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Issue No. 176 | 02 May 2003 |
Solidarity Forever
Interview: Staying Alive Bad Boss: The Ultimate Piss Off Industrial: Last Drinks National Focus: Around the States Politics: Radical Surgery Education: The Price of Missing Out Legal: If At First You Don't Succeed History: Massive Attack Culture: What's Right Review: If He Should Fall Poetry: If I Were a Rich Man Satire: IMF Ensures Iraq Institutes Market Based Looting
Charities Brace for Medicare Backlash Court Throws Out Cole Prosecutions Child Actor Dodges Broken Voice Rio Tinto: $40 Million for Boss, Eviction for Workers Winning Poster Shouts at Freeloaders May Day Tragedy Claims Union Lives Westfield Cleaners to Down Mops Question Marks Over Nursing Home Burn Payout Highlights Compo Fears Costa Blows Whistle on Canberra Raid
The Soapbox Solidarity The Locker Room Postcard Bosswatch
Bob Gould Sprays Gerard Henderson War and Peace A Strange Light A Little History Does It Have To Be?
Labor Council of NSW |
Letters to the Editor A Little History
In 1966, the ALP massively lost a federal election on a simple and now uncontroversial proposal of non-participation in Vietnam, particularly not with conscripted youngsters.. Given the size of their win, it is an odd measure of the guilty fear which the Right invest in that result that after 37 years, they still attempt to discredit and impugn the then Labor leader Arthur Calwell. Calwell, they continually, untruthfully and slyly imply, was a racist in particular, as well as a backward anachronism, a nong etc., etc. Right-wing "think" tank commentators still pimp this canard (this is not a mixed metaphor if you know these bludgers' vices) among their other lies. It reached a low point with the effete, vacuous, dishonest 100 Years The Australian Story TV program which depicted Pauline Hanson as following on from Mr Calwell. And like their Vietnam fraud, this kind of dishonesty underwrites Tory behaviour in office today - grubby (but profitable) wars, racism, tax cheating, ministerial impropriety, lies and the undermining of Australia's rule of law (even to the forgery of Commonwealth documents). Happily for the Liberals, a lot of people buy this rot. Many are just the usual rusted-on weak Liberal maggots who would tumble like ninepins if you ever put them on the Kokoda Track or anywhere they had to pull their weight. But as Silent Majority's bumper-stickers say: "I make grunting noises and I vote." Decent Australians must knuckle down, work hard and wait for a fair go to come back into fashion so swinging voters can crawl out of the Liberal dung-heap.. And the untelegenic Simon Crean can wear Newspoll's "disapproval" rating from dumbcluck viewers of Big Brother like a red badge of courage. Imagine the alternative - aping the execrable Howard ministry, an even worse bunch of vultures than Harold Holt's 1966 silvertail sleazebags. Peter Woodforde
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