dolorosa_12 | History has a way of signing us up in the morning (Reply)

Like virtually every person in Generation Y, I remember this day, twenty years ago, with terrible clarity. One of my mother's colleagues (she is a radio journalist, and at that time worked in ABC local radio in Canberra) called our home phone in the very early hours of the morning of 12th September and told her to turn on the TV. (Due to the time difference, the morning of 11th September in the US was the middle of the night for Australia.) We watched CNN all morning before my sister and I went to school with a kind of blank-faced horror. When I got to school, wild speculation and conspiracy theories abounded. In the afternoon, my stepmother called me in hysterics saying she hadn't been able to get hold of my father — who was in Washington DC covering Australian prime minister John Howard's visit to the US. (My father was the political correspondant for ABC television news.) Dad later told me that he'd been in a press conference with Howard within sight of the Pentagon when the plane hit, and everyone present was then whisked off to a secure location. After that, he swung into journalistic overdrive, as a boring official overseas visit became swept up in world changing global politics.

I'm not going to talk about what those attacks, and the US response did to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Syria and the wider region — we've seen those things play out with terrible clarity over the past few months (and years). In those parts of the world, it was, obviously, a devastation. Every time I see people try to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush (and the warmongers around him) it makes me feel as if my skull might crack with contempt. The damage they did was profound, and that they will never suffer consequences appalls me. But I want to turn instead to my country of origin, Australia, and talk briefly about what unfolded in the twenty years that followed.

Australia has a habit of trotting along after the US to war, so it was no surprise to me that the country sent troops to Afghanistan (and later, Iraq, in spite of some of the largest protests the country had ever witnessed), but even at the time, as a sixteen-year-old, I felt it was a bad idea. (My modern history class at school was at that point studying decolonisation movements in Asia in relation to Cold War politics, and our teacher pivoted seamlessly from teaching us about twentieth-century Vietnam to the effects of the Cold War in Afghanistan, which had not been on the curriculum, but whose parallels to the Vietnam War, including Australia's potential involvement, were clear to every teenager in the class.) I walked out of school on multiple occasions to protest going to war, the protests ending at the base of Parliament House, and my school was such that when I gave this as a reason for my absences from class, no action was taken against me. (As an aside, one of the starkest changes that 9/11 wrought on Australia was literally written into the landscape: Australia's Parliament House is designed with grassed hills over its roof, and when I was growing up, you could walk over it at any time. Every Canberran of my generation has fond memories of rolling down those hills while on a school trip. At some point after the terror attacks, barriers appeared, and to this day it is no longer possible to walk over Parliament House unless part of a vetted tour group.)

As I said before, this is not a post about the damage done to those regions by US-led military coalitions, so I don't want to dwell too much on this aspect of things, except to point out that even as a teenager I could see that the choices made by the US (and followed eagerly by the Australian government) in the wake of the 9/11 attack were going nowhere good.

When those planes hit, Australia was a few months away from an election. The consensus was that the government — at the time the right-wing Liberal-National coalition, who had been in office for two terms — was on the verge of being replaced by the left-wing Labor Party. And then a boatload of Afghan Hazara refugees drifted towards Australian waters, and the LNP realised that they could turn their prospects around by stoking ugly Islamophobia and playing the Australian voters like a violin. (This happened before 9/11, but the terrorist attacks ensured that the situation could be wheeled out again at the election in November and recontexualised as something pertaining to the 'war on terror'.) The Tampa affair is in my opinion one of the most shameful moments of recent Australian history, and it was the first step down a long road transforming the Australian political landscape into one where far-right tabloid/talk radio fearmongering played a reliable role in most elections and pushed the country from a kind of bland apathetic centrism much further to right.

I don't want to pretend that Australia was an antiracist paradise before the Tampa affair. Clearly, it had been a racist country since its inception and right up the present moment. But it felt at the time that things were moving towards a kind of fuzzy multicultural consensus — not actively antiracist, and not particularly honest about injustices of its past, but blandly celebratory of its identity as a country of migrants, at least in the big cities. (I'm not claiming this was good enough, but it was at least moving in the right direction, and with better politicians could have been steered in a more progressive direction, in my opinion.) But as soon as John Howard and the LNP won that third election on an explicitly anti-refugee, Islamophobic, and racist platform, all that fell apart. The Murdoch press, which had always played too big a role in Australian politics, went into overdrive, politics drifted rightwards, and suspicion of immigrants, refugees, and non-white Australian citizens (particularly Arabs and/or Muslims) was treated as a reliable button to press whenever voters looked like jumping ship to the centre-left.

I'm absolutely convinced that neither Tony Abbott nor Scott Morrison would have been considered remotely electable if events in 2001 had not unfolded the way they did. Politics in Australia was never particularly edifying or pretty (although there are exceptions), but things went in a very ugly, dark direction after 9/11 and Tampa, and have not yet recovered from the damage.