It's A Black Thing.

The Australian Federal Government's response to the child abuse scandals in indigenous communities is heavy handed and lacks the very element crucial to it's success - consulation. Unfortunately, this is a message Prime Minister John Howard does not, or will not, understand.

The indigenous people of Australia are a long-suffering mob. Since 1788 thy have been systematically murdered and robbed, dispossessed and treated as second if not third rate citizens. Years of neglect by successive Federal Governments, particularly the current one who refused point blank to seize the day and apologize in the spirit of reconciliation, has resulted in a breakdown of aboriginal health, education and housing, and the horror of rampant child abuse, alcoholism, and domestic violence.

The Little Children Are Sacred, a report prepared by indigenous health expert Pat Anderson and QC Rex Wild, highlighted the wretchedness of the situation and offered ninety-seven recommendations for how it could and should be rectified. To the authors’ great surprise, the Howard Federal Government leapt into action and John Howard, ignoring his great hero Ronald Reagan’s famous edict ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”’ and announced that he is from the government and he is here to help.

The last time indigenous children were ostensibly ‘saved’ by Federal Government intervention it turned out to be all part of a concerted effort to ‘breed out the black’ so no wonder the indigenous population is a tad nervous, but suddenly the condition of aborigines became first priority for Honest John Howard.

However, in classic conservative style, Howard ignored all ninety-seven of the bleeding hearts’ ‘expert’ proposals, much to the disappointment of Anderson and Wild. ‘Let me say’ said Anderson, ‘there is not a single action that the commonwealth has taken so far that corresponds with a single recommendation…there is no relationship between this emergency protection and what's in our report.’

Anyway, Howard has declared the whole thing a ‘national emergency’ and come up with his own somewhat more ‘practical’ remedies, like ‘restoring law and order’; He obviously thought that Pat and Rex were missing out on a perfectly good opportunity to do a little shock and awe, and literally sent in the cavalry. ‘We argue’ sniffed the PM, “that our intervention plan is the way to respond’.

Anderson, however, is less than impressed; ‘When we turned the TV on and saw the troops roll into the Northern Territory’ said Ms Anderson, ‘we were just sort of devastated to think that that could happen, so we feel sort of betrayed and disappointed, hurt and angry and pretty pissed off all at the same time.’

And neither is Rex wild about Howard’s way. ‘We arranged meetings, we told people about them’ explained Rex, ‘that we were coming and why we were coming. ‘We arrived quietly with courtesy and politeness’ said Wild, ‘We didn't arrive unannounced in helicopters, we didn't arrive in gunships, we didn't arrive in tanks or trucks’

Contrary to the Liberal’s core belief of an individual’s right to choose Howard’s fix is a one size fits all, take it or, er, take it proposition. Communities with absolutely no record of child abuse, or that have controlled their alcoholism, are being targeted as if they are as dysfunctional as the worst of them and they are rightfully horrified at being stigmatized as child molesters. They are being treated with the sort of one-you-has-ruined-it-for-everybody routine that would be more at home in a kindergarten; it is patronizing, paternalist, racist and should be stopped. However, this is John Howard we’re talking about…

Anyhoo, there are seven main planks that the blackfellas will have to walk, seven main aims which are:

1) To perform compulsory health checks.

2) To ‘quarantine’ dole payments so that parents feed their children properly and get them to school.

3) To boost employment opportunities for aborigines.

4) To outlaw X-rated porn

5) To outlaw alcohol.

6) To lease aboriginal lands.

7) To abolish the entry permit system.

Many argue that Howard’s plan is racist in that is inflicting draconian measures on only one section of the community based on the colour of their skin and/or cultural practices; Howard’s scheme is discriminatory and therefore, QED, racist. It is pointed out that child abuse is pretty rife in the wider white community too, as is drinking and wanking to X-rated video nasties, but no one has mentioned that the rest of us must also be subjected to these same sanctions.

