decidedly anti-American. Cairns had been one of the main anti-Vietnam War organisers. I have no doubt the US politicians & people inside the intelligence community were communicating to Liberal politicians & people in or intelligence agencies that they were not happy with Whitlam. I have no doubt that some of them offered assistance. What I have never been able to find is any evidence that US attitudes made the slightest difference to the attitudes of conservative politicians in Australia. They wanted Whitlam gone from day one and they were prepared to trash generations of accepted practice to do it. I do not for one minute doubt they would have done the exact same thing if no one in the US had said a single word to them

 

As long as Australians are happy being dominated by Washington, I'm happy.

 

Excellent article, so true and at the same time, so sad....
Reg.

 

Some very interesting comments here, haven't looked at it that way....
Cheers

 

Also a very good reply, which makes me think and rethink, thanks

 

As long as you do not piss in our soup we will follow but that is and has been changing

Look up ASEAN

 

Thanks....I think.

I have a long running issue with the way my fellow left wingers think about the way these things unfold. They consistently treat people in 'smaller' nations as if they have no agency. The only people who are seen as acting for their own reasons are the ones they agree with. It is actually very similar to the way right wingers viewed Communist movements - they assumed everyone was just puppets of Moscow or (later) Beijing rather than having their own motivations and making their own decisions.

If you want one of the most stellar examples of how this works have a look at discussions about Richard Nixon's attempts to derail the 1968 Paris Peace talks. While he was running for office Nixon contacted the South Vietnamese government & told them that if they withdrew from the talks he would get them a better deal. They did withdraw, which was a blow to Hubert Humphrey's campaign in a close election. Johnson knew from his sources what Nixon had done. Everyone involved thought Nixon had cause the talks to fail, something which people have subsequently used to blame Nixon for causing the war to drag on for years.

Only one problem with this narrative - nobody seems to have bothered asking the Sth Vietnamese their perspective. It isn't that hard to find accounts from people at the top of that government, all of whom say they already knew they could influence the US election by pulling out of the talks, that they didn't trust Humphrey ans that they liked Nixon. In other words, they would have done the same thing anyway. That doesn't make what Nixon did any more acceptable, but it does change the narrative a bit.

I see 1975 in similar terms. The fact that America didn't like Whitlam isn't the reason the Libs acted the way they did. They had been hating on Whitlam since the 60s & were desperate to remove him. They were running their own race, it just happened that the US was cheering from the stands. I also suspect the Queen's letters will turn out to be less exciting than people think.

 

From memory it was not just about Whitlam

Al Grassby the man who started multiculturalism in this country also played a part in making that government unpopular

There was the Morosi affair and ever other tiny bit of dirt they could explode

These were the days when newspapers ruled the information feed and government contracts dictated to the news

Famously the Courier Mail in QLD not only jumped to Johs song but they conga danced to it. And Joh hated Whitlam

 

Yeah, I was giving the dot point version. There were a lot of things that led to the unpopularity. Some were policies, some were personalities, some were good ideas in hindsight, others were terrible errors of judgement. Grassby was controversial, as was Cairns, though both were victims of their own actions as much as anything else. Connor was probably the worst and cost the government dearest. Ultimately Whitlam failed to rein in his people. He was a great man who also had great flaws.

In hindsight I think the saddest thing is that they didn't win in 69. That would have given them the time & money to implement the reform agenda properly before the roof fell in. That said, if you look at the list of policy achievements of what was effectively a single term of government not only is the amount staggering, but also the vision. So much of it is stuff that is either taken for granted now or stuff that is still good ideas. Indeed, much of it is so taken for granted that we forget it was ever contested.

 

Up to and including our UHC

They should have been re elected for that alone

 

A succinct summary of a perennial problem. The far left and far right are virtual mirror image of each other. Everyone in the 'middle' of the bell curve (or at least those on their side of it) are naive victims or unthinking puppets who have to be 'saved' from their ideological opponents. And here's the thing. They have to be 'saved' regardless of whether they wish to participate or not. Dare to object and you become by default part of the 'problem' i.e. the enemy.

