Hiya. Today, a few of your comments on Not Happy John! A lot’s been happening for me this week and I haven’t been able to read all my emails, so please send or resend your comments on the book to nothappyjohn and the team will endeavour to get them up there.

 

But first, have a look at a great scoop by the Herald Sun�s Jason Frenkel, which the Murdoch Melbourne tabloid buried on page 17 today. Fellow Australians, John Howard has decided that WE will pay for sitting members� how to vote cards, for the first time ever. How�s that for an unfair, undemocratic process. No fair fights for John. And for fair dinkum vote-rigging, what can beat Jason�s report that MPs got their annual $125,000 printing allowance on July 1, so sitting members can spend the bloody lot to see off the competition. See Double dip for poll campaign. He added privately: “Abetz’s office says its an unwritten convention. But ask any of the senior campaign officials on either side and they have never heard of it… And Abetz’s office has confirmed to me that they are re-writing the member’s entitlements handbook right now – my guess is that a previously “unwritten convention” will now be codified and formalised in writing in the new edition handbook. It will pump an extra $20million or thereabouts into party coffers.”

June�s Webdiary statistics are:

1. Howard’s 2004 Tampa: director George Bush, June 9

2. Our beds are burning election, June 11

3. Not happy John!, June 20

4. Did our government lie to us to protect America?, June 2

5. A call to scream from Andrew Denton, by Andrew Denton, June 11

6. Tony Fitzgerald: Howard a “radical”, June 29

7. Howard drapes polluter’s package in green, June 15

8. Was Australia complicit in U.S. war crimes at Abu Ghraib?, June 2

9. Hill – defeated by Defence or just another pawn in the lie game?

10. Renewable energy crumb laced with poison, by Meg Lees, June 15

The top five referring websites were spleenville, roadtosurfdom, bushwatch,informationclearinghouse and iraqdaily

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YOUR REACTION TO NOT HAPPY JOHN

Heather Jeffcoat, a staffer of Democrats Senator John Cherry: Congratulations on your new book. Check out familymovie, truthaboutwarmovie and refugeesmovie (audio required).

Grant Lee: I listened to your comments on Late Night Live on Wednesday night where you referred to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao as a “communist dictator”. A malign dictator he may be, a “Communist” in name and rhetoric he may be, but a communist in fact, he is not. Since the death of Mao Zedong, private enterprise has been enouraged to the point where less than half of the economy is now in public hands. This is especially significant in a country where more than 70% of the population is still involved in peasant agriculture (and therefore comprises far less than 70% of the economy). The political elite such as Hu and his family and cronies have become immensely rich as result of this privatisation by default. It is safe to say that Hu is, effectively, not a communist.

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Trish Kench

I’ve always seen my right to vote as an obligation – a duty of citizenship; the “right thing” to do. In recent years I’ve watched the dishonest antics of the spoiled brat brigade; the woeful lack of principled leadership from representatives of both labour and the privileged; the tossing out of the ‘fair go’; the sacrifice of honesty for expediency, of independence for dollars; the growth of brand and spin, of the citizen-as-consumer and the replacement of ‘society’ with ‘the marketplace’.

We have no society if we don’t care about each other’s well being; if profit is more important than compassion and moral integrity; if our national identity rhetoric (fair go; mateship; dinkum) is co-opted as ‘brand’ by the cashed-up powerful who, straight faced, serve it back to us on its head and think we won’t notice – or care.

I do notice and I care a great deal. As did many others, I recorded my protest at the last election by voting Green – for the first time.

Listen up boys, or I will take away your toys: I want a good education for my neighbour’s children and I want his elderly parents warm, well fed and happy. I will help to pay for their teachers, their pharmaceuticals, and any hospitalisation they need. When he is etrenched because his skill set is outmoded I will help to pay to retrain him.

I want teachers and nurses paid commensurate with the importance of the hard and valuable work they do. I want the natural environment protected and sustained. I want an informative free press.

I am not an anarchist or one of a mob of terrorist-sympathisers and I want to say Sorry. I want something constructive done about the health and welfare of indigenous Australians. I want to treat ‘illegal’ refugees with compassion and child abusers sent to jail.

I want a clear demarcation between politics and the bureaucracy. I want democracy. Increase my taxes.

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Penny Butler in Fairfield, Melbourne

Firstly – thank you for your amazing book. I read Tony Fitzgerald’s launch speech in The Age on Tuesday and immediately left the office to purchase your book. I am half way through it and although the points made are frightening, it is an excellent read and so far sums up many of the discussions my father and I have regarding the state of political play in this country. Further, although I am not there yet, I notice that you have actually included suggestions of ways we can bring about change. Bravo.