And this perception hasn’t been helped by the president of the Northern Territory AMA, who wrote a letter to Health Minister Tony Abbott stating that as Aborigines do not have ‘processes, accountability or any form of formal management structure in their culture’ then ‘Caucasians…need to exert some mild dictatorship into the management of aboriginal healthcare’. The ‘major error’, he opines, ‘started from the time self-determination was returned to the Aboriginal people some 40 years ago’.

Golly! Imagine! Returning self-determination! Why did we ever get rid of those nice missionaries! That’s the thing about dealing with fuzzy-wuzzies – you’ve got to show them who’s boss! Oh, why can’t they just be more like us!
The good doctor then compounded his stupidity by entering into a certain amount subterfuge about the use of the dreaded ‘D’ word; ‘neither you nor I’, he whispered, ‘must ever use this word publicly’ but worryingly, now that it is out in the open, it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Local good ol’ boy Dave Tollner, Country Liberal Party member of the house of representatives, didn’t have much a problem with it – he was actually CC’ed a copy – and worst of all, neither does Mal Brough, the hapless bastard of a Minister who has to implement Howard’s little land grab; he says that Beaumont was ‘frustrated’, and the AMA are quite happy too. ‘Peter’, sniffed AMA national president Rosanna Capolingua draws us to the attention of many issues’ – like he’s a complete and utter fucking racist – ‘and I am very proud that he continues to want to represent the AMA.’ Oh. So that’s all right then.

The trouble is with Howard solution, or solutions, is they’re all madness, and every one of Howard’s answers will result in the exact opposite of what is purportedly trying to achieve. Let’s take a peek.

1) Performing compulsory health checks.

It turns out the compulsory health checks would constitute assault, so it’s back to the drawing board with that one.

2) Quarantining dole payments.

This one has hit some rocks along the road. The government swears that the greater community will be also exposed to this privation, although there are no details available no how this will be accomplished nor how taking money away from people will improve their diets.

However, for aborigines to eat properly they might need something proper to eat. Decent fresh food is not simply not available in the remote communities Howard is trying to target, and when it is it’s wildly expensive, so how anyone is supposed to buy it when their income has been halved is beyond me.

Furthermore, although the getting the kiddies into school is a laudable enough concept, the schools on many, if not most, of these communities are incapable of physically fitting them all in, let alone seating them, let alone finding someone to teach them. Or maybe we should take up Noel Pearson’s idea and send them all of those black kids to the leafy city suburbs’ elite boarding schools.

3) Boosting employment opportunities.


It is a constant grumble of the migrant community (the rest of Australia) that indigenous Australians should get with the program and BE LIKE US! Why they should be like us no one can really say – it’s not as if they asked for our culture to be imposed upon them, or begged to be poisoned and shot, or pleaded to be rounded up and imprisoned on missions and settlements, or demanded that they not be counted on the census, or requested that their tribes, clans and culture be deliberately mixed up and obliterated – but no matter! Mal to the rescue!

The current concern is that if aborigines don’t work they become ‘welfare dependent’ but it may come to a surprise to white Australia but the indigenous folk agree. ‘Aboriginal people are worried about their kids’ said Anderson, ‘but they want to be part of the solution not merely to be passive recipients. The days of being passive recipients are over, absolutely over. That isn't going to work, that hasn't worked.’

That indigenous Australians should get a job has been an article of faith for the invaders since 1789, and in 1977 the highly successful Community Development Program (CDEP) was introduced to help communities by employing their inhabitants for twenty hours a week and paying them for it. Not much, a little more than the dole, but with the various extra payments available to those involved in viable operations, the 35,000 people on the CDEP were able to carve a living and not be part of the unemployment statistics.

The CDEP is working; communities have locally run stores, garages, all manner of things going on that employ something like 35,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders across the country, empowering those who volunteer to be involved and providing a gateway to employment outside of the scheme.

As a result, people are making financial commitments and breaking out of the ‘welfare dependency’ trap that conservatives wail about from dawn ‘til dusk. Who knows? If the blackfellas keep this up they might even make Howard’s wettest dream come true and start getting mortgages! They’re becoming…more like us!

So Mal is ramping up this proven success in order to achieve the government’s objective forging an independent and self-motivated indigenous population that will flourish in the face of the 21st Century’s harsh realities, yes?

