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John Quiggin 
Sir Henry Casingbroke Says: December 2nd, 2007 at 9:57 am
Done. Payment details hereunder.
Payment Sent (ID No.5G751050YU6289618)
Business Name: Mark Bahnisch
Contact details deleted
Total Amount:-$50.00 AUD
Date: 1 Dec. 2007
Time: 16:05:37 PST
Status: Completed
Note:
Sir Henry has asked me to settle my Howard-Bennelong bet with him by making a contribution to LP’s server repair fund. Consider this Howard’s final contribution to LP’s political discourse.
Good stuff Jack.
JQ, you might wish to edit Jack’s post at comment 51 to remove the direct references Mark’s gmail address. No doubt he’s on some spamlists already, but no need to add to the pile.
Done
Dear Jack,
That is an outrageous allegation. I have nothing but the greatest respect for my friend the ex-Chancellor of Austria. Claims of “racism” are no truer of him than of me.
In my experience these allegations of “racism” are from people who don’t understand how the “level playing feild” works. People succeed or fail on their own merits, and if some people find themselves at the bottom of the pile, well, they just need to work harder.
Jon and I know that. That’s why we are such great friends
Thank you Mr Strocchi for your prompt and honourable response.
alan, i would be happy to add ethical standards to my list of benchmarks, except i cannot remember the last time that i was moved to applaud ethical behavior in a pollie. setting standards in that area is perhaps too demanding, like expecting hyenas to move down the menu to the ‘vegetarian’ section.
John Howard changed the face of Australian politics by making his conservative vision mainstream. I forget Kim Beazley’s exact words but they were something like ‘the leading force in Australian conservative politics in a generation’.
Kevin Rudd is the most conservative Labor leader for quite a while and in all major policies is mimicking John Howard. On climate change (after Garrett’s goof) almost exactly mimicking Howard. Education, taxes,…all the same.
Kevin Rudd owes it all to John Howard.
After being PM for 11 years the worst that John can come up with was that he was a borderline bigot and that he told fibs. The best that Fred Argy can come up with was that he was a nice man who remembered people’s names. There’s some deluded conceit here.
And Fred you attack the political biases in others but fail to recognise your own – is your assessment of Howard neutral and fair or a thoroughly biased hack ALP view concealed with some side comments about Howard’s claimed politeness?
And who, Jill, could forget Lowitja’s name. She is one of those aboriginals claiming to be from the ‘stolen generation’ who was in fact (along with her siblings) abandoned by her father. I remember her almost as well as I recall Charles Perkins. He also had a defective memory.
Both John and Sir Henry point to Howard’s ‘bigotry’ and ‘xenophobia’. But I think our relationship with Asean countries is pretty good. We now admit significant numbers of immigrants from Africa – under Keating/Hawke almost none and both the immigration intake and the refugee/humanitarian intakes are far higher than they were during the Keating/Hawke years.
Partly that is because the economy is in a much healthier state than then with record low inflation, unemployment and high economic growth. But even if that is true the evidence is hardly consistent with Howard being a bigot.
Indeed this is a leftwing myth that most people know is false – repeat it long enough and frequently enough and the myth might be transformed into another myth – that Labor won to save Australia from bigotry.
By the way Rudd has ruled out increases in African migration. Oh yes but he is from the ALP and there is no way he could ever be viewed as a racist or a bigot.
The meme that Howard promoted bigotry is inconsistent with the policy and polity facts. The AUS govt has never in its history had such a diverse civic intake and the population is right behind the govt.
“Howard=Bigot” is something that Leftists say to make themselves feel socially superior to people who voted for Howard. Perhaps it is social achievement to cast an vote anti-Howard but its not one that I would be bragging about.
Perhaps Howard’s politics occasionally “played the race card by dog-whistling specially coded xenophobic messages to the red-necks” or some such. All this tells me is that AUS political culture is so intellectually debased that truthful social pattern recognition is considered unrepeatable in polite company.
I’d be fascinated to know what “truthful social pattern recognition” means in English.
Michael Says: December 2nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Well “pattern recognition” is a talent that got our species its name. “Social” is is what blog is about – dealing with contentious current affairs esp the so-called Culture Wars. Perhaps you have a problem understanding “truthful”?
As this thread so spectacularly attests, those who claim the Culture Wars are “over” need to be told “they’re dreamin.”
