Dispatch From Down Under: John Howard is Toast!

Posted by Alison Jobling, AlterNet at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2007.

Today, it feels great to be Australian. I've woken up in an Australia that has waved bye-byes to John Howard and his Liberal* government, after nearly 12 years of the whining little weasel and his passel of purse-lipped nationalistic sycophants.

Labor's Kevin Rudd, the PM-elect, ran on restoring working Australians' beaten-down bargaining power, taking on climate change and getting Aussie troops out of Iraq. With four-fifths of the vote counted, there was a popular swing from Liberal to Labor of almost eleven points compared to the previous election.

It's not perfect, of course. For years, the Labor party has been moving towards the center, in a Democratic-style triangulation that's progressively abandoned their traditional base while failing to appeal to staunch Liberal voters. So I don't expect a worker's paradise, full of health care and education for all, with lashings of renewable energy and a humanitarian foreign policy.

But it's a start. Labor's gain of 24 seats from the Coalition** gives it a comfortable majority of 86 to 62 in the House. And, to add the icing on the gloating cake, there's a chance that Howard might lose his own seat. And not only lose, but lose in a manner that should cause him conniption fits: his opponent is female, well-educated, and a very well-respected journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Commission which Howard thinks is riddled with 'left-wing media bias'.

There are also a few interesting points about this election that are not immediately obvious.

The first is that, with Julia Gillard as Kevin Rudd's Deputy Prime Minister, we now have the real possibility of a female PM in the near future. Hurrah hurrah: at last we might catch up with the likes of Chile and Pakistan!

The second is that many of the incoming Labor team come from union backgrounds. The Liberals tried to demonise Labor on that basis, but the notion of a 'fair go' is central to Australian culture: indeed, one of the main reasons for the swing against Howard's Coalition government was the appallingly regressive "Work Choices" legislation.

Another interesting aspect is the movement among the minor parties. Voters can list candidates in order of preference, so a vote for a minor party candidate isn't thrown away (cough * Ralph Nader * cough). Consequently, we have more minor parties, who have the ability to impact national politics, usually from the Senate. One minor party, the Australian Democrats (very much like the US Dems), is now effectively dead, while another, Family First (very conservative and religious) now has one Senate seat.

The leading minor party is now the Greens, with about 8% of the vote. They've picked up 3 Senate seats, giving them a total of 5, and probably would have picked up more of the vote if getting rid of Howard hadn't been such a priority. And the leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown, is not only a prominent environmental and social activist: he's also openly gay. So we have social justice, environmental responsibility, and gender choices, all in one outspoken package.

Anyway, since the Howard era is coming to an end, I thought a few edited highlights of past glories might be a fitting tribute to the man that George Bush called his sheriff in the region.

There was Howard's failure to joins hundreds of thousands of Australians in offering apology for the ""Stolen Generation" of aboriginal children -- at least 100,000 -- taken from their parents and raised as wards of the state through the 1960s. (Music/politics trivia for those who care - Howard's shame was exacerbated by the "sorry" suits of the band Midnight Oil who performed at the closing ceremony: the lead singer of the Oils, Peter Garrett, is likely to become Australia's next Minister for the Environment).

Howard also disparaged what he called the black armband view of history (acknowledging that whites in Australia did some nasty things).

The anti-refugee stridency of the Tampa Incident, the ominously-named Pacific Solution, and the shameless manipulation of the children overboard affair showed the bigoted and selfish nature of Howard's politics, as well as his penchant for lying to make political capital.

His flexibility with the truth came out again in the oil for food scandal of which he 'knew nothing,' although a subsequent enquiry suggests he and a couple of his Ministers, may have been telling porkies.

And, of course, Howard's friendship (craven submission-ship?) with Bush was far more important than the opinions of hundreds of thousands of Australians. But them's the breaks when you're a sheriff.

Not sorry to see you go, John. Not sorry at all.

*In Australia, 'Liberal' is our conservative party, while 'Labor' is our main left-wing party
**The Coalition government comprises Howard's Liberal Party plus the Nationals, who largely represent country areas.

Tagged as: bush, labor, readers write, howard, australia

Alison Jobling is a guest blogger, whom readers may know as regular AlterNet reader and commenter "Heroesall".