Australia: Murdoch media attacks 1976 Lebanese refugee intake

This year was no exception. 1976 was a turbulent time, and a serious review of the documents of the inner workings of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s conservative coalition government could have shed light on a range of key issues.

Fraser had seized office in November 1975 through a fundamental attack on democratic rights—the dismissal of the elected Whitlam Labor government by Governor-General Sir John Kerr in the “Canberra coup”—and faced deep-going hostility and resistance throughout the working class. In July, despite the best efforts of the trade union leaders to prevent an eruption, there was a one-day general strike against Fraser’s dismantling of the universal Medibank health insurance scheme.

The government tried to impose severe spending cuts amid an ongoing global economic crisis—reflected in double-digit inflation, rising unemployment, stagnant investment and a large budget deficit. By the end of the year, after trying to inflict an outright wage freeze on workers, it had been compelled to devalue the Australian dollar by 17.5 percent in a bid to boost exports.

In order to prepare for further class confrontations, Fraser began a series of measures to significantly strengthen the security and intelligence agencies, establishing a new peak Office of National Assessments within his own department and creating an elite SAS force for domestic use, under the guise of “counter-terrorism”.

In foreign policy, his cabinet continued the policy of the Whitlam government (and the Ford administration in the United States) of supporting the Indonesian invasion and military occupation of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, while publicly trying to distance itself from the ongoing bloodshed by calling on the Suharto regime to allow a formal act of self-determination.

Far from subjecting these actions to close scrutiny, the Murdoch media trawled through the 50,000 pages of 944 cabinet submissions and 2,098 decisions to concentrate on just two documents—both of which dealt with Lebanese immigration.

On January 1, 2007 the front page of the Australian accused Fraser of “contributing to contemporary racial tensions” by allowing Lebanese Muslim refugees into the country during the first phase of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. Under the banner headline, “Fraser was warned on Lebanese migrants,” the article claimed: “Immigration authorities warned the Fraser government in 1976 it was accepting too many Lebanese Muslim refugees without ‘the required qualities’ for successful integration.”

The aim was to further two campaigns currently being waged by the Murdoch media: to vilify Muslim and Arab Australians and to attack Malcolm Fraser. A traditional conservative, Fraser has become concerned in recent years at the destabilising potential of some of the Howard government’s policies. He has, for example, condemned its treatment of refugees, its flouting of legal and democratic norms in the “war on terror” and its proposed new English-language “Australian values” citizenship test.

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/thir-j10.shtml