On 26th January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be ‘a day for families’, say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth.

Those we used to call ‘New Australians’ often choose 26 January, ‘Australia Day’, to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26th January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s ‘First Fleet’ dropped anchor on 26th January, 1788.

This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was ‘settled’. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our hearts”.

The world’s most ancient culture

The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.”

This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.

The truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile ‘apology’ in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical ‘settlement’. Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”

He was wrong – up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26th January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in ‘language’: their own.

Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US. The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken”:

“Imagine watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.

“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”

Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud – with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be ‘divided’ on opposing racism.

Invasion day is to be commemorated – not celebrated

On Australia Day 2016 – Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day – there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation.

This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political grovelling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of ‘kaffir’-abusing South Africans.

Apartheid runs through Australian society. Within a short flight from Sydney, Indigenous people live the shortest of lives. Men are often dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and deaf from otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me,

“I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class of the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

The racism that allows this in one of the most privileged societies on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a ‘Protector of Aborigines’ oversaw the theft of mixed race children with the justification of “breeding out the colour”.

Today, record numbers of Indigenous children are removed from their homes and many never see their families again. On 11th February, an inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding the return of the stolen children.

Inspiring racism worldwide

Australia is the envy of European governments now fencing in their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as in Hungary. Refugees who dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have long been treated as criminals, along with the ‘smugglers’ whose hyped notoriety is used by the Australian media to distract from the immorality and criminality of their own government.

The refugees are confined behind barbed wire on average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness. Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister private security firms includes concentration camps on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.

The Australian military – whose derring-do is the subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport bookstalls – has played an important part in ‘turning back the boats’ of refugees fleeing wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility, is acknowledged in this cowardly role.

On this Australia Day, the ‘pride of the services’ will be on display. This pride extends to the Australian Immigration Department, which commits people to its Gulag for ‘offshore processing’, often arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and despair and rot.

Last week it was announced that Immigration officials had spent $400,000 on medals which they will award their heroic selves. Put out more flags.

John Pilger is a journalist, writer and filmmaker based in Australia. He can be reached through his website, where this article was originally published. Follow him on Twitter @johnpilger and on Facebook.

The film: Utopia (watchable online) is distributed in the USA by
Bullfrog Films.
 
Action

• On January 26, Indigenous Australians and their supporters will march from The Block in Redfern, Sydney, to the Sydney Town Hall. The march will begin at 10am.
• On Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against Removals will address a rally in Canberra. This will start at 12 noon at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march to Parliament House.

Climate change deniers are quickly becoming some of Britain’s most vocal Eurosceptics.

Prominent climate deniers including Matt Ridley, Owen Paterson, Lord Lawson, and James Delingpole join the roughly 50% of the British public who are in favour of the UK leaving the European Union.

Last spring, Prime Minister David Cameron promised in his Conservative Party election manifesto to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU. It is expected that an in-out referendum will be held before the end of 2017.

But what does this group of anti-greens stand to gain from a ‘Brexit’? Does the UK leaving the EU simply fall in line with their general politics, or is there a more specific ‘brown’ agenda at play?

“It’s really ideological”, said Nick Mabey, chief executive of E3G, a non-profit organisation focused on driving climate policy: “The package of what they see as internationalist, left-wing state intervention – which is a caricature of what climate policy is and why they don’t like it.”

Winter flooding – blame the meddling bureaucrats – not climate change!

The group kicked off the New Year with a deluge of articles blaming the EU for the unprecedented winter flooding across the country. According to the Met Office it was the UK’s wettest December on record.

But according to James Delingpole, a former Telegraph blogger, climate change did not cause the flooding. Writing in The Sun on New Year’s Eve, he blamed the “Brussels bureaucrats who, driven by lunatic green ideology, have made illegal the measures that might have prevented flooding.” Namely, dredging.

Coal baron and Times columnist Matt Ridley chimed in on 4 January, with an article titled ‘Don’t Blame Climate Change For These Floods‘. Like Delingpole, he pointed to the EU Water Framework Directive which prohibits governments from dredging rivers.

This was followed by former environment secretary Owen Paterson who presented the same argument on BBC Radio Four, saying that leaving the EU will help protect the country from flood damage. During the 2014 flooding Paterson was criticised by the then environment shadow secretary Maria Eagle for letting his climate denial “blind him“ to the dangers of future flooding.

