MAXINE McKEW: Are you getting complaints from parents or have you talked to, say, history teachers?

JOHN HOWARD: It is self-apparent. It is obvious to me that there’s -

MAXINE McKEW: Why so?

JOHN HOWARD: From talking to people. The increasing number of people I talk to, younger people, who don’t have a full understanding of some of these things.

[and later in the same interview]

MAXINE McKEW: Has this come to your attention because there are, say, younger people in your office or other ministers’ offices that are ignorant of these issues?

JOHN HOWARD: It is everywhere apparent. It is not just in offices.

(source: Interview, The 7.30 Report, ABC-TV, 25.1.06)

Earlier that day, Australia’s most anti-intellectual Prime Minister in living memory dropped a bombshell in his Australia Day address to the National Press Club in Canberra, when he used the words “postmodern” and “relativism”, not just in the same speech, but in the same sentence. To put this into perspective, a search of the comprehensive transcript database on the Prime Ministerial website shows this is as being the first time he has used either word in public since becoming PM.

While it’s not yet known who ghosted his speech (which can be read in full here)

The gentlemen in the above photo are:
(a) Turning the first sod at the Shanghai Inflatable Doll Trade Fair;
(b) Gravediggers of the Central Committee of the Communist Party heroically exceeding their quotas at the funeral of the last member of the Gang of Four;
(c) Performing the ground-breaking ceremony at the start of construction of the Beijing Olympic beach volleyball arena.

For the second year running I am doing a preview of the Australian of the Year award, which will be announced by John Winston Howard later today. Please refer to my 2005 preview for some facts, figures and background on past winners.

The eight state and territory nominees, as announced in November:

New South Wales: Justice Michael Kirby, member of the High Court of Australia since 1996, and a distinguished jurist with many accomplisjments to his name. Often finds himself the dissenting voice on conservative judgments handed down by the court. Openly gay, and was the subject of a disgraceful and unsuccessful smear a few years ago by JWH attack-dog Senator Bill Heffernan, based on fabricated documents. It will be an interesting scene if JWH has to congratulate Justice Kirby tonight.

Queensland: Professor Ian Frazer, Director of the Centre for Cancer and Immunology Research at the University of Queensland. Among other things, he advises the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on papillomavirus vaccines. Already named “Australian of the Year” by The Australian newspaper, though this is not an automatic indicator of the winner here. Nonetheless, he would be a safe and popular choice.

South Australia: Dr Bill Griggs, Director of the Trauma Service at Royal Adelaide Hospital. Not likely to better Prof. Frazer’s claims in the medical science field.

Tasmania: Richard Bovill, rural activist and leader of the Fair Dinkum Food Challenge. Outraged by cheap imports of produce from overseas (apparently McDonald’s decision to use potatoes from New Zealand was the last straw), a group of North Tasmanian farmers led by Bovill took a convoy of tractors on a protest trail around rural Victoria and New South Wales before meeting John Howard in Canberra. A folk hero if ever there was one. He’d be my pick for Australian of the Year, but I expect the judging panel to ignore the “traditional Australian value” of larrikinism and pass him by.

Victoria: Reverend Tim Costello, Chief Executive Officer of World Vision Australia, minister of the Baptist Church, alumnus of Monash University, former Mayor of St Kilda and current brother of Peter Costello. Two brothers with more differing ideologies you could hardly imagine. Reverend Tim seems to be the popular favourite at the moment, and the one I expect to win the title tonight. Another interesting scenario as he shakes hands with JWH.

Western Australia: Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Bolton, distinguished historian and currently Chancellor of Murdoch University. An outstanding Australian intellectual, but not a likely winner this year.

Australian Capital Territory: Dr Geoffrey Lancaster, associate professor in theKeyboard Institute at the School of Music at Australian National University. This year’s token representative of the performing arts, and not a serious contender for national honours.

Northern Territory: Peter Fannin, Indigenous Arts Patron and botanist. Been a quiet year up the Top End by the looks of it.

I can make no comment on the Senior Australian of the Year nominations. The only name I know in the Young Australian of the Year nominations is Trisha Broadbridge, whose husband, AFL footballer Troy Broadbridge, died in the December 2004 tsunami while they were on their honeymoon. The “Local Hero Regional” nominations are all unknown to me, but I can’t think of a more deserving “Local Hero Metropolitan” than Victoria’s nomination, former AFL legend Michael Long. If there was a write-in candidate for Australian of the Year, he would be my pick.

The full list of nominees in each category can be found here.

(PS: Note that there are no current sportspeople in the main Australian of the Year nominees? Hoo-ray!)

http://www.pm.gov.au/news/media_releases/media_Release1752.html

I wonder what’s the point really. We know that ministers aren’t responsible for the actions of their departments and are always given wrong information by them anyway. So who cares who has what portfolio?

It’s election day in Canada today. The following press release from the Green Party of Canada hit my inbox overnight on Friday. The principles basically hold true elsewhere, including Australia:

1. I want to feel good about my vote. I want to vote for someone, not against someone.

2. The Green Party has the best platform. The Green Party platform has earned positive reviews in the media, has done well under analysis by non-partisan organizations.
3. My great grandchildren will be proud of me. I want them to have a sustainable future, a green economy, and better democracy.
4. I want my vote to have an impact on the legislative agenda of the next parliament. MPs will spend the next session trying to look good for the next election, so they will be looking at who they lost votes to. Vote Green and Green priorities will set the agenda.
5. People are saying good things about the Green Party.
6. I am nobody’s fool. I refuse to let Martin, Harper, Layton or Duceppe think he can scare me into “strategically” voting for him just for not being the worst among them.
7. Green Parties around the world get elected, govern countries, and make the world a better place.
8. Whoever I vote for will get $ 1.75 in public funding, per vote, per year. I feel good about the Green Party putting it to good use defending my values.
9. I am socially progressive, fiscally responsible, and committed to environmental sustainability - just like the Green Party.
10. One hundred and thirty nine years of Liberal and Conservative governments. Albert Einstein said it best: “The significant problems of our time are not going to be solved by the same level of thinking that got us into them.”

