Posted on 10/06/2004 1:40:51 PM PDT by naturalman1975
THESE petitions from the Great and Good, damning John Howard, have persuaded me at last.
We do indeed suffer from a culture of deceit.
What finally won me was reading the name "Phillip Noyce" on the latest of these declarations -- a demand on the weekend from 40 actors, writers and directors for "truth in government".
Phillip Noyce, I told my wife over breakfast. Demanding truth. Heavens.
I just had to keep reading.
You may have doubted that people paid to pretend or make things up are especially expert in truth, in government or anything else.
But these petitioners shared no such reservations.
People like them, they insisted, "bring to the world images and entertainment that reflect the integrity of Australia", and were disgusted the Howard Government had "greatly besmirched Australia's international image".
We were now the "laughing stock" of the "international community".
What is this "international community", by the way, that is so often said by sophisticates here to be stunned and revolted by Australians?
I suspect this "community" is simply the Paris or London dinner party companions of those who make these overwrought claims.
But I'm getting sidetracked by a minor deceit in this petition condemning deceit.
Let's talk about the bigger whoppers -- starting with the boast of these signatories that they're really sad to see our reputation "besmirched", when they work so hard to show the world "images and entertainment that reflect our integrity".
But who are these eager boosters of our country?
WELL, there's actor Vince Colosimo, whose films include Chopper, a "real life" story that made a hero of a hitman; director Alex Broun, who directed Purgatory Down Under after finding Australia to be a "selfish, greedy, nasty place", and; director Rolf de Heer, whose film The Tracker showed white police massacring Aborigines.
Gosh, after all that, how could Howard have made us seem any worse to the "international community"?
By his "deceitful behaviour", thunder these makers-up and pretenders.
As Noyce explained: "The letter writers are appealing to whoever wins (the election) to stop lying, because we've had enough. We're sick of it."
I know just how he feels.
I became just as sick when I sat in a darkened theatre, surrounded by children on a school trip, and watched Noyce's film, Rabbit-Proof Fence.
As I've explained before, the very first words of the film -- "This is a true story" -- are false.
In fact, when it was premiered, in a Aboriginal settlement in Western Australia, the woman it was about, Molly Craig, stood up and protested: "This is not my story." And it wasn't.
Molly was removed from her mother from a squalid bush camp as a girl, after welfare authorities were warned that she'd been ostracised by her tribe as a "half-caste", and was "running wild" and at risk of sexual abuse.
She was taken to the Moore River Native Settlement, where many Aboriginal parents had voluntarily gone to get their children care and schooling.
But Molly ran away with two other girls, and walked and rode the 2000km home.
This truth would be astonishing enough, but Noyce seemed keener to tell the "truth" instead -- that tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were "stolen" from loving parents by racist officials.
And so he showed Molly living not in squalor, but in an Eden.
He showed her removed not from fear for her welfare, but as part of a plot to breed out Aborigines.
He showed her torn by police from the arms of her screaming mother, instead of peacefully leaving with the approval of the head of her tribe.
He showed her transported in a locked dog box, not in a ship's cabin in a trip her daughter says was a "most pleasant experience".
He had her joining wards of apparently stolen children, rather than children who lived there largely at the wish of their parents.
There are many more deceits in this film, but you get the picture.
The "international community" sure did, deciding this was a land steeped in evil.
And now Noyce demands "truth in government"? I'm still laughing.
But there are plenty of other artists attacking Howard for a lack of honesty and political judgment they seem to lack at least as much.
On Sunday, author Tom Keneally berated a "Truth in Government" rally in Sydney over Howard's "lies", warning: "There is ultimately a price to the lie."
He should know.
Keneally in the 1980s fell in love with the Marxist revolutionaries of Eritrea, and wrote Towards Asmara, romanticising their cause.
He admired the rebels' leader, Isaias Aferwerke, saying just this year he had "a kind of purity".
But Aferwerke today leads yet another warlike Muslim dictatorship, jailing evangelical Christians, punishing dissent and ruining the economy, so you'd think Keneally would have learned to be more modest when advising on politics.
But modesty is not a quality obvious from any of the anti-Howard petitioners.
It is odd that the 43 "eminent" ex-diplomats and bureaucrats, the 400-plus university staffers, and the 56 doctors who all signed Howard-hating petitions of their own seem so sure that they represent their professions' best mind -- and collective will.
It also seems strange that petitions saying Howard lied assume there is proof he actually did.
As I've argued before, going through the evidence, the claim that Howard is a proven liar is a lie itself. But do these "experts" actually have any informed insight to offer when they lecture us?
The doctors' petition, for instance, berates Howard over the Iraq war, claiming it has devastated the health of Iraqis.
NONE seems aware that Iraq's Health Minister, Ala'adin Alwan, says Saddam Hussein's misrule, corruption and wars ruined Iraq's health system so completely that only $20 million was spent on health care in 2002 -- compared to $1 billion now from Iraq's Ministry of Health, thanks to the liberation.
Should Howard apologise for this, too?
Or is truth, again, less important than the "Truth" of the petitioners?
The university staff who loftily condemned the "dishonesty" and "duplicity" of the Howard Government were particularly self-congratulatory.
One, Professor Stuart Rees, said their petition was inspired by the thought that if academics did as the Howard Government did, "then no student should trust what we write and say".
I suspect many don't already, professor.
After all, didn't you award the Sydney Peace Prize to the mouthpiece of terrorist leader Yasser Arafat? And haven't some of our most prominent history academics themselves become a "laughing stock" by claiming, with false "evidence", that Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by a racist "genocide"?
When asked to explain falsehoods in her influential work, The Tasmanian Aboriginal, Professor Lyndall Ryan explained: "Historians are always making up figures." Besides: "Two truths are told."
Is only one "truth" correct?" No professor, as far I could see, objected to what she said.
NO, "Truth" trumps truth every time -- in this case, the "Truth" that we were genocidal child-stealers and murderers.
Likewise, who cares about the truth about Howard, as long as the "Truth" gets out that he's a tyrant, an American lapdog, and the cause of the Bali bombing. The liar.
And the people who sign these petitions deploring Howard's "lies" are just the sort for this deceitful work.
By the way, are the polls still all over the place in Australia, or is a clear favorite emerging? I haven't heard much election news from Australia -- maybe that means Howard is doing well and the papers don't like to report it.
Your right - and I can't even keep up with the lefties here, much less try and keep track of other countries too.
(That poem on your page brought a tear to my eye- it's not even my flag.)
Most recent polls are showing the Howrd government with a slight lead - but not enough to say the election is anywhere near safe. It's a step in the right direction though.
Excellent post.
The Australian counterparts to our Joe Wilson/Greg Thielman/Hollyweirdo/freedom-hating nutjobs.
The Australian counterparts to our Joe Wilson/Greg Thielman/Hollyweirdo/freedom-hating nutjobs.
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