Was that Deputy PM John Anderson I heard shaking a rattle at the electorate as he claimed that Labor is attempting to SEIZE POWER? I didn't catch the name, but whoever it was had the 5:55 P.M. political spot on the ABC spruiking for the National Party. That's what the bloke said and that's what Australia has come to under John Howard: that Her Majesty's Opposition is to be regarded as nothing more than a radical group of un-Australians whose goal is to OVERTHROW the born-to-rule Howard Government.

If you take every word that every Illiberal says about Labor and turn it back on the Coalition you have the most accurate picture of what this wannabe totalitarian party has become.

And then there is this:

John Howard has personally brokered a deal with the Family First party that would see the Coalition consult over policy with the Assemblies of God-backed party in exchange for preferences for most lower house candidates across Australia.

The party's policies oppose abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriages and stem-cell research and promote sexual abstinence before marriage.

Will this be enough to relegate John Howard to the dust bin of traitorous infamy? Hardly. It doesn't matter to the woman I spoke to this morning that he has lied over and over to keep power, that he has put children behind razor wire, that he has taken from the poor to increase the wealth of the rich. She told me with pinch-lipped defiance that Howard has her vote. When I suggested that her allegiance to such moral corruption meant that she would have backed Hitler just as strongly, she grunted. It's amazing. She actually looks like a human being!

Australia's leading expert on weapons of mass destruction defied political and bureaucratic walls to warn the Prime Minister that his case for war against Iraq was based on falsehoods and it would make Australia a bigger terrorist target.

Bob Mathews, a 35-year veteran of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, wrote privately to John Howard three days before the Prime Minister committed Australia to the war after the expert was repeatedly blocked by his superiors from expressing his views.

The following quote, from Richard Overy's book, "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia", comes from a review by Sam Leith in The Spectator

"The words terror and terrorist were applied not to the policemen and security agents who enforced state repression but to those who opposed the dictatorships. Both systems saw themselves at the forefront of a war against international terrorism. What is now defined as ruthless state terror was viewed by Hitler and Stalin as state protection against the enemies of the people.

"This very different perception of terror is central to an understanding of the relationship between the security forces and society. For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations.

"Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected on to the victims of discrimination and state repression. Terrorists were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security but by a population made anxious through orchestrated programs of public vilification."

Jeff Kennett is a sort of matrix Illiberal. He's the one who showed John Howard how to get away with murder. Actually rape is a better descriptor. Kennett and his band of privatising mercenaries stuffed Victoria for generations to come. Here is just one aspect of his desecrations:

Of all the dastardly acts of the former Victorian liberal government of Jeff Kennett, perhaps the most mean-spirited was the closure of the Northland Secondary College. When it was closed, in 1992, Northland was a run-down school in the Labor heartland of East Preston. It also had the highest proportion of Aboriginal students of any Melbourne school. It was one of about 350 schools closed as part of that government's education cutbacks, which also included sacking one in 10 state school teachers and slashing millions of dollars from the education budget. In Victoria now, 40 per cent of students go to private schools.

Guy Rundle went to one of the 67 schools on Latham's "hit list", which proves that while they all look like "14-year-old golf-club administrators" during their incarceration they don't all grow up to be ethics-free toffs.

An allegedly meritocratic society based on some students having more money spent on them than others is, of course, a racket, and one likely to be spotted by as-yet unformed minds studying "clear thinking" and the like. So it has to be imparted implicitly and explicitly year in year out, until everyone understands that they are in it together. The arguments don't make sense, but hey, before you know it you'll be needing it for your kids.

We call this process the production of ideology - a set of falsehoods that make a political reality look like the expression of unquestionable truth. The big private schools are at their best in this when dealing with the Christian heritage they purport to be part of.

The truth is that Christianity is a religion of radical reciprocity. The elite schools are multimillion-dollar educational entrepreneurs, whose attachment to the religion is now simply a form of thematic branding, a bit of spiritual swoosh.

It is surprising and disappointing that more actual Christians have not broken ranks to condemn this state of affairs, when the arguments of the private school lobby more closely resemble the contribution to theology provided by the Borgias than that of the man of Galilee.

In the lead up to the 2001 federal election, Prime Minister John Howard said "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come." John Howard promised to do everything in his power to stop asylum seekers from reaching 'our' shores. Howard had just one problem, the courts. Today, in Darwin, we have found out exactly how Howard is getting around that problem.

This morning a former Australian Army Colonel sentenced Ali Hassan Al Jenabi in the NT Supreme Court for 2 offences against the 1958 Migration Act (Commonwealth) for organising the arrival of asylum seekers into Australia.

Off we chugged to a place called Green Island, which wasn't named for the pallor of the passengers at the halfway mark, but might well have been.

Curiously, Mrs Howard was among the more queasy. Janette gives the impression she could captain a skiff through the Perfect Storm and still dictate her husband's press releases, yet she sat very quietly, gazing glassily at the horizon.

It was a bloody awful journey, leavened only by the prospect of a mighty story should a prime ministerial hurl project breakfast from starboard to port. No such luck. While the rest of us suffered, the PM chirpily conducted interviews on his mobile phone without missing a beat.

