For The Australian Worker, Sept. 2004

John Howard's life changed forever on 8/16 (to be known hereafter as Scraftonday) and he could now, I reckon, lose blue-ribbon Bennelong to Labor or the Greens. For on that day Mike Scrafton, triumphantly clutching his lie-detector test, swore no-one had hurled their children overboard and the Prime Minister plainly knew it before he courageously told the nation they truly, truly had.

This puts the great man in a difficulty, ardently squawking on the one hand that cheating in the Olympics is wrong but lying to your nation, on the other hand, is fair enough if you did it a good few years ago, to cheat in an election. 'I lied in the past,' he is effectively saying, 'but I won't in the future. Trust me. And I won't take a lie test either. That's just a gimmick.'

And it isn't working. He's looking today more and more like a nine-year-old caught playing doctor in the outhouse by his mother. 'It wasn't me, Mum. This wasn't my idea. The woman tempted me. I'm a good little boy. And she's a notorious slut. Ridgey-didge. Trust me.' Or the playground creep forever telling teacher, 'It wasn't me, it was him. Trust me. You've got to trust me. I haven't lied in a whole week.'

His Green opponent is the truth-proud whistle-blower Andrew Wilkie and the bitterest backroomer his old friend John Valder of the Not Happy John Party. Valder, though a former State Liberal President, judges him and Ruddock and Reith war criminals for what they did in Iraq, and Woomera, and Baxter, and Nauru, and how they averted their gaze from the loathsome squirming tableaux of Abu Ghraib, and feels they should henceforth rot in filth alongside Milosevic in an underground cage in The Hague. Clearly something has gone amiss in their old, fond, fervent forty-year friendship; but this is pretty common with Howard, whose creepiness at length gleams through the artifice, the grinning skull beneath the affable chimpanzee trust-me expression asserting itself at last.

Will Howard lose blue-ribbon Bennelong then? Well, he could. His career is thus far much like Richard Nixon's: both whitetrash over-mothered suburban solicitors of mealy-mouthed mendacity and a taste for midnight whiskey, they both gained high office, Treasurer and Veep, at the same age, thirty-nine; party leadership at the same age, forty-seven; lost party leadership at the same age, forty-nine; regained it at the same age, fifty-five; won at election the highest office at the same age, fifty-six; and then divided and smashed their separate countries with big lies, pointless wars and cheated elections. Howard has lately, tardily, at sixty-five (Nixon got there at sixty-two), with these imaginary airborne infants, reached, well, his water-gate, and he may be due, as Nixon was before he wormed his way out of it, for the slammer pretty soon.

Ah what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. In Mayo in the Adelaide Hills Alexander Downer seems likewise bound for political ruin. His Not Happy John opponent Brian Deegan, the furious bereaved magistrate, has found him guilty of not only helping kill his son Josh in the Sari Club in Bali, but of foreign policy lunacies that endanger all Australians, like cursing Spain and the Philippines for not permitting their citizens to be decapitated in America's cause, for applauding Hicks' and Habib's torture in Gitmo, and for continuing to embrace the present Mesopotamian bloodbath while most sane countries are tiptoeing out of it. 'How many decapitated Australians,' Deegan asks with nuanced irritation, 'is this Iraq fiasco worth?' Unwilling to debate him and unable to belittle him (he swore Deegan didn't live in Mayo till he found he'd worked in it for twenty years), the possibly sleepless Alexander is tripping and pratfalling and blithering non-sequiturs all over the map. On his way to quiet talks with North Korea he accused them of aiming nuke rockets at Sydney. On his way to Taiwan he swore fealty to Red China in any war they might wage against the United States. Asked if this bruised the precious US alliance he said (in effect) 'Not necessarily,' though he said pulling out of Iraq most certainly would do. As the Najaf slaughter mounts and the petrol prices rise he looks more and more like a flapping dill and the handsome door-knocking Deegan his quiet nemesis.

In Wentworth in Sydney's coastal hotbed of silvertails Malcolm Turnbull, amazingly, may lose to his old campus foe David Patch, the left wing Labor candidate. Patch beat him in fifteen previous contests (for mainly student posts) and is running now on the slogan, 'Give it up, Malcolm, it's never going to happen.' Stumbling mightily Malcolm has called Iraq 'an unadulterated error' that we nonetheless had to be in because the US is our ally ('the bloodstained fiasco we had to have,' a coarser wit might call it) and seems set to join, rumour has it, Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. Many rich educated women mysteriously detest Malcolm, and his brute usurpation of Peter King's hard-fought preselection may tempt sufficient female votes across, via King, to the buoyant, hopeful Patch to undo the barbarian invader.

We live in interesting times. Ross Cameron, the sanctimonious adulterer, seems set to lose Parramatta and Trish Draper, the sanctimonious dirty-weekender, Wakefield in Adelaide. And I'm urging the dour, charismatic Dr Peter Macdonald to run once more against Tony Abbott in Warringah using the slogan, 'Decency, for a change.'

Such ploys might just work. And with only three of these possible seats and a three percent punish-the-lying-little-turd swing it's a landslide, government, thirty years of Latham and national salvation. Speed the day.