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?
Then there were the ongoing exchanges between Latham and John Howard over junk food and fat Australian children and what the Government could or should do to ban junk food advertising during children’s television programs.
On Tuesday, after several bites, Latham lined up yet again to know why Howard had said he was opposed to a ban because of “a loss of revenue to the corporate sector”. Howard got hugely upset with Latham’s “devious and slimy” question, and insisted, sarcastically, that “the last time I looked” it was not illegal for “children to consume McDonald’s”, though it “might be undesirable” to have children consume “too much McDonald’s”.
Next day McDonald’s bought into the issue, claiming its product was highly nutritious and there was absolutely nothing wrong with children eating it once a week.
Latham, meantime, challenged Howard’s “devious and slimy” jibe and quoted the Prime Minister having told the Parliament, in part, about the “impact, once you start banning things, the loss of revenue” would have on Australia’s “very effective and high-quality free-to-air television system”. What Howard said nothing about were the 2000 food vouchers McDonald’s donated to Liberal Party campaign headquarters for the 1996 election – see Pamela Williams’s book The Victory – and, I understand, has gone on donating each election campaign since.
Then there was the email from an old Liberal Party friend on Thursday, which read: “Congrats on your piece on the opinion polls. I’m constantly bemused by the Canberra press gallery’s laziness in its reporting and analysis. It’s tribal, superficial, out-of-touch with real life. Above all it’s so predictable, bogged down in the excruciating detail of daily political combat. Only a few seem to want to hold the Government to account for its deeds and words. They seem to prefer the contest – the slippery, weasel words, the insults – to actually reporting fact and separating it from propaganda. Was it always thus? I think not.
“Have not changed my mind about the outcome of this eight-month election campaign. Howard will lose, not because he’s personally hated (like Keating was by many) but because normal people are getting tired of the constant fear-mongering, the lies, the over-the-top propaganda, pathetic use of flags and soldiers in uniform, the wedge attempts, kids locked up, the shrilly desperate Downer, the revolting Ruddock (he used to be a liberal), and above all the old-style politics of say anything, do anything, deny everything. Jesus, it looks and sounds so tawdry.
“It is eerie watching CNN or Fox cable news. Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft; it could be Howard, Costello, Ruddock. The words and symbols are almost identical. By Christmas it will be all over – in both countries.
“Sorry about the rant. It comes over me when I get deeply depressed.”
Many of us know exactly what he means.
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