Er, no. In fact, the government is so hell-bent on punishment as a way looking tough for the edification of the white electorate that, when they were told that ‘quarantining’ the money earned CDEP participants was actually illegal because it is not ‘welfare’ as such, well, Brough just took the 8,000 CDEP employees in the Northern Territory sacked ‘em and stuck ‘em on the dole!

Now that is one progressive policy! Now they are all on Newstart, instead of being allowed to earn money they are being penalized for it as deductions from the Newstart allowance begin after twenty bucks a week has been earned. This means that loans will be defaulted on, money will be a whole lot tighter, people will be angry, let down, depressed, and who will bear the brunt of this? The kids and their mothers, the very people the ‘strategy’ is supposed to help. Welcome to compassionate conservatism, Aussie style! Way to end welfare dependency!

4) Outlawing X-rated porn

The X-rated material is either illegal anyway, having been distributed by illicit traders in the Northern Territory, and as a result is far more graphic and violent than the legal, classified variety, but such is the price of prohibition, or is beamed in via the Austar satellite Pay TV service.
With regards to the first component of the porn problem, all good capitalists know that a demand will result in a supply, that is, if people want porn they will get it, so if classified porn is easily available it will reduce the supply of unclassified porn. Contain and control (More on this coming up on Let’s Ask Elroy!™ real soon!).

The second bit may be trickier. The Austar satellite has two adult channels and Elroy is looking forward to seeing John Howard go in to bat for the future of indigenous kiddies with Austar’s majority shareholder, the quietly achieving media magnate billionaire John C. Malone, a man known in the cable industry, due to his understanding nature, as Darth Vader, as Elroy knows that Howard loves nothing better than showing media magnate billionaires who’s boss.

5) Outlawing alcohol.

The alcohol ban is way stickier. The vast majority of NT communities are dry already, due in the main to agitation from indigenous women, except for the drinking permits granted to white teachers, policemen etc that may work there. This system does rankle deeply with many indigenous denizens of said communities as it is, quite obviously, racist, so the question is whether the Feds are going to stop that practice as well?

But if the communities are for the most part dry, how does the grog get there? From the big towns, roadhouses, corner shops and petrol stations, but the chances of them being subject to the kind of draconian regulation that would be required is negligible – indeed, the liquor outlets have fought tooth and nail against any restriction to their trade, no matter what effect on the local population, and not without some success.

So here’s Mal’s latest genius idea: allow, nay, FORCE the hitherto dry communities to open ‘wet’ canteens! That’s right! The Liberal/National coalition’s brilliant scheme to eradicate drinking in the communities is to, er, introduce drinking to the communities.

Now, Elroy is no fan of prohibition (more on that in an upcoming Let’s Ask Elroy!™ special investigation), but if a population of a community is overwhelmingly in favour of it, then who is anyone to argue? The point is, many communities have discovered that the ready availability of alcohol has been a disaster, and so have tried hard to stop it, and it is those initiatives that the Government is intent on overturning.

This is a complicated issue, and Elroy is treading a very thin wire to avoid quite valid accusations of hypocrisy. In most cases, but by no means all, Elroy holds that prohibition does not work, and in indigenous communities this is still true – those that really want alcohol will get it – but the difference is that communities choose an alcohol ban for themselves instead of having it imposed upon them.

There is, of course, another angle as to why communities desperate to stay dry must become wet. The trouble is that aborigines that want to drink have the nerve to come into town to do it! In a pub! Well, as that’s just plain not nice for the tourists, white chambers of commerce across the NT have been trying for years to keep them darkies on the missions and settlements and out of the towns, and they think the ‘wet canteen’ would be a perfect solution. The white pub owners would be perfectly happy to ferry the grog out there, at a price, cleaning up the streets and the dole cheques while they’re at it, so when you read that Howard wants to institute ‘new alcohol restrictions’, remember that means new alcohol restrictions in white communities.

6) Leasing aboriginal lands.

