Decay & Deceit

"Your beliefs are a part of your personality; at the heart of your identity. To admit they are wrong is to renounce a part of your life and sense of yourself, along with the hopes and vendettas you have accumulated over the years... Rather than accept the psychological consequences of confessing error, people lose their bearings. They talk only to friends. They imagine conspiracies as they seek the worst possible motives of their critics. They retreat into coteries and speak in codes... To cut a long story short, they go a little mad."

Nick Cohen.

It looks like just another inland creek; but it hadn't rained here in a decade. That night the frogs that had lain encased in mud cocoons under the surface for all those years would be out, filling the air with the racket of their courtship as they sought desperately for a mate. A decade's a long stretch between drinks.

Nervously, obsessively, preparing to speak: To understand why an air of decay and deceit has attached itself to a dying Howard government, you only have to look at their treatment of separated fathers.

While he didn't say it in exactly those words; he's a lawyer after all; in effect he said to the grieving, heartbroken dads of Australia: vote for me and I'll get your children back. I'm not blind. I know what's going on in this lunatic place they call the "family" court. I know and do not support the contempt with which you're treated. Vote for me.

And to the, if possible, even more heartbroken grandparents; regularly denied contact with their beloved grand kids after separation, he transmitted the message, intentionally or not: I feel your pain; I understand how deeply amoral these institutions, these appalling creations of the Labor Party, have become. Vote for me and I'll fix it.

But that's not what he did.

Instead he let the bureaucrats take control. He let the tax payer funded ideologues who infest the bureaucracy to spread their poison; to paint men - doting dads - as violent patriarchs; to paint women as hapless victims of those men's brutality.

He allowed them to draft out a multi-million dollar role for themselves in protecting those children from all those brutes. And in case anyone had missed the message, he allowed the bureaucrats to perpetrate an utterly dishonest print, radio and television domestic violence campaign portraying all men as violent and all women as victims. In this country, you can't to the toilets in the movies without standing at urinal and being bombarded with feminist propaganda from posters right in front of your face while you point Percy at the porcel. It's an f'n pain; completely offensive. I bet the girls don't have any propaganda in their toilets telling them to treat blokes better, to stop all the emotional abuse; to stop hitting them over the head with saucepans, to stop the contract killings and to stop making up a whole pack of lies about them to advantage themselves in court cases,

We said at the beginning of this twenty million plus domestic violence advertising campaign that there was no evidence from anywhere in the world that these types of campaigns reduce the level of inter-personal violence in the community and instead do more harm than good by promoting negative stereotypes. We predicted that far from addressing inter-personal violence, by deliberately promoting public hysteria over domestic violence it would instead allow the DV industry to justify the expenditure of yet more hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers money. And so it has come to pass.

While the head of the House of Representatives Inquiry into child custody, National Party member for the Riverina Kay Hull, said repeatedly and often that the family law was in desperate need of reform, she has been silent on the debacle, apparently conscience free, ever since. After all, it was Kay Hull who oversaw the appalling Every Picture Tells A Story report; written by a feminist bureaucrat within the department who was promptly, as we understand it, moved sideways so she could not be held to account; and then signed off on by politicians too lazy to even bother reading it; judging by their depth of knowledge when we interviewed them.

In a classic disconnect; Every Picture Tells A Story was presented to parliament with great fanfare and salutation; with the Prime Minister handing out praise to everyone involved. It was all a crock; and now the chickens are coming home to roost.


THE STORY CONTINUES:


"He had not expected to see Louis ever again, was surprised to run across him back in Australia several years after their first stray encounter. He never bothered to make anything more out of their acquaintance but had continued to run into him every few years, one of the stray filaments of encounter which made up his life.

"He compared notes on the evening, at the same time watching the crowds still dispersing. The pubs were deliberately shut, waiting for the potentially trouble-causing straights from the suburbs to return to their breeding grounds, the heterosexual heartlands. The street was carpeted with beer cans and trash. The lights of the sweeping machines turned the street yellow, adding malice, turning the crowd into looming giants. Men in white overalls were already in action. It would take hours to find a taxi. There was no point in even trying to go home now. If he did he would be walking.

"I've got some free vouchers for the Love Art shop," Louis ventured after a while. "You want to come and check it out?"


THE BIGGER STORY:The tide has well and truly turned when conservative columnist Andrew Bolt writes:


IT IS unfair, I know. But it's time John Howard quit. He must quit as Prime Minister not because he's a failure, but - perversely - because he's a success.

He must quit because he's done so well he should be red hot to win the next election.

Instead, every poll this year agrees he's stumbling to the mother of all hidings.

And yesterday's pictures of him falling over are devastating in their symbolism.

Howard can argue all he likes that he's brought us record employment, record growth, record wealth, record surpluses.

He can keep boasting about the lowest jobless rate in 33 years and remind voters of their latest tax cuts....

Most voters simply refuse to be impressed. They refuse even to listen any more.

Take Howard's bold decision to send in troops to help rescue Aboriginal children from appalling poverty, neglect and abuse.

Yawn.

Or consider the tax cuts, which started to pour into pay packets this month.

Ho hum.

Time to turn the dial because voters seem bored to sobs by Howard after 11 years, and especially by that last half a decade of yammer about terror, Iraq and lies. ...