He has been with the Liberal party since he was 18
He lived at home until he was 31
He was a solicitor
He was Fraser's Treasurer
These are the links available on his personal web page:
Arrange a message for special wedding anniversaries and birthdays
St George/Illawarra Rugby League Club
Baggy Green - Home of Australian Cricket
CricInfo - The Home of Cricket on the Internet
Australian Rugby Union Official website
Official website of the Australian Football League (AFL)
My Electorate
Bennelong - Aust. Electoral Commission Details
City of Ryde
Hunters Hill Council
Hornsby Shire Council
Parramatta City Council
State MPs
Andrew Tink - Member for Epping
John Watkins
Local Media
The Weekly Times
The Northern District Times
John Winston Howard grew up in the inner west of Sydney. His father owned a service station on the corner of the street. These were the halcyon days of little Winston's life - when the working classes knew their place and when all migrants were British. Lucky John Winston Howard moved further north across the harbour.
He certainly would not be comfortable living in the inner west of Sydney any more.
A bit too much change for his lifetime I'd say (try doing a search on Howard and Multiculturalism)
John Howard has always been proud to call himself a conservative, his entire perspective characterised by a free market economy, monetarist economic policy, privatisation of state-owned industries, low direct taxation but conversely higher indirect taxation, opposition to trade unions through state regulation, Nationalism, Centralization, as well as checks on the size of the Welfare State and local government.
Thatcherism, Reaganomics, Rogernomics, Ruthanasia and now Howards version "economic stability".
Managing Australia’s $800 billion economy is a huge responsibility
that takes knowledge, focus, discipline and experience. . -John Howard
Currently the globe is facing the biggest issue of modern times.
Global warming is poised to have massive economic costs, something which even Howard can understand.
And yet out of this $800 billion economy $60 million has been allocated to researching renewable energy sources, required to ensure our very survival, yet it warrants half the funding of the WorkChoice advertising campaign which left the majority of Australians more confused about the changes than they were before.
He has managed to convince the majority of Australians that he is peronsally responsible for the economic prosperity we have been experienced in recent times whilst simultaneously assuring us our defence spending must be increased.
He has implemented numerous policies he promised he would not.
the privatisation of numerous public institutions with no consideration to the possibility some companies/institutions provide more benefits for society when they are not run soley for profit...something it seems he fails to comprehend.
Our defence white paper has made the greatest ever additional provision for the future defence needs of Australia of any government in more than a quarter of a century. Over the next ten years we will invest an additional $32 billion in the defence of Australia and how proud I am to say to you that when we came into government in March of 1996 and we found not withstanding what Mr Beazley had told us during the election campaign that our budget was $10.5 billion in deficit that we’d accumulated as a nation $96 billion of federal government debt the one restriction I put on Peter Costello and John Fahey in getting the budget in shape was you will not cut any money out of defence. And not only didn’t we cut any money out of defence we in fact increased defence expenditure, and just as well because in that five and a half year period we’ve had the demands of East Timor, of Bougainville, and now the commitment to the war against terrorism which is as much our war and our fight and our struggle as it is for the people of the United States..
You see Johnny Howard walks taller in the company of men like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Rupert Murdoch.
He thrives on this false sense of self righteous importance and as the lopsided, nationally detrimental 'free trade' agreement with the United States...
And so the Howard government’s deluded sense of the special nature of its relationship with the Bush administration saw it enter into negotiations under a misguided assumption that the US would modify its publicly proclaimed approach to international trade negotiations— that is, aggressive advocacy of US business interests in overseas markets (heard of the PNAC? You should have)— in order to further the special friendship that our countries are believed to enjoy..
Australia’s negotiators, led by the trade minister, believed the attainment of such an agreement would be possible due to our special relationship with the US.
It is a fact that the Australian negotiating team sold the idea of an AUSFTA to Australian industry constituents, both at home and in the US, on the grounds that the deal agreed to would be comprehensive.
It is a fact that Australian businesspeople working in the US and familiar with the US political system believed such a deal was impossible, and that the US had no intention of granting substantive market access concessions to Australia in a range of areas in which we are highly competitive, including sugar, beef, dairy and a range of horticultural industries such as stone fruit.
It is a fact that US-based Australian business representatives expressed these concerns to the trade minister during a visit to the US in 2003 to muster support for the negotiations.
It is a fact that the minister insisted that a comprehensive agreement would be possible due to our special relationship with the US.
It is a fact that Australia’s US based businesspeople were right and the minister was wrong. Australian businesspeople in the US never believed for a moment that the Australian government would actually push ahead with a deal which clearly fell so short of its original goals and which in many ways puts Australia’s economic future at risk.