Michael,
BTW Rudd will continue the indigenous intervention. Thank God someone finally recognised that pattern of abuse.
More power to him and all who sail against the Lefts discredited and disgraced cultural program.
Fred Argy is too kind to John Howard. He says, “On the kinder side, I found Howard to be a very courteous and naturally friendly person.”
Apparent kindness and charm one-on-one when working a room might be fine if it is coupled with genuine concern applied in relation to general humanity. The real test for powerful people is how they treat powerless people. John Howard and his cabinet failed that test abysmally.
What got up my nose was their unprincipled pursuit of powerless people like Dr Hanif, their throwing of the legal and humanitarian book out the window (on Guantamao Bay for instance), their lies and evasions (children overboard), lack of accountability (AWB wheat scandal), mean-spiritedness (Ms Solon), locking up of people indiscriminantly (the Bedrae family, young children and Australian nationals in immigration detention), mis-use and politicisation of the Army, Immigration, Aust Fed Police), mis-management and ad hoc policy (10 billion Murray plan on the back of a napkin, Aboriginal settlements invasion strategy quaintly called an intervention), demonisation of minority groups; all done of course for no other reason than their own petty power. Howard showed that was true at the end when he could not let go even at the death and even at the cost of his own party.
To attribute any public good to that cabinet or anyone in it is to ignore an absolute mountain of evidence. I have the same revulsion for leftists who act like that or worse. The only brake on Howard was our democratic system. It’s not about left and right. It’s about basic kindness, humanity and rule of law on the one hand versus cruelty, selfishness and arbitrary subversion of the rule of law on the other.
John Ralston Saul put it well. He quite rightly said it isn’t about having love for humanity. That is an impossible ideal. JRS pointed out that it’s difficult enough for each of us to love our own family at times (or for them to love us).
It is about holding to the ideals of democracy, rule of law, elightened and moderated self-interest along with an ability to act disinterestly in the public arena. The last means not thinking of your own sectional interests all the time but seeing that some things must be and are done for the general good of others.
To achieve the above we must, in the politcal arena, totally reject John Howard and all who are like him.
Harry, with regard to Howard’s xenophobia and bigotry, two things emerge: one is that he genuinely held those views and two, that after the emergence of Pauline Hanson as a political force, he was advised to take up and with alacrity did take up that political opportunity, while at the same time destroying Hanson and her party as a political force (with the help of Tony Abbott). This was a brilliant strategic move although I doubt that it was of Howard’s own making.
When it emerged that his seat of Bennelong now contained a large proportion of Asian migrants who would be vital in any borderline swing, the penny dropped for Howard and he lamely tried to explain his views as “being a product of their time� by way of seeking absolution. As if understanding where he was coming from would make the views any less odious! (Especially by people on the receiving end of racist policy.) It was too little, too late and pathetically transparent.
Howard was now faced with the prospect of losing his own seat even though there was a small chance the Liberals might still prevail in the general election as a whole. Advised now, again, by Grahame Morris (who was forced out the job as John Howard’s chief spin doctor by the travel rorts scandal back in 1997) Howard tried to bluff his way through, even though his position appeared self-contradictory and preposterously unsustainable.
Howard’s post-election comments about his love for the Liberal Party were meant to convey to those in the know that his was an act of self-sacrifice; he’d tried to win it for the Libs one more time – by coming home in the final stretch by a nose, powered by the bigot vote and he lost his seat in the process. Is there a greater love?
It would have worked but for one detail. Those very same Howard’s Battlers whose ears pricked up when they heard his dog whistle, ignored it this time because Howard sold them down the river with Work Choices. Replacing the juicy bone with a small can of Pal was just too much to ask. For this he can thank Minchin, Julie Bishop and Costello, all of whom carried in their knapsacks instructions from the big end of town – miners, merchant banks and industrialists. (No wonder that Costello is now oh-so petulantly asking them for a payoff with a job in the boardroom in the sky. I hope they tell him to get stuffed.)
Howard was always a gambler, and a “loser.� By that I mean something specific. Not a no-hoper but someone who comes into a game of poker and pathologically bluffs his way through the game, always half-expecting to be called and found out. It is inevitable that sooner or later their luck is going to end. Howard knew it, too. His previous comments shed a light on this mentality most clearly.
