For The Byron Echo, December, 2005

A while back John Howard said we Australians reserved the right to bomb pre-emptively any country that unusually annoyed us, but since then he has been in all his dealings with foreign countries craven, snivelling, bumble-footed and nauseating in his cowardice. Whales on his watch were killed illegally, David Hicks tortured, innocent Iraqis bombed to smithereens, East Timor voters unprotected from gangs of murderers, Gallipoli gouged to build a carpark and bombs were dropped, no trade was cancelled, no curses howled in the United Nations at any cruel or unjust foreigner. Howard the coward talks big as always, but when the time comes to act he crawls under the lino and puts his toes in his ears.

What should he have done about Van Nguyen? Well, he could have told Singapore that for two weeks before and two months after the execution any Australian travelling to or stopping over in Singapore would be fined a thousand dollars. Or any Singaporean coming here would be fined a thousand dollars. Or he could for that period have slapped a tariff, doubling its price, on any imported Singaporean product. Or he could have moved at CHOGM that Singapore be expelled from the Commonwealth if it did not, within five days, or six, or seven, abolish mandatory hanging, which the UN finds a crime against humanity.

He could have banned Singapore Airlines from landing in Sydney for two months, or three. He could have doubled with fines for two months, or three, the cost of a phone call on Optus, a Singaporean entity. He could have stopped, or threatened to stop, the coming merger of Qantas and Singapore Airlines. He could have expelled for two months, or three, the Singaporean ambassador. But what did he do? He wheedled and snivelled and smarmed and talked about drugs and how bad they were. He intervened so Van Nguyen before he was strangled or neck-broken could hold his mother's hand, but not hug her.

Did he bomb Singapore? Of course not. Did he threaten to? Of course not. Did he damn capital punishment in even Texas under even Governor Bush? Of course not. What a charlatan he is. Once you realise he inhabits two universes, what he says and what he does, you see how false and sly and contemptible he is at his heart. Happily I can say these things now, since the sedition on political comment did not go through and, like John Howard, comedy survives. But has, I wonder, the pebble-slide now begun -- after Van Nguyen, and the IR laws, and the terror laws -- that will take, in eventual avalanche, the Liberals out of power everywhere in Australia?

The Pittwater by-election makes it seem so. I live in the electorate, ran for parliament there twice, and saw each election morning what I sourly called 'the clam-faced bearers of haemorrhoids' come out from behind their green wooden shutters and their white picket fences in their brown cardigans and sandshoes and horn-rimmed spectacles to vote in surprising numbers for John Howard, or John Hewson, or Nick Greiner, or John Mason, or Bronwyn Bishop, these last thirty years.

This time they did not, and the Liberal vote went down from sixty percent to thirty-four percent, a fall in approval greater than that of Nixon after Watergate, a sudden vanishing overnight of the forty-six percent of an erstwhile safe seat's true-blue Tory vote to a surfboard-polishing local Buggins whose greatest electoral asset was his lifetime residence and Anglo-Saxon surname against a Greek-Australian blow-in twice rejected elsewhere.

Of that forty-six in a hundred votes the Liberals have lost you would have to say eight, or nine, or ten, were to do with John Brogden, the former member and party leader, and his groping, propositioning, racial vilification and silly botched suicide. Another four percent, probably, are to do with his backstage knifing by the fascist, Opus Dei, anti-abortion, God-bothering Christian-maddie wing of his party, to which with careful caveats and sneaky pride John Howard still belongs.

Another three in a hundred to Van Nguyen and the feeling of national impotence that is John Howard's particular gift to his native land. Another two in a hundred, no more, to the terror laws, and two more to the absurd sedition laws. And a goodly seven percent, or eight, to the local prejudice against a Mediterranean interloper in an electorate thronged with fair-haired Poms.

But where did the other twenty-one, or twenty-two, or twenty-three in a hundred other Liberal votes go to? To a protest vote I think, against the IR laws which three in four Australians abominate, and rightly so, in fear of a future in which anyone can be sacked or down-waged at any time, and gaoled if they take strike action in the name of justice against their fate. This fundamental attack on the way we live (you come across now, girlie, or I can retrench you any time I like because of your attitude), whose tentacles reach into every house mortgage, and every private school fee, and every grocer's bill on every kitchen table, has become, since the fifty million he spent plugging it (enough to fund two theatre companies for a thousand years) one Howard atrocity too many. And the Liberal Party's brand-name is not well regarded any more. And neither, remarkably, for the first time in eighteen years, is Teflon John. And even heartland Pittwater is voting against him, for nobody in particular, because of what he has lately, with malice aforethought, done to his country.

If I'm wrong I ask any Liberal-voting Howard admirer in this still-conservative beachside region, similar in many ways to Pittwater, to write a letter and say they are. Say 'I vote Liberal and I admire John Howard' and give reasons. And accurately sign your name.