The Howard Government intends to ‘lease’ Aboriginal communities from the relevant Land Councils for five years, after which time Howard says that the lands will be returned unless they’re not. ‘We are not going to take anybody’s land’ he sniffed the other day, ‘without just compensation’, and any suggestions of a land grab were sneered off as ‘Ludicrous!’

And just to show he meant it, he repeated himself. ‘The purpose of this is not to violate people’s land rights’ we weaseled, ‘the purpose of this is get control of these townships and if there is any disturbance of title’ – Uh oh! Title disturbance alert! – ‘just compensation will be paid’.

Disturbance of title? A curious turn of phrase, no? Well, he sure meant it, meant it so much he said it again. ‘We are leasing the land for five years and then it goes back’ he condescended, ‘and if there is any disturbance of title involved in that there’ll be, er, compensation paid.’ Never mind if the communities don’t want to lease it it’s going to be leased anyhow –What’s all that mewling that conservatives do about the sanctity of property rights?

Howard knows exactly what he is saying – he is a wizard with the weasel word, a Sultan of semantics – because he hardly ever says anything he does not mean. He is the lord of linguistic smoke and mirrors, of plausible deniability, of sounding like he said one thing when he really meant the opposite, a paragon of parsing. He is a creature of the law, and knows as well as any other suburban solicitor just how malleable the letter of law can be.

Anyhoo, if there is one mob that really deserves that land, one mob that Howard owes above all others it’s not the voters of Bennelong, it’s the miners, and on crown land, well – they’re more than welcome! Shame about those sacred sites and that, but hey! We’re progressing here!

7) Abolishing the entry permit system.

The last part of the equation is the entry permit system, which the government seeks to abolish. This is pure ideology; John Howard just seems narked that Aboriginal communities get to say ‘We choose who comes to our country and the circumstances in which they come’ about their patches of dirt when Howard cannot do the same in Bennelong.

He said the same about Australia when it came to bombed out Afghans clinging to the side of a sinking bathtub, and circumnavigates the irony that had the indigenous population said ‘We choose who comes to our country and the circumstances in which they come’ to Captain Cook they might be in better shape today; instead, Howard insists on maintaining the conceit that Australia is one country and will demands that black Australia become white.

It all gets particularly loopy when the Liberal Party starts accusing the left, and Aborigines, of being ‘racist’ for arguing for a system that, on the surface, promotes inequality. Apparently it is un-Australian to lock our indigenous brothers and sisters up in outback ghettos and really, if the left had any heart at all, they would understand that what the blackfellas really need is some input from the rest of modern day Australia; not only that, throwing the permit system on the municipal tip of paternalism would mean greater scrutiny for evil doers who might be tempted to roam around the outer bush doing evil.

But that’s the point. After the Aborigines’ previous experiences of white mans’ input, Elroy cannot blame them for wanting to keep whitey as far away as possible but, as usual, logic has taken a holiday. The indigenous folk say that, contrary to John Howard’s educated and knowledgeable opinion, the best way to keep evil doers at bay is with – get this – a permit system!

Yup, the locals have the bizarre notion that being able to screen who can visit their isolated communities actually reduces the evil done to them by evil doers and even the police, not known for taking a blackfella’s side when a little oppression is in the air, agree! However, it seems that a community on Bathurst Island, rife with youth suicide and alcohol abuse, has been offered to keep their permit system in place if they sign a 99-year lease, so suddenly permits and all the little children are not as important as land. Why is Elroy not surprised?

Unfortunately for the communities however, the wagon trains are a-circling on the prairies as people doomed to forever wander a sunburnt country, the lost tribe of Australis known as Nomadus Greyus, look for a promised land to put their barbeque sets and park the Winnebago, ask for directions to the toilet block and where they can buy some fresh Tupperware, purchase doilies and air freshener.

Some forward reconnaissance backpackers have already been spotted asking the whereabouts of the local Centrelink office in the more remote locations, and nomads have started campervanning where no white man has campervanned before, despite the relevant legislation not having been passed yet. ‘Oh’ dithered the oldies, ‘we’d heard that we the permits had been scrapped’ as they putted around the perplexed peoples of the pittianhajara, ignoring the fact that they were in breach of the law and liable to be fined $1000 a day. Elroy always thought that oldies respected the rule of law, but it seems they follow the example of their man Howard and disobey if he says to do so.

