9-20-07, 9:47 am
Howard has certainly lost the plot. Maybe its those adverse polls that keep on rolling out dismal numbers for the Coalition. Maybe the old clichés don’t work any more. Maybe people are just sick of being lectured to and have switched off. Its probably a combination of all of these and one could add a few more like WorkChoices, the Iraq war, climate change.
Howard is possibly the most conservative, right-wing politician ever inflicted on Australia and he’s got it into his head that he is indispensable. It’s probably true that no other potential Prime Minister would be as conservative as he. The Liberals have always held the belief that they are born to rule and that only they know what is in the best interests of Australia.
But the mutterings and underground murmurings continue to disturb Howard’s sleep. Sensing defeat he is pushing through every bit of conservative legislation he can before calling the election date.
His latest international action the UN vote declaration on the rights of the Indigenous people. 143 members of the UN voted for the declaration and 11 abstained with only four against.
Howard’s further attack on against the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is par for the course. However, Howard persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister to declare a 'no' vote against the rights of the Inuit and other indigenous people of that country.
The other two nations in this unholy exercise were the US (against its First Nations and Hawai’ians) and New Zealand (against the Maori).
It has shown, once again, how isolated the Australian Government is in the world despite the Government’s pretensions that Australia is a 'world leader'. The Howard Government also came a cropper at APEC and did not get its policies accepted despite the Howard being strengthened by the strong right arm of George Bush.
In his attitude to the Indigenous people, Howard has a worthy lieutenant in the person of Mal Brough. Brough is a militarist from WA and is imposing legislation that would wind back the clock for at least a century. It would thieve Aboriginal land once again, force them to abandon their culture and customary law and impose outside white officers to run their communities.
Its assimilation all over again which many hoped had been buried as an Australian Government policy objective. But Howard and Brough are blinkered by blatant racist attitudes and are ignorant of the rights of the Indigenous people. They will stubbornly resist any concession giving recognition to the many centuries of occupation of the Australian continent by the Indigenous people before Captain Cook landed in 1788 and began to steal all the land from the original owners.
However, getting back to the elections. Howard’s got himself in a muddle. He faced down the opposition in the Liberal Party, then said he would go after about two years if he is elected again to the seat of Bennelong.
He now says that he would not subject the voters in his electorate to a by-election half-way through the coming term. This means that if a Liberal Government is re-elected he will remain as Prime Minister for the full term and will not give Peter Costello a go. But who wants Peter Costello as PM anyway?
The challenge to Howard is not going to go away even if he were to be elected. Sooner or later the members of the Liberal Party and going to find the courage to vote Howard out of the Liberal leadership. Perhaps this will only happen when the Coalition Government is defeated in the elections and Howard is no longer a Member of Parliament.
And when that finally happens, Jeanette will have to tear herself out of the Lodge where she also seems to think that she has permanent tenure on the property, evidenced by the tens of thousands of dollars she has spent on renovating 'her home' to her taste. That too may take a bulldozer.
All the indications are that Howard can be defeated this time around. And the more he manoeuvres and the more he attempts to con the Australian people the more votes he loses. His conservative policies have finally caught up with him just as they finally did when Robert Menzies was thrown out. When that happened Australia heaved a sigh of relief. The defeat of Howard will bring on an even bigger celebration.
From The Guardian
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