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No surprise to hear John Howard equivocating on Christian fundamentalist Fred Nile's ignorant call to target Muslim women by claiming they could hide weapons and/or bombs in their chadors. The foolishness of this verbal diarrhea matches the brain dead assumption that asylum seekers on leaky boats contained terrorists. A three year old with half a brain knows that terrorists do not draw attention to themselves. In effect, the comments of Nile prove one thing: the terrorists are smarter!

As with Nile, Howard equivocated all the way on genetic garbage heroine Pauline Hanson and it won him the desiccated hearts and undifferentiated minds of the nation's Silent Majority. The rise to power of this previously ineffectual little blob has always been based on baseness.

Thus far, in his "shame-riddled, wriggling, scrambling, weaselly, noxious career" (as Bob Ellis describes it), Howard has aligned himself with some of the most reprehensible white Christians in the nation and the world. From his support of Apartheid in South Africa to the Orwellian regime of George W. Bush, we have always been able to count on him to do the wrong thing. True to his repulsive nature, those he opposes are invariably not Christian and not white. This position suits his supporters.

That the prime minister could respond to Fred Nile's idiocy as he did, and get away with it, means we are a morally bankrupt nation.

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You'll remember Ron Walker from such famous political extravaganzas as The Three Scrooges do Victoria. (The other Scrooges were Swell's Casino operator Lloyd Williams and former premier Jeff Kennett.)

Walker was instrumental in stealing the Grand Prix from a relieved Adelaide, and, as a parting favour to Kennett's Reich, for securing the 2006 Commonwealth Games, a colonial sporting event for those who have nothing else to enrich their lives. In the process, Victoria lost Albert Park and is about to lose a sizeable chunk of Parksville, both to developers in no way associated with Walker's bank accounts.

The darling of the Federal Illiberals, Walker has been their Treasurer for 15 years, raising some 200 million dollars to promote the party's destruction of the fair go.

Now it transpires that the red-headed ringer for Alfred E. Neuman (albeit a Neuman suffering from gigantism), hustled up 4.5 million pounds a year for six years and poured it into the coffers of Britain's Conservative Party, initially in a bid to help overcome their 14 million pound overdraft in the mid-90s, and then to help John Major in his final, losing election campaign.

Walker has always denied involvement, but in a possibly unguarded moment at a breakfast in Melbourne to kick off the 2003 Grand Prix, he told all to ABC's morning radio current affairs program AM.*

On two occasions he referred to the Australian Illiberal Party as the "Conservative Party in Australia (or here)", and how they like to help their sister party in Britain. (Why then, do our home grown conservatives continue to call themselves Liberals? It must confuse the hell out of their pillow pals in Washington, the Republicans, for whom everything "liberal" is Satanic.)

As you can see from the transcript (link below), Walker refused to give details on how the money was raised, except to say that it came from Australian companies doing business in the UK.

Finally, Walker has just been appointed to the board at Fairfax, publishers of The Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald. The appointment went missing in the main pages of the dailies, with only cursory reporting in their Business sections. Stephen Mayne, of crikey.com voiced concern over Walker's lack of experience in publishing, further citing his threat to sue the paper during Kennett's "Dissent is Un-victorian" days. Crikey, however, has written nothing on the event.** Perhaps Walker is seen as a foe would will stop at nothing to silence Crikey forevermore if the least unpleasant word was said against him.

It was enough for us to cancel our subscription to The Age. Putting Walker on the board of one of Australia's last liberal-leaning newspapers is like Kim Beazley backing the Coalition's heinous immigration policy. We no longer have a supportable Labor Party, and The Age may be headed in the same direction. In the meantime, we'll keep reading it on the Internet, until Walker's expertise in "economic management" convinces other board members to take it down for nil generation of profit.

*AM 18 November, 2002.

** I'm wrong on this. Crikey put up a damning page on 10 November.

Late breaking "Hullo, wot's this?":

Phillip Hudson (The Age) reports that Walker has resigned from the Illiberal Party. Walker's reason: "When I joined the board of Fairfax, it was proper not to be compromised by politics."

Must be a bloody lucrative/powerful deal, eh?

The former Lord Mayor of Melbourne still retains his positions running the Games, being chairman of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria, and chairing the Microsurgery Foundation of St Vincent's Hospital.

Hudson quotes Stephen Mayne: "Resigning from the Illiberal Party is a small step forward but Ron's long history as a controversial figure remains and his ongoing public roles with the Grand Prix and the Commonwealth Games still make him an inappropriate director of John Fairfax. He has no media experience, plenty of political baggage and ongoing potential conflicts."

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ASIO chief Dennis Richardson, the man who wants to have the liberty of every Australian (except members of the Illiberal Patriot Party) in the palm of his hand (the other holding a sap), must have been secretly biting a rubber bullet as he was forced to answer questions by a Senate Committee of bleeding hearts as they held inquiry number three into a certain Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) bill which most of us believe will hand over to Richardson his lifelong dream of a police state.

Secretly (that's his way) praying to J. Edgar Hoover for the courage to restrain himself from machine gunning the questioning scum, Richardson nearly fell off his chair when Hoover's phantasm appeared in bits and pieces, trying in vain to jiggle its ectoplasm into focus.

Richardson recovered swiftly. In tones nearly as funereal as Heil Ruddock, he said: " ... my views ... don't come from a mad driven perspective of wanting to break laws and infringe on people's rights. They come from a genuine concern to see put in place measures that I think are necessary in terms of terrorism and the like."

For "the like" read dissent. Any dissent.

The ASIO bill allows the spy agency to detain people for 48 hours without legal advice. They would then only be allowed to consult with a lawyer in the presence of an ASIO officer.

It also provides for jail terms of up to five years for people who refuse to provide information, and allows for the detention of children as young as 14.

Richardson was loathe to admit that there was a provision to protect those detained against abuse of the law by ASIO officers.

"There's a provision for legal action to be taken against officers carrying out the warrant when they knowingly do the wrong thing," he said.

Providing that is, that the person detained is ever seen again.

Meanwhile, one of the primary goals of the Howard Government's new police state--getting people to dob in anyone who looks, acts, or thinks differently--is flourishing. More than 4000 people have contacted ASIO with tip-offs since 9/11. Most offers of information were from nutters, of course.

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I hate to kick a man when he's down, but John Elliott is an exception.

The man who "personified the worst excess of the 80s", who for years used his ill-gotten funds to pervert the course of justice has finally gotten the chop from his beloved Carlton football club.

He is now left with just about nothing. No more mansion in Toorak, no more wives, no more Fosters, Elders and IXL, no more rice paddies or other failed businesses, no more the darling of the Illiberal Party (who, in their usual hatred of loyalty, have turned their backs on him now he is a pariah).

All he has left are his cigarettes and his booze. Which, in the end, are probably the sole causes of his downfall.

His corrupt business practices and trademark arrogance are still revered qualities in the business/Illiberal Party world. If he had given up or moderated his excessive use of these two drugs, he would still be flying high.

For SCATT's previous comments on Elliott, see:
John Elliott: The evil face of business
Life in Tory Australia
Jan Wade's Buttered Bread

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