In doing research for my last post, MrLefty, I’m sorry, but Johnny’s dead!, I was trying to find a transcript of John Howard’s farewell speech to Australia. After 10 minutes and searching I gave up. But what I did find was this little gem. It is a speech John Howard gave on the 50th anniversary of Quadrant, a magazine a dedicated to the right in Australia.

What follows is a little hypocritical according to my last post.

The speech basically lists all the reasons why we are lucky to be rid of John Howard. According to him the people who contributed most to the 20th century were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.

Ronald Reagan an actor turned president the only reason he got a second term was because he got shot. Late in his second term Reagan was caught up in the Iran-Contra affair, he professed complete ignorance of it. (Maybe this is where John Howard got his talent for pleading ignorance.) Margaret Thatcher admitted to being friends with far right dictator Augusto Pinochet. Pope John Paul II was a great man from the way he battled against the Nazis and later the communists in Poland, but his policies on condoms greatly contributed to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Not the sort of people who are my heroes.

John Howard goes on to say:

Of the causes that Quadrant has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important to me than the role it has played as counterforce to the black-armband view of Australian history. Until recent times, it had become almost de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare.

Again, it would take the brave voices of a few individuals to take a stand against the orthodoxies of the day. And again Quadrant has been an outpost of lively non-conformity in its willingness to defend both Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle against the posses of political correctness.

The black-armband view of Australian history? Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windshuttle argued against the views of many historians who say aborigines got seriously fucked over by white colonization. I don’t really understand how you could argue like this. After all there isn’t a single full-blooded aboriginal in Tasmania. It’s the only successful genocide I know of. John Howard wished the Blainey-Windshuttle version of Australian history to be taught in schools.

Blainey and Windshuttle probably were treated badly by the intellectual establishment. Everyone does have a right to their views and that should be respected. But for a Prime Minister to pick a minority view in a field as important as history is something else.

This speech does show why we are lucky John Howard is no longer our Prime Minister.

Hopefully, Kevin Rudd can identify John Howard’s mistakes and govern for all of us.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.