June, 2006

George Bush nicknamed John Howard 'Man of Steel' because of his 'brave' support of America at every turn. Bush-watchers have decrypted this as a coded sneer. 'Man of Jello' feels more fitting to us who note, like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, that only the US and Australia now have not signed Kyoto. Throughout the last half decade John Howard has stuck closer than a crablouse to George Bush's whims and leering trickeries, however unlawful and elsewhere condemned. He bought the whole hidden-chemical-weapons-nuclear-tubing-African-yellow-cake-forty-five minute fabrication and bruited it up and down his native land. He found no legal fault in Guantanamo Bay and defended its 'procedures' with might and main. Asked if he sought David Hicks' return to face Australian justice for his countless wicked war crimes (he killed no-one, harmed no-one, fired no shot in anger, merely offered like Rambo to help the Taliban fight impertinent heathen invaders), Howard chose to leave him in Cuba under torture. This contrasted with Tony Blair, who brought his kidnapped nationals home, condemning Gitmo meanwhile as a hellhole.

Howard further alleged the Taliban were infiltrating Australia in the guise of boat people. For cover they kidnapped children, he and his Cabinet said, and threw them overboard to drown on reaching Australia. With this nonsense he narrowly won the 2001 election, called hours after George Bush first rocket-bombed Afghanistan, a date they had colluded on. The promised film of children being thrown overboard proved after the election not to exist.

Widely thought a racist and known to use the word 'boong' in his informal discourse, Howard has profited politically out of persecuting The Other. His first act as Prime Minister was to find cause to cut money to Aborigines. He then refused to apologise, as millions of other Australians in reconciliatory ceremonies and spontaneous gatherings did, for past governments' kidnapping of Aboriginal children, their enslavement, rape and impregnation by white homesteaders, and the destruction of letters their mothers wrote them, and evidence of where they were. He also did horrible things to Muslims.

Afghan Muslims and Hazaras fleeing the murderous Taliban and seeking a better life in Australia, and coming in leaky boats from Indonesia, were pushed back out to sea, one of them a newborn baby and his bleeding mother in a time of storms. Those that achieved the mainland were put in razor-wired encampments in the blazing desert (one of them the site of previous atomic testing), given numbers instead of names and not informed for years if they would be let settle or sent back. Toys sent to the children were confiscated, their televisions kicked in, and those who attempted suicide derided as having 'behaved inappropriately'. A boatload of them sank during an election and 332 of them drowned -- watched, it is said, by anguished Australian servicepersons ordered not to help them.

Some were sent back to Afghanistan, and prompt execution. A pregnant woman who begged to be allowed to have her baby was sent back to China and forcibly aborted in her eighth month. A despairing Pakistani, forbidden to bring his disabled daughter to Australia, burnt himself to death on Parliament steps. He too was said to have 'behaved inappropriately'.

When sympathy grew for children imprisoned throughout their formative years, Howard had them moved offshore, and tormented behind razor wire amid guano on Nauru. This he called, with Hitlerish rhetoric, 'the Pacific solution'. Finding those who reached the Australian mainland could legally apply for refugee status, he declared the Australian mainland no longer part of Australia, and all arriving boat people (including children) must now be 'processed' in Nauru, and sent to another country, if another country will have them.

He impoverished, of course, the universities, and students must now pay back as much as $200,000 for their degree. He made a wasteland of public education while pampering with government billions the richest private schools. He banned gay marriage, overturning Territory law, stopped lesbians having IVF babies, let police 'interrogate' terror suspects for fourteen days without lawyers, forbidding them to reveal to their families where they were. He tried and failed to ban the morning-after pill. He passed laws that, though not yet tested, would gaol any satirist who criticised the government of the day. He lately passed laws that strip workers of the right to strike, protest their vile unsafe conditions or dispute their summary sackings, and with 'individual contracts' cut wages by hundreds of dollars a week.

And, oh yes, his Trade Department paid $297 million in bribes to Saddam Hussein, whose corrupt Trade Minister they lobbied to keep in place when Saddam fell. Australian soldiers then shot and killed the new Trade Minister's personal bodyguard, and wounded three of his minders, by mistake they nervously mumbled, and Howard refused to apologise for this diplomatic erratum. He doesn't like apologies. They might prove expensive, he says, later on.

He does his fascist work well, this man of steel, this wittering sycophant, this man of jello, this lifelong hater of boongs, and as a result Australia, the preferred destination of much of the world at the time of the 2000 Olympics, has become very quickly in the mind of much of the world a detested smalltime tyranny, like Southern Rhodesia in 1962. Howard may be retiring in December; speed the day. But it will take fifty years, or a century, or two, to repair the ghastly, stinking shambles he has made of our otherwise jovial democracy.