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2014 Festival of Dangerous Ideas

John Pilger on ‘Utopia’, Objectivity, and the State of Australian Indigenous Affairs

We spoke with the veteran journalist ahead of his lecture at FODI 2014

Investigative journalism is needed more than ever. While there are shining examples, there are few who stand out like the veteran Australian journalist John Pilger. In the last 40 years, he’s reported from war-ravaged Vietnam, Apartheid South Africa, an East Timor struggling for independence, and Pol Pot’s murderous regime in Cambodia. He is a truth teller, a breaker of silences, and a rare voice amongst the propaganda and misinformation.

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Earlier this year, Pilger released a heart-wrenching investigation into Australia’s treatment of the first peoples: my people. Utopia is a 180 minute ode to the strength of Aboriginal people, who have survived more than 200 years of dispossession, displacement and disadvantage. It features interviews with politicians, journalists and activists from both sides of the fence, including myself. Utopia also holds those in power to account—both Labor and Liberal governments—for paternalistic and racist policies leading to a situation more dire than ever.

In 2014, Aboriginal children are being taken away at sky-rocketing rates, Aboriginal men, women and children are being incarcerated higher than ever before, and suicide rates continue to rise and devastate whole communities. And despite the official government lines, the gap is not closing, but, in fact, widening. I spoke to John Pilger about the current state of journalism and Aboriginal affairs in Australia.

VICE: A lot of your work is about breaking silences—from the lies told to the public to justify foreign wars, to the denial of history that feeds ignorance and racism. You’ve written extensively about your own family history, and how the horrors endured by your convict ancestors was never fully told. You’ve also reported about the devastating silence on the massacres of Aboriginal nations during the frontier wars. Is this silence uniquely Australian?  
John Pilger: No, it's not uniquely Australian. It's typical of colonial societies, that is, countries taken from their Indigenous populations. You see similar attitudes in colonial people from South Africa to Latin America. However, there are distinctions about the Australian experience. For one thing, we are bottom of the imperial league in recognising the truth of the past and our obligations to the people we dispossessed. And I say "we" advisedly.

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Non-Indigenous Australia has benefited hugely from the historical theft of land and the sacrifices of the First Australians. It's striking that we've made a national cult out of celebrating the sacrifices of white soldiers in foreign, mostly imperial wars, but understanding, let alone commemorating, the most significant sacrifices in our country's history seems beyond us. For me, this is one reason why we're still not fully formed as an independent nation. Another reason is our incessant servility to great power, notably the United States.

You’ve completed four films on Aboriginal Australia, with Utopia being the latest. In Utopia, you compared conditions in Aboriginal communities to those filmed in The Secret Country. Nothing had changed. You were shocked, but why—in your view—isn’t Australia shocked?
There have been changes. The most striking is the emergence of an Indigenous bourgeoisie, which includes some remarkable people. I would also call it the co-opted class. Frantz Fanon called it the "transmission" class, because transmitted is what the colonial power wanted, not what Indigenous people needed. In other words, if elite Australia has been clever at anything, it's seducing educated Aboriginal people to join the very system that exploits and oppresses the First Nations.

I have in mind the often extreme corporate ideology that now dominates so much of Australian political and institutional life. Setting up Indigenous corporations might have seemed positive at the time, but what it did was create its own elite and its own gravy train. Genuine co-operatives that reflect the unique values of Aboriginality, a true sense of community, ought to have been the model, in my view.

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In the lead-up to Utopia, you asked for interviews with a number of people who turned you down—Tony Abbott and John Howard being key figures. Kevin Rudd attempted to dodge the interview, and turned up almost two hours late. Mal Brough later claimed he was “ambushed”. Warren Snowdon heatedly debated with you, saying he was “proud” of the work his government had done. This seems to be the norm in Australia. Is this lack of accountability unique to this country and does it feed this great Australian silence?
Australian politicians are seldom interrogated about Indigenous matters, other than in the form of compliant stereotypes. Warren Snowdon clearly had never been asked the questions I put to him.  This indifference to real accountability is true in other areas, such as Australia's addiction to colonial wars. There's an aggression waiting for those who try to break this silence. I was thinking of the Channel 7 reporter who asked Tony Abbott to explain his remark “shit happens”.  I think it was  in regard to deaths in Afghanistan, and the reporter ended up having to apologise.

As a young journalist going to university, I was taught, along with my colleagues, of the importance of “balance” and “objectivity”, but in my reporting as an Aboriginal affairs journalist, I find this often just clouds the real picture. What is the role of objectivity in journalism—is the truth sacrificed on this sacred journalistic altar of objectivity? "Objectivity" and "impartiality" have all but lost their dictionary meanings. A lot of the time they're media propaganda terms, a kind of doublethink.

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When someone declares how impartial they are, I am immediately suspicious. It often means they report what I would call the authorised received wisdom. For example, when Tony Blair invaded Iraq, BBC reporters lined up to declare his actions “vindicated”. They called that “impartial”. To point out that Blair was a liar was committed journalism. It's actually Orwellian, as in "war is peace".

Of course, there are some first rate journalism colleges - or rather first-rate teachers within the system - but generally academic journalism has achieved obedience to a set of assumptions that young journalists ought to be challenging. Too often the media courses are factories, supplying corporate fodder. Young journalists ought to be taught they are agents of people, not power. Too many graduate believing a cynicism about their readers and viewers ordains them as journalists: the Murdoch view.

You’ve written a great deal about public relations, and the new forms of propaganda. You’ve said “as people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated”. It’s now harder than ever to trust the news and establish the truth behind the spin, especially for young people. Do you have any advice for Australian youth in wading through this propaganda?
In many ways, mainstream journalism and so-called PR have merged. The military calls this "information control" or "information management". You see it on the TV news, much of which is not news at all. If I watch it, getting information is not an option. I find myself monitoring and deconstructing it, and trying to work out what has been left out. So much of media is manipulated by what Edward Bernays, the father of PR, called "the invisible government".

There's no conspiracy. Journalists don't have to be told; they wouldn't be in certain jobs if they didn't know what their role was. That said, we are not robots; it can be an individual choice. You either "get" the insidious nature of propaganda both outside and inside the media or you don’t. And you opt to be part of it, and take its rewards, or you don't. The latter often requires courage. I say to young journalists: follow your own instincts of what's right and wrong, and your own ideals. That sense of yourself will help you at least navigate through the system.

The other thing I find unique in your reporting is the humanity, and I think this is what struck a nerve with a lot of Aboriginal people when watching Utopia.  You always champion unreported heroes, who are more often than not, the anti-heroes of the establishment. How can young journalists like myself, in a country where Murdoch has such control over the media, keep sight of this humanity in our reporting?  
Amy, you are the embodiment of unbowed humanity in Australian journalism!

John Pilger will be speaking at Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on August 31.

Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist from Rockhampton in Central Queensland. She worked on Utopia as a researcher. You can follow her on Twitter here: @amymcquire