The belief that the US would approach its negotiations with Australia any differently from the way in which it negotiates agreements with other countries— that is, on the basis of aggressive advocacy—bears testimony to the naivety of Australia’s negotiators.
The fact that our government is seeking to paint meagre concessions and horrendous potential damages as overall wins for Australia is, at best, naive and, at worst, anti-Australian.
It is clear that the costs of this deal dramatically outweigh the benefits and cause irreversible damage to our economy, to our major national institutions and to our enviable status as a disease-free producer.
But Howard saw supposed financial gain and the chance to walk among the most powerful men on the planet...
And since he gained control of both the house of representatives and the senate he has been pretty free to do what he wants, which is an opinionless, mechanic society lacking culture and continually increasing productivity.
This is the man we have leading the country - a man who is so instinctively petty and so bitterly obsessed that he could craft an entire parliamentary career without mentioning the word `multiculturalism' and what that represents, because it is an idea he is opposed to. He is positive]y Orwellian in his pettiness.
This is a smallness of mind, a meanness with breathtaking scope and ignorance beyond comprehension.
And yet everyone is aware John Howard lies...is the apathy so rampant that the line "oh shock horror politicians lie, at least interest rates are low" still holds some merit?
Australians
Prefer
Alcohol
To
Historical
Yammering
He has shattered his credibility in all areas
He 'didn't recall' seeing a report that stated we were funding one of the most wanted men in the world.
He had no evidence of childeren being thrown overboard
He had no evidence of WMDs in Iraq and he charged in just as blind as Bush
The Lance Collins affair which reopened all the old unanswered questions about the political misuse of accurate East Timor and Bali intelligence; the Keelty affair; Australia’s craven acceptance of US terms in the trade negotiation and its $450 million bribe to our sugar farmers to keep quiet afterwards; the damning HREOC report on abuse of human rights in Australian detention centres; the government’s grudging drip-feed release of refugees from Nauru; the growing public disgust over government indifference to Hicks’ and Habib’s rights as Australians to decent prison treatment and a fair trial.
There is dawning public awareness that Australia as part of the Iraq invasion force shares some of the moral responsibility for what has gone wrong in Iraq... Quite frankly Australians are no longer as liked in the world, and we entirely have John Howard’s misguided national security policies to thank for this.
What is happening in Iraq was both predictable and predicted. It is not just about Abu Ghraib: it is about Fallujah, the holy cities Najaf and Karbala, the massacred wedding party in Western Iraq. All of it testifies to the coalition’s brutality, stupidity and contempt for Iraqi lives and human dignity. It is all there in the honest reporting of people like Robert Fisk and Paul McGeogh and Sally Sara, long before Abu Ghraib became public news.
The government’s current evasions over what it knew about Abu Ghraib and when it knew it are so absolutely reminiscent of how it tried to cover up the children overboard and SIEV X affairs. This government uses people like Major O’Kane and Major-General Molan, as it used people like Commander Norman Banks of HMAS Adelaide and the Australian police people smuggling disruption program liaison officers in Jakarta. It hides behind their professionalism and their service obligations to confidentiality..
It’s an incestuous networked culture at the top, involving planned career rotations around agencies and ministerial offices. Consider the career paths of people like Kim Jones, Phillip Flood, Dennis Richardson, Ric Smith, Bill Farmer, Michael Thawley, Michael L’Estrange, Miles Jordana, Peter Varghese. We see here the formation of a shared culture of assumptions and values and professional friendships that –under the vestiges of the old Westminster system, which senior public servants still cling to in their minds even if politicians have totally abandoned it – can also carry through changes of government. Most of the people I just mentioned held senior positions under the last Labor government. Many will keep senior positions under a Latham Labor government.
Another thing - people go out from DFAT or ONA to work in opposition leaders or shadow ministers’ parliamentary offices, then go back into their agencies. We see fluent networking in the national security field, a bureaucratic culture of easy familiarity and cameraderie. Gyngell and Wesley claim that this has operational efficiency advantages.
This may well be true, but it also risks entrenching policy error. Also, the corollary of it is a culture very prone to exclude and marginalise dissidents and whistleblowers like [ONA whistleblower]Andrew Wilkie – even, people who became dissidents after they had honourably retired, like [former DFAT Secretary] Dick Woolcott and [former chief of the Defence Force] Peter Gration. Having stepped outside the charmed circle of mainstream thinking, any person – even a former prime minister like Malcolm Fraser or Paul Keating - quickly loses voice and influence, no matter how much wisdom they still have to offer.
All these voices spoke out against the Iraq invasion before it happened. All were ignored.
