| Australia's Journal of Political Character Assassination | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | Next Issue: 26 May 2001 |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 5 Number 8 |
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Downer diminishes us yet again It's not everyday you get to see someone dying, whether in front of you, or on TV. SBS Television's Dateline provided heart-stopping footage of a young East Timorese boy with a gaping hole in his side, a hole big enough to see what could have been his liver. The wound was all the more horrific because any blood had been wiped away. There was simply a hole the size of a cricket ball where his flesh should have been. The look on the boy's face, for he was still alive, was far away, uncomprehending. It told us, in the comfort of our lounge rooms, that he was already contacting the other side, or whatever place his consciousness was about to go to. Contrast this with the mottled potato face of Alexander Downer, the man in charge of Australia's Foreign Affairs, as he denied charges by Captain Andrew Plunkett, that his department had deliberately concealed reports predicting the killings in Maliana. Or the poncy denial he gave a day earlier, his voice sounding as if he'd just inhaled helium as he nearly shrieked his outrage as such allegations. According to Plunkett, of 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, this boy's death, and the massacre of more than 40 people at the police station in Maliana in 1999, could have been prevented had the Australian Foreign Affairs office acted on intelligence repeatedly given them. He alleges also that Australian soldiers entering Maliana after the killings were ordered to underestimate the death toll. Separate reports of pending catastrophe were sent to the UN and the Australian defence intelligence community by Wayne Sievers, an Australian Federal Police officer serving with the unarmed UN Force. Instead of taking these reports seriously, the Defence Department showed no interest whatsoever, while the UN went so far as to tell people in Maliana that if violence erupted they should go to the police station for protection. This, in spite of the obvious collusion of police with the militias and, ultimately, the Indonesian Army. According to Plunkett, his reports were "pushed up the chain of command, hosed down and politically wordsmithed by the Asia division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade." Australian appeasement of Indonesia (begun by Labor) has contributed to the deaths of untold numbers of East Timorese over the last few decades. It will one day be shown that successive governments have known in great detail of the imminent atrocities planned by the Indonesian military, but that they turned a blind eye. Fear and oil have always won the day. We were appalled at Labor's wilful disinterest in uncovering the facts of the Balibo killings. We recoiled at Senator Gareth Evans's lame interpretation of the Dili massacre. We are repulsed by Little Lord Downer's obvious disregard of the truth in Maliana. The truth is, while our soldiers have been conned into fighting every war of the last hundred years, our leaders have, without exception, behaved as lily-livered cowards in their dishonourable service to privilege and power. John Howard should put on a black arm band and wear it to his grave. (Based on an article by Jill Jolliffe and Mark Forbes, The Age 9/5/01, and Dateline 9/5/01.) Arnott's Typical of the Mafia-inspired tactics corporations employ these days, Arnott's played the states against each other by requiring them to submit the best tax incentives in order for the biscuit maker to grace the winner with a new factory. QLD was the winning supplicant, at the expense of Arnott's old factory in Victoria where 600 expendable souls will lose their jobs for no sound reason. Typical of the contemptuous corporate mentality towards workers, they were not even warned or consulted. "Fuck 'em," says the Campbell's subsidiary. Australians can get a grip on their apathy and return the contempt in kind by boycotting all Arnott's biscuits. Aussies gave it a go when Arnott's sold out to Campbell's a few years ago (sending some $65m a year in profit to the parent company in the US). They lapsed of course -- one thing politicians and businessmen can count on is our short attention spans -- preferring their Tim Tams to doing the right thing. Now it's time to get serious. We don't necessarily advise a Buy Australia Only policy -- who wants to look at Dick Smith's mug every time you jam up the baguette? -- but any other product (and let's face it, they are all inferior to Arnott's) will have to do. And while we're at it, Campbell's