And yet John Howard, the now self-defined ‘climate change realist’, persists with the same policies and the same thinking that has failed Australia for the past decade. And Kevin Rudd shows little sign of making that seismic shift in thinking required to address the most urgent matters confronting Australia today – climate change and water security.

John Howard’s so-called ‘good’ economic management has produced [a] growing disparity between his prosperous and comfortable Australia and the millions, including pensioners, who are struggling with huge burdens of personal debt... Meanwhile a small but growing number of Australian corporate executives take home pay packets in the millions of dollars...

Howard won government with the slogan ‘For all of us’. We now know this was a sham. It was not true for Indigenous Australians, for pensioners, for people with disabilities and their carers – and for millions of other Australians who watch as the cost of living rises and their pay packets shrink by comparison. Under Howard’s watch, Australia has become more like America, and more divided than before. . . read more

Mick Dodson: “Who are these people, who is this generation that took my grandmother, my father, my mother and my grandfather and my two sisters? Who is this generation that tried to take me from my family in 1960? What generation do we look to if Mr Howard says it wasn't this one? Where is this mythical group of Australians who made these laws, adopted these policies, put them into practice, who took the kids?”.

Critics of the 'Bringing them Home' Report believe the report demonises the white officials who were involved in removing indigenous children. The late Editor of Quadrant magazine, P.P. McGuinness, reiterated this point in an editorial.”To denigrate the honest and sincere efforts of so many people who thought they were doing the right thing”, says McGuinness, “is merely a historical ignorance.” But according to philosopher Raimond Gaita, this view represents a kind of moral blindness about our immediate past. [More] . . read more

Many a crime he’s turned a blind eye to, many a treaty he’s blatantly thwarted. He spurned the UN to appease a mad President, our military tried to keep Abu Ghraib secret. Neither torture, rendition or the slayings of civilians has copped a rebuke from the saviour of Oz. Check the reports of Oxfam and Amnesty – descriptions of hell. Dirty water spreads cholera. Black Water spreads death. Bush spreads propaganda. Soldiers admit “the entire war is an atrocity”. Howard says it is “just”, but history will not absolve him, and he knows it. What becomes apparent in Iraq – once you peer beyond the confines of Australian media – is a slow motion genocide. This is a war crime. Key perpetrators will be brought to account.

Out of office, Howard becomes vulnerable. Major figures are positioning themselves to be witnesses for the prosecution. Today, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq called the handling of the war “incompetent” and said those responsible for its “catastrophic failure”, must be held to account. Ominously, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez described the occupation as a “nightmare with no end in sight.” One day, John Howard’s nightmare will begin.

More on Iraq's humanitarian challenge . . read more

The choice you face on the 24th of November has become more intense and more urgent because of some of the stormclouds that are gathering on our economy both domestically and internationally. With the right leadership, the skill that people like Peter Costello have displayed over the last eleven-and-a-half years, we can continue to see it grow. We can reach that great goal of full employment. We can once again walk the shopping malls and the streets of this nation and meet enthusiastic young people bubbling with hope and pride and confidence about their future job prospects. But if we get it wrong, if we hand it over to inexperienced people, a government dominated by 70% of former trade union officials, if we have a nation for the first time in its history with a Labor Government at every level, coast to coast, wall to wall without lead or hindrance, isn’t that a huge risk – isn’t that taking too big a risk with the prosperity that we have worked so hard to build?  . . read more

And let’s look at the way it has been used in that Intervention. It has been used:

• to compulsorily acquire interest in Aboriginal private property in “prescribed communities”;
• to remove the permit system, or the right of Aboriginal traditional owners to say who can, and who cannot, come onto their property;
• to arbitrarily control individual Aboriginal incomes;
• to control Aboriginal organisations and assets.

