.......It's all Howards fault

Australian PM Mr John Howard

IMRE SALUSINSZKY


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12315913%255E37556,00.html



Disaster or disappearances, they're all Howard's fault

February 21, 2005
JUST when I convince myself the Howard-haters have shown us everything they have to show, they come up with more.

The first time I decided this madness had reached its watershed was in October, 2002, when Bob Brown, Bob Ellis and various other dimwits called Bob sheeted blame for the Bali bombing home to John Howard.

But no. It turns out the needle on the "nut-o-meter" had several notches left to climb.

The Boxing Day tsunami gave the Howard-haters a whole new excuse to roll their idee fixe out of the garage, give it a quick polish and take it for a run around the letters pages.

True, none of them claimed Howard had actually snorkelled out into the middle of the Indian Ocean and set off the earthquake using a nuclear device strapped to his belt. But first up came the claims the Government's initial offer of $35million in aid was too stingy - or, as a correspondent to The Australian on December 30 put it, "peanuts when compared to the huge amount of money Australia is spending in its Iraq occupation".

Howard, as is his wont, then wrongfooted the haters by upping the aid ante to $1billion.

They barely skipped a beat.

One wrote to The Australian suggesting Howard was merely trying to "buy Australia a place in Asia". He admonished the PM: "Money can't buy you love". With some people, apparently not.

But my favourite Howard-hating letter over the tsunami appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on January 10:

"And so the tsunami comes along and Prime Minister Howard hands over $1billion, tells us to be generous and compassionate in our private giving and all is forgiven.

"We forgive him the lack of compassion and generosity he showed to our indigenous population, to the asylum-seekers, to the Bakhtiaris, to the Iraqi civilians bombed, to the homeless, the sick, the uneducated in our own country.

"We can forgive it all. Or have we forgotten by having our attention diverted to a newer, bigger more exciting event? How sad are we."

No comment.

I've been studying the Howard-hating phenomenon for years but hardly understand it better than when I began. All I know is that the way Howard sends a tiny section of the community crazy as snakes is his finest achievement and one that nobody will ever be able to take away from him.

What sort of person reacts to a tragedy on the scale of 9/11, or the tsunami, or Bali by immediately trying to score a political debating point against the Prime Minister? That I cannot tell you, but what I do know is that last week that sort of person was once again swinging through the high-up branches, pelting ground-dwellers with bark and husks and uttering loud shrieking cries - this time over the plight of poor Cornelia Rau.

This also turned out to be Howard's fault. Geddit? No schizophrenic person is misdiagnosed, mishandled or mistreated anywhere in Australia without the explicit say-so of the MP for Bennelong. Rau's problems even had the inmates at the Howard-hater website funded by the Fairfax newspaper group (webdiary.smh.com.au/index.html) dusting off their old Howard = Hitler analogies. But forget their view of Howard's policies: these people are off with the fairies even in their view of Howard's physique. When you hear the phrase "Little Johnny" you imagine a perfect tiny replica of a normal male, somewhat in the style of Mike Carlton. So I was astonished when I finally met the PM and discovered I was pretty much eyeballing him - and I'm just over 5' 10" (1.78m) in the old language.

These observations are not made by a Howard apologist. For years I've been a swinging voter, as I believe all journalists should be on principle, but suspect very few are. I've always supported either Labor or the Liberals and voted differently in 1998 to 1996, and differently again in 2004 to 2001. So I am far from suggesting the Prime Minister is an untouchable Australian of the order of Shane Crawford or Leigh Matthews.

But when my car breaks down, my footy team loses or my GP reports some "slightly worrying results" from the tests on that lump in my armpit, I don't rush to blame the bloke of average height in The Lodge.