Election Looms - Howard's Doom?
After what seems to have been a year of a phony
election campaign, the incumbent John Howard, Australia's Prime Minister, will
soon have to call an election. He is in no hurry to do so, as his so-called
'Liberal' party trails the opposition Labor Party by more than ten points, and
the Labor leader Kevin Rudd is being perceived as a fresh face. Howard is
increasingly being seen as a man who has run out of ideas, but also as a man who
has brazenly danced around the truth far too often.
Howard has always been a formidable debater, and
I can recall watching him run rings around the Labor stalwart Tom Uren on
television in the mid 1970's. He has also been a man of firm convictions. He has
always held a pathological hatred for the trade union movement, a barely
disguised contempt for the Aboriginal people of Australia, and although at times
he has managed to muddy the waters, he has always harboured an ingrained and
ongoing strain of racism. Howard knows he is perceived as a racist, which is why
he is forced to deny it; and he knows he is seen as a liar, or he would not see
the need to deny that he is on national TV.
There is a consistency about Howard.
The man who turned away a boatload of refugees who had been rescued at sea by
the bulk carrier Tampa, in 2001, and who demonised them, assailed them in
parliament, and had them herded off to detention camps at gunpoint, is the same
man who, while serving as a cabinet minister in the Fraser Government, was the
only one to vote against that Government's decision to admit Vietnamese
refugees known as the 'boat people' in 1976. In the wake of the attacks on the
world trade centre in September 2001, Howard gleefully turned the Tampa incident
into a divisive debate on racism, and even went so far as to nurture the
outright lie, initially pedalled by his minister for defence at the time, Peter
Reith, that refugees had threatened to, or had, thrown their children into the
sea. Photographs of children in the ocean, taken during another incident when a
refugee ship sank, were even proffered by the Howard Government as proof that
these evil people had done just that, and far from attempting to establish the
truth of this incident, disputed from the start, Howard solemnly declared that
he 'would not like people who would do that to their children coming into this
country.' Howard won the election, and his minister for immigration, Phillip
Ruddock, who was given the responsibility of driving the anti-refugee agenda,
was given a standing ovation as a tide of racism and fear swept Howard back into
power.
During Howard's next three
years of power, he managed to support the invasion of Iraq by the United States,
while simultaneously subjecting those fleeing from the evil Saddam to years of
detention behind barbed wire. Men, women and children attempting to flee to
Australia in leaky boats found themselves in desert gulags overseen by mercenary
guards, or despatched to Neuru for years on end; - the so-called 'Pacific
Solution', wherein vast regions of Australia were declared to be no longer a
part of Australia, so that international obligations regarding refugees could be
avoided. Dirt-poor Neuru was paid to house many of these poor wretches, thus
stymying attempts by those imprisoned on Neuru to get efficient legal
representation. Despite the bastardisation of these people, the great majority
of them were eventually deemed to be genuine refugees.
Howard's 2004 election was won with an
almighty scare campaign about interest rates, combined with the eccentric
performance of the then Labor leader, the sometimes brilliant, sometimes
erratic, and occasionally intimidating Mark Latham. Latham gave Howard a scare
for a while, but less of a scare than Howard gave the voters, who voted him in
with an increased majority. Latham may not have helped his cause when he roughed
Howard up with a televised vigorous handshake at an ABC studio, which in
retrospect, was a lost opportunity to apply a well executed head-butt.
Incredibly, and partly because of an
all-too-clever allocation of Labor Party preferences in the Senate which enabled
the conservative Family First Party to gain a seat, Howard found himself in
control of both houses of parliament, and immediately set about fulfilling his
life long wishes. He was able to privatise Telstra, something the vast majority
of voters were always opposed to, but high on Howard's wish-list. He outlawed
compulsory student union fees for universities, depriving the campuses of
millions of dollars which went towards providing services for students, and
weakening the influence of these dangerous radicals. Finally, he dispensed with
an arbitration system which had served the country well for over a hundred
years, abolished laws which protected workers against unfair dismissal, and
passed the so-called Work Choices legislation, designed principally to side-line
unions, and to force workers into individual contracts. During this term of
Howard's Government, it emerged that the Australian Wheat Board, responsible for
the marketing of Australian overseas wheat sales, had paid Saddam Hussein's
regime bribes to the order of three hundred million dollars, at the very time
which Howard was supporting the invasion of Iraq. Incredibly, no-one in the
Howard Government, despite numerous tip-offs, seemed to know anything about it,
and unsurprisingly, an enquiry with limited terms of reference, and muzzled
public servants, deemed that the government was squeaky clean in the
affair.
The Howard Government has
enjoyed good economic times during its reign. It is a combination of good
management, of reforms initiated by the Hawke/Keating Labor government before
it, (such as bank deregulation and the floating of the dollar) and of the export
mining boom driven largely by the expansive boom in China. To Howard, economics
is everything. It must be a mystery for him, as to why the people of Australia
seem inclined to reject him at the next election. The mystery for me, is why a
country which purports to be the land of a fair go, ever voted for him in the
first place.
Posted: Mon - September 24, 2007 at 11:37 PM
