Last night was the final episode of the Howard Years. The ABC launched a full frontal attack on Howard in an attempt to undermine his legacy and the possibility of a future Liberal government. Nearly half the episode was taken up by the ABC’s and the left’s favourite bastard son, the leadership issue. The most concockted issue in Australian politics over the last ten years has to of been the prospect of Costello becoming PM. Viewers were treated to 26 minutes of leadership fall-out-talk mixed in with workplace relations discussion only to be told at the end of the segment, by Costello’s media advisor, that 90 per cent of the party room supported Howard. If those comments had been mentioned at the beginning of the segment there would have been no story. Costello never had the support of the party room and no one suggested in the programme that Costello would have won the 2007 election. All the polls indicated that he would have done worse than Howard, who ended up losing by only several thousand votes.
Work choices was poorly implemented and was the main reason Howard lost the election. Other reasons, such as the absence of Costello as PM, issues pushed by the free Hicks save Osama brigade, climate change or other pinko pet issues being pushed by the media, especially ABC radio, were marginal issues. Those issues had been around for a long time, Work Choices was a new issue and therefore was the defining issue of the election. Of course this did not stop the ABC showing plenty of footage of the radical left with their free David Hicks banners marching around city streets and generally causing chaos.
The programme then went on to climate change, implying that the recent drought was and is caused by carbon emissions; As if some how footage of the dry outback is proof. There remains no evidence though that the drought was and is a symptom of human induced climate change.
Al Gore’s documentary was then raised and we were treated to the following juicy snippet. John Howard said, “I don’t take policy advice from films.” The reporter responded, ”But it’s a documentary based on fact.” Oh really? Interesting that the ABC continues to push this line when Al Gore’s film has been roundly discredited as inaccurate, misleading and alarmist. I feel I might be labouring a point here, but let’s quickly revisit the issue with some basic facts of our own.
Towards the end of 2007 the British High Court ruled that the documentary contained 9 scientific errors, with 2 more specific errors. Now proponents argue that the film’s central thesis was upheld by the court, but subsequent investigation showed that the film is riddled with more than just 11 errors, but 35 errors in all. Proponents ignore the fact that the court only considered some of the film’s errors. How many errors does the film have to have before its central thesis is discredited and the ABC stops referring to it as a scientific authority?
The programme and many of the Liberals interviewed had a hard time distinguishing between media hype and populism for ‘doing something’ about climate change and the actual effects that an emissions trading scheme would have on the economy, and if the claims of global warming were true to begin with. Howard made the following prophetic comment about the issue:
“My suspicion is that as time goes by, there will be increasing doubts raised in the community about whether everything said in alarmist terms about climate change is correct.” One has not had to wait very long for suspicion to be aroused. (Even Rudd’s cabinet is starting to cool on the issue of a trading scheme.) A survey released last month by HSBC indicates the reluctance of Australians to put their money where their mouth is. When the bills start rolling in, people will begin to question the underlying assumptions behind climate change theories.
The programme then moved onto the champion of the left, David Hicks. You know, that poor victim of American aggression that just happened to find himself in Afghanistan on a Club Med holiday with the Taliban. What bad luck and what a cruel and nasty Howard for not getting him out of Club Gitmo sooner. And of course when Hick’s trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that recently attacked Mumbai and killed and injured 481 people, he was probably just on a back packer holiday gone wrong.
Then we moved onto to the now multi-millionaire Cornelia Rau and the supposed scores of other wrongly detained immigrants in detention centres – a claim stated but never backed up by the ABC in the programme. Well it turns out millionaire Rau has been again detained, this time in a German hospital for two months. The programme also took a swipe at Howard and long-term illegal-immigrant detainees, even though the policy of detention centres was started under the ALP. And to back up these attacks? Two Liberal MPs at the margins of power were interviewed.
If Iraq, immigration, Hicks or any other pinko pet issue were electorally important, they would have been at the 2004 election, not 2007. The left has been seeking affirmation of their agenda, an agenda that had nothing to do with the ALP 2007 victory. Work Choices and the length of the government’s term in office were the real issues, not hard left pet issues.
The programme then gave the most cynical interpretation of a Howard policy yet, by couching the Northern Territory intervention package as Howard’s way of getting one over Rudd in the polls. To reinforce the point they added the following snippet from an ABC reporter: “The Howard government’s dramatic intervention in the Northern Territory has only fanned the flames.” That’s all it did? Child rape, drug and alcohol abuse, other forms of sexual abuse, general violence, welfare dependency, etc…. What about those issues? Apparently, according to the ABC, we are all meant to believe that the intervention was never about those issues but about resurrecting Howard’s political fortunes in the run up to an election. As if to respond to Mal Brough’s final comments, in the transition to a new segment, the programme switched to a group of people pulling down their pants and bending over in front of the camera. The editing of the programme really hit the depths of desperation and absurdity at this point.
To end the programme, we get another re-hash of the leadership issue during APEC, most of which had already been covered in the previous episodes. We were then treated to this editorial comment, almost indicative of the entire ABC and their design to get Rudd elected: “Australia had moved on and John Howard had been left behind.” By only several thousand votes. A little fact the ABC never mentioned in the series. While Howard lost his own seat, the election was hardly a rejection of Howard’s legacy. As evidence of this, the WSJ’s assessment of Rudd in comparision to Obama is telling:
In a major policy address in New York earlier this year, Mr. Rudd explained his outlook this way. “The new Australian Labor government,” he said, “is . . . unashamedly pro-market, pro-business and pro-globalization. That is our policy orientation because we believe it is in the best interests of the working families who trusted us with the responsibility of government.”
The day Americans hear a Democratic president deliver these words, we’ll know we have change we can believe in. And if Mr. Rudd can help nudge Mr. Obama along this path, he’d be doing all of us a huge favor.
And Rudd’s comments remind you of who?