After Peacock engineered a leadership coup Howard admitted readily he was just “luckyâ€? to be in the right place at the right time but now his luck had run out. He said famously in answer to a question of coveting again the leadership: “Oh, that’s Lazarus with a triple bypass. I mean, really, break it down…” He then laughed, seeing the proposition of himself as leader again quite preposterous and funny – as in absurd. His cards now on the table showed nothing, not even a pair of twos.
But luck would again grant him a roomful of mugs.
To sum up my position in answer to your post Harry; it was Pauline Hanson that changed the face of Australian politics by having her conservative vision mainstream. Howard’s opportunism ensured that.
As regards our relationship with ASEAN countries, to suggest that Australia’s “good standing” is due to Howard’s policy (what policy?) is uninformed and glib, especially when you remember that Australia’s foreign minister was a buffoon right out of Gilbert and Sullivan and a laughing stock in diplomatic circles everywhere. ASEAN countries have their own agenda and if playing Australia along is part of it then it had nothing to do with Howard. Note also that some ASEAN countries are not above using racism or religious bigotry to further their own political ends so presumably they would understand where Australia is coming from, i.e. political self-interest in playing the race/religion card. Moreover, Paul Keating, who was neither a racist nor a xenophobe, had brought Australia’s relations with ASEAN countries to a nadir.
Sir Henry Casingbroke Says: December 2nd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Howard sacked Hanson from the LP for making unsavoury comments about Aboriginals. He then relentlessly pursued her through the courts until she was finally jailed by a politically correct ball-buster of a judge.
If this is somehow “encouraging Hansonism” one shudders to think what discouragement would mean. Would burning at the stake do?
Howard’s attitude towards the prospect of more minority diversity is that of a conservative pragmatist: cautious realism. If it works he is prepared to pull out all stops. If not then he rolls up the welcome mat. The (welcome) turnaround of his attitude towards high IQ NE Asians is proof of that.
This is a sensible attitude to take. The results speak for themselves: AUS’s minority problems are as nothing compared to the USA and USE. Believe me, I have driven my way accross both continents- of the tourist traps – and I know of what I speak.
Do you really want to turn the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney into social experiment laboratories, as in London, Paris and LA?
The New Left’s play towards minorities is a seductive political intoxicant for the Left. But it is poison just the same.
The Broad Left dodged a bullet when Howard got into power in 1996. It was heading down the Northern Atlantic road of ethnic ghettoes, far-right political parties and a festering politically correct culture based on deceit, rackets and bad-faith.
Any party that indulges post-modern liberal fantasies in its civic cultural policies would rapidly find out how much the average Australian’s attachment to “bricks and mortar” outweighed nominal ideological positions. “There goes the neighborhood” is not a phrase likely to go down well in a population as over-mortgaged as Australia.
The ALP, through painful organizational and political experience, knows this. Which is why it is unlikely to tinker too much with Howard’s cultural policy settings, despite wishful thinking about Ended Cultural Wars.
Howard’s greatest legacy to public life is his sincerely flattering opposite number: Kevin “Mini Me-Too” Rudd.
HC,
This assertion would carry more weight were you to explain, in broad terms, what you mean by Howard’s “conservative” “vision”.
More precisely, what sort of a conservative:
1. Increases enormously the role of the state in cross-subsidisation of various political clientes?
2. At the same time reduces appreciably the legal right of wage earners to organise themselves to negotiate their working conditions with their employers?
3. Vastly increases the powers of central government by petitioning the High court to extend enormously the corporation powers of the Australian constitution.
4. Undermines judicial independence by excision of Australian territoriality?
5. Annuls leasehold title of lands in the Northern Territory, but only those leases deemed to be held by aboriginal persons?
6. Creates a national security system that operates beyond the purview of the judiciary?
7. Executes a thoroughgoing purge of the Liberal Party, as a result of which traditional liberals were excluded or made to feel unwelcome and which now fields candidates and policies that have made it unelectable the length and breadth of the country?
Is this the sort of conservative that you are?
While there is no doubt Rudd is conservative I suspect his more defining political attribute will be his authoritarianism. I suspect there will be quite ruthless cuts in bureacracy and services. Perhaps we will see the phoenix of “Razor gangs.”
