Saturday, December 1, 2007

The Howard Legacy like leprosy






The unauthorized biography of John Howard

Excreted from Sir Robert Menzies’s arsehole in 1939, John Winston Howard became one of the most pungent and stubbornly persistent stinks to ever encompass Australia.

Johnny lived with Mummy until he married at the age of 32 in 1971. His idols include his namesake Winston Churchill, former Aus PM Robert Menzies and former British PM Baroness Thatcher.

While normal youth were fantasizing about sex, young Johnny found nothing more arousing than neo liberalism and neoclassical economics. His political ideology to this day is derived from these bizarre fetishes.

Howard became a federal parliamentary member in 1974 after failed attempts dating back to 1968. By 1977 he had slithered his way into the chair of the nations treasury. He almost resigned as treasurer in 1982 after being frustrated for years, the Prime Minister at the time was unwilling to take part in his sick neo fantasies. Johnny was a tortured soul as Margaret Thatcher promiscuously waved around a regime of privatization and deregulation right before his eyes. He masturbated furiously as she mutilated trade unions and introduced market mechanisms into health and education, but alas Malcolm Fraser continuously hosed him down with a very cold shower way before he was ever near climax.

John became leader of the liberal party in 1985 after sticking a few knives in the back of his predecessor, Andrew Peacock. Howard became unpopular, even by his own standards, in 1988 when he proclaimed that Australia was letting in too many Asian immigrants. From 1989 to 1995, the liberal party tried in vein to find a leader less creepy than John Howard. Mr Peacock had another crack, then Dr John Hewson and finally in desperation even Alexander Downer was thrown up, but resigned in 1995 when he realized that he would no longer be permitted to wear fish net stockings out in public.

Under the leadership of Hewson, the liberal party lost an un losable election in 1993. Something called a GST (goods and services tax) which was the centre piece of the liberal party policy platform, scared the living crap out of the Australian voting public. Until this point, Howard had been a forceful advocate of GST but now it became some what of a bastard love child to him. He was totally absorbed in the miracle of its creation but couldn't share that with anyone for fear of being stoned (as in struck by flying rocks).

Howard said in 1995, "There's no way that a GST will ever be part of our policy. Never ever. It's dead. It was killed by the voters in the last election. Any suggestion that I left the door open is absolute nonsense. I didn't. I never will. The last election killed the GST. It's not part of our policy and it won't be part of our policy at any time in the future."


Howard Government

In 1996, an over representation from the sadomasochistic community at the voting booths, saw the evil empire of Howard installed to governance. In the same year when his own party disendorsed candidate hopeful Pauline Hanson for being a racist, xenophobic cow, John said of the matter he thought it was good that the years of political correctness were finally over.

In 1997 Howard introduces work for the dole, a program that enforces unemployed people to participate as slave labour. The program is helpful in obscuring unemployment figures in the governments favour and is found to actually be detrimental to participant’s prospects for real employment. Extensive funding is provided to employment service providers and work for dole hosts, to administer the program. Officially much of the funding is designated for training and equipping participants for the work they are forced to do. In reality, providers and hosts siphon these millions for there own personal gain, making unemployed people an industry to profiteer from obscenely like any other business. In addition to the theft of funding dollars, service providers are paid exorbitant commissions by the government, for herding the unemployed and stereotyping them as bludgers. Luckily there is plenty of money for inflicting this policy as $1800 million dollars was cut from labour market programs over a 4 year period from 1996.

1998 - Howard government supports the Patrick company in a mass sacking of all its unionized waterfront workers. The following day after going bankrupt, Patrick re emerges under a different name with all new staff working for lower wages and inferior conditions, all made possible by the governments recently implemented Workplace Relations Act of 1996.

In addition to robbing the tertiary education sector of millions in funding and cutting $527 million from Austudy in his first term of government, Howard promised there was no intention of introducing a loans scheme with a real or indeed any other rate of interest for students, and that "I can guarantee we're not going to have $100,000.00 university degree courses." Hmmm...

2000 - Howard implements GST. Hmmm... refer 1995 comments. Apparently his words GST - never ever, had completely slipped his mind by this stage. Conspicuously, the fact that Australian's didn't want GST hadn't slipped his mind and thus he spent $20 million dollars on TV advertising telling us why we really did want it. This was after he implemented it mind you, sadistic little prick.

Again after promises to the contrary, Howard stole significant funding dollars from Medicare (public health system) only to redistribute it into the private health insurance industry, in the form of a 30% rebate on premiums, payable to all who signed up for private health cover. He promised private insurance premiums wouldn't rise when the policy was met with scepticism. The public remained unmoved, the private health business didn't get their sign ups, their premiums have inflated to around 30% more than they were at time of policy launch, and of course the public health system has been about 30% reduced in capacity as a result.