is out too. Life will go on without either of these company's products. Petrol Companies: Shell, Caltex, Mobil, BP DO NOT BUY PETROL FROM THESE COMPANIES FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR. Find an independent near home and/or work and try to purchase your overpriced petrol from them. Make sure the independent is not associated with the above companies. If this proves too difficult or impossible, then boycott three of the above you dislike most. Eventually they will have to discount to get your business back. A $13 weekly wage increase (before taxes, to $10.88 an hour) for some 800,000 minimum wage workers was graciously granted by the benevolent Industrial Relations Commission. It amounts to another punch in the face for the nation's backbone. $10.88 an hour is what John Howard and Tony Abbott make in 15 minutes. BHP CEO Paul Anderson makes it in 20 seconds. As Ken Davidson points out (The Age, 3/5/01), "Over the past year the CPI has increased by 6 per cent. The $13 a week for the lowest-paid workers is equivalent to a 3.25 per cent increase in the minimum wage. "For workers ... to retain the 2000 buying power of their wages in 2001-2, they would have needed a pay increase of $24 hours a week. "The $11-a-week cut in real minimum wages almost wipes out the $12.30-a-week cut in income tax for the same workers introduced as compensation for the GST." So the Hun fodder are Wilson Tuckeyed as usual. Forget house loans, living alone, holidays, a car without a carburetor; in short the potential we all enjoyed before globalisation made it impossible for our children. (I use the pejorative term "Hun fodder" in the sense that the vast majority of humanity is regarded as mere feed for its fundamentally barbarian rulers, and because we fodder historically roll over and show our belly's to them.) Even so, Mark Patterson, CEO of the blood-sucking Australian Chamber of Commerce was wringing his hands over the plight of small business, bleating on about how they won't be able to cope, the result being job losses for the uppity poor. Well, Tuckey the ledger keepers. If the system can't afford to allow it's lowest paid to have a life, then to the wall they should go. Until there is a place for all of us to enjoy the capitalist adventure, then the current system should wither and Tuckeyin' die. Meanwhile it's the RGR, PGP as usual. M1: Saving the world from itself Anti-globalisation protests -- the recent M1 protest following on the heels of FTAA in Quebec City and S11 before that -- are now a permanent fixture of life in the early 21st century. Globalisation as it stands is a blight on civilisation. It needn't be that way. The "global village" Marshall McLuhan announced three decades ago has devolved from village-type cooperation to rule from the board room. Until corporations are forced to include the rest of humanity in the equity they like to tout but which is merely an equity among themselves, they are going to have to require that their servant governments employ uniformed thugs to man the water cannons, fire the tear gas, and shoot the rubber bullets. It is understandable that the right wing jumps in with frothing rhetoric against protesters. The right always stands to make a quid off its ultimate ideology: totalitarianism. That every right wing radio and TV commentator in Australia and the world vied for chest-beating heart attacks in denouncing M1 was no surprise. But when the centre and left commentators (what few there are of them) also denounced the protests, you have to wonder what is going on. Melbourne ABC radio's John Faine was such a commentator. His editorialising against the M1 (and S11 before it) was breathtaking. Why? He seemed almost incapable of discussing the object of the protests, electing instead to get stuck into the possibility of violence. We are talking about one percent or 0.5 per cent or perhaps even .001 per cent of protestors. Yet that is all that seemed to matter to him. Faine is regarded as a leftie by the right. In fact, he gets a bit unbalanced in trying to keep a balance in all matters. Working for Jonathan Shier's Liberal-controlled ABC may be taking its toll. We don't wish to cast aspersions on Faine, but it is noteworthy that in his demeaning interview with M1 spokesperson Sarah Peart, it was left to a police spokesman to defend the M1 folks. Aside from turning the façade of a Collins street McDonald's into an advertisement for Halloween, the protests were peaceful here in Melbourne, but not elsewhere. Faine's intent, it would seem, is to draw attention to the violence and not the reason for the protests. But the worst aspect of the anti-anti-globalisation rhetoric is the hatred exhibited against protestors themselves. As