Katz
While I share your disdain at Howard’s bribes, I wonder how fairly they can be reduced to “middle class welfare?” I don’t have the data at my fingertips (I’m sure JQ will), but I was under the impression that there was actually a substantial redistribution in favour of the bottom twenty percent during the past ten years.
Also, I am not sure that handing a surplus back to the taxpayers is a repudiation of “conservatism,” especially when those handbacks were aimed at strengthening families. Perhaps if he had pursued these agendas by putting the state into debt he could be so derided.
Again JG, I never used the term “middle-class welfare” in the context of Howard. The closest I got (though misspelled!) was “various clienteles”.
But as you admitted, Howard didn’t give it back. He redistributed it.
You can’t have it both ways, JG!
I never used “encouraging Hansonism”, Jack, so I don’t think you can build your response on such a premise. This is classic straw man argument. Howard and/or his advisers noted that Hanson’s views had resonance among some traditional Labor supporters and by signalling to them that he would adopt some of those ideas and attitudes he hoped to woo them over for political advantage. It was a successful strategem. At the same time, he used the statutory machinery of state, in the way that Vladimir Putin is doing at the moment in Russia, to remove her from competing with him on that ground.
“Well “pattern recognitionâ€? is a talent that got our species its name. “Socialâ€? is is what blog is about – dealing with contentious current affairs esp the so-called Culture Wars. Perhaps you have a problem understanding “truthfulâ€??” – JS
Is it the sociological version of the 19thC ‘scientific’ defense of racism?
“BTW Rudd will continue the indigenous intervention. Thank God someone finally recognised that pattern of abuse.
More power to him and all who sail against the Lefts discredited and disgraced cultural program.” – JS.
The cultural warriors delusions on this are phenomenal.
Aboriginal social dysfunction emerged yesterday because they finally bothered to notice. Go back and read Nugget Coombes from 30+ years ago and he was commenting on the same problems and the need for significant government intervention to improve the lot of Indigenous australians.
It remains to be seen if they can divorce themselves from neo-liberal fantasies in favour of doing what works.
Steve the (re)publican says: “Iraq ain’t over yet. All wars are fiascos of one sort or another.” Which is why we bleeding hearts are against them unless the case is overwhelming.
JWH’s legacy is that we were almost sole supporters of the Iraq debacle that costs hundreds of thousands of lives. Howard’s loss means very little to me though, because the war was not an election issue. He can console himself that he was the victim of the silly Kevin07 slogan.
Harry Clarke: Do you have any evidence for your claim that Lowitja O was not a member of the stolen generation? You seem to suggest that she is not because she was abandoned by her father, which hardly follows since she had an aboriginal mother. Just a link would do fine.
Sir Henry
There is a combination of nastiness and hypocrisy in the line (now a cliche) you have adopted over Hansonism. Nasty in that it does not respect the right of Labor (and other) voters to express their rejection of Keating’s taking them for granted by patronising them via his Culture War; nor does it recognise the responsibility of democratically-elected politicians to listen and respond to the views of the electorate.
It is all very well for Keating to hiss and fume that he would have responded differently, when it was his Cultural Wars that provided the demand for Hansonism in the first place. A classic statment of Keating’s hubris was his SMH article last Monday morning claiming Howard was wrong to respond to Hanson the way it did because he ‘made it OK for Australians to be racist, blah, blah, blah…’ Wrong Paul. We do not wait for Prime Ministers to tell us what and when can have an opinion.
The hypocrisy comes from giving a tick to Howard’s Battlers when they express their dissatisfaction at Workchoices, etc. by voting Labor at the ballot box, when Labor has responded to the Battler’s demands. But when The Battlers did the same thing over Keating’s Culture Wars they are abused and derided.
Chris Lloyd, here.
Sir Henry, At the time of the Hanson/Blainey/ Howard business I was working on immigration research with several people of Asian ethnicity. They told me they believed the pace of Asian immigration (its first derivative) was too high – that it would produce a backlash.
It turns out they were wrong. In particular the Vietnamese influx has integrated well and has not caused problems even where it has concentrated.
But I don’t believe it is racist to express such concerns – just cautious and sensible. I agree with Jack – Australia is not a social engineering experiment for left-wingers. Nor is Australia a common property resource of the world’s people. It is the home of Australians and we should be cautious about inviting in migrants who will not fit in.
There are awful racists in both the Liberal and Labor Party. John Howard isn’t one of them.
