--- In powderworks@yahoogroups.com.au, Michael Blackwood
<blackwood_michael@...> wrote:
I know most here will disagree vehemently with this essay,
i do, but that's ok. disagreement is allowed in a democracy. what
shits me is guys like that who are out to promote an agenda in the
guise of a logical argument.
ACCORDING to my Oz-watching pals in Britain and the US, John Howard
is not a failure but a victim of his own success. He made Australia
safe for the Labor Party: or, at any rate, safe enough that a
sufficient number of bored electors were willing to take a flier on a
house-trained Labor on the short leash of a quasi-Blairite leader.
where exactly did the Liberals train? at the academy for successful
politicians? and if the electors were bored, change was the last thing
they would have voted for. change is risk. people dont like change.
this is why Howard was elected last time. it is true that howards is a
victim of his own success. he has just been drinking his own piss for
too long and thought he was invincible and that he can now bully
everyone to submission.
That, at any rate, is the spin.
yeah. your spin
True, I object in principle to Australia's gun laws,
not trying to insinuate that these are not important but what is your
opinion about our foreign aid policy? climate change? trade? labour market
and I regard much of the Aussie economy as embarrassingly overregulated
are you kidding me?
What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard's
ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you'll forgive
the expression) Western civilisation.
now that's good. really good. howard and strategy in the same
sentence. islam has been a major issue in europe for years, if not
decades. centuries in the middle east - always ready to explode and
rain chaos on the world. howard did not seem to think it was an issue
until after 9/11. the only strategy howard had was the preservation of
the "natural order" in society - rich people at the top, the others
dont matter.
but a dependence on immigration is always a structural weakness,
this is exactly what the native americans thought about the english
and the french. where was this dude 200 years ago when we needed him.
oh, pardonnez moi. this was not immigration. it was discovering the
new world
and should be addressed as such.
they tried. the whites had bigger guns.
At a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace,
the majority of developed nations have chosen, in effect, to give up
on the future. Howard's ministry was one of the first governments to
get this and, in contrast to the dismal Euro-fatalism above, to try to
do something to reverse it.
like what? lets go and wage war on these less prosperous nations so
that we can get their natural resources, create tons of refugees and
then be surprised they are all at our doorstep and those that we let
in hate us? they have chosen to give up on the future by ignoring
climate change, by continuing to support homicidal maniacs as head of
state so that our corporations can become richer
Costello's exhortation to Aussie couples - have one for mum, one for
dad, and one for Australia - gets the stakes exactly right.
sure does. what we really need is more people when our water supplies
are dwindling, our environment is crumbling. this is just another
brute force approach - a solution that seem to be very popular with
howard/bush supporters. they have guns? we'll show them ours are
bigger. and btw - who are these aussie couples? these cant possibly
include muslim ones or we will be shooting ourself in the foot
The mid-20th century entitlement state was built on a careless model
that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it.
not at all. it just requires the rich to pay more taxes. but we cant
have than now, can we?
When I made this point in a speech in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull
passed me a note in which he'd scribbled down various population
models based on certain fertility-rate calculations. I confess I've
always had a certain antipathy to Turnbull because his republicanism
seemed small-minded and unworthy,
unworthy of what?
but in the years in which I've spoken on this subject to political
figures on three continents, that's the only occasion in which a key
government figure already knew the numbers and understood their
implications.
errrr ... let me see, he could actually predict that if our fertility
rate grew by X% but that of the muslims by Y% then in Z years there
would be more muslims than whities? i can already see Turnbull on the
podium in Stockholm. this is some kind of math, people.
And that brings us to the Coalition's next great strand of strategic
clarity. At his 2006 education summit, Howard called for "a root and
branch renewal of Australian history in our schools, with a
restoration of narrative instead of what I labelled the 'fragmented
stew of themes and issues"'.
As he explained at the Quadrant 50th anniversary celebration: "This
is about ensuring children are actually taught their national
inheritance." The absence of a "narrative" and an "inheritance" is a
big part of the reason that British subjects born and bred blow up the
London Tube, why young Canadian Muslims with no memory of living in
any other society plot to behead their own prime minister.
FINALLY - something we agree on
Government should promote citizenship, not multiculturalism.
why are the 2 mutually exclusive?
i am going to stop here. i am tired and i hope my point is clear.
rock'n'roll .... hello cleveland