In 2001 he campaigned for an election on a platform of providing serious border protection which he assured us we were in desperate need of. He told us as fact, a rumour which it was later found that he knew to be false, that terrorists were masquerading as refugees and throwing children overboard into the sea when approached by our Navy, so that they might jump the queue and gain entrance into Australia. Details at http://truthoverboard.com/

Months earlier, a cargo ship, the MV Tampa had rescued 438 refugees from a sinking boat 4 hours away from the Australian migration zone of Christmas Island. The Australian government refused to rescue, asking Indonesia to do so. They refused and the Australian Rescue Coordination Centre sent an SOS call for any passing ships to attend for rescue. The Tampa did, but then was refused entry to both Australian and Indonesian territory. Australian SAS troops engaged the Tampa and forcibly turned it away when its captain tried to ignore authorities and dock at Christmas Island anyway due to the declining health of the rescued survivors. Thankfully New Zealand opened its doors because John Howard was quite happy to let 400 odd people die in pools of their own vomit and diarrhoea, locked inside shipping containers.

Following the Tampa incident, Howard’s government began legislating away all responsibility for asylum seekers to the extent that thousands of islands had been excluded from Australia’s migration zone by 2003. Mandatory detention became law for any refugee sailing towards Australia. The government bribed various Pacific island nations to do the detaining. In the financial year 2003/2004, detaining little more than 1000 people on a couple of islands, cost Australian taxpayers $15.5 million.


From the new year of 2002, we all pretty much knew G.W without a doubt had set a date for invading Iraq. Howard and his government, consistently refused to answer the question of whether Australian troops would aid and abet in this criminal action, even pretty much to the day they left in mid 2003. Of course during this period, the government put out for our consumption, great wads of propaganda in support of war, even though they didn't really know if it would really happen and if it really did, didn't really know if our troops really would be committed. Manufactured documents presented as actual intelligence on WMD's in Iraq, captured media coverage daily, all courtesy of the government.

Since 1996 the government incrementally eroded away Australian workers pay rates and employment conditions. In 2006, the most indignant offensives ever dispatched upon workers rights by the Howard government, were enacted into parliament. The new IR (industrial relations) laws allowed employers to: sack workers unfairly or for no reason, force workers in signing individual contracts that reduced their pay and working conditions. This had upper management in the business sector rubbing its hands with glee as even arbitration services for mistreated workers were being dismantled by the government.

2006 also saw the introduction of anti-student organization legislation, euphemistically referred to as voluntary student unionism. VSU deprives students of many important services once funded by union fees. Its real agenda, to remove the ability of student organizations to rally and resist government attacks on education, is an achievement Howard will never stop smirking about.

As is the case with Australia's health care system, Howard pillaged millions from the public school system and then just like Robin Hood (only slightly confused), he gave the spoils to the wealthy, resource rich private school sector. Another ingenious education concept employed by Howard was to allocate $90 million dollars over a 3 year period to fund the appointment of chaplains in government as well as private schools. The National School Chaplaincy Program pays $20,000 per year, to any school—secular or religious, to support the employment of a chaplain.

In 2006 it was revealed that Howard apparently hadn't noticed AWB (Australian Wheat Board) bribing Saddam Hussein with millions of dollars despite his own DFAT officials being present when bribe agreements were brokered. Most amicable of our government to give Saddam a fighting chance by helping with cash flow to arm himself against us invading. If this didn't stink enough, Howard was then more than helpful in setting the terms of reference for the investigating commission, which strangely enough, had no provisions for scrutinizing the government’s involvement. True to their putridness, it is reported that members of government celebrated with a party as it was decided by the commission, that wasn't permitted to investigate them, that they had done nothing wrong.

A new "welfare to work" system implemented the 1st July 2006, saw 5000 Australians lose their benefits, for a period of 8 weeks each, in the 6 month period that followed, for breaches of their newly imposed obligations. This represented a 250% increase in the number of jobless stripped of all income for a two-month period over the previous years figures. Denying recipients any assistance for eight weeks is designed to give them no choice but to accept cheap-labour work under any conditions. The new obligations also apply to single parents and the disabled for the first time. In a revealing comment, Employment Minister Kevin Andrews said the higher level of two-month cut-offs showed that the new system was working efficiently. He predicted that within the next six months, the program would meet its target of fully “breaching” 14,000 people. That is, the scheme was specifically designed to reduce thousands of jobless people to a state of abject poverty.

About 4,000 of the estimated 18,000 people to suffer the eight-week penalties each year are being placed on “case management” programs. The government pays their essential bills, supposedly to prevent them and their children from starving, being evicted from their homes, or having their electricity, phone or water services cut off. The government had been planning to contract these programs out to charities, which would organize the payment of food and household bills, and provide financial counseling. However church-based charitable organizations approached, described the measures as so draconian that they refused to participate and denounced the government for demanding that they carry out its “dirty work”.

The Howard Government tried removing the Big Stink Guide for writing this post in Feb 2007. The host reported being under duress from legal reps acting on behalf of the Australian Government who wanted the site gone, offering to pay US $5000.00 if it was removed by host client.

The attempted bribery was declined but several weeks later the site received 10,000 hits from one IP address in short succession. This got the server a bit confused, or to put it another way, totally fried. The host got a bit upset and consequently we had to find another.

We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the Australian public for voting this fucker (Mr Howard) out of office - Nov. 2007, after 11 long years, Hooray!

see also - the John Howard Memorial photograph gallery