I regularly email the PM, Mark Latham, Amanda Vandstone etc asking questions and making points. Iraq, Hicks & Habib, Refugees – all these issues and more cause me much concern. However the greater concern is the failure of the News to inform the people and to even ignore key issues. I recently emailed the editor to the Age asking why this is so (we know why). I couldn’t believe, after the Abu Gharib situation, that our Government was misinformed yet again. In all my 33 years I have never known a govt. to be so misinformed about so many things. And all of these things will potentially impact Australia’s future in a major way. The newspapers are relatively quiet on it and Mark Latham has been near silent. Pathetic.

I was nearly ready to throw my hands in the air in disgust and give up – most people at work think I am a bit of a freak because I go on about the Government so much – but their lack of concern is another worry I carry with me. However, you have given me hope and upon finishing your book I will do what I can to effect some change about the place because you are right, Howard’s version of Australia is not the one I want to belong to and I will do whatever I can to help remove him.

Your book also introduced me to Webdiary – as an Age reader I hadn’t seen it before. There should be a link from The Age to it. It is a fantastic forum. Thank you.

At the end of the day – whether it be Liberal or Labor – they both have a duty to protect our democracy and they are failing. So I guess it’s up to us.

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Jim Connolly in Paynesville, Victoria

You�ve opened up a can of worms with ‘Not Happy John!’ and it’s time somebody did. From the time the First Fleet arrived, Australians have feared invasion by a foreign power. Perhaps it is guilt for the dispossession of the Aborigines that we have, ever since, anticipated that we, in our turn, will be dispossessed by a foreign invader. We have reacted to perceived threats by the Aborigines themselves, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the “Yellow Peril” of the millions of poor in the Asian countries to our north, the Japanese in particular, Communists, the Domino theory, “Boat People” and, at the time of writing, Islamic terrorists.

Perhaps this is why politicians have perpetuated the myth that the US saved us from Japanese invasion during the war. The fact is that the Japanese attacked the US because America had cut off supplies of oil and rubber to Japan. Australia had no oil or rubber at that time and Japan had neither the will nor the capacity to occupy a country this size during the war in the Pacific. Churchill and Roosevelt knew this but, because they didn’t trust Curtin, whether Curtin was told is still in dispute.

Macarthur arrived here as an asylum seeker, unexpected and uninvited. If he arrived the same way today he would be locked up in a detention centre. It was the Australians who first stopped the Japanese on the Kokoda Track. We owe the US nothing and can expect nothing from them unless it is in their interest. Surely it is time we ended our sycophantic, subservient subjection to American political objectives.

The following questions should be discussed:

1. Who really runs Australia?

2. Will the forthcoming election be a de-facto referendum on Australia’s Sovereignty?

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John Caldecott

Re Tony Fitzgerald�s speech at your Sydney launch, it is now easy to understand why public education is being put down by both major parties. Institutions of society have been taken over in the name of neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism. Their social, economic and political religion is based upon the Washington Consensus and their values are based upon corporate values.

Democracy is about who has the most private property and the modus operandi is whatever it takes and however long it takes. These are the corporatists, and they exist in the media, think tanks, political parties, governments and lobby groups. They are not game to stand as one political party – it is much easier to take over and control existing institutions so as not to alert the public that they are about to be deceived by a well engineered and manufactured crisis. Royal Commissions are almost never used, as they might uncover the truth and compromise the movement.

It is a movement that knows no borders and as we have seen with both the Liberal and Labor camps (federal and state), their values and ethics constantly change to suit the corporatist end game. Putting up PBS prices in readiness for the FTA. Putting up the cost of water in cities and towns in readiness for the planned water privatisation and the FTA. State governments, all Labor, are planning to convert the water entitlements (public property) of irrigators and farmers into permanent private property rights to enrich landowners and the banks. Obscene private education and private health funding, the recent baby bonus and no questions asked Family Payment (Grant) don’t make sense when at the same time public school and universities fees are being put up, public housing sold off and public hospitals are under immense strain. Welfare recipients are terrorised by CentreLink and the ATO whilst they pay back any overpayments caused by extra earnings – so much for incentive. Public infrastructure is starved of funds to justify Private Public Partnerships.

All these “reforms” are designed to gradually transform public property into private property, never mind whether effectiveness and the competitive position of the economy is compromised. Social policy is now regressive not progressive.

