What lies beneath

BY NOW few sensible people would believe that John Howard and Alexander Downer, among other members of the Government, are not involved somehow in AWB’s Iraq mischief.

We might once have been prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. But all the Howard Government’s lies over the years have peeled away whatever credibility and promise it brought to power.

In other countries ordinary people might be jolted into action by such habitual official misconduct. Not here. Despite a case for the urgent removal of the Howard Government, too few ordinary people seem to care much or be prepared or able to do anything about it.

No need for sedition laws here.

Australia’s institutions are ill-equipped to deal with this Government’s misbehaviour. Political opposition is weak and patchy, the ALP remaining a national laughing stock under the bumbling management of Kim Beazley.

The public service is politicised, much of the media is compliant or incompetent — and royal commissions and other inquiries are ineffective as long as their terms of reference are framed by the people most in need of scrutiny.

In a healthier democracy the head of state might have intervened by now. But, again, no chance of that here: Governor-General Michael Jeffery is beholden to the PM who selected him.

The Iraq debacle keeps coming back to trouble the Howard Government, as it should. But Iraq is as much about what Australia has become as about the personal behaviour of the likes of Howard, Downer and others.

Andrew Wilkie,
Sandy Bay, Tasmania