Not that the grey nomads and backpackers are necessarily evil doers, but where goeth the Jayco Heritage so goeth the bootleggers, pornographers and miners both off duty and on. The Government says it is all for the aborigines own good, but has so far failed to reveal how exactly that will be achieved; meanwhile, forty years of land rights struggle is about to be undone as a favour to the mining chums, and forty thousand years of culture is about to breath its last.

So, in short, in order to save kiddies form child abuse the Howard Government is going to perform common assault on all aboriginal kiddies in the Northern Territory, to get them to schools that don’t exist and eat food they can’t afford the government is going to take their money, to boost employment and reduce welfare dependency the people will all be sacked and put on welfare, to outlaw porn the government will allow 24 hour sex channels on satellite TV, to outlaw alcohol the government will open ‘wet canteens’ on dry communities, to encourage self-determination the government will steal, er, ‘lease’ aboriginal lands, and to keep the bootleg alcohol and pornography out of the communities the government will abolish the entry permit system that keeps bootleg alcohol and pornography out of the communities. Excellent! What are waiting for!

Elroy is not suggesting for one second that the indigenous population don’t need help – they do – and Pat Anderson recognizes that it will take the logistical and financial heft of the Feds, saying ‘We needed the assistance of the federal government that had the bigger cheque book’; she knows that the problem of land rights, substance abuse, housing, education and health care will take years, generations, to improve, and millions of billions of dollars to enable that improvement, but Mal Brough says that the report’s ninety-seven recommendations along these lines are ‘band-aid solutions’; far better, obviously, to go with John Howard’s timeline of ‘six months’ and dollar expenditure in the ‘tens of millions’.

To be fair, the government has revised his guesstimate to $500 million per year and Howard now says ‘This will take a number of years, it will be expensive, it will be very costly’ but it is still not enough, and the haste with which this is all being cobbled together belie the possibility that the Howard Government, with an election merely months away, are actually serious about this mission.

The legislation is in the post, but a last-ditch effort by people who have no place at the table in this debate, those who actually know what they are talking about, is being made to head the postman off at the pass. A high-powered delegation spearheaded by Pat Turner, former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment Coordinator and John Ah Kit, former NT government minister, is barreling off to Parliament House in an attempt to talk the government into taking a few deep breaths and, uh, thinking about it all a little bit more.

The government has pulled out all the hairdryers to try dry the ink on the 500 page legislation before the vote today, Tuesday, before the rest of the House of Representatives have even had a chance to spill their coffee on it. This is a huge constitutional shift, a major alteration in the Federal/State relationship but it is not even being allowed to go to a one-day inquiry by a Senate committee because, according to Mal ‘It'll only have the accusation that this is insufficient time.’ So apart from thinking that it is perfectly acceptable for him to second guess the Upper House and nominate himself as a one-man senate, what Mal is saying is that isn’t time for the senate to consider this legislation and to tell him that there isn’t time pass it. Viva democracia!

The delegation is also going after the opposition, whose me-tooism is not helping. ‘Federal Labor's job is to distinguish itself from the conservatism of Howard's government’, said Pat Turner,‘It has to show the people of Australia that it has backbone, that it is prepared to lead a proper united Australia that all stands for a fair go. The Labor party has to differentiate itself. It cannot hide behind the excuse of avoiding wedge politics.’

Politics, of course, is what the whole thing is about, and it all feeds into Howard’s brand new War on States. He says that his intervention is ‘an example of where a function that was meant to be carried out by states and territories has not been carried out, and it has been necessary for the federal government to intervene’, which means that he is being deliberately antagonistic, which means that aborigines are but a political football. Again.

In the end, no one in the government has been able to convince anybody except themselves of how any of these measures will prevent child abuse. There are methods but they will require extensive consultation, education, and lots and lots of time. One point The Little Children Are Sacred report stresses over and over again is that a top-down, fly-in/fly-out, Canberra driven response is the one sure way of guaranteeing failure, but Elroy is thinking that Howard is just planning ahead.

