Monday, October 24

Manifesto


Hello,

My name is Oliver Johnson and I’m WORRIED and ANGRY.

I’m worried because Australia seems to be rapidly becoming a one-party police state under the Howard government and I am angry with the Australian people for their apathy as this process is carried out.

The purpose of this wiki site is to point the furious finger towards the Howard government’s scurrilous power-grab tactics and to beseech people to contribute their time and talent to protecting the delicate flower of Australian democracy from the Liberal Party’s steel-shod jackboot of conservative duplicity.

In particular, I would like to put the magnifying glass on these central aspects of Liberal Party ideology:

  • Violence: Howard and the Liberals are obsessed with spending our tax money on the science and techniques of killing. Their antics in Parliament verge on deranged: like teenage boys, they memorise the rate-of-fire statistics and names of US commanders and present them in an “enough said” pseudo-authoritative tone as they inform us that they have decided to spend 50 billion dollars of our money on threatening or killing people around the world. Government lackeys further pound the drum with their wild, unsubstantiated calls for more defense spending: Here’s Professor Babbage with some meaningless buzzwords for us: “We can't go on the trajectory we are on at the moment. If we don't get a substantial hike, it's simply not going to work”. I say that, as the largest desert island in the world, Australia presents a difficult and unrewarding landmass to invade and, as such, our tax dollars should go into more urgent causes like public health, infrastructure and education in our own country and, if we really do care about outside threats, our neighbours’ countries.
  • Fractured Society: Howard and the liberals are hell-bent on fracturing Australian society along the lines of the haves and have-nots. Instead of one country with a coherent set of laws for all, Howard wants to give us a system in which bullying, money-grabbing, brown-nosed sociopaths rise to the top while all the rest of us must be resigned to what the elite will allow us to have. As this system flourishes into the future class, divisions will solidify and we’ll be left with a “winner-takes-all” society with moral cadavers capable of firing people an masse stamping the tune and the rest of us wishing we weren’t such losers.
  • Racism: to cover its own incompetence in all domestic issues from the sale of Telstra to aiding drought-afflicted farmers, the government uses a calculated strategy of racial and religious vilification of Muslims. Terror and threats to our ‘security’ have become the catch-all distraction in Australia from the farce of Liberal leadership. Along with the camps in the desert, rapidly enforced deportations and the enormous budgets for training ‘immigration officers’ the Liberal party’s racial vilification strategy is starting to echo terrifyingly with another right-wing government’s strategy against the Jews, homosexuals, Jehova’s witnesses, disabled people and slavs.
  • Corruption: Our Australian governments on all levels seem to roll around in corruption like pigs in a tasty swill of garbage, gravy and clover. Surely the Howard government’s baby bonus of $3000 given out of the public purse to every child-owning family in Australia right before election time must be the electoral greasy palm of all time! On a state level, we have the cross-city tunnel. On the local levels, we have endless iffy zoning and construction deals like the Orange Grove debacle. I’ve become very agitated writing this paragraph and must move on before I start sweating and twitching with embottled rage. I’m sure we’ve all seen this one in action, anyway.