Politics

John Howard won a fourth term based on a demeaning and deceptive campaign, former Liberal Party president John Valder said.

Mr Valder, who backed the campaign of former intelligence analyst and Greens candidate Andrew Wilkie in Mr Howard’s Sydney seat of Bennelong, said he wanted the return of a Liberal government but without Mr Howard.

“John Howard has been so deceptive, he’s won a great victory in this campaign,” Mr Valder told ABC Television.

“But I certainly don’t admire the methods by which he achieved it, which is a lowering and lowering of standards to the point where he demeaned himself by using the lowest form of marketing, telemarketing.

I’m up bright and early tomorrow morning to work as a polling officer at the Federal elections. It’s tedious, tiring work, and a long day, but I like it and the pay’s nothing to be sneezed at. I have to be realistic and predict a Coalition retain, with a resurgence of Greens Party popularity and the subsequent Labor preferences to make it a close one and cause a few marginal seats to switch hands, but a Howard reinstallment nonetheless. But hey, you never know until it happens.

In 48 hours the election will be all over. Oh god, Howard’s gunna win, I just know it. I can’t stand it. He needs to go. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s a liar. He’s a fear-mongerer. He doesn’t care. It’s all about the history books. People are too fucking dumb to see through his bullshit. I’ve never been so emotional about removing a government. Please, please get rid of him. I can’t bear it.

SMH’s Margo Kingston publishes an interesting letter from a journalistic colleague staying in the US which sheds light on the experiences of an Australian observing the 2004 Presidential elections first-hand. It’s good to see that, contrary to the nagging of my own self-deprecative skepticism, it appears that a hemispheric buffer zone hasn’t affected my own objectivity to any noticeable degree.

Dear Margo,
I have found myself in what feels the bizarre position of travelling in the US at this time. It is bizarre in that I am witnessing the US election campaign and talking to Americans, at the same time as the nuances of what is going in Australian election are lost to me. Of course there is virtually no reference to Australia in the US media.

There is for all practical purposes no real difference in the stated objectives of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry. It’s tweedle dee or tweedle dumb. Why waste your vote on one or the other when the effective end result would be the same?
Yeah, but why Mel Gibson?

If you’re pleased with the way things are and want 4 more years of the same then, by all means, vote for Mr. Bush. If in some way or another you think that Mr. Kerry will improve the situation then be sure to vote for him. But if you believe that our country should embark on a different, more positive course then consider making the effort to write in Mel Gibson for President on Nov. 2.
Yeah, but why Mel Gibson?

from Sydney Morning Herald

A 10-year federal ban on assault weapons expires today in the United States, allowing Americans to buy AK-47s and Uzis at their local gun stores.

“George Bush gave police officers his word that he would keep the ban,” Kerry said, “but when it came time to extend it, Bush’s powerful friends in the gun lobby asked him to look the other way. He just couldn’t resist, and he said ‘Sure’. He chose to make the job of terrorists easier and make the job of America’s police officers harder.”

The law prohibited the manufacture and distribution of 19 kinds of semiautomatic firearms that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition while allowing such guns already in circulation to remain there.

from the Melbourne Herald Sun

The Greens manifesto backs official supply of the dangerous drug ecstasy as well as state-sanctioned heroin and marijuana sales at what it calls appropriate venues.

The ecstasy policy suggests distributing the drug to users while providing official information detailing the dangers of the drug.

About 15 people have died from ecstasy use since it hit Australia in the 1990s. The drug can cause severe psychological side-effects in some people.

Green critic Mike Nahan, of the Institute of Public Affairs, a Right-wing think tank, said the party was the most radical Australia had seen.

“The Greens are loopier than any party I’ve seen, and will be much worse than the Australian Democrats ever were,” he said.

The ABC’s Media Watch does a good job (as usual) at debunking the bullshit surrounding Opposition Leader Mark Latham’s alleged raunchy alleged bucks night alleged video sprung onto a voracious press by Howard’s cadre of muckrakers. As expected, the pious drivel came thick and fast from a wide range of media sources (the Murdoch News Ltd. press was automatically a given, but the Sydney Morning Herald should know better (Miranda Devine’s continued employment notwithstanding)), yet it started to become strangely apparent that nobody could actually lay claim to having seen this video. All sources of information regarding the contents of the sleazy tool of political career destruction seemed oddly sketchy and ephemeral. David Marr succinctly outlines the rest.

—

by Alan Ramsey

It has been a wonderful week for the absurd. The compulsory school flagpoles were bad enough. Yet nothing quite matched the pomposity or ridiculousness of Brendan Nelson (Federal Education Minister), the Sydney Liberal infamous for abandoning his earring to become a Howard minister, when he stood beside his patron and Prime Minister on Monday to fulminate about the Commonwealth’s election intervention, with the new fitness and egregious funding rule, in state education, and who said, with genuine horror, as if he’d just discovered he stepped in dog poo: “A number of schools don’t even have a motto!”

Is there nothing this Government won’t do to stop Mark Latham?

America once again felt good about itself - except the poor who hunted game for food on payday, writes Tony Horwitz.

In this week of eulogies for Ronald Reagan, we often hear that he made America “feel good about itself”. No one asks whether boosting the nation’s self-esteem was a good thing.

Reagan’s unashamed wielding of US power and money may have hastened Soviet collapse. But at home, what he really made Americans feel good about was getting rich, no matter the social cost. This ethos still reigns in America. Increasingly, it seems to be Australia’s creed as well.

John Howard returns from his whirlwind tour of the United States and eastern Europe tomorrow, the latter to participate in the pomp and ceremony of war remembrance which he so earnestly looks forward to (although it did provide the highlight of the last few months in which Howard, in his own inimitably disingenuous style, with one eye on the assembled media throng, was shaking hands with a grizzled old D-Day veteran in a wheelchair and thanking him for turning up, who looked up at him and dismissed him with a matter-of-fact “I don’t know who you are”) and the former to basically pose and mingle with the majority of his actual constituents. Following his meeting with California Governor Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles (in a scene strangely reminiscent of the movie Twins), Howard flew to Washington for his sixth meeting with Bush in the last two years, for “talks” followed by the obligatory “press conference” in front of the White House press corps and select, security-cleared Australian media representatives.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Prime Minister John Howard was passionately against the idea of the notion of gay marriage. Here’s what he actually said.

“You’re talking here about the survival of the species,”

An adult said this. An adult in charge of a democracy of 20 million persons. Who thinks that granting equal civil rights to around 5% of the population will somehow result in a spiralling vortex of human extinction. An adult. With an education. Our publically mandated leader. Never forget that.