- Hark's Barks
- Robert Manne, National Living Treasure (Raymond Gaita's "Exposing the shabby")
- Mobil Oil's Dubaious drive to be Corporate Enemy No 1
- NSD: Model politician for a muddled nation
- Heil Ruddock!
- Drugs: Howard's white picket solution
- Kyoto quake II: Free trade served by "good science"
- Dubbya I: Old style geek shits in own mess kit
- Dubbya II: Bushonics: that dialect gets a name
- Power Puff Girls to rescue Oz from Tony Abbott!
- Bracks rotates 180º twice
- Nippon nullifies war crimes
- Poisonous Viper still on loose
- Promise 'em anything for a vote
Robert Manne, National Living Treasure
I admit to having failed to come up with a response to the recent attacks on Robert Manne by some of the ugliest, fascistic scum ever to walk Australian earth. The project has overwhelmed me because of the immensity of its scope and because the attacks have angered me to the point where every potential sentence ends in expletives. As each day of discarded attempts has drawn to a close, I have been forced to place index and middle fingers to lips, fluttering them thereby with appropriate sounds of mental deficiency.
See what I mean? There is no room for glibness when discussing this gentle giant. Robert Manne writes from a heart full of humanity. His detractors write from the basest, most vile regard for the soul of man. And they are given succour by John Howard's evil government. I believe I speak for many when I say that were we living under a Slobodan Milosevic, our profound disgust could not be greater.
Fortunately for my unimportance and consequent shortcomings, one, Raymond Gaita, has come to the rescue. His commentary in The Age (Good Friday 2001) says it all. The article is reproduced here:
Exposing the shabby
by Ramond Gaita
Robert Manne has written a very important essay entitled In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right. It's not directly about the stolen generations - that work is yet to come from him. Its purpose is to hold to account members of the right who, since 1997, have tried to undermine trust in the basic claims of Bringing Them Home, the report on the stolen generations.
In Denial is a profound exercise of the kind of responsibility that is often demanded of public intellectuals. Evidence is marshalled, arguments are sifted with rigor and sometimes assessed with scorn appropriate to their shabbiness and anger appropriate to their nastiness.
Manne's essay is powerful. The people he has exposed are on the defensive. The ground may even have shifted. Ron Brunton is employed by the Institute of Public Affairs in part to expose whatever errors of fact or reasoning he could find in Mabo, in the case against building a bridge to Hindmarsh Island, and in Bringing Them Home. Only last week however, on this page (4/4), he seemed more anxious than usual to preface his condemnation of Bringing Them Home with acknowledgement of the injustices suffered by the children and their parents. For years he had ruthlessly mocked those who urged the prime minister to apologise. Last week he said an apology should be given. Even when he expressed his disagreement over the issue of genocide, his tone was civil for the first time that I can remember.
Brunton's purpose, however, was the same as that of his comrade-in-arms Michael Duffy, who described many of the pro-Aboriginal intelligentsia as "white maggots" who are "trying to suck the blood" from the Aborigines (Daily Telegraph, 25/3/2000). Both want to destroy Manne's credibility by claiming that he has seriously misrepresented them and distorted the evidence.
Read Manne's essay. Read Brunton and Duffy. Sample some of Piers Akerman Paddy McGuinness and Frank Devine. That is my plea to readers. I am confident they will then see that they are the rum lot Paul Keating said they were, on this page last Saturday.
It is important to do this because one hasn't much hope of seeing the forest for the trees in the argument over the stolen children - or in argument about anything that matters - if one doesn't know who to trust. None of us can check all the evidence entered in support of competing claims, but we must sometimes check some of it if our judgments are to be worth anything.
Of all the intellectual virtues, none is more important than judgment because if it fails, the rest will not count for much. Education in it is one of the most important tasks of schools and universities. Ensuring the conditions for it in the public domain is one of the most important responsibilities of journalists and public intellectuals.