If, through some gaping vent in the space-time continuum, Howard makes it back to Kirribilli then this little initiative will quietly fade away. However, if sanity prevails and the PM is sent checking out the Twighlight Home for the Terminally Vanquished, whoever comprises the opposition can deride the ALP for not doing enough, or doing too much, or not doing it right, all the while knowing that, given the legislation they had bequeathed Labor, Rudd had no chance of success and that the sacred little children would not be saved.

The thing is, it does not have to be this painful. Among The Little Children Are Sacred report’s ninety-seen ignored recommendations are exhortations to improve school attendance; provide education campaigns on child sexual abuse and how to stop it; reduce alcohol consumption in Aboriginal communities; build greater trust between Government departments, the police and Aboriginal communities; strengthen family support services; empower Aboriginal communities to take more control and make decisions about the future; and appoint a senior, independent person who can focus on the interests and wellbeing of children and young people, review issues and report to Parliament.

Finally, after making such a fuss about actually asking the indigenous people what they think would be effective and working with them as opposed to at them, the last word goes to The Combined Aboriginal Organizations of the Northern Territory, who have released an alternative Emergency Response and Development Plan to protect Aboriginal children.

The plan is a comprehensive approach that gives priority to protection from immediate physical or emotional harm but also addresses underlying issues including housing, health care and education.

Unlike the current Government approach the Combined Aboriginal Organisations' plan builds on the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report and programs that are already working in Aboriginal communities. It adopts a partnership approach between Government and Aboriginal people and would strengthen the governance and capacity of Aboriginal communities.

It envisages the creation of a national lead agency to implement the plan and an independent monitoring and evaluation body to report on progress.

There are 68 actions in the plan ranging from developing an emergency response in conjunction with Aboriginal community representatives, boosting child protection services, proper training of a permanent police presence in communities, tackling alcohol take away sales and buyback of existing hotel licenses and improved schooling strategies to trauma counseling for victims of abuse.

Australians for Native Title and Reconcilliation (ANTaR )considers that this plan has a far greater chance of success than the current Government approach. We urge the Federal Government and Opposition to adopt the plan in a bipartisan manner.

There. Simple really, but John Howard would never understand – it’s a black thing.

The Oils Of War.

Truth maybe war’s first casualty but every now and then the fog lifts and truth is allowed to come blinking into the sunlight. The left have been positively ladling out ‘latte and showering in Chardonnay since Australian Federal Minister of Defence Brendan John Nelson intimated on Thursday that the Iraq war was, at least in part, over oil, and proving what the anti-war brigade have been yelling for years.

Then the Prime Minister, of all people, later on the same day said much the same thing, but of course the government have been in damage control ever since and denied that they meant what is was they so definitely said. So what did they say, exactly? Let’s take a peek.

Nelson kicked off this uncharacteristic chaos on ABC radio on Thursday morning when, according to The Age newspaper, he said

‘The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security, and resource security is one of them...the entire (Middle East) region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think well what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq?’

Seems fairly straightforward. Later on, Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard said much the same thing to an Australian Strategic Policy Institute conference:

‘Many of the key strategic trends I have mentioned, including terrorism and extremism, challenging demographics, WMD aspirations, energy demand and great power competition, converge in the Middle East…our major ally and our most
important economic partners have crucial interests there.’

So with the pussycat merrily playing tag among the stool pigeons, Peter ‘Tip’* Costello, Federal Treasurer and all-round gutless wonder, was quickly on the case.

‘We're fighting for something much more important here than oil – this is about democracy and freedom in the Middle East.’

Ah, that’s better! Back on message! And by Thursday Honest John had evidently executed a swift 180 with pike by Thursday arvo and let fly with a little salvo on himself:

‘We are not there because of oil and we didn't go there because of oil, and we don't remain there because of oil…the reason we remain there is that we want to give the people of Iraq a possibility of embracing democracy.’

