Antony Loewenstein

My weekly Guardian column:

It’s a good time to be in the weapons business. Three of the leading US defence contractors, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, are all making unprecedented profits.

In December, Northrop will host an event at the Australian War Memorial to mark the company’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. It will be launched by Federal defence minister David Johnson. It’s a curious location because, as Crikey’s tipster drily noted, “without the endeavours of arms companies stretching back centuries, there’d be significantly fewer Australians for the War Memorial to commemorate”.

Northrop’s US-based corporate HQ decided in the last 18 months to open a major office in Australia. In March the company purchased Qantas Defence Services, a firm that provides engine and aircraft maintenance to the Australian Defence Force and global militaries. It was an $80m deal. In September 2013, Northrop bought M5 Network Security, a Canberra-based cyber-security outfit.

Northrop appointed Ian Irving as CEO of the Australian outfit in June, as part of a plan to capitalise on the “strategically important market” of the Asia Pacific. The centrepiece of that plan is to give smaller enterprises in the defence space access to Northrop’s global supply chain. That’s nothing to be sneezed at: they’re a vital defence contractor for the US military and the company’s weapons have been used in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.

Irving explained to Australian Defence Business Review in July that he was pleased to sell the Australian government the firm’s MQ-4C Triton surveillance drones. The machines will be used to monitor the nation’s borders and protect “energy resources” off northern Australia. Northrop Grumman Australia is set to make up to $3bn from selling the drones. Countless European nations are equally desperate to use drones to beat back asylum seekers.

Despite all this, a Northrop spokesman assured me that the company’s growing presence in Australia has no connection to the Abbott government’s increase in defence spending.

As Northrop’s Australian expansion makes clear, arms manufacturing thrives in an integrated global defence space. Australia is an important market for that other military powerhouse, Israel. In 2010 leading Israeli arms company Elbit Systems sold a $300m command control system to the Australian military. In August 2013 Elbit announced the $5.5m sale of “an investigation system” to the Australian federal police that was tested in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

That’s a trend that has become commonplace since the 9/11 attacks. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in August, “[Weapons companies] need to sell in the large international defence markets – where the products are scrutinized partly on the uses the IDF makes of them on the battlefield.”

In August pro-Palestinian activists climbed on the roof of Elbit’s Melbourne offices to protest its involvement in the recent Israeli military incursions in Gaza, after which the company’s share price soared. Amnesty International recently accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the war.

Defence contractors rarely stop with the profits from war and colonisation. In Britain, Lockheed Martin is now reportedly bidding for a massive National Health Service contract worth $2bn. In the US, Northrop was a presenting sponsor at a recent Washington DC event for honouring war veterans.

It’s rare to read about arms trading in the Australian press; even the country’s largest privately owned small arms supplier, Nioa, rarely registers beyond the business pages. Our politicians are also loathe to speak out, and are happy to have factories and bases in their electorates, and donations for their parties.

The Greens do oppose military trading with Israel. Leader Christine Milne tells me that, “given the continuing disregard by Israel of international calls to halt settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories and the disproportionate response used against the people of Gaza, the Australian Greens have repeatedly called on the Australian government to halt all military cooperation and military trade with Israel”.

Greens senator Lee Rhiannon spoke in parliament last year, saying “if any of the military equipment that Australia has sold to Israel has been used in Israel’s deplorable wars in the Gaza strip which has killed thousands of civilians, the Australian government should be held accountable for this”.

Australia, the 13th largest spender on arms globally, has a choice. We can keep embracing these merchants of death, and the botched deals and waste that they bring. Or we can reject the the rise of Northrop and its associates, and refuse to participate in an investment culture that continues a cycle of violence both at home and abroad.

My weekly Guardian column:

The horror of ebola in West Africa has taken thousands of lives and spread fear around the world. This fact, coupled with ignorance and misinformation, has created the perfect storm. The risk is real, but you wouldn’t know the full picture from watching last weekend’s American 60 Minutes. Lara Logan’s report took her to Liberia, but it did not include any black African voices. It was as if colonialism never died, and the life-saving Americans were the only barrier between calm and chaos.

Meanwhile in Australia, last week’s news that private company Aspen Medical was awarded a $20m contract to run an ebola response in Sierra Leone was given surprisingly little scrutiny. Federal health minister Peter Dutton praised the company’s record and claimed that the firm was chosen because “they’ve got the capacity and the logistical capacity to deliver very quickly what governments want on the ground.” He played the patriotism card –“Aspen is an Australian company” – and said that Aspen “will have this up and running efficiently, effectively, saving lives.”

