It has been eleven months since I posted my last report - in actual fact, a nil return - of John Winston Howard’s public references to Darfur.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Disappointingly, I can only find one reference to “Darfur” in Federal Parliament since the start of this year, a speech in the adjournment debate of the House of Reps on February 28 by Liberal MP Louise Markus, whose electorate in the Blacktown area is home to a large number of Sudanese refugees. Ms Markus took to task an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph.

Our Immigration Department and its parade of incompetent ministers have copped some bad press, quite rightly, over recent years, but to their credit they have admitted more than 10,000 Sudanese refugees over the past three years. According to DIMIA figures (PDF), in the six months to the end of 2005, a total of 2026 Sudanese settlers arrived in Australia - that’s out of a total of 65,804 from all nations. In the 2004-05 financial year, 5572 Sudanese arrived in Australia under humanitarian settlement programs, and that’s 42% of all humanitarian admissions for that year.

If we’ve done well in accepting Sudanese seeking asylum here, we haven’t been quite so forthcoming in helping to make their homeland more peaceful. We still have the grand total of fifteen (15) Australian Defence Force personnel with the UN Mission in Sudan. Enough for a rugby team without reserves.

We could do a lot better with foreign aid too. According to AusAID’s summary of Australia’s Overseas Aid Program 2005-06, a total of $77 million was projected for aid programs for the whole of Africa. A sub-total for Sudan was not given. Overall, Australia’s ODA (Official Developmental Assistance) for the 2005-06 year was projected at just under $2.5 billion. That’s a total of 0.28% of Gross National Income.

How can we get Little Johnnie to take an interest in this major humanitarian calamity? (And here, by the way, is the latest from IRIN about the African Union’s peace talks. The April 30 deadline has come and gone but the AU has given a 48 hour extension.)

What was the answer to the following question, asked at the Cole Inquiry on Thursday:

MR AGIUS: Q. Prime Minister, your full name is John Winston Howard?

Was it:
(a) “It is.”
(b) “I have no recollection of that.”
(c) “Disclosure of my identity would be a threat to national security.”
(d) “No that was the last bloke, I’m Peter Costello.”

Answer at this end of this article.

After the agony of Mark Vaile’s amnesia on Monday, and the slapstick buffoonery of Alexander Downer’s arrival for Tuesday’s hearing via the Sydney monorail, we had an appearance by the Prime Minister on Thursday so perfectly choreographed that Ric Birch could not have staged it better.

From his morning power walk, to the triumphal front-door entrance to the courthouse, phalanxed by the usual crowd of security bovver boys, to the meticulously crafted answers under John Agius QC’s unusually powder-puff questioning, it was all predictable. And irrelevant.

Howard calls this inquiry “transparent”. It’s not. He set it up basically as a set-up, to investigate the conduct of companies directly implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. But not into a government under whose watch it all happened.

AWB’s reputation is in ruins and several of its executives have quit, some of them likely to spend their retirement years in custodial accommodation. Other companies, including BHP Billiton, are likely to get their wrists slapped.

However, the conduct of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its “responsible” ministers are not accountable to the Cole inquiry under its existing terms of reference. Thanks to JWH’s carefully-worded terms for the inquiry, there can be no findings made in respect to the government’s role in this mess.

DFAT’s culture appears little different to that of the Immigration Department and that of the Attorney-General’s Department - a dangerous cocktail of slackness, “whatever it takes”, and reactionary ideological bias. The responsibility for all this rests solely with the man who rules his cabinet with an iron fist.

Every day I have more and more trouble understanding why anyone could think John Howard is a good prime minister.

In any decent Westminster-based democracy, the responsible ministers, and possibly the government as a whole, would have fallen on their swords by now. Howard has torn up the Westminster system in Canberra, made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responibility, and made selective amnesia an essential part of the job description for any politician or senior company executive. And, quite separately to all this, he is systematically dismantling democracy in this country.

Howard’s legacy to Australia is that he has turned impropriety and deceipt into acceptable “Australian values”, and made decency subservient to wealth accumulation and ideological jihad.

Don’t rule out a snap early federal election some time in 2006.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s brilliant dissection of the AWB story so far appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. All the hearing transcripts can be found on the Attorney-General Department’s website.

(The correct answer was (a). As boring as the man himself.)

You don’t have to swear at the football and eat a pie to be an Australian, but you do have to believe in democracy, the rule of law and the rights and liberties of others…. Where we have reason to believe that people are not truthfully or honestly meeting that test, we have every right to deny them citizenship, or if by subsequent conduct they show that they don’t meet the test, then we could invite them to forfeit their Australian citizenship.