if they are criminals of some sort for raising their voices against the establishment. You hear this mostly from small business people. And herein lies one of the greatest heartaches for humanity. The merchant class has been looked down upon since Gilgamesh was a pup precisely because of its narrow view of life, its adherence to the status quo, whether established by a dictatorship or a free-flowing democracy. It cares nothing for human rights, but only for its profit, pitiful as it often is. It supports anti-equity for all in its desire to get as many benefits for itself. It will happily pay the lowest wages to its throwaway staff, regarding its own family as superior or more worthy than the families of its employees. Its values are perfectly enshrined in the definition of philistinism: "a person who is lacking in or smugly indifferent to culture, aesthetic refinement, etc., or is contentedly commonplace in ideas and tastes." It supports John Howard. It supported Adolph Hitler. And it will ever be thus. We should be proud of our children when they show evidence of social conscience, the only basis for true heroism. Those of us who don't understand this have never matured beyond that of a self-centred pre-pubescent. As for violence, history shows that major changes are never free of it. And besides, those who are screaming loudest against the violence exhibited by protestors (most often brought about by state-directed police forces) are themselves only too happy to vote in governments who use it wilfully. The hypocrisy, as always, is stifling. Weasel Howard nips at hero Kirby John Howard employed his trademark anaemic huff over Justice Michael Kirby's comments about the government's elitist funding of private schools. Kirby, Howard said, was making a "direct intervention into a partisan political debate." But, as Richard Ackland said in his article for The Age (7/5/01): "If Kirby had made a speech in praise of the splendid constitutional monarchy we all enjoy, it can be ventured with a high degree of certainty that we wouldn't hear a squeak of complaint from the PM." Nor did we hear a squeak when Howard's appointed Archbishop-General, Peter Hollingworth, gave a speech in praise of private education, intimating that values and ethics were less likely to be taught in public schools. One of Australia's National Living Treasures, Kirby said in his article published by The Age (28/4/01): "By all means let us support private and church schools. But it should not be at the cost of governmental support for the schools that are the government's primary responsibility: the public schools of the nation." Kirby is currently the only High Court Judge to have received a public school education, albeit a level or two above the usual; the others went through the privileged route common to Liberal Party sympathisers. Typically, as Ackland reports, the combined speeches of all of them amount to less than a quarter of the speeches given by Kirby since 1993, most "relating to non-judicial activities". Meanwhile, those taxpayer funds so nimbly set aside for elite schools to promote the corporate high-flyers of tomorrow, are being used to pay for advertisements on the front page of The Age: Carey Baptist Grammar scored the only ad on The Age's cover page of the Federation Day edition (9/5/01). The Australian, meanwhile allowed no ads on its cover page. These front page advertisements cost a fortune and are usually the province of the big guys: National Bank, the ANZ, Medibank Private, and so forth. Need we say more? Heil Ruddock I: His hatred spilleth over ... into Parliament John Howard raised the spectre of abrogating the separation of powers between church and state by appointing Peter Hollingworth as the new Archbishop-General. "Gut idee!" said klug-scheissen* Ruddock with the guttural excitement he exhibits only when alone with his sperm-splattered copy of Mein Kampf. "Why not breach separation of powers between the state and the judiciary, while we're at it!" To this end, the littlest Nazi plans on introducing legislation to tone down meddling "judicial activists" he perceives are sympathetic to all those non-Zimbabweans who keep peppering our Aryan shores with their filthy desperation. Claiming that Iraqi refugees were six times more likely to be determined as refugees by Aussie courts than by UN officials (yeah, and nine out of ten doctors prefer Camels), he wants to "alter the law so that we would be able to have the same interpretation as the UN." In other words, for this selective government, sometimes the UN is the windscreen and sometimes it's the bug. "The constitution? Who needs it?" sez Heil. Besides, he just wants to give the courts some "guidance," the kind beloved of