If public intellectuals, polemicists and journalists can be confident they won't be held to account for what they write, debate will degenerate to the point where hardly anyone will be able to form a judgment responsibly. Only Duffy's understandable confidence that he will get away with it could explain his astonishing claim (Letters, 3/4) that in an article in The Daily Telegraph (2/11/1998) he said the opposite of what Manne reported him to have said.
Sooner rather than later the Aborigines will get their prime-ministerial apology. Eventually there will be a reliable history that tells the full extent of crimes committed against them. It will also detail the full complexities of white/black relations. Concerning the stolen children we will know how many were taken and under what conditions. We will have a reliable idea of the proportion of evil, mixed and good intentions among those who enacted and participated, first in the absorption and then in the assimilation programs. Though we don't yet have that history, we have no reason to believe that it will be substantially different from the one Manne and others have sketched.
Only if Bringing them Home were irresponsible or mendacious to a degree that no one worth taking seriously has suggested, would one have reason to doubt that many thousands of children were forcibly taken from their parents and that they and their parents were often the victims of racist contempt, sometimes brutally enacted.
I wrote almost exactly those words in Quadrant magazine in 1997. Did that encourage Brunton or Duffy or any of the others who ridiculed Manne and me to acknowledge common ground in an effort to pursue, together, a truthful understanding of Australia's past? Not at all. It provoked more hysterical abuse, snide ridicule, uncomprehending misrepresentation, hate mail and even abusive phone calls. Now, when I hear them talk of a "rigorous quest for truth", I feel a little sick.
What we know about the crimes and the evils the Aborigines have suffered, from their initial dispossession under the cover of terra nullius, through the murderous frontier wars to the heartbreaking events recorded in Bringing Them Home, was not written for us in the heavens by the hand of God, for all to see. We know it because people have struggled, sometimes bravely, to discover it and then to tell it.
The facts that we possess and the argument that makes evidence of them, exist only in a space of argument and discussion. They are secure in that space for only so long as it remains healthy. It sickens when judgment is eroded, when laziness sets in, when readers are no longer prepared to follow arguments to their end or to think as hard as is needed to follow distinctions, sometimes subtle, but often necessary, that establish the conceptual structure which gives facts their significance - distinctions that yield serious concepts of collective responsibility, or of genocide for example. It sickens when editors of newspapers and journals will not provide enough space for enough time to make any of that possible for their readers.
Then gullibility, cynicism and despair set in. The dangers for the political realms can hardly be exaggerated.
Raimond Gaita is professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and professor of moral philosophy at Kings College, the University of London. Email Raymond Gaita
Gaita's article in The Age
Mobil Oil's Dubaious drive to be Corporate Enemy Number One
The Battle for Australia is just about full on now. In these, the dying days of the Coalition's rush to reduce this once proud country to that of a corporate branch office, John Howard and Peter Reith must be cheering Mobil Oil in it's Dubai-style attempt at union-busting in its Adelaide refinery. Fang Abbott sure is. "I can't comment about every union paranoia," he said dismissively, inappropriately and, as usual, cluelessly.
Union paranoia? Admirers of the wharfie dispute, Mobil is training 30 maintenance workers at a secret location in Sydney to replace union workers at the Port Stanvac refinery as a precautionary measure if industrial action is taken. They plan to fly the two-legged dogs to the site by helicopter. Citing the refinery's poor financial performance in recent years, Mobil spokesman Alan Bailey said the maintenance workforce was a key area of inefficiency.
Sure, Alan. We believe you just as we believed Ansett's snake oil spinner Trever Jensen when he denied Boeing had written to the company about required maintenance over a year ago. It took but two days for this lie to be uncovered.
As the saying goes, "Efficiency is a totalitarian ideal". Efficiency will continue to be used by corporations to treat their workers as fodder until the very day the Sun goes out. And their lies are just as obvious as the Sun's rising every morning.
Doug Cameron, secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union said: "These are simply employees trying to maintain their job, and for a company to covertly involve itself in displacing these workers is the worst example of how enterprise bargaining is evolving under a Howard-Reith agenda." In a letter to Mobil managing director Robert Courtney Olsen, Cameron said: "Your plan to lock out the existing experienced workforce and replace them with novices will compromise the safe operation of the refinery."