- from Peter Costello’s infamous Islamophobic address to the Sydney Institute, 23.2.06 (source: AM, ABC Radio)

Which brings us to the case of Tony Labbozzetta, as reported in today’s Sun Herald.
Labbozzetta, best-known as the controversial former chairman of the Australian Soccer Federation and of the wealthy Marconi Club. An Australian resident for many years, he retains his Italian citizenship, and under new Italian electoral laws, expats can stand as candidates in the next election, being held on April 9 and 10.
Labbozzetta is running as a member of Fiamma Tricolore, a political party politely described as “neo-fascist”. Anti-semitism, anti-immigration and other racist policies appear to be part of the MSFT (Movimento Sociale-Fiamme Tricolore)’s platform. They are, however, highly unlikely to do well at next week’s elections, with support running at about 1 per cent. Labbozzetta is listed here on the MSFT’s list of overseas candidates for the Senate.

Does this mean that Tony Labbozzetta should be deported to Italy for espousing un-Australian values?

“Short of a neon sign flashing ‘Saddam bribes hidden here’ it is hard to imagine what more Mr Downer and DFAT would have needed to comprehensively investigate AWB, long before the Volcker inquiry belled the cat. The most innocent explanation of Mr Downer’s behaviour is that he has been at DFAT too long, and, like his senior public servants, did not want to rock AWB’s boat. A worse one is that Mr Downer did not want to know what was going on and hoped that nobody would notice how renegade Australians were trading with the enemy, right up until the shooting started in 2003.”
- Editorial, The Australian, 29.3.06

Over the last couple of days I’ve highlighted some of the right-wing rhetoric emanating from The Australian’s op-ed pages (and, let’s face it, The Australian is a Murdoch outlet), but in fairness they have pursued the AWB scandal with a great deal of diligence. To the extent that yesterday’s editorial page called for the Global Village Idiot’s resignation.

Downer, of course, is not the only minister who should walk the plank over this astonishing episode. Mark Vaile and Warren Truss should both be there right behind him. John Anderson’s forgetfulness in not disclosing his ownership of AWB shares, which he disposed of last year, deserves a lot more scrutiny.

And then there’s the man with whom the buck, in any self-respecting democratic government, would stop. If John Winston Howard is to escape from this with his hands clean, then history is obliged to remember him as the Prime Minister who was unable to control, or effectively communicate with, his public service, and only ever made decisions based on incorrect advice.

Note for future reference: Terrence Cole, head of the inquiry investigating the AWB imbroglio, was a member of the Class of ‘61 at Sydney University’s law school. So too was John Winston Howard. This item in yesterday’s Australian does a fair bit of straw clutching, but keep it in mind just in case…

“In 1939, when Britain declared war on the Nazi tyranny, that same day your Prime Minister announced you were at war too�no ifs, no buts, just solidly with the world. How magnificent and how typical of Australia.”
- Tony Blair getting the facts right but their historical perspective woefully wrong, Canberra, 27.3.06

In 1939, as in 2003, Australia heeded the call and joined in a war on the other side of the world. In 1939, Australia was following the lead of its imperial fatherland, though it is fair to say that it was to oppose a major international threat. In 2003, there was no empire and, indeed, no international threat from the chosen adversary. (Let’s not even go near 1915, Winston Churchill, the Anzacs and the Dardanelles.)

Tony Blair, one of the slickest snake oil salesmen in contemporary world politics, was doing a stand-up routine for the pollies in Australia’s federal parliament on Monday. The permalink to his speech on the ParlInfo website is here.

The Australian’s Paul Kelly described Blair’s speech as “the best in the national parliament since Bill Clinton” (who also addressed the joint houses in 1996). All that means really is (a) John Howard and the gang are crap, and (b) Paul Keating was already retired by then.

Kelly’s stablemate Greg Sheridan called Blair “the most articulate neo-conservative in the world” - and clearly meant that as a compliment. And if you want yet another right-wing take but in a competing newspaper, you can’t go past Gerard Henderson at the SMH.

Blair and Howard really should have either been booted long ago for lying about Iraq, or be covered with masses of egg on their faces for believing faulty intelligence. Both may yet get the comeuppance, Blair over “loans for peerages“, Howard over AWB, but you have to hand it to Blair for having the gall to say the following with a straight face:

But for almost three years now we have been in Iraq with full United Nations support.

