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Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

All change for ...

The attitude of the conservatives towards democracy is usually hidden under a mountain of platitudes. Probably their favourite is to quote Churchill (of course) - 'It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' And they nod, wisely, having once again put down those wicked socialists who have dared to criticise some aspect of the way they govern - their manipulation of the media, their secrecy, their cronyism, their reduction of voting rights, their use of dishonest advertising, their stacking of boards, their corruption of parliamentary procedures, their crushing of dissent. This is Democracy as conservatives understand it (to quote Humpty Dumpty 'When I use a word it means just what I want it to mean, neither more nor less').

The Churchill response might come, for example, when there are complaints from civil libertarians (oh for the day when it is unnecessary to describe a small subset of the population as civil libertarians, and when the term is a synonym for citizen) about the loss of liberties under the 'anti-terror laws'. You remember the anti-terror laws, brought in very hastily (a knee-jerk reaction is good when it panders to your electoral base - stem cells, gay marriage, euthanasia, terrorism, refugees - not when it is needed to save the world we live in) to prevent the planet being taken over by Al-Quaida, which was apparently about to happen. The logic, as best I could tell, was that Islamic fundamentalists were about to take away all our freedoms, and Mr Howard had a cunning plan - he would take away all our freedoms first, and then A-Q couldn't do it, and they would wander off grumbling to themselves ('We were that close, damn that fiendishly clever Mr Howard and Mr Ruddock').

I was reminded of all this again when Howard said that Rudd and Gilliard were 'too inexperienced' to run the country; and then shortly after when he not only hoped that Barack Obama would never become president, but that the Democratic Party wouldn't win the next election. Before all that he had been outraged to see the Palestinians, in a democratic election, vote for Hamas. The Palestinians were to be punished for not voting the way Mr Howard and Mr Bush wanted them to vote.

Let me try my understanding of democracy on you - hopelessly naive, I guess, but see if you agree. A democracy involves a number of candidates, for whatever job is available, speaking to the public about (a) policies and (b) abilities, and then letting the public vote to see which candidate they think could do the job best. The election process should happen at regular intervals, and the public's view of the best policies will change from time to time depending on the prevailing circumstances. In between citizens are kept well informed, consulted, listened to.

The conservatives apparently believe nothing of the kind. Their view is that only conservative policies and philosophies are legitimate. The democratic process, in the mind of John Howard is purely the event which occurs, once every three years or so, in which the public gives the Liberal Party a majority. I suspect that he would rather save the expense to the Liberal Party of running elections, but it is in the constitution so we had better keep it going. But in any case the Liberal Party will do whatever is necessary to ensure that it is back into government once the last of the how-to-vote cards is swept up from the polling place.

Now he is probably no fool, Mr Howard (although I do, from time to time, wonder ....). He knows that the public doesn't like conservative policies, that they get angry about workplace tyranny, and public school funding, and climate change, and Iraq, and David Hicks, and refugees, and health care. He knows that there are many people who like that nice Mr Rudd, and many others who like that nice Mr Brown. But no matter what the public attitudes, the role of an election campaign is to ensure that neither Labor nor the Greens will ever be in government. The role of an election is simply to confirm, over and over again, that the only natural government is a conservative one and that the Liberal Party (and indeed Mr Howard himself) should rule Australia for ever. Democracy is a one party state, a conservative party (Cuba of course isn't democratic because while it has a one party state, it is a left wing party!).

So, do I think Churchill was right? Well yes, I probably do, but I am sure that John Howard doesn't. And the problem with the Churchill quote is that while he refers to the other forms of government that 'have been tried from time to time', he clearly believes that democracy has been tried too. Not in Australia it hasn't, not recently anyway.

Will it be tried in the future? Well, we shall all have to wait and see. I'm about as optimistic as I am about climate change - and we are going to need democracy to deal with that.

All change for
Australian politics

2 May 2007
Category Politics general
1 comments

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john howard

{ 4:03 PM, 11 February 2008 } { Posted by Anonymous }
how very true...
and I thought they were no lateral thinkers left in Australia

[David says - why, thank you kind sir/madam. Sometimes people think I am too lateral!]

Edited by mrpickwick on 11 February 2008 at 1:06 AM

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