It’s the 61st session of the General Assembly of the United Nations this week. Heads of government from all over the world are there. George W Bush, Hugo Chavez, Thabo Mbeki, Michael Somare, Jacques Chirac, Thaksin Shinawatra (even if he has no job to go home to); Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Robert Mugabe, they’re all there, including… um, Alexander Downer.

Instead of strutting on a world stage where The Voters Back Home won’t see him, John Winston Howard spent yesterday morning strutting on a world stage where All The Voters Back Home were watching. He gave a speech at the Crocoseum at Australia Zoo as part of the extremely kitschy globally-televised send-off for Steve Irwin. And then he toddled off to the north of Queensland for the twentieth-anniversary piss-up, er, meeting of the Cairns Group.

Let’s just recap, John-Boy: the Cairns Group is a gaggle of 18 agricultural exporting nations and is intended as a meeting of Trade Ministers. Your trade minister, Mark Vaile, is there, as he should be. The United Nations General Assembly is a gaggle of 192 nations - just about every sovereign state in the world. You, John-Boy, as a global citizen should be in New York with all of your peers, not doing a junket in Far North Queensland.

And certainly not leaving this country’s voice on the world stage to the Global Village Idiot himself.

Did I ever tell you Federal Parliament is a joke?

Despite the Prime Minister’s total apathy towards the world’s greatest current humanitarian crisis, the Government hasn’t been totally quiet on Darfur. DFAT announced on September 1 an additional $5 million in food aid for Darfur, and $510,000 to Austcare for “protection officers who will work with United Nations agencies increasing security for civilians in internally displaced person camps in both Darfur and southern Sudan.”

Bruce Baird is one of the better Liberal MP’s in the House of Reps. The member for Cook (which includes Cronulla within its boundaries), chairman of the Amnesty International Parliamentary Group and a committed Anglican, Baird has a social conscience the likes of which his colleague, the member for Bennelong, could never comprehend. On May 29 Baird introduced a motion to the House of Reps as private member’s business:

That this House calls on the United Nations to:

(1) substantially increase the level of aid to the Darfur region of the Sudan;
(2) call upon member nations to provide peacekeeping forces to quell the civil war currently taking place in the country;
(3) lift the profile of this catastrophic situation that confronts Darfur and the conflict which has already claimed 300,000 lives and seen 2.4 million people displaced;
(4) work effectively with the NGOs to ensure a substantial lift in the level of privately sourced aid going to the region; and
(5) ensure that maximum cooperation is given to peace negotiations.

Thirty minutes allotted for six speakers with a maximum of five minutes each: Baird, shadow Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, Petro Georgiou, Michael Danby, Cameron Thompson, and Laurie Ferguson. All totally in support. And then, as is normal procedure:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Barresi)—Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

You guessed it. The debate hasn’t resumed. It might. Do a word search for “darfur” on this page and see how far down the queue it is.

There’s been a couple of mentions of Darfur in Federal Parliament since that debate. Last Thursday (September 14) in the Senate, Helen Coonan outlined Government policy on the possibility of sending peacekeepers in relation to UN Resolution 1708. She at least has a better grasp on events than did her Liberal stablemate Senator Marise Payne on June 21. Poor Senator Payne thinks Darfur is in the south of Sudan.

Fight no battle you are not sure of winning…
- Mao Tse Tung, from “The Present Situation and Our Tasks”, 1947

It must have been the Good Chairman’s words ringing in John Winston Howard’s ears on Tuesday when he wimped out of putting his foul Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 before the Senate.

Headed for the extremely rare situation of Liberal senators abstaining or even (gasp) crossing the floor, Johnny hoisted the white flag before facing certain defeat. It was the right call, but an even better call would have been to have not dreamed up the legislation in the first place.

With that episode brushed aside, Johnny proceeded to charge full steam ahead on that other grand concept inspired by Chairman Mao - his very own Cultural Revolution.

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/11/austra13964.htm

Human Rights Watch, whose Middle East arm is so busy documenting all the Israeli and Hizbollah war crimes at the moment, has had to turn its attention to Australia as the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 winds it way through Parliament.

