Australia: The Sickening of Democracy
National myths are usually partly true. In Australia, the myth of an egalitarian society, or "fair go", has an extraordinary history. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage,
Australia: The Sickening of Democracy
National myths are usually partly true. In Australia, the myth of an egalitarian society, or "fair go", has an extraordinary history. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, child benefits and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in Australia. By the 1960s, Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world.
Today, these are forgotten, subversive truths. As schools are ordered to fly the flag (its British Union Jack still mocking from on high), the maudlin story of Australian soldiers dying pointlessly for an imperial master at Gallipoli is elevated, along with barely veiled colonialism and racism. Self-promoted as a bastion of human rights, Australia has become a sideshow of their denial and degradation. Many Australians are aware of this, not least those who filled a small Sydney theatre on 26 January, "Australia Day", which celebrates the dispossession of the Aboriginal people by the British in 1770. The Australian playwright Stephen Sewell's remarkable play Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America was showing at the Stables Theatre. Inspired in part by Franz Kafka's The Trial, it strips away the democratic facade of Bush's America -- "if you want to see America, look into the eyes of its prisoners", says one of the principal characters. Rapacious power dressed as democracy, and the fear and silence of its privileged -- notably academics -- are Sewell's theme and one that is rarely discussed in public in Australia.
When the performance ended, a lawyer, Stephen Hopper, stood and spoke. It was as if a long silence had been shattered. Hopper is the lawyer for Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. He described Habib's suffering and torture, first in Egypt where he was "rendered" by the Americans after they had kidnapped him in Pakistan. In a CIA-supported prison in Egypt, he was suspended from the ceiling with only an electrified barrel to stand on. "He would stand and get a shock or hang painfully by his arms until he'd collapse," said Hopper. He was blindfolded and locked in rooms that were flooded with water and charged with electricity. In Guantanamo Bay, the guards brought a prostitute who "stood over him naked while he was strapped to the floor and menstruated on him". Photographs of Habib's wife and four children were defaced. "The Americans in their wisdom have taken the heads off the pictures," said Hopper, "enlarged them and superimposed them wit