Sorry.

Sorry

Yes!

As I write this the Rodent who has torn Australia apart is conceding defeat: John Howard's grubby regime has been soundly thrashed in today's election.

It's still debatable, but it's even looking as though Howard has lost his own seat, which makes him only the second Australian PM in history to sufffer the ultimate electoral ignominy.

The first, in 1929, was this charming creature, Viscount Stanley Bruce. He probably wasn't quite as dismal as he looked, but that's also debatable.

Beyond debate, however, is the fact that the past eleven and a half years of lies, human rights abuse, racism and environmental vandalism are over.

Thanks to everyone around the world for your prayers!

John Howard: Slimy since 1955.

John Howard is the most loathsome Prime Minister in Australian history. This dubious honour was once unassailably held by Sir Robert “Pig-Iron” Menzies*; the “Queen & Country” jingoist who resigned his commission at the start of the First World War to avoid the horrors of the Front.



As is all too often the case with his type, Menzies' cowardice didn't prevent him enthusiastically supporting Australia's participation in the carnage of WWI, and as a student he actively (but unsuccessfully, thank God) campaigned for the introduction of conscription. Not that Menzies ever forgot the issue: fifty years later he was able to bypass the messy democratic niceties observed in the years before he seized power. Instead of holding a public referendum, as occurred in 1916 & 17, Pig-iron Bob simply rammed the National Service Act (1964) through parliament and conscripted young Australian men to their deaths in Vietnam.

No, Menzies takes some beating when it comes to the prize for worst Australian PM, but John Winston Howard more than meets the challenge. Viewed on their own, the Children Overboard Affair; the Australian Wheat Board scandal, in which bribes of around $AUD290 million ($US258 million) were paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime in blatant contravention of UN sanctions; or ignoring expert advice on weapons of mass destruction in order to drag Australia into war as George W. Bush’s “deputy sheriff” (we were later magnanimously promoted to the rank of fully fledged sheriff) - are each enough to at least earn Howard the prize as runner-up, but when combined, and then added to his appalling mismanagement of the environment, human rights, the economy (why have interest rates risen six times since he promised his government’s economic prowess would ensure no further increases?) and workplace relations… I won’t go on, but I could. Howard is the worst. Indisputably.

Fortunately all the polls indicate he’ll be gone after Saturday 24 November. If only the damage he’s caused could go with him, but instead we’ll be paying the price of that for decades to come. Yet the writing was on the wall concerning Howard years ago: in 1955 he appeared as a 16 year old contestant on Jack Davey's top-rating radio show "Give it a Go". Here’s a brief excerpt:

All the tell-traits of the man known to his fellow party members as “the Rodent” (and to one former PM as “the unflushable turd”) are there; the smarmy arrogance, the smirking ignorance, and the cock-sure disregard for others. In little Johnny’s world not much has changed since 1955: his religion has shifted from Methodism to Sydney Anglicanism (yep – he’s also one of them), but that’s about it.


John Howard won 100 bars of soap for his efforts on radio that day. Obviously none of it was ever used to wash his mouth out for lying. Pity; we all might have been spared a lot of heartache and bloodshed if someone had just taught him that telling the truth does matter.


*Menzies is Howard's hero. Google and see for yourself.

Crawling out of the woodwork:

Elections have a way of bringing out the bottom-feeders, especially those of a religious variety. From crikey.com:

Exclusive: Brethren get a foot in the doors of power
Alex Mitchell writes:

Crikey can exclusively reveal that the secretive Christian sect, the Exclusive Brethren, has gone to great lengths to obtain parliamentary lobbying status for two of its leading Sydney members.

Warwick John of Copeland Road, Engadine, in Sydney’s south, and David Walter Stewart, who gives his address as an Engadine Post Office box number, have become official parliamentary lobbyists representing the so-called Christian Lobby Group.
With their official credentials issued just before the NSW state election in March, John and Stewart can patrol the corridors of the NSW Parliament in Macquarie Street merely by flashing their official passes. Their keen interest in meeting ministers, shadow ministers and MPs in the privacy of their parliamentary offices is bizarre when you consider that the fundamentalist sect bans its flock from voting in elections!

The parliamentary democracy-worshipping MPs who signed and sponsored the lobbyist passes for the non-voting Exclusive Brethren were Upper House MPs, the Rev Fred Nile and the Rev Gordon Moyes, of the Christian Democrats, and David Clarke, an Opus Dei supporting Catholic and leader of the NSW Liberal Party’s hard right, pro-Howard faction.

John declared on his application form that the purpose of his special pass was to “lobby for Christian rights” whatever they are. Normally, lobbyist passes are authorised by parliament’s presiding officers who, at that time, were Speaker John Aquilina and Legislative Council President Meredith Burgmann. Because parliament was in recess pending the March 24 election, it is unclear whether they co-signed authority for the passes or it was processed by the clerks, Russell Grove (Legislative Assembly) and Lynn Lovelock (Legislative Council).

As comprehensively demonstrated in Monday night’s Four Corners, the Exclusive Brethren has interfered in state and federal elections in NSW, South Australia and Tasmania and overseas in New Zealand and the United States supplying campaign cash and advertising support to right-wing conservative and anti-Green forces.

The exposure of Fred Nile as an ally of the Exclusive Brethren will do little to shame the Iemma Government. This week it was revealed that Premier Iemma successfully solicited the services of Nile to act as chairman of a limited, restrictive upper house committee inquiry into the Royal North Shore Hospital scandal thereby escaping Opposition demands for a wider investigation into the maladministration of the hospital system, doctor and nursing shortages and chronic under-funding by Treasury.

Watching Labor rely on the likes of Nile, whose reprehensible re-election platform was a religiously bigoted 10-year ban on Moslem immigration, is sickbag-reaching stuff. Iemma, MP for Lakemba, is living down to the catchcry of his mentor Graham Richardson – “Whatever It Takes”.

This particular Christian would like to make it perfectly clear that unlike the Brethren I don't believe women must always wear their hair long, covered by a little scarf thingummy. However I do believe that usimg the name of God to forbid people from exercising their democratic right to vote is evil - as is compromising one's values in return for a few grubby Brethren dollars.

Be Ashamed Australia. Be Very Ashamed.

So I’ll admit to being a bit behind the times, but the shock of this has taken some time to sink in:


Australia has been providing training to Burmese “security” thugs.


This mightn’t be the most disgusting thing an Australian government has ever done (although it’s hard to think of anything much more disgraceful), but it’s unquestionably in the top ten.


No doubt there’ll be an outcry over this outrageously immoral activity from every bible-believing church in the country.


Surely there will be. Matthias Media can’t possibly overlook this act of national sin.


Can they?