Tonight it's Melbourne's turn to kill the fatted calf. Those commoners (formerly known as citizens) grateful for any trickled down crumbs from the plates of their Tory superiors please make your way to the wheelie bins near the servants entrance of the Myer Family Toorak Mansion, Cronulla -- oops, I mean Cranlana. No one but the corporate toffs who are invited know exactly where it is, but the forecast is for a balmy evening, so just stick your noses out the window and follow the odour of venal hubris.
As yet another toast is raised tonight to the rodent of the hour, all bets are on as to what he will say, if anything, about the headline in The Australian today:
A sensitive diplomatic cable sent directly to John Howard six years ago warned of alleged kickbacks in AWB's contracts to supply wheat to Iraq under the UN oil-for-food program.
The cable, from a senior diplomat and headed for the attention of the Prime Minister and, among others, his former adviser Max Moore-Wilton, was released as the Cole inquiry threatened to execute search warrants at AWB headquarters to uncover missing notebooks recording hundreds of crucial meetings with ministers and government officials.
The cable follows Mr Howard's repeated claims he was unaware of alleged kickbacks until they were raised by the Volcker inquiry late last year.
"We did not know that kickbacks were being paid by AWB. The suspicions of that first arose in the context of the Volcker inquiry which was long after the oil-for-food program had ended," he said last week.
Mr Howard is named on a list of recipients from the highest levels of government and intelligence organisations, including Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Trade Minister Mark Vaile, as well as the head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation.
Prior to the cable being tabled at the inquiry, Mr Howard told parliament yesterday that no one in his Government knew of the kickbacks until 2003. AWB is accused of funnelling $290 million to Saddam's regime.
"Let me say again, lest there be any doubt in the minds of anybody in this parliament: no knowledge in relation to the alleged bribery by AWB Ltd was in the possession of members of my Government, in my possession or any of my colleagues' at the time those offences occurred," Mr Howard told parliament yesterday.
Johnny is the master and ducking and weaving, so whatever he says, if anything, will be solid gold.
I'm just wondering if there is a precedent for all this. In a supposedly democratic state, that is. I have a feeling there isn't. A government so contemptuous of its people and yet supported and then elected over and over by the same people … it beggars belief. The real key to all this must reside with Labor. For ten years they have offered no opposition, leaving the Australian Liberals as incumbents in a one party nation. What then, are people to do?
Anthem for Howard's Second Ten Year Reich
White Australia here we come
Right back where we started from
Where hucksters and haters bloom in the spring,
Each morning at dawning
Johnny sprints to one-up Ming
A booze-kissed racist says "don't be late"
Industry reps can hardly wait
Seal off those borders, hurry mate
White Australia here we come
Not directly connected with the present pageantry of corruption, but perhaps a taste of the next ten year Reich is this little titbit:
Petro Georgiou, one of only a handful of Liberal members of parliament with a conscience -- he who fought against mandatory detention -- is being challenged for pre-selection. By whom? By Joshua Frydenberg, a director of global banking at Deutsche Bank and former senior adviser to the Prime Minister on national security. For what reason? Georgiou is the only national Liberal MP to have presided over five consecutive elections where his vote has declined. And why is this? Because he is the member for Kooyong, Menzies' old blue-ribbon electorate wherein resides the Myer Family mansion, Cranlana. There are only so many doctor's wives in Toorak. The rest must wonder how this former cutthroat, eased into power from his reputation as Jeff Kennett's hatchet man, suddenly turned into a compassionate human being. Not allowed in these parts!
To finish this round of political infamy, here are few meaty articles and letters from the last couple of weeks on Howard's nauseating glory. Read 'em and weep.
• For an audio snapshot of the Squidgereen's ten years of power, listen to the ABC's The World Today:
• "This Government decided in its first budget that it could not afford to continue the scheme that provided free dental treatment for low income earners. But it had had no trouble a few years later finding the money for the 30 per cent rebate for private health insurance, that at far greater cost subsidises the cost of dental treatment mainly for higher-income earners."