What became of ‘terrorism and extremism, challenging demographics, WMD aspirations, energy demand and great power competition’ we can only wonder, but that’s Johnny for you.

Tip continued to, as King George II would put it, ‘catapult the propaganda’ on the ABC’s Sunday morning political gossip show thusly:

‘What Brendan was talking about was a different point, the point that was made in the security update that the globe has an interest in energy security.'

Sounds like the point to Elroy. However, the message seems to be that Nelson didn’t say what he said, he said something else that was exactly the same thing as what he said only different and Nelson agrees – on the Friday he was at it too.

‘People should hose themselves down in Australia; I think elements of the media and those in some political parties who are always engaged in political opportunism (should) look very carefully at every word that I said yesterday. Iraq is not, nor has ever been about oil.’

That’s all very well, but of course Nelson cannot be trusted in any matter at all – he was contradicted by his Prime Minister and so then immediately contradicted himself. He has no shame, no principles and absolutely no common sense, but we should not be surprised; after all, this is the guy who, back in the days when he thought being a member of the Labor Party would better suit his ambitions, was once famously filmed at a student rally shouting, at the top of his, voice, ‘I HAVE NEVER VOTED LIBERAL IN MY LIFE!’

It seems Brendan has always lacked the power of his convictions; he only became a medical practitioner after he found he was too old to be a policeman and too randy to be a priest, and it was this choice of profession which led to him becoming Tasmanian State President of the Australian Medical Association by 1990 and falling under the powerful influence of conservative warrior and AMA Federal President Bruce Shepard.

He became Federal President of the AMA in 1993, and this proved to be a turning point for Nelson; his former medical partner and future Labor politician David Crean sighed ‘I think had he not been in the AMA, his political choice might have been different’, and the professor of public health at Sydney University, Simon Chapman reminisced: ‘In his AMA days he came across as a social wet, a guy who would speak up for oppressed groups and was extremely good at it … there was no sense that it was an act. I would find it astonishing if the private man didn't still subscribe to a lot of the values he championed those years ago.’

He claims that he was voting Liberal as far back as 1987, even though he was a paid-up member of Labor until 1991, but after his 1994 pre-selection bid for the safe Labor seat of Denison in Tasmania was rejected, Nelson did the honourable thing and got Shepard to intimidate the sitting member for Bradfield before a pre-selection battle for that blue-ribbon Liberal seat which saw Nelson only just fall over the line. He then transformed himself into a vanguard of the neo-liberals, a hard-core economic rationalist of no fixed opinion – ‘an example’ said Sydney University's vice-chancellor Professor Gavin Brown, ‘of ambition overriding principle’.

Brendan Nelson used to be two thumbs aloft for abortion rights, land rights, injecting rooms and foreign aid, and two thumbs down for mandatory detention, but all of a sudden he was mad keen on state schools having mandatory flag-flying and Intelligent Design while handing their funding to the elite private ones, so what happened? ‘He's done a Faustian deal with the driest dries in the Liberal Party’ said one ex-ally. ‘You do all this stuff … and we'll give you power.’

So is Nelson merely a conviction-free turncoat or a lying scumbag quite happy to swap principles for privilege? ‘The Nelson of today is totally manufactured’ offered fellow Liberal Greg Barns ‘I think if he's honest with himself, you would see a sort of centrist with a social liberal side’, and Dick Shearman of the Independent Education Union declared that Nelson had been ‘compromised by the general attitudes of the Government and doesn't want to be seen as soft’

Confused? So is Brendan. His attempts to remodel himself as a hard-man of the Right has seen REAL hard men of the Right label him a ‘political hermaphrodite’, but what of the great man himself? ‘I would feel equally comfortable as a moderate Liberal” he stated unequivocally in 1994, ‘as I would in the Labor Right…I still have the same views, but I promote them where it's appropriate.’ Where that is exactly is unclear, but Elroy is waiting patiently for the day that they are promoted. Appropriately, of course.

But whatever his lack of principles and core beliefs, Brendan Nelson is known to be a stickler for whatever detail any given portfolio he is pointed at contains. He is nothing if not thorough so these admissions of his do not reflect a lack of understanding; rather they reflect the lack of a political compass, and his subsequent 180 reflects the fact that he will twist in whatever way the winds of his ambition may blow him.