That Mobil plans to provoke industrial action resulting in their being forced to lockout workers is also as certain as the Sun going down every night.
Once again, Australia is faced with massive disruptions as unions join forces to help workers fight for what jobs they have left. How much damage can John Howard's ideology do in the time he has left? Massive! (Based on an article by Michael Bachelard, The Oz 12/4/01.)
NSD: Model politician for a muddled nation
Natasha Stott Despoja's rise to the leadership of the Australian Democrats is great for that ailing party and a breath of fresh air for Oz. Despoja and Greens leader Bob Brown are among but a handful of politicians not beholden to the MegaCorpse. In other words, they have integrity. Their combined efforts could be electrifying. Expect a counteracting volcanic eruption of evil from the Coalition.
Democrats founder Don Chipp has this to say of Despoja: "She epitomises the values for which I formed the Democrats. If I'd wrirtten a blueprint for an ideal member of the party in 1977, it would have been very close to what Natasha is. She is a magnificent human being, senator extraordinaire and a person of the highest integrity."
Already Despoja and ACTU president Sharan Burrow have met to discuss plans to foil Workplace Minister Fang's controversial industrial bills until after the election, when of course they will no longer matter.
Among other priorities on Despoja's menu are increased casual labor and it's impact on family life, the GST rollback, tertiary education fees, censorship of the Internet, and labelling for GM foods.
So, as the Russians are fond of saying, G'DonYa, NSD. Hang in there after the Dems lose a few more seats in the coming election. For while you are the politician we all want to have, there are too many dowdy old conservative incumbents for the party's own good. After they are removed for their dumbfounding support of weird old duck Meg, the Democrats under your leadership can make the comeback this country deserves.
A question hangs over Aden Ridgeway, however. How could he have been so removed from reality as to have believed that the leadership spill would seriously detract from Democrat chances at the next election? Didn't he realise that under Meg Lees the party would be decimated? We'd better keep an eye on this man's judgement.
Anyway, good luck now and better luck next time!
Ed Note: Having said the above, it's hard not to remark on Nath's good looks. Her beaming smile on the cover of The Australian Magazine nearly found itself prominently displayed on HH's wall--until he realised that the last time he had a pinup on his wall was, heh-heh, many years ago. But recidivist genetic inclinations to sexual objectification aside, isn't it time we had alternatives to the male gargoyles regularly inhabiting the august chambers of Parliament?
Oberst-gruppenführer Philip Ruddock has announced new legislation for the sonderbehandlung of untermenchen in his beloved zurückbehaltunglagers, manned by US einsatzgruppen to preserve Australia's version of the Umwelt.
All troublemakers will be henceforth turned over to sonderkommandos for strip searching--including children as young as 10, especially appealing to paedophiles in power--under the proposed new legislation. Untermenchen who escape will be jailed for up to five years.
Replacing his AI button for an internet-purchased Hakenkreuz, OG Ruddock said the government could not ignore or tolerate "violent and threatening actions" and extra powers were needed to discourage and better manage violent behaviour.
Eschewing civilised inquiries into why the violence was occurring in the first place, Herr Ruddock has opted for more and more punishment. The Australian Democrats and Amnesty International have damned the legislation. AI spokesman Graham Thom said: "The vast majority of recent arrivals have been found to be genuine refugees, in which case they may have suffered torture or trauma. How do you convince a 10-year-old child who has fled Afghanistan or Iraq and ... then is subjected to a strip search, that the country he has arrived at is any different to the country he or she has fled?"
Sadly, all we hear from the Labor party is that they will oppose strip searches for 10-year-olds. (Based on an article by Darren Gray and Annabel Crabb, The Age 6/4/01.)
Drugs: Howard's white picket solution
The Harks failed to receive one of John Howard's brochures. Or maybe it was among the junk mail routinely carted to the garage. Thus we were unable to see ourselves as a sensible "Pleasantville" family discussing the subject of drugs as if we inhabited a grainy black and white 1950's documentary.
