What a miserable and deceitful little worm is our former PM

On Wednesday 5 March 2008 John Winston Howard delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture to around 1,400 guests at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) gala dinner in Washington DC.

 

Ignoring the fact that both the Australian electorate and his own party repudiated his major industrial relations and foreign affairs policies as well as conveniently forgetting that the Howard Government presided over rising interest rates and decreasing national productivity, the former PM sort to justify himself and dump on the new Rudd Labor Government. 

 

In a display which confirmed his local standing as 'lower than a snake's belly'; Howard also managed a swipe or two at left-wing liberals, single parent families, feminists, gays, those against the Iraq war and anyone who had ever disputed his version of Australian history.

 

Showing an unparalleled level of manure shovelling in Washington, John Winston Howard has also awarded himself the honourific title of The Honourable according to AEI documents. Something he is no longer entitled to since he was kicked out of Parliament.

 

Here are some excerpts from the speech.

 

"The former Australian government, which I led, was accused of many things, but never of betraying its essentially centre/right credo. We pursued a blend of economic liberalism – in the classical sense of that term connoting as it does a faith in market forces - and social conservatism. So far from being in conflict the one reinforced the other. ---

From our election in 1996 we pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy. On the social front we emphasised our nation's traditional values, sought to resurrect greater pride in her history and became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.---

Of particular note, economically, were our major reforms to the taxation system, the complete elimination of net federal government debt, and changes to our labour market laws which produced a freer and less union dominated system.
These last mentioned reforms, strongly supported by small business, not only boosted productivity but even more importantly they helped reduce unemployment to 4.2%, a thirty-three year low, when the government left office, compared with 8.5% in March 1996.
They included the abolition of unfair dismissal sanctions on smaller firms, which had been discouraging those enterprises from taking on more staff.
The new government in Australia is pledged to reverse those labour market changes.---

We should maintain a cultural bias in favour of traditional families.---

In Australia, at any rate, the late eighties and nineties was the heyday of the more zealous feminist view of these matters. According to this view women who elected to stay at home full time when their children were young were regarded as inferior and in some cases traitors to their gender.--
I am disappointed that Australia's battle group will be withdrawing from Southern Iraq in June as one of the new Labor government's election commitments – rather than making a greater contribution to training the Iraqis to maintain their own security."

 

John Howard's 2008 Irving Kristol Lecture full text.