Inequality Down Under : A SECRET COUNTRY: The Hidden Australia, <i> By John Pilger (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 320 pp., illustrated)</i>

There is a big truth in the title “A Secret Country,” for much has been suppressed in Australia’s history. While many outsiders see the continent as emblematic of the good and robust life lived on a large scale-a land of beer and beaches, pioneering energy and generous camaraderie, room to breathe and opportunity for all-the truth is that an undercurrent of racism runs through Australian culture. It is a current, crusading Australian journalist John Pilger writes here, that traces back to Britain’s bloody dispossession of the Aborigines in 1788. Many Australians have yet to confront this tragedy, and as a consequence, they have yet to confront their conscious and unconscious racism.

Pilger’s leftist criticism is nevertheless so noisy and indignant that is obscures political and educational reforms over the last 20 years which are now helping, however slowly, to eradicate the prejudice that still bites into the Aborigines’ well-being.

His report that the Aborigines’ health and dignity is far from being restored is indeed quite accurate, for instance, but the fault lies less with a nefarious business Establishment, as he implies, than with the disaffection and demoralization felt by many Aborigines. Moreover, the state, once brutally insensitive in the way it entered into the private lives of Aborigines, is now perhaps overly inhibited. The old age applies, that the wisdom of compassion lies not in the desire to help but in the understanding of when and how to give that help.

In going out of his way to enumerate what he sees as aboriginal racial superiorities--e.g., “they learned languages better than whites,” they “created a means of communications . . . which is only now matched by satellites”--Pilger does not do the cause of racial acceptance any service. Equality will come to Australia when non-Aborigines can argue against aboriginal positions without fearing that they will be tagged racist, and when the aboriginal culture is viewed realistically rather than romantically.

In reading Pilger’s admiring account of aboriginal culture, I was reminded of a documentary film in which the earnest, liberal filmmakers are praising traditional tribal life in Africa. The head of the tribe says that he has heard many Europeans pay tribute to his tribe’s traditional way of life, but “never do you leave your world to come to live among us.”

First published in Australia and Britain in 1989 and now in the United States with too little revision and no rethinking, “A Secret Country” is a typical example of a fading leftist critique. The “boo-hiss” words are big business (especially mining), the market, the CIA, and American imperialism (epitomized, of course, by Coca-Cola). Pilger is shocked that Coca-Cola sponsored one of the sailing ships in the Australian bicentenary celebrations. On nearly every page he uses quotation marks to signal the boo-hiss words: “good for business,” “market forces at work.”

This illustrates one of the most crippling distortions of the left wing in the U.K. and Australia, which Americans perhaps will find strange: the ideological assumption that private enterprise is pernicious and alien to the true community. Pilger still seems to yearn for central planning, “to manage fairly the natural resources . . . to trade with the peoples of the Pacific and Asia on a planned basis. . . .” He also is outraged that labor politicians should have social relations with the business community.

The other ugly truths about Australia reported here are the meddling of the CIA in Australian politics and culture (which, where proven, seems to me at worst politically neurotic rather than sinister), and the loss of Australia’s legendary egalitarianism (there are now too many rich and too many poor). Most societies, including Australia, would like to have a high bottom line of income as well as the chance to become rich. But in Pilger’s leftist economics, the existence of the rich creates the poor.

In his final chapter, “Breaking Free,” Pilger makes a confused call for national independence for Australia: independence, that is, from the traditional U.K. relationship and from U.S. defense and cultural influence. “For us, like everyone,” Pilger writes, “breaking free is the only future.” He vaguely suggests that Australia unite with New Zealand and the peoples of the Pacific and establish links with the “democracy movements of Europe” and with the process started by the “initiatives of Mikhail Gorbachev”! Politically, the Pacific is still 99% water. But sovereignty, for Australia or any other nation, has never been static or pure.

It is more likely that Australia will retain its ties with the United States (despite America’s occasionally neurotic political behavior toward it) and with the British Commonwealth (despite post-colonial irritations). I think I recently glimpsed something of the future of nationalism in a restaurant in Paris, named “The European” but advertising the slogan, “The most Parisienne restaurant in Paris”: Local identity will intensify, but within wider political arrangements.

Whistle-blowing on the bandits, in government and in business, is still a vital role for the good investigative journalist, and there is a need for a new breed of political opposition, if not a new left. Yet a new opposition will have to be at least “financially literate” and politically wiser than the old left: understanding the limitations of governmental intervention, toning down its puritanical rage about the vanity, silliness and greed of the rich and powerful, and moving on from a Boy Scout view of what constitutes misbehavior in public life.

In the politics of the future, power will be granted to those who can think creatively and laterally of original approaches to social and international problems, rather than to those espousing a simple return to the heritage of the left. Unfortunately, “A Secret Country” does not open this new discourse: In Pilger’s book, an old discourse shrilly peters out.