Katz, There is a difference between libertarianism and conservatism as you know. I have repeatedly criticised the handouts so yes I agree on that. It is a disease of modern government. I think 2. is very important and Howard misjudged it. The power of the unions and the leftwing intellectual rabble to limit the possibilities for labour market reform is strong. It is a short-term move designed to save a dying trade union movement but will cost jobs and reduce national productivity.
Howard needed land rights to stop the grog problem and sexual abuse of children. He guaranteed land would be returned. Kevin Rudd supported this move as did most – not the looney left who see conspiracies everywhere.
BTW lets cut the crap – lets give freehold title of land to individual aboriginals and forget about leasehold and land that can be lived on but not sold.
Sir Henry again, Paul Keating sucked up to Suharto. John Howard maintain a dignified diplomacy which has got us further. We are not Asians, we are not part of Asia but we want close links (trading and cultural) with Asian people.
I shall never forget how he stood up to the Muslim hordes as they tried to take over our country and circumcise our daughters.
And when he put the boot into Obama, what? Just like the old days when we could sit on the porch with our gin and tonics.
All the best,
Dolls
I have not adopted any “line” John. I have come to my conclusion by commonsense reasoning from the available evidence. If others have come to the same conclusion as me in this instance, it does not follow that I agree them in other areas, hence this is a logical flaw in your argument made up by conflating parts of what I said conflated what you believe otehrs have said along similar lines about other things – it is a fallacy of composition. My reference to Paul Keating was to refute that having a non racist and non xenophobic policy at home follows that this would ipso facto obtain plaudits from ASEAN countries and hence the converse, about Howard, which was my point.
Harry, you are absolutely correct with regard to Keating’s attitude towards the corrupt war criminal and mass murderer Suharto. My sentiments have been expressed brilliantly by Enemy Combatant in this link:
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/2007/09/17/the-political-butterfly-effect/
Further, let me volunteer here that Howard often showed courage, which Bomber Beasley never did – gun laws and intervention in East Timor (albeit the latter under some public pressure and with the agreement of the US Commander for the South Pacific, John Howard’s immediate superior.)
So to reiterate, HC,
The one policy of Howard’s I mentioned as being a candidate for being described as conservative with which you have stated agreement is his WorkChoices.
And you agree that it was WorkChoices which brought Howard down.
How, then, can you assert that Howard made “his conservative vision mainstream”?
On the contrary, it would appear to me that either Howard has not been conservative or he has not be successful when he enacted conservative policy.
This conclusion appear to contradict your quoted assertion.
HC,
A lack of understanding about another’s circumstances is usually accompanied by ignorance.
Lowitja O’Donahue is a strong woman – however she has a sense of humour and honours her people. These are excellent qualities but it must be understood that she is exceptional.
Your denigration of her circumstances is dishonourable and attacks the concept of the stolen generations. It happened and the effects are still evident in Aboriginal communities today. Howard might have in his political desperation started the Intervention – however it is better that Rudd take it from here if we are not to repeat history.
John Winston Howard 25th Prime Minister of Australia. An obtuse and complicated character who managed to blend the worst of the British Torie Party with an antipodean version of US Republicanism covered in a veneer of Sydney parochialism and middle class Presbyterianism.
A willing ambassador and agent provocoteur for the HR Nicholls society, the Mining Industry and predatory capitalism. A blend of mercantilist, Riccardian frenzy, a skewed Friedmanite and aparthied activist. A clever and wily debater who always disputed the meaning and argued over words, relied on factoidal anecdote and never let the truth get in the way of a good story. A true illiberal who destroyed himself and his party both.
He will be remembered for failing his nation by ignoring; global warming and climate change, the end of the petroleum era, making education a province of the wealthy, handouts to the upper middle class and being unable to recognise the pain and suffering of Australia’s indigenous peoples. For hindering true nationhood and a republican constitution. For engaging the nation in wars of ill-repute for disengenious reasons and making our nation a target for extremist assassins. A PM who shunned the Pacific Nations and the indigenous nations of the world. A PM who with sought to undo four hundred years of hard won legal freedoms and rights at law, reintroduced sedition, trampled on habeus corpus, removed the right to silence, a fair trial and finally built concentration camps to house the stateless and desperate and who eagerly allowed children to be incarcerated in offshore gulags. And finally who repudiated a centuries of seafaring tradition to abandon those in peril at sea.
