For The Australian Worker, April, 2005

Has John Howard at last outworn his welcome? Do his monotonous chirpy-mucous tones on radio bring gloom and dread not just to me but to all mankind? Does our buffeted nation want him, at last, to put on his slippers and creep away? I think so.

The forsworn interest hike, the forsworn troops to Iraq, the grab for East Timor's oil, the grab for the right to set wages and bring them down, the 20,000 Iraqi children he helped kill, the WMDs that, whoops, weren't there, the torment of poor, mad Cornelia Rau, the torment of poor, pregnant, diabetic Roqia Bakhtiyari, now freezing in Afghanistan, the arrest in a Sydney schoolroom of innocent, weeping children in front of their classmates, the release and grumbles of Mamdouh Habib, the unpatriotic remarks of the father and widow of Paul Pardoel, the disloyal exit from war-smashed Iraq of Spain, Thailand, Hungary, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Portugal, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Italy, the Ukraine and Poland, the shooting by dumb Americans of the selfless hero who rescued Giuliana Sgrena, the twenty thousand tsunami deaths he, Howard, probably caused by silencing Radio Australia, his hints that he'd quite like to outlaw abortion, the rise and rise in the polls of Beazley, the fall and fall in the polls of the people's trust in him and Tony Blair, the Tony Abbott baby that, whoops, wasn't there, the way the tsunami reminded Australians of global warming and how we hadn't signed Kyoto, the helicopter so old that nine young Australian heroes horribly died in it, the unwarned infant who caught gonorrhoea in a Bali creche, the 'rude' Ray Hadley who called Alexander Downer 'a pompous dope', the Australian who watched torture in Afghanistan and admitted it, the Minister who lied about it, Costello's cancellation of the very notion of retirement, the news that Blair's Attorney-General did think bombing Iraq was illegal, and so on, add up to a bad four months all in all; but, of course, that wasn't the half of what went wrong for our Prime Miniature.

For he also refused to sign an accord of peace with our nearest neighbours, preferring to bomb them unexpectedly if his 'intelligence' told him there were two or three terrorists resident on one or other of their 30,000 islands, the way a good white-hatted Deputy Sheriff would, in spite of Downer begging him to. And, most important, he refused to apologise to Michael Somare for making him take off his shoes. In South-East Asia and in the Pacific and across the world this was the most obnoxious Ugly Australian folly of all.

Because, well, frankly, one can't imagine him humiliating Donald Rumsfeld in this way; or Ariel Sharon; or Jacques Chirac; or Gordon Brown; or Donald McDonald; or that other bearded, beloved father of his country, Fidel Castro -- and not saying sorry afterwards. But you can imagine, can't you, our perpetual crustacean First Minister John Howard doing it to a black man. It's the way most foreigners think of him anyway, after all those other black people he refused to apologise to, the Stolen Children, and it fits.

It fits too the rumour -- one I've always discounted, but don't any more -- that the word 'boong' is used around Kirribilli, even now. What kind of a creep is this, one might respectfully ask, this noisome grass-tick who orates round the clock in front of our flag in our name? Somare won't even accept his millions any more, and prefers to travel in private planes. Indonesia won't release or pardon the innocent Shapelle Corby, and they'll probably shoot her, because they can't stand John Howard, the shifty Christian xenophobe and Scrooge who among other things invaded their country and stole their oil.

What, then, will become of him and his government in the next four months? The idea that they'll capture the Senate, sell off Telstra, decapitate the minimum wage and let lustful employers sack any girl who won't come across, then gracefully pass the baton to Costello and win the next election seems more unlikely, if not absolutely impossible, by the day. Howard won't go, for one thing, why would he, and Australia will bleed and bleed.

He won't go, principally, because thereafter, and forever after, no-one will invite him to dinner, or phone him up for a chat, or send him a postcard, if he's not Prime Minister any more. 'He has no enemies,' as Oscar Wilde once said of Bernard Shaw, 'and all his friends hate him.' And Australia will bleed and bleed, with this mouldy rotting bilby as our prating figurehead. And the nations will chuckle and shut their doors.

What then should Labor, comrades, do? Well, here's a modest proposal, sly and contemptible, worthy of Lynton Crosby or Reg Withers. We should use the numbers we still have in the Senate, and with the Greens and Democrats vote to suspend from the Senate Hill and Vanstone for lying to it about the intelligence they got, on Australians torturing Afghans, and where the Bakhtiyaris came from and the suffering they thereby caused. We should use these brief, fleeting numbers while we still have them, and suspend these two guilty Liberals from the Senate for a year or so -- pending, let's say, the outcome of a Senate enquiry into the extent of their international criminality.

This will mean that Labor, the Greens and the Democrats will still have the numbers to control the Senate for nine or ten months after the changeover in July. And this in turn will mean Howard won't get his loathsome legislation through, unless he persuades Hill and Vanstone to resign their seats to successors not famed for their war crimes. And they won't, because they hate him too. Like all his friends. And there won't be much for him to do but resign himself, or advise an election he's bound to lose.

I urge Kim, Jenny, Wayne and Steve at least to think about it. This is a government of nongs and cheats and godbothering neofascists who deserve no quarter, who boarded the Tampa and made gooses of us all. It would work, and also bring a harmless joy to millions. Just do it. You'll be so happy you did.