It is, in other words, a leap back to the days of the first Intervention, to the days of assimilation, control and coercion; to the days when Aboriginal people were regarded as too naïve, and too simple, to control their own affairs. And it has nothing to do with the protection of children. . . read more

The mad rush of getting things done before Xmas is a mixed bag of irrelevant and meaningful. Barack is in a rush giving out jobs - only trouble is there's a terrible mess to fix and you have to live in Washington. Rebecca, who's been out of work for months, lands a job in banking - the great thing is the job's in Sydney so she can keep swimming at Bondi and she doesn't have to do data entry.

Patrick, an engineer from Byron Bay visited Bondi on the weekend and defended Kevin Rudd's Xmas Carbon Emissions Plan as laying the framework that can be activated in the future. I pointed out that it did nothing but churn money in a circle from emitters to government to consumers to emitters. Patrick replied that the present Australian Senate would reject any plan that actually does something - so we have to have a plan that has no effect but can at least be approved by parliament. Like an empty box wrapped in Xmas paper - nothing in it but at least you've got the box to put a present in later. Not a very happy Xmas thought but which is more important happiness or truth.

At the moment people are hoping that Barack's pre-Xmas rush to put a team together will result in magic. At least the world has already received its Xmas present in the shape of two shoes being thrown at a silly man - it brought "joy to the world". We still have to work on the "peace on Earth". In Sydney Rebecca's new bank job is in "team building", something which Barack will need plenty of with his team of super stars, and in fact something that the whole world economy needs right now. But Rebecca would rather go swimming with her squad at Bondi before she slips into town for some quiet team work.

Life's tough in Sydney.

World Vision research shows that the extra funding that Labor has committed to aid, if delivered, could allow funding of programs that could reduce child deaths by 140,000 each year in the Asia Pacific region. As well the funding boost could also reduce maternal deaths by 4,200, lead to at least 29,000 fewer deaths from AIDS and 31,000 fewer deaths from TB annually. It could also provide access to safe drinking water to almost 37 million people.

Overseas aid is too important to be captured by partisan politics and it is my sincere hope that the Government will move to match the ALP's pledge on aid... to boost overseas aid to 0.5% of Gross National Income... Individually, Australians are among the most generous donors on the planet in terms of their giving to overseas aid and we expect our government to also act generously and with compassion... unfortunately our overall level of government aid is languishing badly. Over the last decade we have failed to show international leadership on critical issues such as climate change and on the level of overseas aid we give as a nation. This is an issue Australians understand, it is an issue people care about. . . read more

In the wake of his defeat the attacks on Howard's legacy will turn ferocious, but at their heart will be an unease, a ritual exorcism of something deeper that Australians would perhaps rather not admit. For a decade Howard's power had resided in his ability to speak directly and powerfully to the great negativity at the core of the Australian soul - its timidity, its conformity, its fear of other people and new ideas, its colonial desire to ape rather than lead, its shame that sometimes seems close to a terror of the uniqueness of its land and people.

At the end of his concession speech, Howard claimed to have left Australia prouder, stronger and more prosperous. But it didn't feel that way. It felt like it had been a lost decade. It felt like the country was frightened, unsure of what it now is, unready for the great changes it must make, and ill-fitted for the robust debates it must have. There was a strange sense that Australia, which had seemed so often to sleepwalk, mesmerised, through the past 11 years, had suddenly woken up. But where it might go and what it might do and be, no one any longer knew.

From The Guardian. Richard Flanagan is a novelist. . . read more

All for what? "To ensure that the community better appreciates the significance of wartime experiences to our development as a nation". And now, today, Howard has further extended the hours of compulsory Oz history in schools, and appointed two of his pet poodles to ensure unsavoury episodes are underplayed. One of these poodles, Gerard Henderson, is a notorious neo-con ideologue who never met a war he didn't like. His credentials? Producing a long forgotten history of - wait for it ­- the Liberal Party. Now he runs a secretly funded think tank, collects files on his enemies and lauds the Prime Minister at every opportunity. Poor fellow, our country.  . . read more