“It happened and the effects are still evident in Aboriginal communities today. ”
Yes, a lucky few got to leave those glue sniffing communities many years ago.
Before the myth gets set in concrete, what is the evidence that Labor’s loss in 1996 was due to rejection of Keating’s cultural agenda.
A more plausible explanation is that the battlers took out their revenge on Keating for the recession we had to have, having been denied the pleasure three years earlier by their inability to swallow Hewson.
John Greenfield, if you’ve got some data that shows that the battlers voted Liberal in 1996 because they were really upset by Keating’s Redfern Park speech, or his flirtation with the arts community, can you point to a link?
Sir Henry Casingbroke Says: December 2nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Whoa, John Howard guilty of pandering to the populus preferences. What kind of crazy political system lets this happen? I know, a democratic one.
I guess that liberal-Leftists will just have to get used to the idea that people with a different take on matters have the vote to, you know. Some of them are workers who have families in whose well-being, on the streets and in schools, they take a keen interest. Rotten bigots one and all, we can agree.
Sir Henry Casingbroke Says:
No. It was the adjudicative, rather than legislative, arm that got Hanson in the end. The situation got out of hand when a nasty and nosy liberal-Left judge let her political prejudices get the better of her professions notional committment to civil liberty.
It makes you think how seriously some so-called liberals take the idea of “liberty”.
Harry, we’re all agreed, Keating’s sucking up to Suharto was disgusting. But it was realpolitik, exactly like Howard’s judgment that we had to support the US in Iraq, aside from his personal preference for doing so.
The problem with realpolitik is that it looks so shabby such a short time later, whether it’s Keating-Suharto or Howard-Bush.
Ikonoclast et al Says:
I have heard this so many times over the past decade it is has practically become embedded in my DNA. Yet I have seen no evidence for it and plenty against it.
The one, and perhaps only, thing that really brings us down in the eyes of decent Asian society is sex tourism by paunchy, middle-aged Aussies. They really gross me out when you see them strolling along Bali beaches or Bangkok streets slobbering all over slightly built Asian girls barely out of their teens.
And then there are the pedophile rings in DFAT. Charming.
But this is kind of sexual commerce is considered legal and above board by most liberals. Free trade and tourism, global economy, cultural exchanges etc.
Liberalism in its post-modern phase is pretty much exhausted and definitely on the nose.
Webmaster could you fix the blockquote tags in the above comment.
Thanks.
“It was the adjudicative, rather than legislative, arm that got Hanson in the end”
After a plot hatched by Tony Abbott, Peter Costello’s father-in-law Peter Coleman and Whitlam minister turned Tory, John Wheeldon.
Sir Henry, On Suharto, I am criticising Australia’s fawning attitude towards Suharto not necessarily Suharto. He had a complex role in Indonesia doing many good things while dipping his finger in the public purse. One thing he did was get most Indonesian kids to school. Its an enormous achievement.
But I much prefer Howard’s attitudes to Asian leaders which respects them without the cringe that Australia is a dirty white imperialist country with everything to apologise for and ready to absorb all the great culture of Asia on the blank sheet that represents the culture of Australia. A Howard contribution.
Its like the attitude of the left to immigration generally – come here anyone and fill up our void with your glorious culture – not only to you have a right to come here but because our own culture is null/illegitimate we must by definition benefit from the infusion. I don’t believe this.
Jill, I provided a link to references which suggest Lowitja was not a member of the so-called ‘stolen generations’. I quote from it:
Dr O’Donoghue’s nephew, Professor Paul Hughes of Flinders University, confirmed that to say Dr O’Donoghue was stolen would not “be technically right in a pedantic way�.
“In a technical sense, if someone’s being brought in (to a children’s home by their parents) you can’t say they were stolen,� he said.
She was dumped by her parents and brought up by two extremely decent nuns who raised her to be the woman she is.
BTW wasn’t it much the same for Charles Perkins? He wasn’t ‘stolen’ either.
I prefer the truth to lies Jill. It is not denying aboriginal disadvantage but simply taking away that measure of unwarranted guilt that the left feel so necessary to impose out of their own miserable self-hatred.
I don’t believe in feeling guilty but in doing things to advance the prospects of indigenous Australians. As Howard would put it I am a convert to ‘practical reconciliation’.