Admiral Howard [was reminded] of another story in The Australian - Labor frontbencher Craig Emerson's promise to stay mum on ALP industrial reforms. This brought all cannons on top deck. Cap'n Emmo, warned Howard, was an evil pirate with a "dagger at the throat" of the economy. The policy was "a dog" and, confusing his metaphors, the admiral vowed to send "sniffer dogs out" to find it.

With that, the Master and Commander headed back to ship, pausing to beseech a bunch of camera-toting Chinese visitors to tell everyone back home to come to Australia. Whether far north Queenslanders in marginal seats might welcome such an influx is questionable, but to paraphrase the famous 2001 election shanty, Admiral Howard will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they arrive.

As we've said before, educating the entire population is anathema to the right wing. They rely on basic ignorance and unworldliness to retain power.

Marcus Latham, as he fights the hydra-headed John Howard in far-flung electorates, is certainly going for death or glory. As one of his generals told me last night: "If we lose this time, at least we'll lose honourably."

As Canadian writer John Ralston Saul points out, it's all too easy to educate the various elites. Any wealthy country can manage that. The real challenge is quality education for the entire population. Latham is addressing that after a long period of neglect. No, more than neglect -- of deliberate destruction, as evidenced by the PM's recent attempts to undermine the legitimacy of a state education through crass attacks on the values of the schools and their teachers. And, by extension, the children.

As expected, the dumbed-down boneheads in Umeruhca are responding to the Siren call of George W. Bush's simpleton politics. Quality education ended there some decades ago. It's replacement is television. The entire nation has been an experiment in what happens when the latter replaces the former. The results are, in part, Iraq.

[Americans] seem to fall into two broad camps. One is that George W. Bush is incompetent. This view has been given to me by both Democrats and lifelong Republicans. At the risk of being accused of elitism, what the Bush critics share in common is a relatively high level of education. They come from largely professional backgrounds.

The other view is not so much that George is strong, as his advertising would have us believe, but that a strong America relies on simple absolutist policy prescriptions.

Kerry committed the ultimate mistake when he said at the Democrat convention that reality is complicated. This is not the message that a population suffering future shock want to hear. So whilst to the professional classes such a claim is simply stating the obvious, a Kerry world is indigestible to those seeking refuge from a world they don't understand.

Now the biggest thing expected of the President by certain Americans is to deliver a simpler world.

So there seems little debate. It's just about shouting slogans. Bush declares that he is strong and that America is richer and safer with virtually no reference to supporting evidence. These claims are paraded around as fact. A vote for Kerry is going backward, but backward on what? Bush presents policies with no reference to his track record. Scrutiny is minimal. Pigs can fly.

Labor should be a mile ahead. Why aren't they? How can a disgraced John Howard still be calling the shots? The second paragraph below, on "downward envy" v "upward envy" pertains around the world, and may be the missing link in the puzzle of humanity's apparent reluctance to evolve.

Within the Labor Party there are still many key advisers frozen in the world view of 1970s feminism. They respect dual-income families who send young children to institutional care. They pity or despise parents of single-income families who think it is the responsibility of one parent, usually the mother, to care for their children at home before preschool.

In contemporary Australia, among this broad middle class, "downward envy" resentment of public spending on supposedly undeserving welfare recipients is a far more powerful political emotion than "upward envy" resentment of public spending on private goods. My guess is that many members of the middle class admire the sacrifices made by people only slightly wealthier than themselves to send their children to private schools. Many would send their children there if they had the means.

It remains incomprehensible that Labor backed the Howard Government's medieval bill opposing same-sex marriage. I can only imagine that it was calculated to neuter a potential Howard wedge and that, in power, Labor will make moves to reverse it.

What the Government, with the help of the Opposition, has succeeded in doing is to turn back the clock nearly 140 years. They have done so at the expense not only of the gay and lesbian community, but quite possibly the transsexual community as well. They have passed one of the most discriminatory laws that could be imagined. They have ridden roughshod over the legitimate rights and aspirations of these citizens. Not satisfied with this they have also struck at the right of single-sex couples to marry or adopt children elsewhere.

Pursuant to my comment Cashed-up schools squealing with outrage on how taxpayer funds are going to finance those Wesley College adverts on the front page of The Age, try this:

Lawyer Simon Smith, whose daughter Rebecca is in Year 7 at Wesley College, is another who has broken ranks with the chorus of outrage coming from hit-list schools. Smith is a former Wesley schoolboy and so was his father. He and many of his friends who send their children to Wesley are uncomfortable with the argument that rich private schools should receive multimillion-dollar grants from government. Wesley received $5.5 million in federal funding last year. "One of the issues I have with this is I believe in better funding for the state system because (Jeff) Kennett did a lot of damage there," he says. "It should be on the basis of need. No one compels you to go to private schools. My parents made sacrifices and they didn't get any support for it."

Smith says that many of the threats about fee rises ring hollow because most private schools are not transparent about how they spend their federal funding. He suspects that a lot of the money is spent on schools marketing their wares, given the plethora of expensive ads in newspapers and on trams. Smith argues that the large global budgets enjoyed by many of the schools on the hit-list have enough room to allow for minor cost-cutting without pushing fees higher.

"Wesley gets $50 million in income from fees alone, so what are they doing with that money? There needs to be greater rigour and accountability about the way private schools spend their money, particularly when they're putting their hands out for taxpayer dollars."