Apartheid

40
by the people from the far north of the other hemisphere started in the southern extremities of
the continents. And they were no doubt most destructive there. Naturally, the northern
European conquerors were most interested in and likely to easily adapt to land and climate
similar to what they had known in Europe.
The Koori, the Aboriginal people of Australia, were reduced from one hundred to two
per cent of the entire population in the space of two centuries; they were ethnically cleansed
from their ancestral lands in a period of time comparable to their brethren in the Western
Hemisphere. The indigenous Maori, on the other hand, still make up around ten per cent of
New Zealand’s population. Hundreds of thousands of native Australians and New Zealanders
were killed directly or indirectly by the white invaders. After having seen their land stolen, reappropriated,
and to a large extent either destroyed or altered beyond recognition, and
renamed, the remaining Koori population still suffers from grossly discriminatory treatment
by Whites in the realms of police policy and practice, health care, housing, and access to
education, to name but a few. Their life-expectancy is 18 to 20 years shorter than that of
Australian Whites, not least because they receive 25 per cent less state health care per person
than Whites do. They were only allowed to participate in elections from 1962, only three
decades before Blacks were finally allowed to vote in South Africa. The 400,000 remaining
Koori are the poorest and most imprisoned ethnic group in Australia today, not least because
of racist police practices, but also because of the stubborn refusal, by the white governments
and the white majorities who elected them, to redress or even admit the wrongs done to the
indigenous. 37
Once white supremacy had been established, the white elites on the southwestern
Pacific Rim also flourished economically and technologically, like the ones in South Africa.
Both Pacific Rim countries, however, had low initial population densities and were conquered
relatively quickly. Neither of them achieved the high degrees of concentration of wealth or
power that South Africa did. Being islands, they also lacked immediate threats from
neighboring countries with apartheid refugees and ties to the oppressed and murdered
indigenous people. During the course of colonialism, moreover, Britain had obviously also
learned – the hard way – from its own older former colonies, the USA and South Africa, not
to let its colonialists empower and arm themselves so much that they would become or feel
enabled to secede from the mother country. And so, Australia and New Zealand never
declared independence from Britain, although there were some futile attempts along those
lines. Most importantly, from the theoretical perspective, the Whites soon became an
overwhelming majority in both Australia and New Zealand, as in the USA or Canada, where
the white elites were, not only with regard to origin and numbers, similarly genocidal in their
treatment of the indigenous people. 38
37 Pilger: The New Rulers of the World, 2003 (2002): 172ff; Diamond: The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution
and Future of the Human Animal, 1993 (1992); N.N.: Aborigines Riot after Death of Teen, February 16, 2004
38 Stone, B.: Genocide in Australia: Report Details Crimes Against Aborigines, 1999; Fenton 1999: 41ff; Pilger:
Australia: Apartheid? 2002. The latter article considers the racist attitudes towards and the ethnic cleansing and
genocide of the Koori, but restricts its one-to-one comparison to the following paragraph: “Andrea Durbach,
formerly of Cape Town and now a prominent human rights advocate in Sydney, said she did not believe the
horrors of apartheid South Africa would ever be reproduced in Australia. ‘What may be coming is not as crude,’
she said. ‘The language is not as crude. It’s much more subtle; it’s much more consensual.’” In terms of cultural
and linguistic genocide, however, the ‘horrors of apartheid South Africa’ were arguably surpassed by Australia.
But Durbach is almost certainly restricting her comparison to South Africa from 1948 to 1994, i.e. to apartheid in
a narrow sense. During that time and since then, Australia does not match South Africa in terms of the horrors of
racism, though racist crimes and structural racism against the indigenous Australians do persist. See further
Pilger 2003 (2002): 12, 195f; Pilger: In John Howard’s Backyard, 2002, in which the author comes out even
more directly in favor of using ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ to describe white treatment of Blacks in Australia
since the first invasion. See also N.N.: Australia Police Use Aborigines’ Photos as Targets, July 7, 2003; Fenton
1999: 40f; N.N.: The Report of the Regional Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
Hawaii and the United States, on the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and
Related Intolerance held at Sydney, Australia, 2001.