I should disclose at this point that I have been a member of the Greens since last October, the first time I have ever actually been a member of a political party. But I’ll explain more about that in a future post.

A grain of truth
Marian Wilkinson’s excellent, but necessarily long, summary of this week’s astonishing revelations at the Cole Inquiry into bribes allegedly paid by Australian companies as part of the UN oil-for-food scandal.

It’s fair to say that the loneliest man in Australia at the moment must be AWB managing director Andrew Lindberg, who spent most of the week telling Justice Cole that he couldn’t recall anything about the quite extraordinary scams that his staff were pulling to maintain wheat contracts with Iraq while sanctions on most non-humanitarian transactions were in place.

It seems, indeed, that the Pakistan government (before Musharraf’s time if I understand the chronology correctly) may be implicated in some of these bribes.

One small point to recap: while Australia was preparing to take part in the Coalition of the Willing, our monopoly wheat exporter was Iraq’s biggest kickback client.

More damage to Australia’s reputation, just as our Immigration Minister begins handling the claims of 43 West Papuan asylum seekers by shipping them to a processing centre at Christmas Island.

A big, big story is unfolding this week at a Royal Commission being conducted in Sydney by Justice Terence Cole into “Certain Australian Companies in Relation to the UN Oil-For-Food Programme”. Australia’s biggest agribusiness company appears to be up to its neck in it, and so too the Howard Government.

In short, AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board), Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter, was named in the UN report as one of the companies alleged to have been giving kickbacks to the Iraqi government whilst sanctions were in place. Testimony before the Cole Royal Commission is supporting those allegations, with some extraordinarily bad attempts at arse-covering by AWB executives this week.

The most interesting revelations surround the evidence that AWB’s kickback activity began before July 1999. That was the date when the AWB was privatised - before that it was a Government-owned business enterprise.

I’m not going to attempt to analyse the nitty-gritty of this latest scandal to stain the Howard Government’s CV, rather give some links by which you can follow the development of this extraordinary story:

• The website of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the UN Oil-for-Food Programme, which handed down its findings on 27 October 2005 (press release in PDF)
• The UN news website’s coverage and official reaction to the Oil-for-Food Inquiry
• AWB’s reaction to being named in the report (press release in PDF)
• BBC Online’s coverage of the Oil-for-food Scandal
• The Australian Attorney-General’s Department’s website for the Cole Royal Commission.
• I have also set up a playlist of nine MP3 files from the ABC website covering news reports of the Royal Commission so far this week (about 36 minutes of listening all up). Here’s a link to today’s latest story on the ABC website.
• Here’s an op-ed by The Australian’s Mike Steketee in today’s edition, which also featured an extraordinary letter to the editor by Global Village Idiot Alexander Downer (he’s on holidays you see and therefore can’t issue an official press release).

In addition to AWB there were two other Australian companies named in the Volcker report commissioned by the UN: Alkaloids of Australia Pty Ltd and Rhine Ruhr Pty Ltd.

Significantly, the terms of reference for the Royal Commission only refer to investigating the role of “certain Australian companies” in the Oil-for-food program, not the role of the Australian government. The circumstantial evidence forthcoming from this hearing will, nonetheless, be dynamite. Federal Parliament resumes sitting on February 7.

Planning a distraction yet, JH?

The Australian Christian Channel is available on every major pay-TV platform in Australia and, in the Sydney metropolitan area, on free-to-air digital, not to mention streamed online. It gives the opportunity to watch at any time of day those American evangelists that usually turn up on the commercial networks in the early morning between the Victoria Principal documentaries and the brekky chat shows. Pride of place in the ACC’s nightly prime-time schedule belongs to The 700 Club, which goes to air in the plum spot of 8.30pm Monday to Friday (repeated at 6.30am and 1.30pm next day).

The 700 Club has been hosted for 38 years by a gentleman by the name of Pat Robertson. The very Pat Robertson who sought Republican nomination for the US presidency in 1988. The very Pat Robertson who advocated the killing of Hugo Chavez last year (for which he later apologised).

Now, Robertson has told his viewers that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was the work of God, punishment for abandoning the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Ha’aretz reports that the Israeli Government has suspended contact with Robertson, who was negotiating with them to build the “Christian Heritage Centre”, a theme park to be situated in the Galilee district.

Now I’m not normally an advocate of censorship, but check out these two dot-points from the ACC’s principles relating to content standards:

• “Programs should bring life to our viewers and reflect the love of our Father. They should not be critical of others but rather be positive and encouraging.”
• “In the event of a Ministry falling into disrepute, the ACC has the right to remove the associated programs from the channel line up.”

Is Robertson’s flavour of “Christianity” appropriate for Christian television viewers in Australia? Does his rhetoric meet the standards necessary to comply with Australia’s new anti-terrorist legislation? Why does the ACC (of whom little information is disclosed on their website) schedule The 700 Club as its only program which airs five days a week - bearing in mind that they provide air time to ministries free of charge and subject to their own approval?

And, more to the point, shouldn’t we be applying the same scrutiny to people of extreme Christian viewpoints that our government now expects of all Muslim clerics?

I’ll drop the ACC a polite email when I get the chance.

2006 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification (IYDD). The official website is iydd.org

I’ve done a three-part obit on Kerry Packer on my cricket blog. Go here, here and here.