John Winston Howard was Australian Prime Minister for a quarter of my life–eleven and a half minutes would have been too long, let alone eleven and a half years.
A misty-eyed enthusiast for the ‘golden age’ of the Menzies Government, he tried to return the country to the 1950s, when Australia was for whites only, when Indigenous Australians were neither allowed to vote nor counted in census figures, when the government attempted–twice–to ban the Communist Party, and the Prime Minister would ostentatiously sniff Betty Windsor’s knickers:
I did but see her passing by, And yet I love her till I die.*
Howard, like Menzies, fawned obsequiously over the British hereditary ruling classes, but introduced a new dimension, indulging in the most cringe-worthy worship of Australian ‘royalty’–notoriously leading the audience of the Midday Show–Trisha presented by a bloke in a wig–in singing Happy Birthday to an absent Don Bradman.
Howard’s racism can be documented over twenty years. During his first stint as Liberal leader (1985-1989) he complained that there were too many Asian migrants coming to Australia, and opposed proposals to acknowledge the crimes committed against Indigenous Australians and redress some of the wrongs of Australia’s murderous colonial past. Later as Liberal leader for a second time, and then Prime Minister, he remained true to type. Instead of admonishing disendorsed Liberal candidate and One Nation MP Pauline Hanson for her racist remarks about Asians, Aboriginals and others–I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians…They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate–he welcomed her words and the fact that people can now talk about certain things without living in fear.
His government used asylum seekers from the very countries for whose liberty and freedom Australian soldiers have purportedly been fighting, as fodder for election propaganda, herding them into concentration camps and whipping up anti-refugee hysteria with accusations that they were ‘fifth columnists’ and ’sleeper agents’, and the spectacularly lurid fabrication that boat people had thrown their children into the sea. At the time Commander Norman Banks of HMS Adelaide, the ship at the centre of the controversy told the ABC:
No, I have not told people that children were thrown overboard.
My statements are on the public record and they indicate that by 10 October it was clear that no children had been thrown overboard.
The Government and the right wing press ignored him.
During his final term in government, Howard’s government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act and police and military were sent into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, ostensibly to prevent ‘child abuse’, but in fact acting to close down ‘unsustainable’ communities and takeover community lands and resources, and cut welfare payments to people in areas where there is no work. Liberal party activists were caught during the last days of his Prime Ministership, distributing bogus leaflets intended to stir up race-hatred in the electorate of Lindsay in Western Sydney.
In the end it wasn’t his racism, or his introduction of regressive taxes which unfairly penalised low income earners, which ended his political career, it was his workplace ‘reforms’. In 1998 masked thugs with attack dogs and batons were sent, with the connivance of the Howard Government, to enforce the sacking and lock-out of unionised labour and its replacement with non-unionised scab labour on the Australian waterfront. Howard was offended by the very idea that two or more employees might organise cooperatively in the workplace in order to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment with their bosses. Howard’s 11 years in office were devoted to the gradual destruction of the wage and arbitration system, with the final goal–the complete elimination of trade unions and collective bargaining power, with employees being placed on downgraded individual workplace contracts, as enacted in the 2005 ‘Workchoices’ Act. This finally, proved too much.
Now he is gone.
Well I hope I don’t die too soon
I pray the Lord my soul to save
Oh I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down
—
* The poem continues: Had I her fast betwixt mine arms, Judge you that think such sports were harms, Were’t any harm? No, no, fie, fie! For I will love her till I die. Ooh er Prime Minister!
