How Australia won the Olympics
By John Tomlinson
At 4.20 a.m. on September 24, the secretary of the International Olympic Committee announced that Australia had won the right to host the year 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. It can now be revealed how human rights were key in Australia wresting the games away from the other competitors.
Manchester
Manchester was considered to be too far removed historically from the widespread and brutal repression of the British colonial era. Even the Indian delegate failed to accurately recount the major massacres carried out by the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent.
Some delegates, however, had been impressed with the subtle repression of the entire lower orders as a result of Mrs Thatcher's economic rationalism. But the French delegate pointed out that even in this regard the British could not claim total success, because there were some working-class people in parts of south-eastern England who were not doing very badly.
Britain did get widespread approval for its cooperative effort with the Americans in Grenada, and there was almost unanimous support for the way the British authorities had treated prisoners in Northern Ireland. But what had they done lately?
Istanbul
The Turkish bid was generally regarded as an out of town try-on, in that much of its repression of the Kurds lacked any subtlety. The substantial efforts of volunteer groups like the Grey Wolves was applauded, but many delegates had great difficulty separating government and non-government responsibility for the murders of trade unionists.
Berlin
The German bid, like that of Britain, suffered most from the fact that its attacks on homosexuals, Gypsies and Jews could not be recalled with any clarity by many of the younger delegates.
The Ukrainian delegate declared Germany to have so lost its path that even when the Soviet Union had supplied West Germany with 10 million under-trained East Germans, the government totally abrogated its responsibilities to skin heads and neo-nazi volunteer groups. She rose to her feet, pointed at the German delegate and shouted, "If ever there was a group of people who would have made ideal Gypsies, queers and Jews, they would have. What did you do? You just threw money at them."
The Berlin bid was strongly supported by a small but vocal group who felt the intense efforts by the local citizenry, to intimidate Turkish migrant workers deserved support. Finally Berlin dropped from contention when the French delegate berated the German officials for leaving all the work to volunteers, reinforcing his point by referring to the concerted volunteer and police attacks on North Africans in his country.
Beijing
The vote came down to a play-off between China and Sydney. Beijing gained initial support as a result of its undoubted efforts in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. The Chinese delegate, with tears in her eyes, acknowledged the tumultuous applause which greeted her showing some previously unseen footage of a demonstrator pinned under the tracks of a slow-moving tank. Gales of laughter swept through the audience when she read from the menu of the People's Liberation Army banquet the day following the incident, which included items such as sweet and sour chopped students and shredded bicycle tyres chop suey.
The hall was shocked into silence when the Indonesian delegate rose to his feet and denounced the Beijing leadership for releasing dissidents in the days leading up to the Olympic decision. He pointed out that Chinese repression and transmigration policies in Tibet paled into insignificance alongside his government's efforts to subjugate East Timor, West Papua and Aceh.
Chinese efforts to regain the agenda mainly consisted of unsubstantiated claims that they had developed a further five-year plan to crush the aspirations of more than 50 ethnic minority groups. The Chinese bid came completely unstuck when the American delegate exclaimed that China had lost its resolve to pick fights with its neighbours, including Vietnam. Finally, she denounced China for failing to execute as many criminals in 1993 as had the United States of America.
Beijing officials were left only their allegedly appalling treatment of animals to fall back on. The list was long and boring, causing the Australian delegate to jump to his feet and try to interrupt with stories about habitat destruction, kangaroo shoots, overstocking of cattle and sheep on marginal lands during droughts, cattle food lots where thousands of cattle had died of dehydration in a single day and the incarceration of battery hens.
Sydney
The Australian presentation relied strongly on the fact that since the Boer War it had been prepared to pay for its bravest to travel vast distances to get involved on the side of colonial powers. But Sydney's central point was that it was the site of the first dispossession of Aborigines of their land and that it had played its part in the continued subjugation of Aborigines since 1788.
John Fahey, on behalf of the NSW government, pointed out that in response to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, it had used its "truth in sentencing" legislation to prolong the length of time people remained in prison and to increase the number of prisoners.
The Australian bid was praised because the government had frozen any major developments in Social Security reform for over 40 years. International delegates were particularly impressed by the way that governments had managed to convince the electorate, despite the Australian income support system being one of the cheapest in the OECD, that it was overly generous.
Paul Keating received great praise for deflecting calls for a national superannuation scheme into a compulsory scam which bankrolled the profits of the major insurance companies.
John Dawkins' efforts in turning a free tertiary education system into one which imposed compulsory fees was belatedly recognised as an important part of the process of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
Australia got further support for being prepared to introduce legislation which will suspend the Racial Discrimination Act. The withholding of foreshadowed social justice legislation, which is supposed to compensate Aborigines for 205 years of repression and dispossession, was also applauded.
All this helped, but Australia was still two votes behind despite Indonesia's assertion that it could not have managed its extermination of 200,000 East Timorese without Australian cooperation and support.
PNG weighed in with its gratitude for the help of Australian troops and weapons on Bougainville; but because Australia had failed to publicise its activities there, no-one was moved.
John Fahey jumped to his feet declaring his government had just scrapped legislation which would have made it illegal to vilify homosexuals. He was told to sit down.
Then the Cambodian and Vietnamese delegates announced their support for Sydney because of the way Australia treated arriving boat people. This was enough to carry the day. Australia's human rights record had won us the Olympics.