Mike Steketee: Richer, harsher decade
• "During his 10 years as Prime Minister, one of John Howard's greatest achievements has been to make the most of his opponents on the Labor side. For most of the time, most of the Labor team seems to have shown up simply in order for the political game to keep going; to be there to kick the ball back in after the Government has scored a behind or when it's gone out on the full."
Shaun Carney: Little to stop Howard
• "The mantra of choice has polluted the minds of our political class, both Liberal and Labor. Our leaders see the triumph of the open economy as an excuse to privatise society."
George Megalogenis: Government by default
• "Respect? For the man who misled us over the children overboard affair; the man who created the infamous distinction between core and non-core promises; the man who used $4 million of taxpayers' money to pay outstanding entitlements to the employees of a failed company of which his brother happened to be chairman?
"Respect? For the man who created an admirable set of standards of ministerial propriety and then revised them downwards rather than sack a mate; the man who sent Australian troops to invade Iraq, based on false information about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction; the man who never seems to know anything about the kind of scandals (such as the corrupt wheat deals) that would once have had any responsible minister hanging his head in shame, if not actually resigning?"
Hugh Mackay: Howard: an ordinary bloke who feeds a nation's prejudices
• "The Prime Minister sees little need for change. The cricket fan believes the stonewaller stays longest at the crease. Yet in the absence of a reform agenda, we now are seeing squabbling - low-level but divisive fights over trivia such as flag-burning and burqa bans."
Christian Kerr: Drifting in stagnant waters
• "[Under Howard] 'family values' becomes a code for being anti-gay, anti-euthanasia and anti-abortion. It is alarming to hear how frequently young people today embrace this kind of neo-conservatism, almost like a race to see who can be more right-wing.
"This generation has also been the generation to feel the impacts of the transition to a privatised society the most deeply. We have witnessed public transport losing its emphasis on personal service, while suffering a tangible decline in efficiency. And the "user pays" mentality that has now infiltrated health care, higher education and the utility sector has ultimately chipped away at the notion of the common good, that as individuals we are willing to make a collective sacrifice for the betterment of society as a whole. It's the inverse of socialism, the death of big picture idealism - lost to the ethos of debt, competition, user-pays culture, and rampant individualism."
James Norman: Howard's young people are shallow and disengaged
• "Howard once said he preferred to take an optimistic view of the past. I always thought this a puzzling claim. Optimism is properly an attitude about the future, one that puts a premium on hope and faith in the inherent order of things. Howard made this claim in one of his forays into the debate about relations between settlers and the indigenous populations in Australian history. He has taken a strong personal interest in arguments about Australia's history and has been a champion of those who see it mainly as a triumphant story of progress and development, albeit with a few black spots.
"Whatever we think about Howard's understanding of Australian history, after 10 years in power we know far more about how he sees the past 100 years than how he sees the next."
Judith Brett: Howard: man of this moment
• Aren't other fair-minded Australians tiring of John Howard's "Schultz Defence"?
Never in our history has a prime minister known so little about so much. He should take a lesson from a great statesman: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
Only a person with the arrogance of Howard could expect to come out of this scandal not smelling of sewage. But I suppose he can count on the willingness of the people to overlook his transgressions to be re-elected PM in the next election. Maybe the Australian public deserve to be treated like mushrooms for their lack of scrutiny of this contemptuous character. - Michael Higgins
• Hugh Mackay ("Howard: an ordinary bloke who feeds a nation's prejudices", Opinion, 21/2) has it almost right. The key to Howard's electoral success is that he appeals to Australians' basest instincts.
But electoral success is not real leadership. Real political leaders call us to be better men and women, not merely comfortable ones. Think of Churchill, who promised Britons nothing but blood, sweat and tears. Or Roosevelt, who called on Americans to be fearless in the face of the Great Depression.