With a few notable exceptions, the media mainstream commentariat listens mostly to the current foreign policy establishment consensus, and the risk is that it will absorb their views
More recently The Australian Government has scored poorly in a report card reviewing its contribution to reducing global poverty, receiving a thumbs up for just two out of 15 indicators.
The annual Make Poverty History review found the Government foundered in four areas: increasing total volume of aid, assisting least developed countries, improving environmental sustainability and monitoring progress against the Millennium Development Goals – the global blueprint to halve poverty by 2015.
For nine other areas the Government was given an average mark, including debt, employment for the young, access to medicines, and a poverty-focussed aid program.
The report found positive progress, with the two best-performing indicators being fair trade and aid support for small Islands...'Despite these steps the Government needs to do much more if it is to match contributions made by other developed nations towards poverty reduction,' said Mr Costello.
'It is shocking that we rank 19 out of 22 rich countries for the amount of aid we give as a proportion of national wealth. The Government needs to commit to the international aid target of 0.5% of national income by 2010 and 0.7% by 2015 to provide our share of aid.'
A tripling of basic health up from the current $291 million to $1000 million by 2010;
• An increase in our commitment to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria – currently it’s 93c per Australian, compared to $1.90 from the US and $3.31 from the UK;
• Greater funding for the Asia-Pacific, particularly on child health – about 550,000 children under age five die in our region each year. Five countries including PNG, East Timor and Cambodia all have very high rates of child mortality yet relatively low levels of Australian per capita aid support.
We are not fairing well on the world scale
Locally Howard is incapable of admitting he was wrong, or that he lied, or that he is sorry.
So on his behalf
-sorry to those still languishing in detention for many years for no crime other than that of wishing to escape persecution from regimes such as that of Saddam Hussein.
- sorry to the Bakhtiari family for the mean spiritedness of Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone, who with approval from John Howard, deported this hapless family after giving them hell for 5 years.
-sorry to the families of the 353 asylum seekers who drowned tragically while trying to reach Australia on board the SIEV X in October 2001 and whose memory the Howard Government has done its best to ignore.
-sorry to the countless indigenous Australians that have been ignored and oppressed since our arrival
-sorry to East Timor
-sorry to those countless thousands of Iraqis who have suffered grievously from the invasion of the “Coalition of the Willing” in which Australia took part thanks to the blind obedience of John Howard to the whims of George W Bush.
-sorry to those millions of Americans who looked to Australia for change as an inspiration for their own need for change
-sorry to those millions of people throughout the world who hoped to see a more caring, just and independent Australia emerge from the election of 9 October 2004 .
So what do we do?
We fight back, we remain publicly active, we stand for parliament, we write books, we open websites, and over time we influence the climate of opinion. That is how democracy works. But it is not how Australia’s foreign and security policy establishment has worked over the past 10 years and probably before that....this is bad.
The only sin in modern politics is to be found out..Such ethic creates enormous opportunities for prime ministerial misconduct if that prime minister and his close advisers are not constrained by decent personal ethics.
Who would have believed that the Australian Defence Force command allowed its soldiers to be sent into a covert undeclared war in Iraq 30 hours before the time John Howard told the Australian parliament the war was now starting ? And that the Defence Department and ADF are still trying to cover up that sequence of events even now ?
Who would have believed that the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2001 sheltered and fostered Australian-sponsored illegal people smuggling disruption activities, that would lead to the preventable deaths of hundreds of people mostly women and children? And that Defence would conceal from the Australian Senate in July 2002 its knowledge of where SIEV X sank ?
And who would now believe that Major O’Kane who helped Colonel Janis Karpinski write the reply to the ICRC, had not picked up real knowledge of the cruelties being inflicted on Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, knowledge which he would have reported in one way or another to colleagues in Canberra?
The presumption of regularity....in a world where we have endless evidence of power corrupting will still naively presume things are right...
It is the presumption of regularity that makes it harder for us to admit such possibilities. This is an impediment to clear thinking and honesty. We need to shed it if we are to get better governance after John Howard leaves the political stage.
The Howard government is highly skilled at re-packaging every policy failure as an alleged operational agency failure, thus sending the media hounds off baying after false scents, and even playing off one official against another. When Keelty made entirely reasonable comments about the policy implications for Australian security of the Madrid bombing, which implied criticism of government policy, Keelty himself quickly became the issue as Cosgrove and Richardson were wheeled in as commentators. The real issue was lost in the fog.