More right-wing climate change deniers backing Brexit

These articles come at the same time as Ridley and Paterson announced they had joined the group Business for Britain which launched a campaign on 6 January in north east England for the UK’s exit from the EU.

These aren’t the first climate deniers to launch a Brexit campaign however. They join Lord Lawson, ex-chancellor and head of the climate denying Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), who announced in October that he would lead the Conservative campaign to leave the EU.

It’s not just climate deniers though but also their funders who support a British exit from the EU. Last November the Financial Times reported Michael Hintze, a known funder of the GWPF, was “close to donating a large sum to the EU Out camp”.

And don’t forget UKIP’s Nigel Farage – famous for saying he has “no idea“ about climate change – who has also given his support to the Grassroots Out campaign group, which plans to target ‘ordinary’ voters in the lead up to the referendum. But this isn’t surprising given UKIP’s raison d’être: fighting for UK independence. UKIP is also the only party to wholesale reject the idea that humans are impacting the climate.

“It’s very counterproductive for the Out Campaign to have so many prominent climate deniers signing up to them because actually the majority of people in the UK are not climate deniers and it damages the [campaign] to have such prominent climate deniers in the anti-Europe camp”, argues Mabey.

“Most people in the UK believe that climate change is happening and it needs to be solved, and they think it’s more important than Europe if you look at the polling. So, in a sense, if I was running the Out Campaign I would be trying to persuade these people not to speak out because they poison the swing groups they need to capture to win the debate.”

“It’s not exactly an endorsement of whether you can trust the facts that they come [up] with on Europe.”

Understanding climate-sceptic psychology

So how does this connection between climate deniers and Euroscepticism work on a psychological level?

As Kris De Meyer from the Department of Informatics at King’s College London explained: “The majority of policy solutions under discussion to tackle climate change – international treaties or top-down government interventions – and the types of policies that appear to come from the EU – top-down regulations – have this in common: they can be perceived as threatening values of individual freedom, economic (market) freedom, or the sovereignty of national governments.”

This can be seen for example in Delingpole’s article when he “plays the card of national sovereignty under threat to reject both climate change and the European Union”, says De Meyer. As Delingpole puts it in his article, “Far easier to blame ‘climate change’ than our unelected masters in Brussels.”

This view is also expressed in a Newcastle Chronicle article by Ridley in which he writes: “Unelected EU judges have far too much power over our daily lives. If we vote to leave we can end the supremacy of EU law.”

“People’s prior opinions and values colour how we make decisions and evaluate new information”, De Meyer said. “When new information jars with our opinions and values, it’s as if we ask ourselves ‘Must I believe this?'”

“This means that we are often too unquestioning in accepting arguments that support our worldview, and that we try hard to find fault with arguments when they don’t support our worldview. Over a longer time, this process of evaluating information differently can strongly polarise public and political debates.

“Ridley, Paterson, Delingpole, and Lawson will be, to different degrees, driven by a perception of threats to these values of individual/market/national liberty, and hence make different but sometimes overlapping arguments for rejecting both [climate change and the EU].”

UK climate policy on the line

There is, however, another lingering question: is this just ideological, or would the climate-Eurosceptics see the bonus of a weakening in UK environmental policy if we left the EU?

Many argue that the impact of Brexit on UK climate policy would be a negative one. “The first thing is it would massively reduce UK influence on the world to determine climate change”, said Mabey. “Politically it would generate huge pressure to water down the UK’s role, and basically move more to a completely free-riding position.”

For example, Mabey anticipates that Brexit would lead to a battle over the Climate Change Act. The Act doesn’t require the UK to be part of Europe to exist however many would argue that on the grounds of competitive-ness, the targets within the Climate Change Act should be weakened.

This is something the Institute of Economic Affairs has long been arguing. (The free market think tank has been instrumental in building up British climate denial.) And, shortly after the Paris climate conference Benny Peiser, director of the GWPF, wrote an op-ed arguing this same point.

Of course, it’s likely that Europe would insist the UK adopt EU environmental laws anyway in order to ensure future trade access agreements into the European markets he added. But, being outside the EU would mean the UK wouldn’t have the ability to influence these regulations anymore.

And, while leaving the EU would in theory give the UK freedom to set its own standards and regulations, and in doing so could choose strong targets – say for fisheries or setting a carbon tax – the question remains whether this would work in practice.

Remember, the UK used to be known as the ‘dirty man of Europe‘ – those in power at the time were not strong on environmental issues and it was the EU that pushed the UK to step up.