Politically, the Gillard government echoes every foreign policy position and nuance uttered by US President Obama and Hilary Clinton. On trade and economic issues, the Gillard government is more than receptive to the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement which seeks to give US monopolies open slather in Australia, tearing down health and environmental standards, labour laws, food labelling laws and other ‘restrictive’ trade practices that protect Australia’s sovereignty.

 

Even more disgusting is the back-handed way in which the Labor government has placed the Australian military forces at the disposal of US imperialism, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but right across the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions. Here are some recent examples exposed by WikiLeaks...

 

At the 2008 AUSMIN meeting between former Defence Minister Fitzgibbon and US Defence Secretary Gates, a secret agreement was signed to provide for “geospatial intelligence co-operation”, sharing data from spy satellites. Consequently, the 2009 Defence White Paper stated “It has decided to improve Australia’s intelligence collection capabilities by acquiring a satellite with a remote sensing capability, most likely to be based on high-resolution, cloud-penetrating, synthetic aperture radar.”

 

At anything between $800 million and $1.6 billion, these things aren’t cheap. An Australian satellite would only be built by companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Raytheon; it would be launched in the US and integrated into the network of satellites operated by the US National Reconnaissance Office.

 

No doubt the government will try to justify this by some ‘border protection’ fantasy, but the reality is the satellite will be doing the dirty work of US imperialism, spying on countries such as China, north Korea, Pakistan and Iran.

 

At the same AUSMIN meeting in 2008, Fitzgibbon told Gates that the Labor government review of the decision to buy 100 Joint Strike Fighters was for domestic consumption only, and that the purchase would eventually go ahead. Gates expressed the US position as “... for Australia to remain interoperable with the United States.” Delays and cost blow-outs have meant that Australia will pay a fortune to get a fairly basic model of these fancy planes, and will have to purchase 24 aging Super Hornets as a stopgap in the meantime.

 

Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson has been exposed as another “Running Dog”, secretly telling US Ambassador Bleich that “a deal to supply India with nuclear fuel could be reached in 3-5 years.” This is in spite of current Australian government policy not to export uranium to countries that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

 

The Labor government is looking to worm its way out of NPT obligations to boost BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine profits and follow the hypocritical example of US imperialism.