The real tragedy of the Howard decade is that, with the exception of the Greens, the opposition parties too have forgotten that real leaders summon the citizens of a nation to be better people, and not just better-off people. - Dirk Baltzly
• "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his (peoples') soul" (Mark: Chapter 8, verse 36)
Most of us, but not all, have become more comfortable financially under John Howard, at a cost to our collective self-esteem and sense of fairness and plain decency. Many at the bottom of the pile have sunk deeper, with the contemptuous neglect of the traumatic lives led by indigenous Australians the most shameful.
For all Mr Howard's blatant courting of Australia's battlers, they are the ones who will lose wages or jobs and time with their families under his draconian new industrial relations laws. Education and health, potential circuit breakers of disadvantage that are capable of generating new hope and the skills for a better future, have been squeezed to dangerous levels despite a large budget surplus.
Starting with Pauline Hanson, the expression of racist sentiments has been encouraged and prime ministerial propriety has been lost to non-core promises, to stonewalling and to an amazing loss of memory. To the children overboard and the shameful treatment of asylum seekers we must now add the wheat bribes scandal, channelling money to the dictator our soldiers were sent to fight.
We have the potential and the resources to be a fair and decent society - no longer can we make that claim, thanks to John Howard's mean-spirited lack of vision and his brazen political ability to appeal to our baser instincts. - Sid Spindler
• Most of the comments about John Howard have missed the quality that has been the most distinctive during his term of office. What Howard has done, above all, has been to destroy the "unwritten rule" that, whichever party is in power, the self-elected intellectuals (generally of the left) will dictate policy on the big national issues.
Howard did this, notably, in the Tampa incident, when he articulated what the great majority of Australians were thinking, but might have been hesitant to say: that "we will decide who comes to Australia".
Time and again, he has infuriated the fashionable left (beloved of, and loving, the Italian-suited, French clock-collecting Paul Keating) by saying the words that mainstream Australia wanted to hear. He has ignored fashion and refused to blindly accept the mantra of the three Rs (refugees, republic, and reconciliation), preferring to make considered, pragmatic decisions that reflect the wishes of his mainstream electorate rather than those of the superior voices of radio commentators, university professors and others who claim to know better than the "ordinary people". - Rob Siedle
• John Howard is certainly no fool and knows exactly which buttons to press in his headlong pursuit of populism: he has now angered Australia's Muslim leaders by saying that a fragment of the Islamic community is "utterly antagonistic to our kind of society" (The Age, 21/2).
Pauline Hanson taught Mr Howard the power of xenophobia, even if at the time she didn't know what it meant.
We have a plethora of shock jocks in this country who relish their Islamophobic message as they, too, know this is what their audience want to hear. The fact that they are aided and abetted by our Prime Minister is a blight on the collective conscience of Australia. - Christopher Paul
• So John Howard believes there is a tiny minority of Muslims whose views on jihad and women are out of step with mainstream Australian values. Hmm, I would have thought a number of AFL footballers as well as one or two parliamentarians exhibit "extreme attitudes to women" - but Mr Howard found no need to comment on that.
Mr Howard also took Australia to war in Iraq on the basis of a doctrine that was certainly out of step with mainstream public opinion. But apparently it's OK when he does it.
Or perhaps it is that there are no votes in denigrating Australian footballers and pointing out his own inconsistencies, but many, many votes in dog whistling that it's OK to be prejudiced against Muslims. - Chris Curnow
In the Howard 10 year interview on the 7;30 report last night he claimed no one knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the public wanted him to invade on the off chance they did have them. He seems to easily forget the million+ Australians who got into the streets to say no to this war.
How easy it is to rewrite history when you are in power.
We did not know no one told us I was never told blah blah blah blah.
Posted by Doug Steley on March 3, 2006
'A government so contemptuous of its people and yet supported and then elected over and over by the same people … it beggars belief.'
If only this were true. The sad reality is that most people will choose economic stability over compassion any day. I fear that a terrible judgement will one day come upon this nation for its collective selfishness.
Posted by Slaymaster on March 4, 2006