5-17-06, 8:56 am
“Just in case”, says Howard, a platitude echoed by Beazley and Kevin Rudd – who are just as imperialist-minded and eager to grab a piece of the action in the South Pacific as their Liberal counterparts.
And the best way to go about this is to install governments sympathetic to Australian interests.
The Australian warships will arrive off the East Timorese coast just as the Central Committee of Fretelin is to meet and possibly elect a new Prime Minister.
It was only a short time ago that the East Timorese Government succeeded in squeezing a better deal out of the Australian Government over the rich Timor Gap oilfields. Once this money starts flowing into the coffers of the East Timor Government it will be able to start to alleviate the desperate poverty that remains the main problem facing the people of East Timor and is a cause of their discontent.
The Australian Government’s self-appointed role of Big Brother to the Pacific Island nations has again been highlighted at the Pacific 2020 conference held in Sydney last week under the banner of Challenges and Opportunities for Growth. Alexander Downer gave a keynote address. He said that the report prepared for the conference was about “a critically important issue in a region that is critically important to Australia: economic growth in the Pacific and East Timor”.
But for Downer, the growth he envisions in the Pacific Island nations and East Timor will be based on opening up their economies to foreign takeover and the expansion of the private sector.
Downer said the report “underscores that we need to do more to support growth and private-sector development …”. He announced the allocation of “$22.5 million over six years for two programs aimed specifically at encouraging private sector development in the Pacific and East Timor”.
Downer also announced another allocation of $10 million over five years to the Asian Development Bank’s proposal for a “Private Sector Development Initiative in the Pacific and East Timor”. He said it “will promote enterprise, investment and growth by addressing the impediments to private sector development”.
One has to turn to the Pacific 2020 report to find out what the “impediments” to the private sector are.
It says that “The alienability of land can be seen as a ‘defining issue’ in Pacific politics ... People have a deep-seated fear that they will be stripped of their land”. And that is precisely the objective of the Australian government’s push to develop and give all economic power to the “private sector”.
The report says: “Our view of the way forward is to free up customary lands, so that land can be freely sold, leased and mortgaged to raise funds for development.”
Land in most of the Pacific Island nations is still owned by the communities – in other words it is collectively owned. But collective ownership is anathema to the private enterprise brigade who believes that capitalist ownership is the only way to achieve “development”. The truth is, however, that capitalism, while making a small number super-rich has left the majority of the world’s people in poverty.
The Pacific 2020 report says that customary ownership of land remains at 97 percent in PNG, 84 percent in the Solomon Islands and 83 percent in Fiji.
Faced with this reality the task of destroying communal land ownership and converting ownership to private ownership is immense but the Australian government is not backing away as it attempts to foist a full-blown capitalist economy on the island nations.
The report says that: “Gov-ern-ment interventions that en-courage the gradual, progressive reform of customary tenures are likely to promote steady and sustainable growth…”
That is why the Australian government is attempting, even by using its naval and military forces, its treasury officials, judges and jailers, to impose governments which will carry out this assault on the customary ownership of land.
But the report is fearful that the destruction of communal ownership will lead to “landlessness and poverty” – a fear that is well justified.
So the Australian government is attempting to achieve a compromise, what it calls the “middle option”. It calls for the protection of customary groups “while individuals are given the security they need for investment in land development”. This fake compromise would, however, lead to the privatisation of land which would then become owned by the logging companies, the gold and copper miners such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper, plantation owners and other big capitalist investors.
If the governments of the Pacific Island nations are conned into accepting this false compromise they will have on their hands a population that will be landless and poverty stricken – a situation that will lead to widespread social unrest and conflict. This will leave their countries ripe for occupation by Australian military forces, who will move in under Australia’s policy of “assisting failed states” to shore up the interests of the private sector investors and put down the dissenting “mob”.
Just as they claimed to be doing in the Solomon Islands.
From The Guardian