Mr Hark: We certainly can't have this, can we, dear?
Mrs Hark: No, dear. It has no place in our life or anyone else who proudly calls themselves Australian.
Ms Hark: (Entering the sparkling clean kitchen.) Whutcha talking about, mum and dad?
Mr Hark: We're talking about the latest left-wing commie scourge, darling.
Ms Hark: You must mean da-rug-sies!
Mrs Hark: Isn't she perceptive, darling?
Mr Hark: She sure is, darling. What's your opinion, darling daughter dear?
Ms Hark: Oh, they're awful, of course. And none of my friends take them, either.
Mr Hark: And if any Labor-supporting swarthy man approaches you with you know what?
Ms Hark: I'll just say no, daddy dear.
Mrs Hark: Isn't life grand?
Mr Hark: It sure is. Well then, are we ready for church?
Ms Hark: (As they all scurry for the door.) Afterwards, can we get out the paint by numbers set and finish the doggies and kitties?
Mr Hark: Only if you'll promise to help me paint the fence again.
Ms Hark: A gleaming new coat of whiter than white!
Mrs Hark: Isn't life grand?
Mr. Hark: You've already said that, dearling.
Mrs Hark: Oh! So I have, dearly.
Ms Hark: When we get to church, can we give thanks to Mr. Howard for our drug-sy freesy homesy sweetsy homesy?
All: Thanks be to John!
And the problem of drugs in Suburban Family Hark was solved for ever and ever, amen.
(Too bad about the poor, the unemployed and the uneducated who have nothing to look forward to but getting stoned.)
Kyoto quake II: Free trade served by "good science"
A certain Ray Evans wrote an astonishing article in The Age (2/3/01), "Ignore the spin. Focus on free trade." In effect Evans has placed supreme importance on the Free Trade agreement with the US over the Kyoto protocol. He congratulates George Dubbya for having shown "courage and provided world leadership by" reneging on the protocol. While purporting to be the secretary of "The Lavoisier Group, a society to promote debate on global warming," as well as an employee of WMC Ltd, a significant Australian uranium producer, Evans mentions nothing about the subject, except this baffling paragraph:
"They (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are also aware of a heat-venting mechanism caused by cloud behaviour over the Pacific Ocean, which acts as a global temperature regulator and may well explain why tropospheric temperatures have not risen since the satellite record began in 1979."
So does this mean we have nothing to worry about? That all is well within the self-regulating atmosphere and we can go on polluting in the name of free trade? What?
Evans tells us that the government of Australia should "immediately lend support to Bush ... in the interests of good science." He produces a further chuckle for readers by stating that "During the presidential election campaign late last year, Governor George W. Bush questioned the science behind Kyoto, and emphasised the economic costs of implementation."
Dubbya concerned with the science of anything?
The rest of the article is devoted to tangential pre-election Republican intrigues over whether Kyoto should be supported or not. And the point he is making repeatedly is that if Australia does not go along with the Americans, we "will not be taken seriously in Washington." Oh, my God!
Look, I'm just a bloke from the suburbs and a lot of this stuff is over my head, but I do know that Australia is the largest per capita polluter in the world and that we weaseled our way out of Kyoto with an 8 per cent increase of greenhouse gas emissions while other developed countries were required to lower theirs by 5.2 per cent. And we did it because the government claimed our commodity exports would be devastated and we'd go down the gurgler (read: it's commodities mates would go down the gurgler). Simultaneously, the government shot its other foot by cutting R&D spending and turning its back on IT. In other words, John Howard backed the past while shunning the future. We were shamed then and we are shamed now. Worse, we are trapped in an economy that is being eaten alive by the GST, with a dollar that is benefiting exporters only. How many exporters do you know?