a government who hates for a living. *Not certain of the correct translation, but I take it to mean "smart-arse". Heil Ruddock II: He should be tried for crimes against humanity Damn near the last of the true Liberals, Malcolm Fraser is getting headlines again. This time he is calling for a federal judicial inquiry into Australia's treatment of refugees, including an investigation of alternatives to putting unauthorised asylum-seekers in detention centres. The terms of reference he would like to see applied are: "the appropriateness and reasonableness of Australia's policy of mandatory detention and whether it contravenes Australia's international obligations." He said Australia was attracting international derision for putting "whole families into detention when they come ... without papers. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the world." Heil Ruddock responded by saying Mr Fraser was out of touch. Speaking of being out of touch, where is the outrage of Australians (and in particular media editorial writers) at the Coalition government's concentration camp at Woomera? Or Port Hedland? Immigration Minister Heil Ruddock doesn't want to talk about the inhumane conditions and mounting evidence of child abuse because of commercial contract confidentiality with the private American company running them. Sure petrol prices and the GST are hurting our pocket books and are but two of many reasons to dump the Coalition, but this government's treatment of illegal immigrants as worse than second class citizens is nothing short of a catastrophe for a country that considers itself part of the civilised world. Or are we no better than mute cowards, part of the same demographic that shopped blithely a few towns over from Auschwitz? Let us hope the outcome of such an inquiry will be the arrest and trial of Heil Ruddock. Of course, like his counterparts at Nürnberg, he'll just claim he was following orders. In that case John Howard will have to be tried too. For Andrew Dodd's article on the detention centres, see An unflattering Australian story (Based on an article by Chloe Saltau, The Age , 2/5/01.) Where's Me Tablets! • "Get your rosaries off our ovaries!" shouted female protestors at the crowning of Pell Pot as Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. God himself would have cackled, if not Pell. Not to mention Cardinal Clancy who (from the front page photo of The Australian, 11/5/01), looks like he is ready to burst into a round of guffaws. • Like the Centenary celebrations, the Federation hoopla went largely unnoticed, except as a bit of dress-up fun for school kids. Now Aussies may be a largely indifferent lot when it comes to US style patriotism, but you'd expect a little interest for the noteworthy marker of the nation's first 100 years. Not so. Perhaps we're still exhausted from the Olympics and Y2K. Could be. Personally, I think the non-event status of Federation lies at the feet of the visionless government that unfortunately happens to be in power at the time. Unconsciously perhaps, John Howard makes us a little ashamed that, after 100 years, he is the one we've put in charge. Instead of pride, we just feel embarrassed. It's noteworthy that The Age showed Kim Beazley speaking to the assembled, not The Squidgereen. • Soccer, the world's greatest violence-inducing sport has entered the surreal realms with a player named Despotovski making the three-fingered "Serbian Salute" to heckling Croatian fans. Given the age old conflict between these two nationalities, it is no wonder the Croats turned on Despotovski's team after the game. How else to relieve the tensions of a sport whose infamous offside rule keeps most games scoreless? The lifespan of soccer fans must be considerably shorter than those for other sports, heart attacks and strokes being the causes of early death. As for the Perth player's name ... well, it's just gobsmacking. Surely it's an April Fool's joke in May by a conspiracy of chortling sports writers? And one that Despotovski himself is party to. You'll have to admit he's got a sense of humour. I know I roared with laughter at his excuse that the salute was really a Christian gesture. Meanwhile, bland-named Milosevic must be eating his heart out. • "Tricky, mean, out of touch, not listening, beholden to bureaucrats." Does that sound like the Howard government? We didn't need Shane Stone to tell us, but it's nice that he told John Howard -- the only person in Australia who didn't know. Not to worry, though. A chorus of Libs have spread the word to all and sundry that while this may have been the perception three months ago, the party has moved on. The faults have been repaired. A new, improved Liberal party has emerged. One that