John Howard
is unfit
to govern

Urgently Needed: Movement To Force Dismissal Of Howard Government
Harold Hark
5 April 2002

It's a wonder Australia has lasted this long as a democracy. With a Constitution full of holes and no bill of rights, it was only a matter of time before the morally bankrupt band of corporate suits who control the Australian Illiberal Party finally decided to chuck democracy altogether. Or at least the part about open, transparent governance for all.

They must have known what they were doing when they installed John Howard as leader. Not only was he the last even remotely credible contender, but here was a man with so little humanity that their antisocial policies would have a clear run. And it came to pass that Howard's cunning concept of reducing every policy to the flexible status of core or non-core became the Illiberal Party's clever way of promising democracy while delivering autocracy. By the election of November 2001, John Howard knew that all he had to do was siren the suckers with promises of one-off, cut-rate bribes and they would happily cash in their consciences. Best of all, he got to rub everyone else's face in the trickle-down caca of deceit emanating from the dog-whistling orifice of his defective soul.

Seeded by Menzies' demonisation of Australia's Communists and their utopian illusions, the Howard Government has captured this nation through a similar demonisation of foreign swarthies. In so doing Howard has superseded Menzies' almost quaint concept of fear-baiting by implementing a policy of sly, indirect ethnic cleansing, thereby bringing Australia to a low rarely achieved by democratic nations.

Those uni-neuronic, talkback-level humans who continue to support Australia's disgraceful excuse for a Prime Minister have been corrupted with the same single-minded intent used by pedophiles to corrupt children. But where the pedophile acts from a psychologically damaged desire for love, the actions of the Howard Government are far baser. This is a mob who willingly perverts a shallow, unformed demographic whose life experiences are akin to those of toddlers. Instead of being provided with leadership in tolerance and the celebration of difference, these poor folk have been guided towards a snarling pollution of spirit where racism, homphobia and anti-intellectualism are the igniters of atavistic hysteria. Howard has even convinced these saps that incarcerating children behind razor wire is acceptable policy and not child abuse. (As for the so-called Aspirationals, their self-congratulatory solipsism has rated home renovations above the suffering of others since time began.)

In his six years of power, John Howard has wilfully pandered to the same kind of people who bought Adolph Hitler's Aryan line in the early Thirties. Because of their ignorance, the people who continue to support the Prime Minister's stand, in spite of his deceit at the election, are unaware of their kinship with Hitler's own Silent Majority. While history's most psychotic racist rose to power with an evil vision of his nation's superiority to every other, John Howard has been incapable of any vision at all, save to use racism as the means to stay in power long enough to match Menzies.

Hitler was proud of his "Final Solution," but Howard is equally proud of his "Pacific Solution". Both put their demonised races into concentration camps. Like Hitler, Howard suppresses information and uses the military to carry out his dirty deeds against citizens and foreign undesirables. Howard's "whistleblower" legislation will clearly bring him into line with Hitler's suppression of dissent. And like Hitler, Howard enjoys a willing, eager and capable group of one-eyed lieutenants to carry out his misanthropic obscenities.

Every nation is comprised of an element that, if given power, can turn it into a Nazi Germany. Thanks to John Howard and the amoral Illiberal Party (with support from Labor), Australia is well on the way.

Much of this hit home as I recently viewed a 1987 Aussie film of gross-out satire called "Australian Dream". Superficially, the Australia of 2002 is much the same, but the warmth of that not so distantly bygone era has begun to ice over. The celebrated larrikin, once the symbol of a healthy anti-authoritarianism, is turning into a skinhead. The equally celebrated fair go, acknowledged by almost everyone, albeit grudgingly by some, has gone missing unless it pertains to genetically certified Anglos. The shrimp on the barbie, that overrated symbol of a nation at ease with itself, is now burnt to the size of shrivelled pea, within which is contained the dwarfing consequences of intolerance: The more you exclude others, the less there is of you.

Anyone who had contact with Australians pre-1996 loved them, almost unreservedly; they were like the Americans should have been; unpretentious, out-going, and able to take the mickey out of themselves thanks to a deep seated sense of irony.

John Howard has single-handedly changed all this.

When you want to know what your neighbours are thinking, you pick up (in Melbourne) the Herald Sun and check out its Voteline. Recently, 92 per cent (some thirteen thousand voters) said they would not have changed their vote if they had known at the time of the election that the Howard Government was lying about the children overboard photos. In the aftermath of unending scandals--Peter Hollingworth's typically right wing view that victims are to blame; Peter Reith's black hand in "a certain Maritime incident" and his overnight employment with a major defense contractor after the election; Michael Wooldridge's transfer of $5 million at the last minute to benefit him with his subsequent employer; Peter Costello's cavalier attitude to gambling away $4.5 billion; and Wild Bill Heffernan's classic homophobe's coded plea for someone to invade his virginal penetralia--Howard's rating in the polls has gone up. That this can be happening in a country whose painters, writers, actors and musicians continue to take the world by storm shows how fragmented, indeed numb, Australia has become.