Everything my government does is for the good of real Australians. Hundreds of refugees subjected to years behind razor wire is for your good, because they will not attack you there or take your jobs. But I not only care for you, I also care for the 600,000 Iraqis who have died in the war that will never end, nor should it. Had they lived they would certainly have enjoyed democracy. As for the so-called corruption of my cherished ministers year after year, let me assure you that they have done nothing wrong, they are fine people who have your interests at heart. And remember, when you hear the sound of my voice, so soft, so soothing, you will slowly drift into sleep, with the warm knowledge that everything I have done is for the good of real Australians
He always goes on about real Australians, who as far as i can tell is anyone who doesn't question his actions..
So steeped in conservative values and fear of what is new is John Winston Howard that he has buried the concept of a social conscience in Australian society...It's something afflicting the elite, latte-cum-Chardonnay (insert stereotypical generalisation here) set.
In ten years he has dogwhistled Australians into a gutless disregard for the suffering of others, and he has done it in the most dishonourable way, by appealing subliminally to their basest, most selfish instincts.
That it also happens in other countries reflects the cold-blooded ideology of his ruling mates: "Me and mine and to hell with everyone else."
The DVD souless fucks of Werribee are a tip of the iceberg. The same is happening in other schools. They are the disastrous result of what amounts to the neo-Nazification of Australia. Only under John Howard it is called Family Values.
Although individuals are ultimately responsible for their behaviour, the type of behaviour that exists in a society is to a significant degree linked to the dominant values that exist in that community and a decade of economic focus has had an effect.
He wants to take us nuclear
He refuses to sign Kyoto on the grounds it wont work unless everyone signs it....including us Johnny?
Between 1998 and 2006 he failed to spend $667 million allocated to tackle global warming.
This long delay in acknowledging global warming largely stemmed from his desire to protect the powerful coalition of coal mining, coal-fired power generation, cement, smelting and other heavy industries
The uranium mining corporations BHP-Billiton and Rio-Tinto, want coal to be replaced by nuclear power and propped up by massive government subsidies, as in the US. Howard is now advocating public acceptance of nuclear power production.
Renewable energy definitely comes last. The Howard Government is granting only $75 million for construction of the $400 million Victorian solar energy power plant, which will generate 154 megawatts, sufficient for 45,000 homes.
As the Australian Conservation Foundation has pointed out, the government already spends $790 million per annum in aviation fuel concessions, and $1 billion on company car fringe benefit tax concessions. In comparison, this year’s entire climate change initiative spending amounts to just $280 million.
Moreover, this and later projects will involve “public/private” deals which would be part-funded by private capital. These arrangements will privatise energy production and impose crippling financial costs on the public.
Howard has hastened to denigrate solar and wind power, which he describes as unable to achieve “base load” generation, i.e. a stable basic energy output. He studiously ignores new methods of achieving this, utilising chemicals such as ammonia and methane, which are already being used in experimental solar projects.
One scientist recently predicted that by 2020 Australia’s entire electrical energy needs could be met by one central solar power station, occupying an area of only 30 by 30 kilometres. The sale of surplus energy from solar plants could fund reforestation of vast areas of deserts and ruined farmland, greatly helping to minimise climate change. But Howard is not interested
The government still refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, even though it would permit Australia an eight percent rise in CO2 emissions, instead of the overall reduction required for other nations. Howard doesn’t want to offend the coal mining industry or embarrass the US, the only other developed Western country which refuses to sign.
Instead, he is backing the Asia-Pacific Clean Development group, which includes Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the US. This group agrees that emission reductions are necessary, but does not impose CO2 reduction obligations on its members. Its contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is therefore likely to be absolutely minimal. And that is also true of the Howard Government’s so-called greenhouse gas reduction campaign.
The Guardian
He is an antique, a remnant of the past that should be put on display, but not in government and certainly not in a leadership position, for anachronisms belong in museums and historical texts, not in parliament.
Australians deserve a courageous leader; they do not deserve the kind of leader that used to dob on them in the schoolyard. They do not deserve John Winston Howard and in time they will put him out to pasture.
Roll on that day, come the federal election.
We need to re-establish the Australian culture...every other social issue is a symptom of the lack of cohesion and harmony within Australian society.
We've had a multi cultural policy in place for years with no work being put into actually developing a national culture at all, let alone implementing various influences into it...
Are we so utterly dissillusioned as a country that we have little choice but to resort to the beer and chardonnay induced apathy that has enveloped our country in recent times?
Perhaps Henry Lawson was right
"Curse the Government, and say the country's done. It doesn't matter what Government it is, for he's always against it. I never knew a real Australian that wasn't."
1 comment:
Wow, what an awesome article. Thank you!
Peace,
Wade
http://blog.wi.id.au
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