Back to your old self again Busty, it's a shame.
yeah, it's a shame when a mod would rather stir shit and troll than contribute to a thread, but i guess us 'grubs' need to be put in our place somehow.
busty, you might be a "sophisticate" in your own mind, but your political comprehension skills leave a lot to be desired.
when somebody like myself makes a passing reference to "the howard years" (not that snivelling individual personally) i am referring to a time, a place, an attitude that proliferated in that time.
i refer to the socio-cultural context of that period, the legacy of his leadership and where we are as a community in its wake. i could be talking about the harm he did to education, the national broadcaster or social welfare, but in this case i am talking about the way people in australia think about australia - and
being australian - in a way that is different to the time before we were led by the fucking liberals for 11 years.
it's like all the openness and welcoming spirit that was hyped in the lead-up to the sydney olympics was instantly tainted and undone by one shameful political period - the handling of what we know as the "tampa incident" and the "children overboard" saga.
when pauline hanson hit the political scene in the mid-late 1990s she created a stir by saying racist, ignorant shit in parliament. people were shocked. some agreed with her, some cringed with embarrassment.
five years after she did her maiden speech in parliament (1996 i think it was?), after her political party came out as the voice of anti-immigration loonies and dumbfucks everywhere - she and her cronies suddenly became irrelevant.
why?
because Howard and his mob (who were about to be trounced in the 2001 federal election by the ALP) suddenly appropriated a lot of One Nation's policies as their own. all that shit about turning refugee boats bound for Australia around, throwing around anti-islamic sentiment in the post sept 11 paranoia that was being ridden hard by the mainstream press.
anyway, Howard came out with all this 'we will decide who enters this country' rhetoric - turning his back on the long honoured Australian tradition of helping needy people flee violence and oppression (well, long honoured since the Vietnam war...let's not mention the holocaust/white australia policy and that other racist dirtbag Menzies; a
different nationalism in a
very different time) - instead making it an election issue - something no other prime minister was low enough to do.
see, the people that run this country know there is racist sentiment in the community - but for the sake of national dignity and harmony, they don't usually pander to it for their own political gain (or to save their political skin like john w howard did).
it was this open xenophobia that reflected back into the community; saying it was ok to be a bigot.
that is howard's legacy, and that is what i am talking about. the howard years.
now if you're finished derailing the thread (oh, that's right, we know how you feel about
drug addicts) i would just like to mention how much i hate sport. fucking bread and circuses shit that keeps people distracted. sport is like religion and politics - boring, tribalistic and a distraction from what's really going on. it's got fuck all to do with society, culture, humanity - it's just a vehicle for advertising, machismo and sedating the masses.
cornishman, good luck with any endeavours to get to this wide brown land. we need more people with good taste in drugs, if you ask me
