Howard Re-elected
John Howard and the Liberal Party is returned to government with, of all things, an increased majority and also the likelihood of a senate majority. The news reports this as "an historic" re-election, because this is the fourth time he has managed it. I thought I'd feel depressed about it, but it's more like numbness. I am shaking my head in a kind of digust. That's putting a strong emotion on it, I know, and it sounds like I must be exaggerating. I can't find any other word for it. My disgust is in seeing this country endorse a leader who has taken the nation down a path of fear, intolerance, meanness and inequality. These are the things he believes in. Of course he never says that, that would be revealing the truth, and that would never do. Instead he steals words such as "Australian values", which should evoke feelings of tolerance, a fair go, and generosity, empties them of their true meaning, and then holds forth the empty shells of words, waving them about, while they ring hollow, echoing all the way to the remote dentention centres.
He says the election was all about trust - one the words he has emptied of all meaning. Forty six percent of the electorate believed the rhetoric that he could be trusted to keep us safe from terrorists (yet he has made Australians unsafe everywhere by his unquestioning support of the US "war on terror"); they believed his rhetoric that if we changed to a Labor government, interest rates would surely rise (even though this is a lie). The combination of fear of "the other" (terrorists, muslims, refugees, homosexuals) and fear of financial hardship (interest rates, experience in "managing the economy") worked. But the cost is too high. He is not building the kind of Australia that I envisage for my children and my children's children. He is building a hard hearted, mean, intolerant, divided country. It happens slowly, not overnight. The 8 years or so of his prime ministership has already taken its toll. Another three years will take us just that little bit more away from the great country we could be, and closer to the stone-hearted, mean-spirited, intolerant country Howard seems to want to live in.
Bob Ellis has summed up my feelings perfectly in his book "Night Thoughts in Time of War" (which he writes in May 2004):
"Will Bush, Blair, Sharon and Howard be gone by the end of the Northern Fall? It could be so. ... It could be so. Or the world may differently turn and the planets line up less fortunately, and the foul dark things that have happened this terrible year continue and over time prevail, and trample us under, distorting and choking the planet, and smashing its cultures and in photos leering with thumbs up gestures over the tortured earth. A breath of prayer might here be in order: deliver us O Lord from evil; do it soon. Lest we forget. Lest we forget. And so it goes."
The world has differently turned down under. I'm hoping the Americans won't make the same mistake.
John Howard and the Liberal Party is returned to government with, of all things, an increased majority and also the likelihood of a senate majority. The news reports this as "an historic" re-election, because this is the fourth time he has managed it. I thought I'd feel depressed about it, but it's more like numbness. I am shaking my head in a kind of digust. That's putting a strong emotion on it, I know, and it sounds like I must be exaggerating. I can't find any other word for it. My disgust is in seeing this country endorse a leader who has taken the nation down a path of fear, intolerance, meanness and inequality. These are the things he believes in. Of course he never says that, that would be revealing the truth, and that would never do. Instead he steals words such as "Australian values", which should evoke feelings of tolerance, a fair go, and generosity, empties them of their true meaning, and then holds forth the empty shells of words, waving them about, while they ring hollow, echoing all the way to the remote dentention centres.
He says the election was all about trust - one the words he has emptied of all meaning. Forty six percent of the electorate believed the rhetoric that he could be trusted to keep us safe from terrorists (yet he has made Australians unsafe everywhere by his unquestioning support of the US "war on terror"); they believed his rhetoric that if we changed to a Labor government, interest rates would surely rise (even though this is a lie). The combination of fear of "the other" (terrorists, muslims, refugees, homosexuals) and fear of financial hardship (interest rates, experience in "managing the economy") worked. But the cost is too high. He is not building the kind of Australia that I envisage for my children and my children's children. He is building a hard hearted, mean, intolerant, divided country. It happens slowly, not overnight. The 8 years or so of his prime ministership has already taken its toll. Another three years will take us just that little bit more away from the great country we could be, and closer to the stone-hearted, mean-spirited, intolerant country Howard seems to want to live in.
Bob Ellis has summed up my feelings perfectly in his book "Night Thoughts in Time of War" (which he writes in May 2004):
"Will Bush, Blair, Sharon and Howard be gone by the end of the Northern Fall? It could be so. ... It could be so. Or the world may differently turn and the planets line up less fortunately, and the foul dark things that have happened this terrible year continue and over time prevail, and trample us under, distorting and choking the planet, and smashing its cultures and in photos leering with thumbs up gestures over the tortured earth. A breath of prayer might here be in order: deliver us O Lord from evil; do it soon. Lest we forget. Lest we forget. And so it goes."
The world has differently turned down under. I'm hoping the Americans won't make the same mistake.