Hugh Mackay says the reason is because "for the past 12 months we have been gradually anaesthetising our social consciences." But this moral fatigue has been going on since John Howard first won office in 1996. His relentlessly opportunistic disregard of ethics is the stuff of autocratic, if not totalitarian, regimes and nothing short of psychopathic. In fact, Howard is a psychopathic liar. Like Slobodan Milosevic, a fellow fallen Leo, who is now sitting in The Hague denying his culpability while blaming everyone else, Howard is unable to tell right from wrong, is unable to see what shame he has brought to his country. Whitlam's financial bungling never had the evil intent that Howard and his cronies have brought to government. If ever a government should have been removed from office, this is the one.

Which brings me to the point of this commentary.

At present, there are many organisations dedicated to the end of the government's inhumane refugee program (in particular the Refugee Actiion Collective of Victoria), several of whom participated in the recent springing of detainees from the concentration camp at Woomera. Contrary to several right wing commentators and talkback scum whose cowardly worship of authority (they think of it as virtuous) excites a withering kind of tumescence and who equate majority-rule fascism as their definition of democracy, each and every one of those participants is a hero.

There is another organisation called Australians for Just Refugee Programs, sporting as founding members some of the nation's most liberal names. But it is not apparent to me what the group's supporters can do beyond donating money. They seem to be a collection of, dare I say it, elites, on our side to be sure, who have rather aristocratically decided to act on our behalf, without any possibility of direct participation by us. Perhaps they are afraid of being directly or indirectly aligned with, dare I say it, Socialists. (Let's face it, while the rest of us are wringing our hands, the nation's Socialists are just about the only people doing anything for refugees.) I'm no card-carrying Socialist (or anything else, for that matter) and neither are the members of this group, but we all know the silent majority reacts like Pavlov's rabid dogs to the word Socialism. Used by the government to attack their credibility, our elite friends would automatically lose all but the usual handful of people.

So perhaps this group represents just another well-meaning dead end.

If so it's time we took things into our own hands and widened these protests against the detention of refugees to include the government itself.

We know that, with the Archbishop General owing his job to the face-saving whims of the Prime Minister, there is no chance of an official dismissal. Therefore, it is up to those of us who value humanity, good government and the good name of Australia to step in and do it for him.

It's time to lift our gaze from diversionary scandals (which will continue as long as the Illiberal's are in government) and act directly on the root of the scandalous cancer that is turning this country into a laid-back Serbia. At the core of this festering root of evil is John Howard. His cancerous, Calvinist disregard for human potential has metastasised to more than 50 per cent of the population.

The protests at Woomera need to spread all over the country, either by individuals standing alone or by groups, however small. A good model would be OTPOR, the coalition of students who used their creative ingenuity to bring down Slobodan Milosevic when their parents became paralysed with fear of retribution and loss. The students had nothing to lose because Milosevic had guaranteed they would have no future. Here in Australia, our economy continues to be strong and, as yet, there is no overt media censorship or threat of police interference with dissent. What we are losing is our pride, our integrity, and our sense of humanity. Once those are gone, censorship and police thuggery will take their places.

The protests should be directed at the source of Australia's misery, to each and every sitting Australian Illiberal Party MP and, above all, to John Howard and Heil Ruddock. There is no point in e-mailing or writing these people; they don't listen, and there is no point in putting your e-mail address on their database of troublemakers. Instead, they should be hounded relentlessly whenever they appear in public, humiliated and defiled in every legal way possible until there is a groundswell of opinion demanding their dismissal. (If the country stops working, changes will be made.) Once that happens, the present majority constituting Howard's Cowards will suddenly fall in line, as they always do when they perceive the herd changing direction.

Simultaneously, support should be given to the likes of Bob Brown and Peter Andren, perhaps the only two members of Parliament worthy of respect. As for the Labor Party, it continues to reside on the operating table, with little hope of recovery from emergency heart surgery.

How to set such a movement in motion? I haven't a clue, nor do I have any connections. But surely someone who reads this will have the talent and expertise to set an OTPOR-like coalition in motion. When this happens, he, she or they can count on me. In the meantime, I have only outrage. And whenever possible I will unleash it on the Scum in Canberra.

It's a start. There is really no alternative.

Related Articles

Guy Rundle: "Australia's own Vietnam"
Woomera will prove to be the Vietnam of both major parties. [This]...parliament of fools...would do well to learn...that the invincible can never defeat the powerless.

Robert Manne: "The nation's conscience overboard"
With the defamation last week of some of the most desperate people on earth as cold-blooded child abusers, Australian politics arrived at the lowest moral point that it has, in my experience, ever reached.

Hugh Mackay: "Australians all let us be judged"
When your grandchildren ask about the detention camps, what will you tell them?

Malcolm Fraser: "The big lies of 'border protection'"
Fraser debunks the myths about asylum seekers, step by step.

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