While I'm not one of Dexter Pinion's "treehuggers" I tips me hat to them, and anyone else at the coal face of the battle over this planet's future. For someone to say with a straight face that Dubbya is concerned with good science, or that John Howard is now describing the Coalition as "greenish" (they are so far from being green that the only word that tripped over his lower lip was a description of extreme nausea) beggars belief. It's not so much that they think we are stupid as that they are themselves blind to anything beyond pragmatic economics.
Dubbya I: Old style geek shits in own mess kit
George W. Bubblehead is offering the world the chance at last to look after it's own interests and to sideline America as the nation of insular, ignorant geeks* that it is.
Fulfilling everyone's expectations, the heretofore unknown cousin of horror film star, Chucky, has, in his short tenure, managed to:
• Dump the Kyoto global warming treaty, without giving allies any warning.
• Embarrass the South Korean leader Kim Dae-jung during his visit to Washington by brushing off his Sunshine policy with North Korea because the President says the North can't be trusted.
• Bomb Iraq.
• With a whiff of cold war paranoia, expel 50 Russians.
• Assure allies that a missile defence shield to protect America against attacks from "rogue states" would not proceed without consultation, and then dispatch Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Europe to say it would go ahead no matter what they thought.
• Shift the American strategic focus from Russia to China, and call the emerging power a "competitor", and not a "partner".
• Keep at arm's length from the escalating violence in the Middle East.
• Say virtually nothing about troubles in Macedonia. (Gay Alcorn, The Age 31/3/01.)
And now that the Chinese have one of his planes and its crew, we can expect Dubbya to act with all haste to make the situation as bad as possible before relenting to corporate interests, massed as they are to set up shop in China.
There is no doubt that the President who lost the election is not up to the job, that he has surrounded himself with incompetent or xenophobic advisers. But, as Alcorn points out, the European Union may emerge stronger than ever, released from the burden of always pleasing the Americans and free to carve out a truly autonomous foreign policy.
Of course Deputy John Howard, through his sidekick Little Lord Downer, is still kowtowing, but his term in office is about to end. We fervently hope that the next Australian government sides with the rest of the world against the fading super power. Especially if "a sharp decline in America's economic fortunes ... knocks the stuffing out of the Bush administration." In that event, we'll suffer too--hell, we'll suffer no matter what happens--but it will be a sufferance born of noble rather than servile ideals. Like the Empires before it, America has the dubious double distinction of being at once the leader in world innovation and hegemonic inequality.
Viva the rest of us!
(*Original meaning from the Random House Dictionary: geek, n. slang. A carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken.
New meaning: A pallid, sweaty, pimply youth, sucking down coke and pizza and hunched over a keyboard peering through glasses at a screen. (Michael Bachelard, The Australian 21/2/01.)
What a shame. The newer meaning used to refer to Nerds, a term needing no improvement. Subsequent synonymous appellations are: dweeb, dork, or spaz. Of these terms, only dweeb is acceptable. For everyone knows that "dork" refers to unsavoury types who like to smell girl's bicycle seats, while "spaz" refers to someone who is a mental spastic.
These horrifying descriptions aside, the original term "geek" later came to refer to anyone exhibiting really weird or dumb behaviour. For example, I once observed a misshapen man repeatedly berating the same oak tree in a park across the street from my flat. He was harmless and he was a geek. Ronald Reagan changed all that when he became the first geek president. With the blood of many thousand Central Americans on his hands, he could hardly be called harmless.)
Dubbya II: Bushonics: that dialect gets a name
The following article is being circulated among speech pathologists:
The day Lisa Shaw's son Tyler came home from school with tears streaming down his cheeks, the 34-year-old Crawford, Texas, home-maker knew things had gone too far.
"All of Tyler's varying and sundry friends was making fun of the way he talked," Shaw says. "I am not a revengeful person, but I couldn't let this behaviourism slip into acceptability. This is not the way America is about."
Shaw and her son are two of a surprising number of Americans who speak a form of nonstandard English that linguists have dubbed "Bushonics," in honour of the dialect's most famous speaker, President George W. Bush. The most striking features of Bushonics -- tangled syntax, mispronunciations, run-on sentences, misplaced modifiers and a wanton disregard for subject-verb agreement --- are generally considered to be "bad" or "ungrammatical" by linguists and society at large.