Non-government organisations with months of front line exposure in battling ebola were shunned for a corporation that won’t face any freedom of information requests because it’s a private entity. We have to take it on trust that taxpayer dollars will be spent appropriately. With former senior politicians and civil servants on Aspen’s board (a typical feature of companies that succeed in winning government contracts globally) financial benefits and political knowledge for the company are assured.

The company, established in 2003, has a history assisting Australian defence in the Solomon Islands, policing in East Timor and a range of other activities in the customs, health and fossil fuel arenas. Since 2007, the department of defence has awarded Aspen contracts worth more than $200m.

But deeper questions are being ignored in the rush to do something – anything – about Ebola. While it’s incredibly brave and noble for Australian nurses and doctors to volunteer with Aspen to establish a 100-bed treatment unit, most media coverage framed the discussion over awarding Aspen the contract as a partisan battle between the Abbott government and Labor opposition.

Victorian Greens senator and public health expert Richard Di Natale has been one of the sole voices questioning Aspen’s qualifications. He tells me that the contract “has a real stink about it. I’m at a loss. The only plausible explanation is that a government is so ideologically committed to advancing private interests, even when it’s counter-productive. ”

Di Natale says that Aspen’s win without a tender process bastardises democracy. “If it went to tender, a range of NGOs would have been able to get personnel in the field much more cheaply”, he argues. He worries that “mission creep” could happen, and that Aspen will require more funds to complete further work. The Greens MP is planning a trip to West Africa to examine the reality on the ground and hopes to receive help from Canberra in facilitating his visit.

He’s blunt on the reasons the Abbott government took so long to respond: “There aren’t any votes in black Africans dying. We’ve led the world in developing a vaccine for the Hendra virus which affects race horses, and yet when it comes to something like Ebola both in Australia and in the US we haven’t given it appropriate concern.”

One of the leaders in fighting Ebola remains Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Its Geneva headquarters tells me that they have concerns with the for-profit model that’s creeping into disaster relief. “Our concern is an uncoordinated approach overall that is inflexible and aid-money rather need-driven. It should not be about what governments want but what is needed to respond effectively to the needs on the ground.”

The scale of MSF’s commitments and the money it is spending places Aspen’s meager program in perspective. This year, the NGO has sent more than 700 international staff to the region, and admitted more than 5,600 patients in four West African states while providing roughly 600 isolation beds and two transit centres. This year, this has cost around $74m. As a rich Western nation, Australia’s contribution is stingy.

This era of unaccountable neo-liberalism has brought moves to privatise disaster management across the world. Recall former US Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney suggesting in 2012 that federal emergency assistance should be outsourced? Hurricane Sandy brought out the usual suspects of rent-seekers and disaster capitalists looking to make money from misery.

This ideology must be fought when fighting wars, disease or natural catastrophes at home or abroad.

My article appears today in The Guardian:

British multinational Serco is in trouble. After years as the favoured outsourcer for public services in Britain and countless countries around the world, the latest figures show a financial crash of unprecedented proportions. The firm announced it is writing down its business value by nearly AU $3bn with no dividend for shareholders and a plea for an injection of a billion more dollars. This is a “bitter pill”, according to its chief executive Rupert Soames.

Revealingly, the corporation admitted that without its Australian detention network, its profit would have been even worse. In other words, imprisoning asylum seekers in poor conditions for extended periods of time in remote locations is good for business. Serco won the contract to manage all of Australia’s mainland facilities and Christmas Island in 2009 – I was part of a team that first published the contract between Serco and Canberra in 2011 – and the profits have soared ever since.

From a $370m contract in 2009 to well over $1bn today, surging refugee boats have been invaluable to Serco’s bottom line. Serco has benefitted from an opaque reporting process and desperate federal politicians and bureaucrats who needed corporate help with an immigration system that ran out of control when asylum seekers started arriving in large numbers from Sri Lanka, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond. Neither the government nor Serco could handle the influx, and both detainees and guards suffered.

During the writing of my book Profits of Doom, I spoke to a senior Serco manager who told me how his superiors gamed the system to increase income. Staff are reduced to “keep profits high” and managers are routinely moved from the most difficult centres such as Darwin and Christmas Island because they’re told that “if they get abatements [fines from Canberra], they’ll be fired’’.

Another senior Serco source recently told me that his company had planned to turn the Australian centres into less prison-like environments. A spike in boats ruined that dream, he lamented.

It’s a sign of the times that a company like Serco, with murky financial statements masking its true economic shape, is continually rewarded for failure with new and larger contracts. Just this week, the Australian government announced a “cop on the beat” system within the immigration department to strengthen oversight. This is little more than window dressing after years of Serco and government obfuscation over assessing self-harm inside detention, profit margins, guard misbehaviour and a culture of secrecy that pervades everything the firm does in Australia and Britain (I recently witnessed this when visiting the notorious Yarl’s Wood facility in England).

Vulture capitalism has become the ideology of our age, with Serco just a symptom of wider economic failure. Outsourcing remains hugely appealing, with Mitie now becoming the UK Home Office’s largest provider of immigration detention. A clean-skin, without the troubles of G4S and Serco, proves that it’ll take more than a Serco collapse to arrest three decades of privatised failure.

Privatisation doesn’t deliver better and cheaper services for our society, or even shareholder democracy. The public knows it. It’s time to empower individuals who want to wrest power from the corporations and return it to the people.

My following book review appears in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age:

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs the Climate

by NAOMI KLEIN

ALLEN LANE, $29.99

“If the news that in the past 40 years the world has lost over 50 per cent of its vertebrate wildlife fails to tell us there is something wrong with the way we live,” British journalist George Monbiot wrote recently, “it’s hard to imagine what could.”

The culture of uncontrolled production is the mantra of our age. “We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly,” he argued.

It’s a key point throughout Naomi Klein’s new book, already a bestseller in America. Following her era-defining works, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, Klein examines in exhaustive detail the politics, ethics and realities around climate change. She shows how the Western power elites remain in denial about the extent of the problem because it suits their economic interests to do so.

“Finding new ways to privatise the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do,” she writes. “Left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing else.”

But this is not simply an apocalyptic road-trip through an environmental movement that has often struggled to attract convincing political support (though the nearly 400,000 people who marched through New York streets recently and demanded action on climate change rightly said that their voices must be heard).

Instead, Klein tackles big business, oil and gas, the green movement, corrupt trade options – she takes aim at deals such as  the one  being negotiated with Australia, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would allow multinationals the power to sue Australia for loss of income, lessening our sovereignty – and a mainstream media that largely follows the narrative set by its paymasters and advertisers.

A Washington Post column in September was symptomatic of the problem.  Robert Samuelson stated that the US should celebrate his country’s “oil boom” and export more of it to the world. Unsaid, despite the paper’s publicly articulated position that climate change is real and must be tackled, was the scientifically proven fact that controlling steadily increasing temperatures globally requires leaving those fossil fuels in the ground while funding renewable energy sources.

Klein has not written just another book about a burning planet. Her prognosis may seem radical – capitalism is the problem because of its voracious appetite for consumption and alternatives must be found to save us from an uninhabitable earth – but it’s only because the terms of current debate are so staid. “We need an ideological battle,”  she told The Guardian. “It is still considered politically unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive measures – particularly in the US.”

In her book, Klein demolishes the arguments put by climate-change deniers that even if the world is warming, a detail often not accepted by older and white conservative males such as leading US Republicans, it doesn’t matter because it “isn’t something wealthy people in industrialised countries have to worry about it”. The market will solve it, or perhaps technology, or maybe science or potentially faith. Who cares about the millions of Africans starving on parched land, conditions worsened by Western economic policies?

“In the wealthier nations,” Klein writes, “we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor and indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas.” This is a disaster guaranteed to bring a surging refugee population and conflict.

Klein isn’t just examining the fallacies of the deniers but also deep failings of the environmental movement. She’s scathing of collusion between The Nature Conservancy and BP America, Chevron and Shell and other major green groups that falsely believed gradual movement on reducing carbon was preferable to frightening the horses and attacking the very corporations that are principally responsible for a warming world. “Market-based solutions” have been a catastrophic failure, Klein shows, and “provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector.”

The world’s largest conservation group, WWF International, is the subject of a new German book, Pandaleaks, damning “green-washing” with Monsanto, Coca-Cola and HSBC and accusing the group of “supplying industry with a green, progressive image”.

Klein’s solutions to the climate crisis are ambitious and already criticised by some as ignoring the Earth’s natural cycles; in this logic, trying to alter the climate is futile. She advocates a combination of building a mass movement for change, finding inspiration in local campaigns that challenge the status-quo, divestment against fossil fuels and huge resistance. Success is far from guaranteed.

She writes with verve, passion, facts and accessible insight, allowing her message to reach a mass audience. “What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to act,” she concludes, “is not because we are too selfish … but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care?”

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of Profits of Doom (MUP)

My weekly Guardian column:

After yesterday’s state memorial service, the beatification of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is complete. His domestic policies were rightly praised for dragging the country into a more enlightened age (although the project is far from complete) but since his death in October there’s been curiously little written about his foreign affairs legacy.

A few exceptions exist: The Australian’s Greg Sheridan’s praised Whitlam for backing the Indonesian invasion of Timor Leste, and John Pilgersaluted his rare challenge to global American dominance.

On foreign policy, Whitlam supported some troubling causes. He cosied up to Indonesian dictator General Suharto, and gave his assent to Jakarta’s plans to occupy what was then Portuguese Timor. During a conversation he had with Suharto in Townsville in April 1975, the former prime minister expressed concern about the Australian left.

“[They] tended to be paternalistic, patronising and wholly convinced of their purity and of the soundness of their own views,” Whitlam told Suharto.

“From this basis they assumed the right to criticise the domestic politics of other countries and to find fault with certain aspects of the social or political structure of other countries, including corruption or the fact that there were too many Generals in government departments.”

This was less than 10 years after the horrific, Western-backed massacres unleashed by Suharto against his own people, which led to one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

The World Bank later called Suharto a model pupil for his repressive economic and political positions. Every Australian prime minister to the present day, from both the Labor and Liberal parties, agreed. On Suharto’s death in 2008, former prime minister Paul Keating praised the dictator as bringing “peace and order” to his country.

It took until the late 1990s for a rare voice of elite dissent to emerge. Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton argued that his party should change its stance on Timor and support self-determination. It’s a view that angered Whitlam. A revealing cartoon from 1999 reflected the mood.

Less well-known is how Whitlam’s stance on Timor influenced Jakarta’s domestic policy. According to a letter sent to Timor’s Jose Ramos Horta on 17 June 1974, Indonesian foreign minister Adam Malik expressed support for an independent Timor. “The independence of every country is the right of every nation, with no exception for the people of Timor”, Malik stated.

This may have been an untruth, designed to fool Timorese independence leaders. A cable sent to Canberra on 14 October 1974 showed that Whitlam’s views influenced Jakarta’s decision to invade:

“Until Mr Whitlam’s visit to Djakarta they [Indonesia] had been undecided about Timor. However the Prime Minister’s support for the idea of incorporation into Indonesia had helped them to crystallise their own thinking and they were now firmly convinced of the wisdom of this course.”

When Indonesian troops rolled into Timor in December 1975 and occupied the nation until October 1999, decades of violence and hundreds of thousands of deaths followed. Diplomatic, political and military support came from Australia, America and Britain.

The murder of the Balibo Five, Australian journalists who were killed by Indonesian security forces in October 1975, remains an open sore from that time; both countries are loathe to investigate the deaths more thoroughly. Even the Jakarta Post recently acknowledged the lack of accountability over Indonesian atrocities in Timor.

Like every political leader, Whitlam could be principled, humane and provocative. On the Israel/Palestine conflict, unlike every prime minister since, he sent the Zionist establishment and Israeli government into conniptions. Like Bob Carr, the Gillard government’s foreign minister, Whitlam was also sceptical of Israel’s colonial ambitions.

Where Bob Hawke was once described as a “pro-Israel fanatic” by US ambassador James Hargrove, the Australian Financial Review’s Tony Walker lamented on Whitlam’s death that “Australian governments have a tendency to tailor Middle East policy to suit domestic political considerations and forego first principles.”

With the notable exception of Labor MP Melissa Parke – who recently saluted the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel – it’s almost unimaginable for an Australian politician, let alone a prime minister, to speak like Whitlam did during his time in government:

“There can be no peace until Israeli forces have been withdrawn from occupied territories, to secure and recognised boundaries, and a just settlement of the refugee problem is achievable. That is an even-handed policy.”

Myth-making is common when a legendary figure dies and Whitlam is no different. His support for the independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975, a long overdue recognition that Canberra should no longer control Port Moresby’s affairs, has attracted revisionism from across the political spectrum.

Some critics believe Whitlam used independence for PNG as “a lever to advance his ambitions in the Labor party”, and that PNG – now a “failed state” – would have been better to wait, perhaps indefinitely, for statehood. Missing from the picture are the real causes of the country’s woes: corruption and the resource curse, prompted by Western leaders and corporations too keen to exploit precious minerals and people.

In a similar way, progressives laud Whitlam for challenging Washington’s meddling in Australia, the Pine Gap intelligence base and the disastrous US invasion of Vietnam. Newly released documents portray a more nuanced picture. Whitlam had resolved to shift the balance in favour of Australian sovereignty. The US consequently became anxious over the future of its military installations.

The Nixon administration seriously considered ditching the formal strategic alliance with Canberra, and proposed to move key intelligence posts to other nations. It was only after Whitlam publicly defended the installations – against the wishes of many in his party – that he again became palatable to Washington.

Every great leader, of which too few exist today, is a bundle of vision, wit, force and contradiction. Whitlam was no different. Domestically his agenda was saintly and vital, giving Australia a modern face and temperament. Overseas, however, he both excelled and sinned. Any assessment of a great leader must acknowledge who benefits, and who suffers – both locally and internationally.