Reparations Payments to Oz for the Port Arthur Massacre?

Isle of the Dead

by Mary W Maxwell

Many researchers have concluded that the terroristic event that was planned for Sunday, April 28, 1996, at 1.30pm was going to happen not at the Broad Arrow Café, but on a boat! The victims were going to be tourists, with a certain percent of them being senior citizens from the US.

At the colonial penal colony of Port Arthur, Tasmania, tourists do a walking tour of the old prison. Also they can take a side trip, by boat, to visit a place called The Isle of the Dead, where convicts were buried.

On the famous Sunday, April 28, the usual 1.30pm boat ride did not take place. This hitch seems to have caused a last-minute change of plans.  Apparently the gunman was quickly re-instructed to do his killing in the café instead.

I must say I find it amazing that the organizers of the massacre were able to act so quickly to change the venue, but I grant that there is evidence for it. So just think: an Australian gunman may have killed many Americans.  I ask: could this have led to the US declaring war on Oz?

Pretend that the killer had shot dead a hundred Americans that day. (The Port Arthur boat can carry 200 tourists.) And, just for argument’s sake, imagine that the media narrative about Martin Bryant was used. That is, a mentally deranged 28-year-old did the killings.

Is there justification for the US to send some bombers Down Under? As we all know, the US did declare war on Afghanistan to avenge Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center.  Afghanistan copped it because Bin Laden was said to be living there – even though he was a Saudi.

Reparations

Now I want to put the matter on a different footing, involving the payment of war reparations.  We all know the real event of that day – it was Aussies who died in the Café, not Yankees who died on a boat.  Let’s ask: could Australia have a claim against any other nation?

What if foreigners were behind the whole thing? Instead of naming a country such as UK or US, I will refer to Ruritania as the bad guy. (Ruritania is a fictional nation that is used in exam questions in International Relations classes). Please play along.

How does one nation obtain war reparations from another?

The basic historic qualifying point seems to have been that the reparation-payer lost the war and then was sued for payment.

For example, if Chad marched on Morocco and did a lot of damage, in hopes of conquering Morocco, but then was defeated, Chad may find itself having to hand money over to Morocco.

Mechanisms for Agreeing To Pay Reparations

How would Morocco get the money “off” the Chadians? There is no outside force to administer it. The likelihood is that Morocco would simply gouge it out of Chad, perhaps by declaring part of Chad’s territory as now Moroccan. Or it may ‘influence’ Chad’s now-subservient government to pass a law gallantly offering to pay the reparations.

An outside administrator is sometimes established. In 1991, the UN Security Council (don’t get me started) passed Resolution 687 (1991) to set up a single-purpose organization in Switzerland, called the UN Compensation Commission. Its only task was to oversee the payment by Iraq of billions of dollars of reparations for the damage it did to Kuwait.

That was unusual. A more typical payment arrangement is the one we saw in Japan’s handover of huge payments to the countries it harmed during World War II. Japan paid reparations to Korea and the Philippines – and also to Denmark and Sweden. Japan negotiated the settlement with each of those nations.

Incidentally, the post-war government of Japan was run by the US. Australia didn’t receive any compo from Japan. It might have been deserving of it but as far as I am aware reparations were not pursued.

How Might ‘Ruritania’ Have Done the Port Arthur Massacre?

One day in April 1996, a person (identity unknown) wielding a gun killed more than 20 people in a Café in Australia. He (or, conceivably, she) then killed more people in the parking lot and up the road. I’ll pass over the fact that a carjacking took place.

The government and media of Australia conspired to blame a helpless citizen, Martin Bryant, and did not proceed to look at the evidence indicating that anyone else was the shooter.

I argue here that the force behind the “Port Arthur massacre” was the nation of Ruritania. It somehow got the killer or killers to do the job at Broad Arrow Café. That nation, Ruritania, did not then conquer Australia.  Nor did Australia conquer it. So the usual method of reparation has never presented itself.

(Note: I realize that the ‘Ruritania’ that caused the Port Arthur massacre is much more likely a secret society than a nation. I think it runs a world government. Such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the military force, NATO, enter into individual countries and rule them, to some extent.)

