For Adbusters, Oct. 04

No comfort lies in the October 9th election. The Labor Party has lost, with a noble experiment, a generation of power. The noble experiment was an inexperienced, twice married, foul-mouthed and once intemperate leader at the head of a much more experience Shadow Cabinet he ignored and sidelined, emphasising his personal destiny. Instead of running against the war, and the lies that got us into war, Latham chose to toy with arithmetic, coming up with bigger and bigger plans -- a free day of preschool, free hospital care for those over seventy-five -- that a mortgage-strapped generation more fiscally fearful than any other would not believe.

And so it is that John Howard, who shrinks to every occasion, has shrunk the nation to fit his personal vision of it, if 'vision' is not too big a word. He has pioneered Poujardism in Australia; the word means, I think (and French-Canadians will know), the shrivelled mind of unschooled, provincial, racist, penny-pinching shopkeeper.

And we now have children in island cages because their parents came here thinking our country was a destination; and a billion new enemies aware that we once pushed out to sea a new-born baby and his bleeding mother in a leaky boat in a time of storms because they were Muslims, not Christians; and we went in, shoulder to shoulder, to smash Iraq when George Bush said 'crusade'.

Four years ago at the Sydney Olympics, we were the envy of the world -- an amiable, capable, graceful mob of self-mocking good guys. Now we are the Southern Rhodesians of our time: stupid, self-obsessed, out of touch with history, mindlessly persecuting innocent people, and unwilling to admit our nationality overseas. For a while John Howard looked like a blip. And now he's an era. And it's a pity.