But that attitude may be changing. Bushonics speakers, emboldened by the Bush presidency, are beginning to make their voices heard. Lisa Shaw has formed a support group for local speakers of the dialect and is demanding that her son's school offer "a full-blown up apologism." And a growing number of linguists argue that Bushonics isn't a collection of language "mistakes" but rather a well-formed linguistic system, with its own lexical, phonological and syntactic patterns.
"These people are greatly misunderestimated," says University of Texas linguistics professor James Bundy, himself a Bushonics speaker. "They're not lacking in intelligence facilities by any stretch of the mind. They just have a differing way of speechifying."
It's difficult to say just how many Bushonics speakers there are in America, although professor Bundy claims "their numbers are legionary." Many who speak the dialect are ashamed to utter it in public and will only open up to a group of fellow speakers. One known hotbed of Bushonics is Crawford, the tiny central Texas town near the president's 1,600-acre ranch. Other centres are said to include Austin and Midland, Texas, New Haven, Connecticut, and Kennebunkport, Maine."
Power Puff Girls to rescue Australia from Tony Abbott!
Whereas the removal of Jeff Kennett would have required the pugilo-martial arts skills and withering repartee of Steven Seagal, there is only one solution for Tony "Fang" Abbott:
Yes, let us call upon Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup, as always under the watchful eye of their mentor, Professor Utonium, to fly into action and SAVE AUSTRALIA BEFORE BEDTIME!
They'll know just what to do. For, isn't there a striking resemblance between our own Fang and one of their arch-enemies, the evil HIM?
You betcha.
Every time the ubiquitous Fang (left) pops up on the radio, TV, or in the newspapers, don't we all cry in one voice: "Oh, no, it's him!"
Why just the other day, the stupefied chucklehead presented himself to the future unemployed at the failing Bradmill Textile plant in Melbourne, a firm the Prime Minister will be unable to bail out because brother Stan is not involved. In his best contemptuously-concerned-speak, the Minister asked workers: "If this company is to close down, are you really saying to me that you couldn't get work somewhere else?" Of course the instant pandemonium passed right over Fang's oval, Zippy-like head. The noisy future-suicides were just behaving like job snobs, he must have thought.
There can be no doubt that Australia is in dire need of help when government ministers the likes of him are allowed to wreak havoc on its citizens. To this end, Harold Hark will be putting in a special plea to The Power Puff Girls this very night. Before bedtime of course.
Further proof that Victoria is being led by Boofhead II, the Bracks Government at first upheld, then overturned a Justice Department ban on showing The Exorcist on Good Friday. Never mind that the film is entirely sympathetic to both Catholicism and Christianity. Thankfully he stopped shot of exhorting us to refrain from impure thoughts or deeds on the day.
Perhaps the silliest ban yet, it shows Steve Bracks has a side that, if not exactly exemplified by Linda Blair's startling persona makeover, is nevertheless in conflict with his status as a state premier. The proposed ban shares a similar lack of judgement with his loss of rational behaviour during the S11 protests at the WTO conference last September. Instead of calmly assessing the situation, he not only sided with police brutality, but did so in an almost hysterical fashion. He reminded this feral commentator of Donald Sutherland at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
And you've got to wonder about his 2.89 per cent flat rate land tax, "a political death wish," as someone said. Hasn't he been paying attention to the outcry against the GST? Granted it's time investors in property joined the taxpaying public instead of enjoying their negative gearing hidey-holes, but wouldn't a progressive tax be more to the point? The government can make all the laws it wants on not forcing landlords into passing these taxes on to tenants, but the tenants will still pay one way or the other. In the event, they'll be sleeping in their cars or out on the street from impossible rent increases or, more likely, because the homes they've been living in will be sold at the next available auction.
It is perhaps timely to reintroduce the often called for psychological testing of all who seek political office. Or would that result in empty chambers far and wide?