Put simply it is capitalism gone mad and as we have just witnessed with the corporatist latest and most audacious revolutionary reform yet, the “National Water Initiative” or should I say the “National Water Privatisation”. It is time to dump corportist political parties, expose their propaganda network and establish institutions that are truly in the public interest.

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Grant Long in Newcastle

I heard you on LNL on Tuesday night. Speaking for myself, I greatly appreciate what you have achieved (so far!) with Webdiary.

A year or so ago, after yet another announcement from the government on detention centres, I started compiling a list of what I believed our country had lost since 1996 and also the things the government had done since that time that I found offensive. It was only a dot point list but it grew to some length.

It started with things like �mutual obligation� that only flowed in one direction. It included other things like SIEV-X and the Tampa. This lead to children, or even adults, in horrendous detention. Little did I know then that our country would commit to war in Iraq. On and on the list went. Needless to say it was a lowpoint in my life. Where was the country of my childhood and youth that I loved for its great contrasts, it inclusiveness, it positiveness and tolerance?

I know many other people of ages from 20 to 70 (no doubt beyond) also feel this way as I have a beer with them and chew the fat over politics. My father in law, who has always been a Liberal voter, now speaks about Bob Brown as a voice of reason in an increasingly self-serving parliament. Things change, evolution is relentless.

But what remained for me was a void, a participation void. I am glad to say that Webdiary has, in large part, filled that void and therefore also greatly reduced my increasing frustration. I could say it has kept me sane.

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Vince O’Hara

What a pleasant surprise to hear you the other day on “Australia talks back” and then again, with that old Adams bastard. Like old times! And congratulations on the book: I’ve got a copy on order today.

Your insightful comment on political affairs is very much to my liking, though I don’t doubt that we would disagree on some things. But you seem to be able to clearly nail the average Australian thinking on some controversial subjects. Your “expose” on the usurpation of our Parliamentary protocol by Howard’s supine complicity during the Bush invasion should be much more widely appreciated, if only our citizens were awake to such bastardry.

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Michael Strutt

Listening to your piece on Late Night Live I was struck by your continued commitment to participatory journalism. You even went so far as to say that you limited your Webdiary editorial discretion to articles which were libellous or abusive (in spite of the fact that you have admitted that you declined to post an article early last year because you thought its argument that there were *no* WMD in Iraq was just too far out).

I agree that it may just be possible to salvage journalism by encouraging broad participation. The examples of IndyMedia, bloggers and OhMyNews (in South Korea) certainly seem to offer an encouraging start.

But is Webdiary really the way forward? Or in being tied to Fairfax is it actually a retrograde step which will ultimately bind contributors just a tightly to the corporate inspired self censorship that has made Fairfax no more of an alternative to News Ltd than the ALP is to the Coalition (and for pretty much the same reasons)?

For the past few weeks I have not even been able to read Webdiary, thanks to registration policies that insist that I must become an open ended marketing resource if I wish to access Fairfax online content. Yes, I know that Fairfax has a ‘privacy policy’. But after 20 years in the IT industry I know just how hollow such promises of privacy protection are (as 92 million AOL subscribers recentlydiscovered.

It seems to me that if you are really committed to *indenpedent* participatory journalism there is an immediate symbolic gesture you could make to demonstrate it. You could demand that Fairfax online exempts Webdiary from registration requirements or, if that is technically problematic, demand the right to mirror its content as part of the nothappyjohn website.

I await your response with interest – but don’t bother doing so via Webdiary as I will be unable to read it.

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Les Bursill in Engadine, Brisbane

Well done MK. I heard you on LNL and I must buy my own copy. Two things.

1. My access card AKA credit card and fund access card got crunched by the machine and no money or credit for me all weekend (no food no petrol no movies, nothing). How can banks get away with that? They have no emergency procedures in place. I went to the manager Monday at 9.30 (no early starts here) and she said ‘tough’. I told her banks need to become (ha ha) socially responsible and remember the billions they make from us sheep.

2. On Sutherland station on Friday last (25th June 3.45pm), the station crowded with school kids. Two sets of police with dogs (dressed like storm troopers [not the dogs]) came to the station and started searching any, every child the dogs showed interest in. The kids couldn’t have been more than 15 or so. No privacy, no appology just bailed them up, emptied their pockets and their bags on the concourse in full view, just tough for you. Don’t approach sir or you will be arrested for interfering. I just don’t feel that warm and comfy glow Johnny promised.