In Case of a Confession or Criminal Conviction

In order to walk through a hypothetical of Australia demanding reparations, I will have to make the case that the offending party, Ruritania, has confessed to the killings at Port Arthur. Or, at least, a properly-working court of law has found Ruritania to be the guilty party.

If Ruritania has confessed, the reparations thing would be like Japan admitting that it harmed the Philippines. (It did admit this.) Then Japan and the Philippines sit down and work out the sum to be paid.

Note: money doesn’t always go to a government.  In the case of Germany paying reparations for the Holocaust, some of the payment went to the government of the state of Israel – a state that had not existed at the time of the Holocaust — but some of it went to Jewish organizations.

Also Germany paid compensation to individuals, for instance those whose businesses it had destroyed.  Similarly, the US Congress passed a law in 1990 to pay compensation to the men and women of Japanese ethnicity (many of them US citizens) whose property had been seized in California during the 1940s.

That American payment did not occur as the result of a lawsuit. Individuals had been blocked from suing to win damages for loss of their property. Anyway, that was all a domestic matter within the US, so it does not quite fit the concept of wartime reparations.

The Control by Foreigners Is Disguised

As I said, if Ruritania were clearly identified as the killer of Australians at Port Arthur, there is well-established way for the damaged nation to ask for reparations. But the situation at the moment is not one in which Ruritania has either owned up to, or been convicted of, doing the Port Arthur massacre.

Many people now realize that there was some force that day whose origins are probably outside Australia. Indeed it appears that such a force controls the government of Oz in a general way.

That force certainly controls the global media. As recently as this week, Malcolm Turnbull, proposed to do away with even the weak regulation that Oz now exerts on the concentration of media ownership.  That means a kowtowing to the globalizers, doesn’t it? What a pity that Australia’s prime minister can’t stand up for this country.

Watch Out for Safety-Valving

When a truly guilty party is protected, and blame placed on some poor scapegoat, we often see the use of some sort of payment being offered to the victims. It is a safety valve, for the guilty; it appears to be a response to public clamor for justice, though in fact it merely suppresses the problem.

In Victoria, in the face of popular demand for justice for victims of Church-related child abuse, the Church itself came up with “The Melbourne Response.” This scheme made payments to victims of the abuse, with a $75,000 cap on payments, per person. Perpetrators, for the most part, escaped arrest.

Today as I was standing at a bus shelter in Adelaide, I noticed a sign encouraging bus riders to look for people who cheat by evading the fare. It mentioned that the fine for fare evading is “$160, plus a levy of $60 for victims of crime.”

That means that an individual who suffers from any crime, such as assault, can apply to the state for money. Cheating on bus fare is a victimless crime, but the funds have to come from somewhere — so $60 is added on to the cheater’s fine! I do not approve of that sort of confusion. Who really owes what to whom?

Punishment Evasion

Quiet payouts have the effect of dulling the search for the guilty party.  Although you never hear it mentioned by the mainstream media, each family that was hurt in the famous attacks of September 11, 2001 got close to a $2 million dollar settlement.

Congress legislated it and a man named Kenneth Feinberg dispensed the payments. He also dispensed “from a private fund” a payment of $2 million to the relatives of persons killed at the Boston marathon. Those who suffered the amputation of a limb got $1 million each.

All the while a lad named Jahar Tsarnaev was used as the scapegoat for the bombing. He surely did not do that bombing, just as Martin Bryant did not do, and could not have done, the Port Arthur killings.

In regard to both cases, I have written extensively about the outrageous breaches in judicial protocol that resulted in the convictions of those two men. This is what society needs to face up to: its loss of the rule of law. It has a far greater effect that the killings at Port Arthur or at Copley Square, Massachusetts.

My point is that the invention of a safety valve – such as paying the victims of 9-11 or victims of the pedophile priests – draws attention away from where it should urgently be focused.

Let’s think about Port Arthur: whodunit?

— Mary Maxwell is the author of Fraud Upon the Court (2015) and Morality among Nations (1990). Along with others at GumshoeNews.com, and at Change.org, she hopes to see Martin Bryant receive justice.