now governs for all of us. Say that sounds catchy. Little Johnny ought to take it up as the slogan for his election campaign. • Meanwhile Australia's high profile walking, gibbering speech impediment, Pauline Hanson, has welcomed Graeme Campbell on board as One Nation candidate for Kalgoorlie. Requiring a translator, The Thing from QLD told reporters that she didn't care if Campbell was changing parties yet again (let's see now: Labor, Independent, Australia First, One Nation ...). After all it was in his office that John Pasquarelli wrote her maiden speech to Parliament. Just one happy family. Campbell himself gave a rambling, peevish interview to the ABC about his multi-party movements, sounding as if he'd wish it would end so he could get off the toilet. • Surprise! Flippy-floppy Johnny isn't going to give us the second round of income tax cuts in the upcoming Budget after all, even though he prides himself in being leader of a political party whose chief goal is to relieve of us our tax burden (at the expense of our civilisation). He was going to screw diabetics too, by making the poor buggers pay extra for their syringes, until one of those leaks revealed the usual meanness. • Mental pygmy and Pauline Hanson speech-alike, Michael Warby has been sacked from his plush job at the IPA. Not just because he erroneously concluded that Bob Ellis had encouraged his lady friend to abort his baby, but also because last year he trumpeted a fanciful line that "Hanoi Jane" Fonda purposely caused the execution of three pow's. He's already begging to get his job back, but it looks like he'll have to find another group of criminal-minded high-flyers to do the circle jerk with. Stewart Fist: National Living Treasure Somewhere in the back pages of The Australian's IT section every Tuesday is the Crossroads column of highly respected telecommunications expert, Stewart Fist. Once in awhile Fist cuts loose with a political salvo, usually against the present government, but by no means routinely confined to that side of same coin. The photo accompanying his articles, that of a jolly, white-bearded man, is perhaps the best of this dubious practice used by newspapers the world over; like mug shots, passport or driver's license pix, they often reveal the subject as a stunned mullet. (Speaking of by-line photos, how about the one accompanying Andrew Bolt's articles in Australia's foremost fascist newspaper, the Herald Sun? Can't you just see him sweeping those lifeless locks off his forehead, palm facing away like you know who? All he needs is the little moustache to complete the picture.) Like his photo, Fist's articles are subtly humorous and gently scathing. Most importantly, he speaks from decades of experience in the telecommunications and IT fields. And he has no qualms in letting the meddling ignorance of successive governments -- so resolute in hampering any progress in them -- have it between the eyes. Not all of Fist's articles are easily digested by the layman, but for those involved in IT, deeply or peripherally, they are a must read. And his political commentaries are among the best in Australia. His entire output (in 15 different categories, including the Crossroads columns) can be found at Electric Words Here is a recent sample of his work: Regulate for real competition Two from Andrew Dodd The dead hand of conservative rule in Australia likes nothing better than an uninformed population. We have endured its lies and desecrations since 1996, but its latest move to cull the ABC's library resources shows the hand of the Vandal. Not exactly on the level of the great library at Alexandria (razed by folks not dissimilar to our present government), the ABC's archives and library division are nevertheless a vast repository for the topical artefacts of a nation, and a vital resource of data for program makers. Naturally, Howard's Huns (through his stooge Jonathan Shier) wants it neutered. Let's hope they don't run through it during the last days of their rule like the Nazi's did during theirs. The full story: ABC culls its knowledge base Dodd's second article reviews a new book by Radio National's Asia Pacific presenter Peter Mares: Borderline: Australia's treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The book, the first on the subject, brings to issue the media's woeful neglect of this national disgrace. As a result, the skittery minds of most Australians are diverted to other important items, such as penis-nipping ferrets. When they do hear from the media, it is usually inaccurate and downright racist comments from the likes of National Living Disgrace, Stan Zemanek. The full story: An unflattering Australian story |
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