Blurring the line between employees and directors is poor corporate governance and presents a potential conflict of interest: the immediate interest of workers, after all, is not always in line with that of the long-term health of the company or its shareholders.
- Editorial, The Australian, 27.3.06

The “company” in question is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The issue is Friday’s announcement of a new stage in Johnny’s Jihad, the abolition of the staff-elected director on the board of the ABC.

Mull over that quote again (with the knowledge that The Australian is owned by a corporation under the wing of one Keith Rupert Murdoch) and consider it in context with that other major platform of Johnny’s Jihad which comes into force today - none other than “WorkChoices“.

And there’s something else to ponder - why, if you enter http://www.workchoices.gov.au, does it take you to https://www.workchoices.gov.au ? Why, perchance, does the workchoices site have to be on a secure server?

… a part of our community might be regarded as suspect because many were recent immigrants. They put the strictures of their faith above Australian law and recognised a foreigner as their highest authority. Their loyalty and patriotism were suspect, particularly when newspapers published stories of secret training camps in the Blue Mountains for young men planning to fight against Commonwealth forces. Unemployed young men roamed the streets in gangs, and a series of harrowing and brutal gang rapes left many convinced that these immigrants had changed the country forever for the worse. Rather than admit that their culture and religion were at fault, their community leaders blamed discrimination in the legal system. They established separate schools where their religious values were taught and sought to change Australian laws and political institutions. And their families had large numbers of children while more and more Australian women were practising birth control. The name of this threat to Australia? Irish Catholics.
- Senator John Faulkner, Federal Parliament, 1.3.06 (source: Hansard)

A superb speech by Senator Faulkner, now sadly languishing on the ALP backbenches, reminds us that the current vilification of Muslims in this country is just a new manifestation of an old problem. The full speech is here.

JOHN HOWARD� Militarism and aggression are the foundations of his [Saddam Hussein’s] regime. If you doubt this, consider his actions against Iraqi Kurds, against the Shiah majority�particularly the Marshland Arabs. Consider the estimated 400,000 combatants and civilians who lost their lives in the war that followed his invasion of Iran�

ANTHONY ALBANESE�We were on his side, you dope!

The SPEAKER�The member for Grayndler will excuse himself from the House under the provisions of standing order 304A.

(Source: Hansard, House of Representatives, 18 March 2003)

The HON.GEORGE WALKER BUSH -Who can possibly think that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power? Surely not the dissidents who would be in his prisons or end up in his mass graves. Surely not the men and women who would fill Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms. Surely not the families of the victims he murdered with poison gas. Surely not anyone who cares about human rights, democracy and stability in the Middle East. Today, Saddam’s regime is gone, and no-one�

(Interjection)

The SPEAKER�Senator Brown, I warn you.

(Interjection)

The SPEAKER�Senator Brown will excuse himself from the House. The serjeant will remove Senator Brown from the House.

(Source: Hansard, Address by the President of the United States to the Australian Parliament, 23 October 2003)

It was ten years ago today, 2 March 1996, that Anthony Albanese and Bob Brown first won election to Federal Parliament, Albanese as ALP member for Grayndler and Brown as Greens senator for Tasmania.

Congratulations to both on ten years in federal parliament!

“There are countries that apply religious or Sharia law; Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under Sharia law, these are countries where they may feel at ease, but not Australia.”

- Peter Costello, from an address to The Sydney Institute, 23.2.06 (source: AM, ABC)

So there you have it. The aspirant future Prime Minister taking up the cudgels of wedge politics, invoking a bogeyman - Sharia law - that has never been raised by anyone of consequence in Australia before. Most islamophobes in this country would never have heard of Sharia law, let alone understand what it is.

Or perhaps Dollar Sweetie (as the good folk of Crikey call him in honour of his finest hour as a union-bashing barista) is merely playing diversion politics - ie, get the AWB scandal off the front pages…

Howard hits out at ‘jihad’ Muslims
(George Megalogenis/The Australian, 20.2.06)

Notwithstanding the fact that this article is really just pre-release publicity for a book The Australian is publishing to celebrate ten years of the JWH regime, the sheer ignorance of the man is mind-numbing.

Does he even have a clue what the term “jihad” really means?

I’ll comment on just one further passage from this drivel:

The Prime Minister also expressed concern about Muslim attitudes to women. “I think some of the associated attitudes towards women (are) a problem,” he said. “For all the conservatism towards women and so forth within some of the Mediterranean cultures, it’s as nothing compared with some of the more extreme attitudes.

I heard nothing in Howard’s eulogy for Kerry Packer last Friday that brought up his appaling misogyny.