A jury found Hanson guilty in the first case.
Sometimes juries’ decisions are quite inexplicable, like the one that acquitted Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen of fraud.
I’d be fascinated to read any citation from any leftist of any public standing who expressed these sentiments.
If you can’t produce such a citation, HC, you are in danger of being accused of hyperbole.
Howard, on John Laws’ talkback radio, 24 Oct 96:
I sympathise fundamentally with those Australians who are insulted when told we have a racist and bigoted past.
Selling truth down the river for votes – and the nation’s soul in the process. Impossible to explain away.
An articulate PM who refused to articulate that guilt is the antonym of credit, regret the opposite of satisfaction, and shame the flip-side of pride; who instead deliberately muddled those simple concepts; whose pride/shame balance was 100% out of whack (no hyberbole at all in that quantification); whose absolute limit was “of course one regrets some (unnominated) things, but … ‘guilt industry’ … ‘political correctness’ … ‘elites’ … ‘cultural dieticians’ … ‘move on’ … ‘practical reconciliation’ … “.
Objectively indefensible, despite all the pathetic attempts at defence above. No, not defence – just playing down, excusing, and extending the label of political correctness to embrace simple concern for truth and decency and suggesting that, so defined, political correctness was worse.
Lleyton Hewitt. Nothing against a little aussie battler in the big bad world of tennis. I give him credit for his success. I got satisfaction from his grand slam tournament victories. I’m even kinda proud of him, though at times a little ashamed of some of his rough edges (maybe embarrassed is the better word). But Australian of the Year? Come on! (as they say). Was there nothing better of Australia to celebrate? To aspire to? To inspire with? Not in Howard’s impoverished vision cum electoral calculation.
Howard didn’t make “cultural dieticians” disappear. He was one, with knobs on, and his new diet was way worse than the one that he so avidly and incessantly scorned. He appealed to the worst in us. Which made us worse. Better he had left out any appeal to national spirit – if the jaundiced notion be true that any appeal to the best in us would have been counter-productive.
hc@74: Howard needed land rights to stop the grog problem and sexual abuse of children. He guaranteed land would be returned. Kevin Rudd supported this move as did most – not the looney left who see conspiracies everywhere.
And the reason that it was only done in the NT was that the Government would have to pay millions in compensation to do the same land grab in States. It’s not like anyone argued that abuse stopped at the border – just the measure.
One Nat MP accused the NSW Govt of gutlessness for not replicating the national legislation in NSW, since the need was just as bad.
But to do it would have radically damaged the warchest in an election year.
An objective view of Howard can now be gleaned from Wikipedia now that the PM’s Department no longer edits his page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_howard
On Howard’s participation in the invasion of Iraq (and I note that in his address to the National Press Gallery in the last week of the campaign, Howard indeed referred to the invasion as “invasion”, and no one to my knowledge picked up on this) the article pointedly refers to the opinion of John Valder, a former president of the Liberal Party, who thought that Howard should be tried and punished as a war criminal. When people in your own party refer to you as a war criminal, there must be something to it.
I expect editing of Wikipedia entries etc to fall under the domain of T. Gartrell, 161 London Circuit, Canberra City, ACT 2600l eg
http://www.howardfacts.com/
http://www.nelsonfacts.com/
“Sometimes juries’ decisions are quite inexplicable, like the one that acquitted Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen of fraud.”
No, no, no, Katz. Not fraud, perjury. And not inexplicable – fraud is the right word in regard to that jury’s failure to arrive at a unanimous decision.
And while we’re on the subject of Queensland Legal, Jack is also wrong, sadly, to blame JWH for ‘relentlessly pursu[ing] her through the courts until she was finally jailed by a politically correct ball-buster of a judge.’ Hanson was pursued not by Howard, but by the Queensland Electoral Commissioner, one Jack Longland, and by the Queensland DPP. BTW, you might have made out a case for persecution against the Queensland DPP given her track record of high profile dud cases – Di Fingleton being another – but you haven’t made out any such case so this is a red herring… Just don’t hang the garland of Hanson-persecution around Howard’s neck, cos he didn’t win it on merit.
As an epitaph on the soon-to-be-forgotten premiership of John Howard…
He was a man of average stature yet strangely perceived by all as shorter than average, who pursued obsessively and in wanton disregard of every ethical or political principle his vision for Australia: a country with himself as Prime Minister.