His efforts to completely rewrite history within a twenty-four hour period merely reflects just how arrogant Nelson has become but, as Elroy is so very fair, let’s do as the good doctor suggests and look very carefully at every word that he said yesterday.

‘The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security’

OK, that’s pretty clear then. Australia’s defence and security priorities are being set out in the release of a defence update. Everyone on board with that? No arguments?

‘…and resource security is one of them’

What did he say? Resource security is one of them? One of what? Well, if we look very carefully at every word, as Doc Nelson suggested we do, we can only surmise that resource security is a priority for Australia or, to put it anther way, a priority for Australia is to secure, and to have security in, the supply of resources.

OK, so far so good. Ensuring resource security is a priority. But what resources? Jelly beans? Cough medicine? ’45 Chateau Latffite? Maybe the Brendan will be so kind as to…

‘The entire (Middle East) region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world.’

Ah! Thank you doctor! Let’s look, indeed, very carefully. ‘The entire (Middle East) region…’ That’s a region not in what was known as the ‘Far East’, China etc, or East, Hungary, Romania etc, but somewhere in between the two, in the middle if you will. Iraq is a country in the Middle East, and that’s where we’re having the war, kids – Iraq. No problem there.

‘...Is an important supplier…’

That is to say, energy is supplied by them, the countries in the Middle East region, of which Iraq is one. All clear?

‘…of energy.’

Energy? What sort of energy? Wheaties? Nine-volt batteries? Solar panels?

‘oil in particular’,

Uh huh…

‘...to the rest of the world.’

Which would be us. As we are not in the Middle East we must be in the rest of the world, that is, somewhere not, like Iraq, in the Middle East. But let’s just go back one.

‘...oil in particular...’,

What? So the energy that Iraq supplies to the rest of the world is…

‘…oil…’
.
Oil among other things? No, oil ‘…in particular.’ Gee, I see what Nelson means now – that is pretty ambiguous.

‘Australians and all of us…’

...who are not in the Middle East…

‘…need to think well what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq?’

OK, what would happen? Is this Nelson’s get-out-of-jail-free card? To Elroy, premature withdrawal would mean less death and maybe even better access to the oil but this is not what Nelson is implying; if it were, then he would not be advocating continuing the occupation of Iraq.

Given the context in which Nelson has couched his implication it is impossible to ignore the conclusion that he is inviting us to reach, that is that leaving Iraq will reduce our access to Middle East oil.

Or will it? Tip, as is befitting his status as the world’s third best treasurer, was as equally unequivocal as he brought to bear the full and onerous weight of his office to bear on whether a suggested withdrawal of US-led troops from Iraq would affect oil prices. ‘It might' he intoned, 'it might not. Well! Glad he was able to clear that up for us.

So, to recap. The Middle East, of which Iraq is a part, supplies energy resources, oil in particular, to the rest of the world, which is us, and as it is a priority for Australia, that’s us, to secure a share of that particular resource, the oil, so we must continue with our current foreign policy, war, with the implication that discontinuing the war, premature withdrawal, would reduce the security on that resource that we have achieved.

Witness that Tip quip again:

‘What Brendan was talking about was a different point, the point that was made in the security update that the globe has an interest in energy security.’

There it is! Has as opposed to had, which means that Honest, Tip & Co. are basically saying ‘Yeah, we didn’t think of that before but now you come to mention it…’

Elroy doesn’t know which is more scary; that our elected leaders are such egregious liars that they can send us to war without ever actually telling us the real reason why, or that they are so monumentally witless that they did not consider the impact on our ‘resource security’ of that war.

Everything the Liberal Party elite has said since Thursday has basically intimated that while the invasion of Iraq was not about oil it could be, any day now. Here’s Tip again:

‘It is possible to see down the track that you could have wars over energy if growing industrial powers felt that their interests were being contained, but that is not Iraq.’

So war MIGHT happen over oil, but it hasn’t yet. Really. Honest. