Marlesy and the Munitions Factory
Sunday Scaries #52: Or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the International Arms Trade"
Enter: Nicolas Cage’s character from Lord of War doing a series of backflips and cartwheels to the entrance of a munitions plant in Melbourne suburbia.
“Welcome, one and all, to Walter Wanka’s Weapons Factory! I’m glad to see you five lucky winners of the Titanium Ticket have made it! Let’s go in and learn about the empire of global arms manufacturing and Australia’s important role as a bastion of it. Please remember, no mobile phones or Taiwanese pagers, and that all of what you are about to see here applies universally and not just in the particular instance of Israel, even if that’s what we discuss today as a case study, okay? Lefties hate all weapons manufacturers, not just the ones making a literal killing right now.”
The finely-dressed CEO stops to adjust his gloves, hiding the damn spots of blood which simply will not out, and takes the ticket winners into the main chamber of the factory: a garden of astroturf with a river of molten metal on the one side and completed bullets on the other, all flowing past the buzzing activity of smelting and pressing occurring in this great hall.
Our Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Donald Marles walks in behind old man Wanka, with Trade Minister (and Temu Chuck Schumer) Don Farrell on his arm. The two seemingly have a sicko sub-factional alliance against Jim Chalmers predicated on the tacit coordination of Marles’ Cons fraction with the Catholic Right spearheaded by Farrell. Farrell isn’t looking too hot these days, he’s no longer as spry or as sharp as he was during the days of Noah’s flood. He keeps muttering mildly offensive things about gay marriage under his breath as Marles gives him soothing arm strokes. And let’s not forget our other winners! Joining Marlesy, we have Anthony Albanese (Prime Minister), Penny Wong (Foreign Minister), Pat Conroy (Defence Industry Minister), and Peter Khalil (Assistant Defence Minister).
Behind them stroll an army of ANU-graduate apparatchiks clad in cheap suits, singing their solemn hymn:
“Oompa, Loompa, Dee-Ohh-Dee, oh!
We have sold our very own soul
Oompa, Loompa, Dee-Eff-Ayy-Tee!
We are here to prevent scrutiny”
The tour stops and briefly admires the river of bullets freely flowing towards a tunnel labelled “U.S.A”
“Now, before we begin, do we have any questions?” asks the kindly death merchant
Pat Conroy shoves up his glasses and raises a single finger, and opens his mouth to speak. In all conceivable ways, I want you to imagine, dear reader, that he looks and sounds like the nerd emoji (here is a clip of his actual voice if it helps):
“Yeah, uh, what company are you? Are you Lockheed Martin, who make the F35? Or Thales Australia who make TNT for use in global munitions manufacturing? Or another Australian subsidiary of a global defence contractor? Or are you a homegrown subcontractor like RUAG Australia which makes the bomb-bay doors for the F35 which we then export? Or are you…”
The Munitions Man looks at our PM and nods. Albanese nods in return, as if to say “yes master, I understand the importance of preserving the bit” and without a word, grabs Conroy by the back of the collar and yanks his own frontbencher into the river of bullets like Conroy were Jewish or Muslim.
“Moving on!”
And indeed the tour does. Room by room the group are shown how a variety of Australian manufacturers contribute to the global F35 pool, and how that fighter jet is used to drop both guided and unguided munitions on Gaza. They learn about the R400, a 30mm autocannon designed to target drones which the ABC recently uncovered had been transported from Australia (where it was developed) to Israel by an Australian company called EOS for demonstration purposes: no permits issued, no weapons sold, but that’s no reason for deals not to be made! The group even get to go into the PR room, and receive a special course on how to say “we aren’t supplying arms to Israel” directly with a straight face while knowing that military aviation parts were shipped directly from Sydney to Tel Aviv by Lockheed Martin. “That’s Greens misinformation”, they are told to say. It’s a documentary about the time Menzies helped get Australian pig iron exported to help the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Marlesy gets an idea: “sure, no weapons, of course… but we’re an F35 country! You don’t seriously think the parts are problematic too?” (#)
One by one, they all are comedically removed from the tour:
Wong tests out some complicated gear that lets her face physically talk out of both sides of her mouth at the same time, and has to be carted away when her face becomes stuck;
Khalil tries a Memory-Gobstopper to forget the year he spent in Iraq with the American occupation’s Halliburton-funded dictatorship as “Chief National Security Advisor” (not even kidding). Don’t know why he’d want to… after all, it’s not like his advice helped create an armed insurgency in Iraq (by ordering the army to go home with their guns but without pay) or a prisoner interrogation camp that was so horrific it created a generation of global terrorists. Anyway he actually ends up relieving all the evil he wrought upon the world before even being elected to Parliament and goes mad;
And of course, our Prime Minister is lucky last. Albanese gets distracted when Trump finally calls him back, and wanders around aimlessly until he falls down a never-ending trash chute.
That leaves Marlesy and Grandpa Don to ascend the Wankavator, a multi-directional flying glass elevator designed by General Dynamics with components built in every US state and which cost $4 trillion.
You may wonder why I feel the need to make light of a depressing situation with this convoluted fantastical parody. The answer is simple: I don’t have much to write about when it comes to arms control, because Australia is (according to Amnesty International and those leftie loonies at THE AUSTRALIAN STRATEGIC POLICY INSTITUTE) famously opaque and mysterious when it comes to Arms Control reporting! One significant part of the problem is that Australia does not do proper reporting per our obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. At least we’ve ratified it! The Yanks and Israel have signed but not ratified. Anyway, DFAT provide annual reports to the ATT, but these omit transactions which we know occur. I know they’re crap because I’ve read the bloody things. I’ve made a lot of hay out of the Drone Gun debacle that David Shoebridge drew attention to where Albo literally lied to Parliament about weapons transfers to Israel. The R400 is probably the exact same situation: Aussie design, some Aussie manufacturing so they can get Government support, but the final product is assembled in America to avoid scrutiny.
