For The Australian Worker, October, 2005

The second Bali bombing killed fewer Australians than highway crashes that holiday weekend. But it did what its masterminds wanted, which was to smash for good and all that Hindu island's tourist economy and show Australians the billions spent on repelling terrorists was, to the last dollar, the last cent, wasted. For the suicide bomber will always kill somebody. He can't be threatened with torture or public trial and the firing squad. He can't be found if we don't search every car-boot entering Sydney Harbour Tunnel. He can't without ten years' brainwashing be taught the error of his ways. And he can't be recognised in a police line-up, or a school photo, or a queue to a holy shrine.

So what are we to do? It's a hard question. We either admit, I guess, that we can't win a War on Terror any more than we can win a War on the Common Cold (which is equally ubiquitous) and ask al-Zaqawi for terms; or we choose, more wisely, the Thatcher Option.

Thatcher's idea, in 1983, after the IRA blew her up in the toilet of the Grand Hotel, was to 'deny the terrorists the oxygen of publicity'. She wouldn't let radio outlets broadcast their voices, or their demands or their arguments, and she put dubbed actors' voices over their faces out of synch. And, sure enough, in only twenty-two years, the IRA disarmed.

And we could do likewise I think, by stoically treating the two Australians dead in Kuta Beach like road accident deaths -- regrettable, sad to the bereaved, but part of the way the world goes these days; as regrettable as death by lung cancer, death by Hurricane Katrina, death by a US checkpoint shooting in Iraq, or a sharply rising ball on a Strathfield cricket pitch. Calling the fierce young decapitated bombers 'cowardly' or 'evil' is not only wrong but silly; no-one believes it any more, and 'evil' doesn't mean anything except 'beyond explanation'. And it doesn't daunt the terrorists, it inspires them. Castro's been called 'evil' for forty years, and he's still there, and rather admired by a lot of people, while Mother Theresa, for instance, is losing traction, and Nelson Mandela, the former terrorist, is gaining it.

We should understand that wars kill people, and in a War on Terror some of our side will die too. Not as many as die in Iraq in a day of course, but dozens or scores in a year, and sometimes hundreds. Nowhere near the four hundred Australians that die each day from smoking tobacco. But a fair few.

I guess by writing this I've breached the new law against 'encouraging terrorists'. The Federal Police know where to find me. You can't admit you've read this, though, or you go to gaol for five years. It's the law.

How quickly freedom goes. Two weeks under 'questioning' without a lawyer, or a phone call, and your spouse or child goes to gaol, if they report your absence, for five years. Franco's, Stalin's, Hitler's, Papa Doc's, General Pinochet's secret police did much the same. How quickly freedom goes.

Mark Latham's Tantrum

Mark Latham's toxic tantrum, like Samson's last muscular, groaning act of destruction, makes you wonder how suicidal he's been, and for how long; or is the adjective 'self-abusive'? Not since Mommie Dearest has a memoir so splenetically derided its author's mentors and mates. Not since Pauline Hanson has a politician voiced such ignorant, whingeing, arid, petulant, smug despair.

Is Mark medicated? We have a right to know. Does he go off it sometimes and, weeping on television, plead for the privacy of his family? It'd say so. If his first wife is a sapphic do we really need to know? If so what about Mark's own turbulent sexuality? Are the rumours true? If they are, why did his tell-all book conceal them? Hypocrisy, not sausage-sinking, is at issue here. Party politics works if the MPs pretend to like and follow the Leader. It fails if they do not, and every reservation is bellowed into the living room by every heartsick backbencher. One doesn't hear the primitive Catholic Tony Abbott, for instance, often asserting that the primitive Protestant Peter Costello will fry in hell. The party member keeps his mouth in order. He barracks for the team.

Mark Latham doesn't seem to believe in any of that. He appears to believe, like Charles de Gaulle, that 'The party is me, and if it isn't me, it shouldn't any longer exist. It should be hereafter burnt to the ground, and the ashes sown with salt. And I mean that in the nicest, most caring way.' Has there been a worse, more divisive Labor rat since Billy Hughes? Jack Lang maybe, Mal Colston maybe, who gave us the GST. But Mark is up there in the Rogues' Gallery with them, nostrils flared and knuckles whitening, his brain an addled stew of jostling furies, a King Kong caged and about to smash up Manhattan, because it is there. A King Lear Junior in search of a storm.

The Inner Socialist in George Bush

It's true to say that Hurricane Katrina brought out the Inner Socialist in George Bush, who in true-red Leninist fashion threw money at the problem in hundreds of billions of his taxpayers' hard-earned free-market profits, but there are, I'm sorry to say, a few caveats to add to this. Halliburton, for instance, will get a lot of the money -- rebuilding ruined cities trashed by Bush folly is much of what they do -- and great wodges of slumside New Orleans where A Streetcar Named Desire was set and Brando with a Latham grimace yelled 'Stella-a-a-a!' is to be bulldozed and replaced with high-rise condominia and marble-foyered grand hotels.

Once you realise, comrade, what the Right are actually like, and what they are really up to -- that they are human hyenas who profit from others' disasters, disasters they often, as in the Iraq War, themselves confect -- it's not hard to call them neo-fascist any more. It's right to do so. For they bomb Iraq and give billions to Halliburton to rebuild it, they mismanage the peace, and the oil wells blaze, and the price of oil (which they own many shares in) then happily triples. The war goes badly and they manufacture Humvees and cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, which they sell at a mighty uncompetitive profit to the US government of hundreds of billions a year. So if the US wins the war, or if the US loses the war, they make money either way. Our foes' disaster, or our disaster -- tsunami, hurricane, unjust war -- it matters little, they profit whoever suffers.

It was because of such rich scum and their lootings and harrowings of the scrambling poor that the Labor Party was founded, and Latham's idea that this cruel nomenklatura can be civilised is wrong. Vultures, hyenas, crocodiles are more house-trainable than these leering, skulking vampires with their Harvard MBAs. One of them, Nick Greiner, ran a company that sold a lethal addictive drug to sad, shy adolescents. It was called tobacco, and he made millions from the triggerings of their early deaths. How can you civilise a succubus like him? It can't be done. Such people are beyond all teaching, all pleading, all medication. Some of them sell to Third World mothers powdered milk that kills their babies. Some charge for AIDS drugs money its impoverished African sufferers can't afford. I mean, really. And now they're smashing up New Orleans, evicting its native, busking genius, and turning it into a shopping mall. How bestial, how barbarous is that?

The Lathem Diaries

In one way only Latham's diaries were, I concede, good politics. For they kept the media, and the public mind, away from the substance of his political thought. This included many of the Free Market blitherings of the 1980s. That Telstra should be sold off, and Qantas, the railways privatised and unions abolished. That public education should be tiptoed round and the lower order encouraged to sacrifice so their kids could go to private schools. That industries that couldn't survive on a Level Playing Field (that ultimate Flat Earth theory) should be allowed to wither away, and the townsfolk that sustain them. That in order to compete -- on a Level Playing Field -- with Chinese slaves we should become, competitively, slaves ourselves. That the economy came first, and the social order, in its wake, should make shift as best it can. What a fool he was, and is. I wonder who, now, when he enters a Campbelltown pub, will offer to buy him a drink. Hands up.