RAISING A GLASS TO DEMOCRACY.(Chinese Embassy in Canberra hosts Tibet invasion celebration, Australia)(Brief Article)

To the progressive left-wing mind, the Chinese invasion of Tibet fifty years ago was not, one suspects, all that deplorable as invasions go (certainly nothing like as bad as the British invasion of Australia 163 years earlier). It clearly wasn't deplorable enough to deter our Department of Foreign Affairs from joining in a "celebration" of the glorious event at the Chinese Embassy in Canberra. No one seemed to find that odd, with the honourable exception of the Green senator Bob Brown, who to his eternal credit joined a vigil of protest outside the embassy, while inside guests and hosts toasted each other and wolfed down spring rolls or whatever they serve at Chinese receptions. Apart from his, were any political voices raised against the Department's craven connivance in a monumental suppression of human rights? None "Argus" heard.

Even so, the Department's participation in the great day seems lukewarm compared with the joyful celebrations arranged in Ghasthurst. Councillor Len Hoxha, leader of the majority far-left Labor group on the city council and chair of the council's People's Spontaneous Manifestations Committee, had ordered that all ratepayers and their families, under pain of a rates surcharge for "lack of public spirit", turn out for "a parade of community solidarity in honour of the liberators of ]5bet and of all forces of liberation against benighted clerical-fascist feudalism everywhere." A procession of floats (hired for the occasion from the Sydney Mardi Gras) lumbered down Whitlam Mall, Ghasthurst's main shopping thoroughfare, each bearing a tableau depicting Chinese soldiers (played by student members of the International Socialist Left) in various stages of bayoneting, garrotting or machine-gunning saffron-clad, jack-booted "monks" (played by illegal Cambodian immigrants from Brereton Hill Detention Centre anxious to curry favour with the authorities by co-operating in a municipal occasion). One tableau with the banner "Enlightenment" showed a student clad in a Chairman Mao jacket and laurel wreath smashing prayer wheels with a sledge-hammer. For another, the piece de resistance of the parade, Councillor Hoxha had engaged the services of satirical actor Gavin Hamm ("the Max Gillies of Ghasthurst") to impersonate the Dalai Lama, with the unusual addition of a white death's-head mask, top hat with the legend "Tool of Wall Street" on the band and a large cigar which he ostentatiously lit and relit with "banknotes" out of a chest labelled "Bank of Lhasa: Property of the Tibetan People".

Apart from an unfortunate scene when two members of the Mardi Gras committee who had opposed the decision to rent out the floats (on the grounds that "Chinese communists are homophobes") arrived to demand their float back and, with shrill cries of "Get off, you bitch!" tried to push Gavin Hamm from his place of honour, the only disappointment of ...