Yes, perjury. Forgetfulness. Passage of time. Sorry.
My use of the word “inexplicable” was, however, deliberately disingenuous.
An easy mistake, Katz, since both offences involve dishonesty. Mere fraud does not involve breaking an oath on the Bible, however, and given the late and unlamented old mongrel’s predilection for bashing what he would have called the Good Book, it’s that exposure of religious hypocrisy we can all find delicious on reflection.
Really Harry. A link to Andrew Bolt’s blog where he gets to summarise a conversation of LO from years before? I am not saying you are wrong Harry. But you need a better source than that if you are going to start throwing things around carelessly as fact. Bolt still thinks climate change is a liberal myth.
There are plenty of out-of-wack jury decisions, like the one that acquitted Dean Waters of murder but convicted his co accused; Dean Waters pulled the trigger.
Many times it is better to not go for a jury as you are increasing the risk of a wrongful decision.
Chris really. You asked for a source and I (with no obligation on my part) gave you one. The claim that she was not a member of the stolen generations came from her nephew – a professor at Flinders University.
You obviously didn’t read the post and I get an ungracious response.
My judgement of Howard is that he is entitled to be acknowledged as one of Australia’s great leaders. Fred Argy damns him with faint praise, I consider that the man’s courtesy and compassion are important in the consideration of what makes a great leader. Credentials established I will continue.
That which I would most thank him for is the abolition of the permit system. Having the misfortune to have friends who have worked in organisations, gov and non, that work in the field of Aboriginal affairs, I just cannot understand the argument that the permit system was a help to Aborigines. To know what has been the lot of Aboriginal women and children and that their oppressors are protected by the intellectuals, and lawyers of this country, is very depressing. The notion that the abolition of the permit system allows the paedophiles to enter when the paedophiles are already there and protected by the permit system is bizarre. I have no doubt that it is the same voices clamouring for detention centres to be open to all who demand entry are those that demand the closing of Aboriginal communities to the presence and scrutiny of any Australian who may visit, the same as any of the communities elsewhere in Australia.
While Rann with his usual panache has managed to ensure South Australia stays invisible in the tragedy of rural Aboriginal communities, I say to my fellow South Australians, what do you know of the Aboriginal ghettos within your state. Do you know that while there is a program for Aboriginal kids to attend high school in Adelaide from the Pitjinjarra lands but many do not return for year 9, and usually it is because they are pregnant, and far too often because the old boys have insisted on their marital rights. That these girls are forced is considered to be “a custom� by those Aboriginals in positions to protect them, rather they protect the perps. I am told that the welfare payments for any children of these polygamous men go to the men. Maybe others know that this is incorrect. No one could think that it is right. But as the reality of rural Aboriginal life and affairs is hidden behind a wall of permits and political correctness it is very difficult to know the truth of life within those communities, and how the Australian state maintains the horrors that are inflicted on these powerless women and children. There is worse, but I am unsure how safe it is for this blog, or the blood pressure of others here to speak of them.
It seems that for us civilised white folk an open free society where the rules, behaviour and actions of community members and powerbrokers must be open to scrutiny, without warning, by the community within which they reside, is fundamental to our rights and freedom. Not so for Aboriginal women and children. Instead their men must be protected at all times from the spotlight of a democratic society.
So Howard, he made one of his last acts a very determined attempt to rescue these fellow Australian women and children. There is much more that I approve of in this man, but that might be the one of the most important of his acts for me.
Please Mr Rudd, do not reinstate the permits.
BTW lets cut the crap – lets give freehold title of land to individual aboriginals and forget about leasehold and land that can be lived on but not sold.
It is not as if this critical failing of the Mabo ruling was not understood at the time, by some. The lived on should be expanded to but not make a living on. What was in the heads of the voices, and the judges choosing to make Australian law, which made them inflict Mabo on Aboriginal Australians?
There are plenty of examples. “Professor Lowitja O’Donoghue, whose white father took her and her sisters and brother from her aboriginal mother when she was two years old, and placed them in a mission, said recently that she considered herself ‘removed’ rather than ‘stolen’.â€?
Lingua Franca 2001, as just one example.
Thank You Mr Howard. As for Mr Rudd, I think I am going to be proud of you too as you step onto the world stage.