not happy bob!

Father of the year Bob Ellis babbles on;



From Goodbye Babylon, published Penguin Books, October, 2002:

Thursday, 8th November, 2001

I went to my motel room in Kingston, tried to sleep and couldn't. I felt it was all too easy to lose, even after this wonderful year when all was won. Things had changed in the hearts of men and women and the frantic dark accusing times were back, the Cold War years, the McCarthyist years, the years of scapegoat and smear and blackguarding and traitorising and ideological name-calling and thrashing about. And I counted, instead of sheep, the sins of the Howard Government, the story so far. The Howard years.

How the first thing they did was go after blacks, with an enquiry into ATSIC, which they falsely said had corruptly wasted money. How they then went after the Stolen Children report, implying in leaks that Ron Wilson was mentally unstable. How they said the children were not stolen but 'saved'. How they wouldn't apologise for the Stolen Children because it was all so long ago, yet celebrated Anzac Day, which was longer ago. How they slashed ATSIC'S budget, sacked Wilson and Dodson from Human Rights, and cancelled scholarships that let young blacks get to good schools and university.

How they slashed money to all universities and their research projects, driving talent overseas and making kids pay up front, in tens of thousands, for courses that used to be, rightly, free. How they slashed money to public schools and gave it in millions to Kings and Geelong and Melbourne Grammar for tennis courts and swimming pools. How they went after the ABC and put in charge of it Howard's best friend McDonald who, ignoring his charter, spoke up for Howard in the 1998 election, and hired an unstable blathering one-time Young Liberal President, Jonathan Shier, who sacked almost all its experienced administrators at a cost of $20 million in severance pay and cancelled Spectrum and Grass Roots and drove out SeaChange and stopped The World Today going on at 1 p.m. so people couldn't hear it over lunch and learn how Howard was going, and sold off the Forestville studios and the Gore Hill studios and replaced programs like Wildside and Frontline and The Games with dreary middle-class ullage from England and sacked staff almost at random, causing breakdowns and suicides (or so Annie was told), and went after Phillip Adams and Kerry O'Brien and yet couldn't, somehow, end its inherent fairness in current affairs though he seemed to lay waste the whole broadcasting structure, emptying its offices and terrorising its few survivors.

How they went after lesbian mothers, asserting it was better that a child be not born than it be reared in a household of women, and passed laws to stop the babymaking. How they stopped scared ill people getting euthanasia when their state government voted, and their people voted, they should have it. How they stuffed up East Timor and let a massacre happen, and cities burn, and children be orphaned and women widowed, by entrusting its elections to the army of General Wiranto, and protested their helplessness for weeks, saying they couldn't go in without Indonesian permission, while more and more people were shot and macheted and raped and pushed into trucks and taken across the border into concentration camps. How they were warned that these things would happen but ignored the warning, trusting Wiranto would do the right thing by people he saw as scum and traitors and enemies of Java.

How fourteen of their ministers and parliamentary secretaries resigned after scandals involving money, and three more, Wooldridge, Moore and Reith, didn't because John Howard protected them. How Reith gave his phonecard number to his son, who gave it to a girlfriend, and tens of thousands of dollars were spent that shouldn't have been.

How they wouldn't sign the Kyoto Agreement until they were allowed to pollute more, not less, in the next ten years. How they let native forests be cut down and sent away to become paper we bought back from foreigners, paying up big.

How they sent home a pregnant Chinese woman who begged them not to, saying she would be compulsorily aborted there, and how she was indeed compulsorily aborted there of a child she fled thousands of miles to save, and rear, and love, and how she was not 'a genuine refugee'. How a man they frustrated burned himself to death on Parliament steps because they wouldn't let his disabled daughter into the country, because she might in future years cost the government money. How they traumatised thousands of children in concentration camps, denying them playmates and proper schooling and normal family life. How they called 'queue-jumpers' people fleeing the threat of murder, and gaol, and poverty, who had no queue to jump. How they called them 'illegals' when they'd broken no law, and how they called them 'terrorists', and 'these people', and called their desperation 'inappropriate behaviour'.

How they bribed Mal Colston into passing the GST, and stopped him going to gaol by falsely alleging he was dying. How they defamed Cheryl Kernot for what she had done, or not done, when she was twenty-three, saying she had 'the morals of an alley-cat', and no male child was safe with her. How they cheated over the Republic and made sure the monarch stayed. How they had only one Debate, and only at Channel 9, too early to matter, in both elections, cheating the normal rules and customs of democracy. How they held one election during the Commonwealth Games and the other, deliberately, contrivedly, during the first weeks of a war.

How they spent half a billion dollars of the people's money advertising their policies. How they drove the dollar down to 47 US cents, and ran for re-election on their economic ability. How they propped up Stan Howard's business, and flicked tens of millions of Doug Moran's business, and a quarter of a billion to Chris Corrigan's business. How they called 'thugs' and 'scam-merchants' ordinary people with families who wanted to keep their jobs on the docks. How they wrecked the country towns and let the banks leave and closed the schools. How they boarded and bullied at gunpoint a Scandinavian vessel for picking up shipwrecked people at sea and bringing them where they wanted to go. How at gunpoint they imprisoned innocent survivors of murderous regimes in desolate places and said, if they protested, this would be reason enough to send them back to the murderous regimes, and send back their children too.

And there were hundred of items to go. The tampons. The petrol. The children-overboard lies. The hassling of the High Court. The war on the unions, Johnno...

And Johnno Justice showed how blind
It is to certain shades of humankind,
And certain ages too, the young and poor and scared:
Steal one more pencil, sonny, and you're dead.


It didn't seem real. It couldn't be real. This couldn't be my country. And it wasn't. Beazley would win, and who it wasn't. He had to.

Pretty soon I was asleep.