Today, The Watchdog is talking about Australia, immigration and racism with Australian comedian and activist Aamer Rahman.
Rahman is a stand-up comedian and one half of the comedy duo “Fear of a Brown Planet.” Originally born in Saudi Arabia, he moved to Melbourne at an early age. Although he trained as a lawyer, he found his calling on stage. His comedy deals with overtly political topics like race, imperialism and terrorism.
When thought about at all, Australia is usually presented as a friendly, like- minded nation; a welcoming democratic, and stable state. This is certainly how many Americans who visit experience it. However, underneath that veneer lies a darker past.
Established by the British as a penal colony and later, a settler-colonial state, genocide of the native population has been central to Australia’s story from the very beginning. As British colonization gathered speed in the 19th century, so did the attacks against its Aboriginal peoples. Wherever the Europeans went, massacres followed.
Until well into the 1970s, the Australian government maintained a policy of removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, placing them into spartan boarding schools in an attempt to destroy native culture forever.
Taking their land were Europeans. Until 1973, the country’s immigration laws were formally described as the “White Australia policy”, barring Asian and other non-white populations from settling in the world’s sixth-largest nation. To this day, immigrants are regularly discriminated against, while the country maintains a particularly harsh policy on refugees.
Australia maintains close political ties to the United Kingdom, with British Home Secretary Pritti Patel seeing the country’s offshore migrant detention centers, referred to by some as “concentration camps” as a model for the U.K. to follow.
Many of the changes to Australia’s overtly racist policies were brought in by the government of Gough Whitlam (1972-1975). Whitlam began to recognize Aboriginal land claims, moved the country closer towards the Non-Aligned Movement and opposed nuclear weapons testing. Yet he did not last long, as a British and American plot to remove him from office succeeded, an event that, for many, effectively ended Australia’s brief run as an independent state and turned the country into an outpost of the American empire.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmark
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog, ” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, _closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
_ * _Lowkey_* is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.