Far left or far right the issue is the same - the sheep just don't know whats good for them.

 

As a wise man (or woman), what is your opinion on the subject then? Please enlighten us....
Reg.

 

It should be obvious. BigFella pretty much hit the nail on the head. Australia like every other country in the Western World has a vested interest in co-operating with Washington - up to a point. And that point is where their immediate geopolitical and economic interests diverge markedly from that of the US. For instance only a fool would think our policies on China have exactly mirrored those of the United States over the past 20 years or so. And that is because we are even more heavily dependent on trade with China for our economic well being than the US is. Likewise our commitment to various international institutions like the World Trade Organization and various UN sponsored treaties. Hardy in lockstep with the US there are we?

As for Pilger? He's still fighting the dismissal while looking for CIA Agents under every rock. Just like his equally deluded opposite numbers on the right see 'Neo-socialist/One World Government conspiracies lurking around every corner. Meanwhile the only country left in his lexicon of trustworthy functioning socialist paradises in Cuba. Every other country on that list well and truly 'dropped the ball' and started chasing the capitalist dream long ago.

 

Most Australians don't like to hear this but Australia is like a Remora. Why did our China policy no mirror the US during the Obama years.. because they didn't really have one and it was beneficial for us to just go with the grow.

 

Australia's foreign policy on China was very much in line with the rest of the world including America for the decade pre Trump. The consensus was that China would take over from America, historically known as the East West Pendulum. The book written by this guy Robert Lloyd George, he explains it in this video below from 2006 (notable is on 15 min's where he talks about a phone call from Soros on knowledge regarding Politburo changes in Hanoi - you may be aware that Soros was intimately involved with South Africa's ANC and their People's War crafted by the Soviet Union and the Communist Vietnamese...so his knowledge for the investment discussed was likely obtained first hand from Hanoi)

http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/archives/videos/item/east-west-pendulum


Also notable is this interview with Soros October 2009
...during an interview with the Financial Times. According to Soros, China must lead this New World Order, “creating it and owning it,” in the same way the United States “owns the current order.”
https://newspunch.com/george-soros-china-new-world-order/

Clearly Australia's pro China policies pre Trump was very much in line with the Global think for this period.. the switching of the East West Pendulum from West to East. No wonder Soros said the world will end if Trump is elected... according to the East West Index he is likely very heavily invested in the East....

 

Why then the Iraq War for us? We could have said no, like other obvious more mature countries....
Reg.

 

This was the deplorable reality of Obama too, and beneath it all was Bush Sr.

Lest we forget, elder Bush was the CIA spymaster for some years and an intimate to just about every American misstep in my lifetime. He has never been examined in this light.

 

Because rightly or wrongly we, and host of other Western countries decided it was in our best interests to participate. But regardless of that point picking one event and one only historical event/decision and saying 'look this proves Australia is a puppet of the CIA' is being disingenuous at best simply because it deliberately ignores other policy decisions during the same period where we didn't march in lockstep with US policy. In other words it's cherry picking only those facts that support you argument.

 

I don't really understand the problem with accepting our "Remora" status. Truth is Australia is a country worth raiding and invading & we simply do not have the military needed to ward off attacks from countries who are very strong militarily.
We basically need to choose our shark and if we choose shark China we choose communism...unfortunately the Chinese take our decision personally but they really shouldn't.

Besides it's not as if we are the only Remora, there's only a few sharks, most countries are Remoras. That's why the rogue countries want nuclear weapons... instant shark status.... (I'm having way too much fun here with my analogy)

you don't want to be a Remora... fine, tell the US to fck off and develop nuclear weapons...

 

I agree that there is a bell curse although for me it is more of an ellipse with both ends curving back on themselves until they have more in common than the “common” man. The further ends of both right and left do want common things - mostly them in charge and us obeying.

Most everyday people - especially here in Aus just want a government that is not to greedy or inefficient and they want them looking after everyone