Because Australia has a very limited defence industry, there isn’t too much to report most of the time. We sell the odd tank or bushmaster but it is actually rare we sell completed products. Small arms transactions (that is, the kind of weaponry you can hold in your hands) don’t need to be specifically listed under the treaty’s standard disclosures… just the permits issued (whether or not they actually go anywhere) and their approved destination. We therefore have not only plausible deniability about what is sent, but whether it gets sent at all. All we have to say is whether we gave permission. According to the ABC, our R400? It was apparently shipped in parts (not as a completed product) and thus avoided the ATT disclosure requirements (a cute little asterisk explains this at the end of every small arms table in every ATT report). This is also Albo’s defence to the charge of deceiving the house, because technically what we will have done is give small arms (complete or parts) permits for export to America for on-sale to Israel.
A little Double Asterisk (love those) at the end of the Small Arms sections explains that, even if a part were a reportable item, “temporary exports (e.g. items exported for demonstration purposes but returned to Australia at a later date)” are marked as Items with an end destination of Australia”. So, provided it came back after we demonstrated it, our mandatory reporting under the ATT doesn’t need to specify if we let the R400 out of the country (if the R400 was even sent off in a completed state). Though part permits are still something controlled under the Aussie Defence Control Act, we aren’t required to disclose those. In fact, under s68, publicly disclosing the reasons for a decision (such as to issue an export license) is prohibited if the disclosure “would prejudice the security, defence, or international relations of Australia”. s69 doesn’t even (according to my reading: I have far more legally adept readers who will correct me I am sure) allow Parliament to receive reports about matters arising under the Act!
You may wonder “can Australia really make a difference?” The answer is apparently that yes, we could significantly delay global F35 production because it is very hard to find replacement sub-manufacturers with the required machinery and business certifications. You may ask “if it’s manufactured outside of our country, how much control do we really have?” to which the answer is that we can track every milligram of uranium we export from ore to waste and if we can do that for stockpiled nukes we can do it for conventional bombs being actually used. You may also ask “do parts really count as weapons?” to which the Arms Trade Treaty says “weapons or items” shouldn’t be sent if there is actual knowledge or concern about genocide or crimes against humanity (Articles 6 and 7), and I personally say “obviously parts count, dingus”. We are obliged under International law, including ICJ preliminary rulings on the settlement issue and on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, to not provide any assistance to Israel.
All of the above is not merely a demonstration of how comprehensively three consecutive therapists (and many teachers and family members) must have failed in order to miss the fact that I’m autistic for two decades. It is also not some showing off exercise that I am particularly clever or thorough: this all took me about an hour using Google. Instead, it is a warning: when Shareholders Reports and Press Releases for the ASX are more reliable means of tracking Australia’s adherence to international law (which is how we know about the R400 or the Drone Guns), more than our own government’s mandatory reporting to international institutions? Then we are truly fucked. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) uses the ATT reports among other things… it won’t be combing through shareholders reports. Yet SIPRI is the go-to database for arms control analysis and arms trade data for most defence economists.
This is all to say that our opacity and complexity make it difficult even for professionals and experts, let alone ordinary dipshit uni students to find out what we are doing. A democracy, particularly one in the digital age, cannot tolerate any barriers to ordinary citizens accessing information. That has to be our standard of transparency: it doesn’t matter if they care to look or not, they should be able to have it at their fingertips if they so choose, even if we can be scientifically certain they literally will never give a fuck. But that’s all softie idealism anyway. The fact is that even with the information at our fingertips, even with 300,000 people storming the Harbour Bridge, even with student referenda and attacks on weapons manufacturers and the MUA threatening to stop loading the ships, none of it actually matters. We have gotten so used to our deep-state unaccountability that Operation Cyclone or Iran-Contra style clandestine arms smuggling is not only shrugged off by the voting public but by the institutions designed to keep MPs under legal scrutiny.
Albanese and Wong acknowledge that there is a serious risk of Palestine no longer existing as a result of the current evil that they are enabling, but enable it anyway for the sake of defence contractor profits. I mean for fuck’s sake Labor should just preselect Oliver North at this rate. Yes, it would probably cause a Defence Procurement crisis if we froze our contributions to the F35 parts pool and got kicked out of the program. I do genuinely care about our national defence. However, if I have to choose between our fleet of F35s and a single hair on a single Gazan child’s head, it is not even a close contest: the kid wins, and anyone who needs me to explain why is bankrupt; intellectually, morally, or both. I have to laugh and make Willy Wonka jokes because I will scream otherwise, and I have to believe that these ghouls we call a Cabinet will be punished with divine retribution in the next world because I know they will absolutely get away with it in this one.
You know who will definitely get away with it? Our Lord of War, Dickie Marles. He won’t be Prime Minister, that I can firmly predict, and his soul is forfeit for sure. But he will end up in the glass elevator with our CEO and be offered something like Chairman of the BAE Systems Board upon his retirement from federal politics after getting thrashed by Chalmers in the leadership election. And when our plucky little death merchant gets high enough up in that elevator to see the flattened Gaza Strip, with what little rubble is left behind being bulldozed for Trump’s new resort chain, and sees the hell he hath wrought? Though the stats will be dated, I reckon he’ll take a cue from one of history’s greatest depictions of the international arms trade: He will take out a cigarette, light it, and opine:
“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s roughly one firearm for every 12 people on the planet. The only question is…
*takes a drag*
How do we arm the other 11?”
(#) - credit my mate Tom who made this comparison to me, inspiring this whole piece.