The Bill was approved by the House of Representatives yesterday 79-62, but with three Liberal Party members voting against the motion (Petro Georgiou, Judi Moylan and Russell Broadbent). Bruce Baird abstained, as did John Forrest, who immediately resigned as National Party chief whip. The number of government members who have crossed the floor in the ten years of Howard government could, until yesterday, have been counted on one hand.

The Bill enters the Senate on Monday. There’s a very good chance that it will be voted down.

Here’s a report from today’s Sydney Morning Herald. (Parlinfoweb is down at the moment, but once it’s back, I’ll link to some of the speeches from this week’s House of Reps debate.)

It’s been an eventful week for Beazley comma B full stop. An amusing confrontation on the steps of Parliament House this morning between his Bomberness and that loosest of Liberal Party loose cannons, Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey.

Video footage at smh.com.au - nearly as funny as George Galloway v Anna Botting.

Update: ABC Online has audio of the Tuckey v Beazley contretemps - 99 seconds worth on mp3. Tuckey was actually in the middle of a doorstop interview about the utterly appalling Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 when he accosted Beazley as he walked past and started taking him to task.

Kim Beazley Junior would make a better Prime Minister than John Winston Howard. So, however, would the average blue-tongue lizard or, in Bill Hayden parlance, would the average drover’s dog.

Bomber Beazley demonstrated yet again in Parliament yesterday his unsuitability to lead the Australian Labor Party back into government. Not only does he blindly accept the nonsensical concept of a “war on terror”, but he actually says that Howard pulled Australian troops out of Afghanistan too soon!

Howard yesterday announced the deployment of additional troops to join Australia’s “Reconstruction Task Force” in Afghanistan. Howard’s address was standard codswallop, but here’s the permalink to Bomber’s reply.

Dancing on Lies

The latest Flash animation from Peter Nicholson and the Rubbery Figures crew.

Not much for me to say except let the great minds speak for themselves:

The Nationals support efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions but do not support international rules which disadvantage Australian industry and interests.

- from the National Party of Australia’s environment and conservation policy

On the other side of the house:

“It’s crazy to suggest we need nuclear plants in a state that has some of the most plentiful coal supplies in the world”

- Peter Beattie, ALP Premier of Queensland, 7.6.06 (source: ABC)

And from the man of wisdom himself:

“The principal reason why Australia will not sign the Kyoto protocol is that it is not in Australia’s interest to do so. We take decisions not based on ideology or prejudice; we take decisions that are based overwhelmingly on a consideration of the national interest.”

- one of many similar statements on the Kyoto Protocol from John Winston Howard. This one in reply to a Dorothy Dixer in Federal Parliament, 16.2.05 (Source: Hansard)

When John Howard refuses to condemn something that seems to use mere mortals to be worthy of condemnation, it usually means (a) he supports the action; or (b) Liberal voters support the action; or (c) both.

JWH generally makes me cringe with outrage every time I see him interviewed on television, and yesterday morning’s performance on the ABC’s Insiders is no exception. His neanderthal approach to foreign policy is bad enough without the outwardly-inconsistent manner in which he selectively offers opinion on other countries’ internal affairs.

The decision to send Australian troops to Timor Leste last week was the correct one, but was it really appropriate to add:

But clearly, the country [Timor Leste] has not been governed well over the past few years, that’s obvious.

Would he like it if President Gusmao were to point out that Australia has not been well governed over the past ten years?

But the thing that’s missing from Barrie Cassidy’s interview with the Prime Miniature is any condemnation of the forces that are causing all the trouble in Timor Leste and exposing Australian (and New Zealand, Malay and Portuguese) military personnel to risk. What game are you playing, Johnny?

Australia has treated East Timor/Timor Leste like dirt ever since Gough Whitlam turned his back when Indonesia rolled in as Portugal rolled out in 1975. We’ve done our darndest to take their offshore oil fields and we only stepped in to protect them in 1999 when the humanitarian situation became screamingly obvious. We need to have a good look at Australia’s culpability in the current violence.

Tim Anderson’s opinion piece on the Australian intervention in Timor Leste can be found on Evan Jones’ excellent Alert and Alarmed.