The Howard Years

While the world, or at least the Middle East, continues to descend into chaos, here on the other side of the world the grinding silence of the nights has created vacuums impossible to fill. John Howard, pictured here at yet another Community Morning Tea at which he specialises, and at which shaking everybody's hands and giving often very good or suprisingly good off-the-cuff speaches are all part of his surprsing success, has been Prime Minister for ten years now. That means if you're 28 and you began voting when you were 18, there's never been anyone else in power your entire voting life. Having faced off so many challenges, he is more confident now than he has ever been. His 67th birthday just passed and he doesn't look like going anywhere; the media full on the morning of him walking through the streets of Melbourne, and being spontaneously embraced by a boy off a rowing boat who happened to be carrying a screwdriver, prompting much comment about the security surrounding him.

But far more remarkable than the screwdriver was that this particular teenager wanted to embrace him at all. It would never have happened in my day, when we regarded Gough Whitlam as the messiah and the conservatives as the face of evil. Of course Gough, too, thought he was the messiah and betrayed the very people who had voted him in. Apart from overseeing a hopelessly scandal ridden administration, he was the beginning of the transformation of the Labor Party from the party of the workers to the party of everybody but the workers, of every trendy left wing cause anybody had ever heard of; the transformation of Australia into a so-called multi-cultural society by left wing bureaucrats determined to destroy the mainstream culture and establish multiculturalism as the state religion. To dare to express any doubt in this creed was to be howled down as a racist and a redneck by the pack mentality fostered amongst the half-educated. And Gough, of course, created the Family Court, the most dishonest, most corrupt and of course completely anti-father jurisidction in the country; a sell out to the sacred cow of feminism of the working class men who were stupid enough to vote him into office.

But once Gough had been the saviour and Malcolm Fraser, who overthrew him, had been the devil. And the Governor General John Kerr, who had been the figure behind the 1975 ructions in Australian politics, when given the opportunity I booed and booed and booed. Even on free tickets. And now we have John, who has just seen off another feeble attempt to push him aside by his deputy Peter Costello; who will never have the common touch that Howard has. The ex is back in Sydney and this time my equanimity has gone out the window. I was proud of the way I handled it before the school holidays, when she was hanging round like a bad smell pestering the kids. Now I've just had it. So you want to impose your mental illness on the children because you have no life? Children will never fill the gaping hole you have inside of you, made worse by the psych drugs and the hydroponic pot, nothing will fill that hole. We were born that way. We'll always be that way. But there are things you can do to live a decent life - and you ain't doing none of them. So piss off pest.

NEWS:

Associated Press:

TYRE, Lebanon - Israeli planes targeted bridges in southern and eastern Lebanon in new airstrikes Saturday, destroying one in a resort area on the Syrian border, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was returning to the region to try to broker peace.
After two air raids destroyed the bridge over the Orontes river in the Bekaa Valley, cutting off the town of Hermel from the rest of the country, Israel said it was flying new missions against bridges in southern Lebanon but provided no further details.
The Israeli army also said Saturday that seven of its soldiers were wounded, including one seriously, in heavy fighting the day before when Hezbollah attacked a ridge overlooking the villages of Bint Jbail and Maroun al-Ras — areas of strong support for the guerrilla movement.