What do right wing Japanese have in common with our own John Howard? You guessed it: a relaxed and comfortable, notably upbeat view of history.
John won't have a bar of past transgressions against Aborigines; no black armband for him, while the Japanese, evidently burdened with the need to save face at all costs, are going just a bit further in doing their best to put a smiley face on history. The government has allowed a junior high school textbook to be distributed, in which the plight of WW II sex slaves are ignored, while claiming Japanese military occupation had a positive effect on southeast Asia. Echoing Howard, the perpetrators of the text claim that present textbooks are biased and full of overly apologetic self-denigration.
The Hiroshima High Court continued the trend by overturning a previous ruling in favour of the "comfort women" of South Korea, the Philippines and China who were forced into brothels to service Japanese soldiers.
More worrying in the short term, is a new film, Merdeka, portraying the Japanese troops during the 1930s as liberating forces, freeing countries such as Indonesia from their colonial oppressors.
South Korea's parliament has retaliated with a resolution stating, "Japan's distortion of historical facts is to betray all humankind in the world who aspire for democracy and peace, as well as a serious challenge to Asian neighbours that fell victim to Japan's imperialism."
Ah, the right wing. Working as ever to nullify human evolution. Truly the curse we live with. (Based on an article by Stephen Lunn, The Oz 24-25/3/01.)
Poisonous Viper still on loose
Michael "Am I corrupt yet?" Wooldridge is in the headlines again. Last June, the Viper addressed the annual Australian Society of Medical Research dinner, telling them that an Australian AIDs consortium had won a hefty contract from the US based National Institutes of Health for $30 million, some 20 days before the formal announcement on the Stock Exchange.
Shares in the winning consortium's Virax Holdings and the Institute of Drug Technology jumped by 50 per cent and 38 per cent respectively in the time between the dinner and the formal announcement.
Like Richard "Clever Dick" Alston denying that corporations paying $7500 a head to get his ear at a recent Communications and IT Forum dinner was not fund raising in the name of policy for sale, The Viper denied anything was amiss because he never mentioned the consortium's name. "What I mentioned was the NIH looking for partnerships in Australia."
But everyone knew exactly who he meant. He may be corrupt but he's not stupid. Or is he?
A party close to the consortium said, "Rockets went round the next day" when consortium members found out that Dr Wooldridge had mentioned the grant in public. "Some people at the dinner absolutely knew what he was talking about. All the draft documents that went round were clearly marked 'commercial in confidence' and warned about disclosure. It was quite unambiguous." The consortium was naturally concerned because Wooldridge's comments could have jeopardised the contract, and may still do so.
Labor Health spokeswoman Jenny Macklin wants to know when Wooldridge knew about the grant, whether he knew about the AIDs vaccine consortium and what role his staff played in negotiating the US grant.
She won't find out, however. John Howard's Ministerial Guidelines specifically forbid disclosures of truth. (Based on an article by Mary-Anne Toy and Darren Gray, The Age 6/4/01.)
Promise 'em anything for a vote
Even though people are still dumb enough to think of the Howard Government as good economic managers--yep, an April Age Poll says it's so by 49 per cent Coalition to 39 per cent Labor--any of them hoping to take advantage of the $14,000 first home builder's grant had better think again.
Sound Economic Managers that they are, the Feds have yet to send the necessary information to the states for revenue offices to design the forms the hapless home hopefuls must fill out in order to get the dough. "The Federal Government have been making policy via press release," said a spokesman for Victoria's Treasurer, John Brumby.
Brumby has given the Commonwealth until 5 PM, Easter Thursday to sort out the problem, otherwise Victoria will be forced to use its own money.
Peter "The Jerk" Costello is blaming it on the states, of course. "Bureaucratic bungling," he said, while conceding that he would immediately advance the states $50 million to help meet costs.
The constant expansion of a no man's land of unresolved policy implementations because of bickering between Canberra and the states is enough to remind us that Australia needs to abolish state governments altogether.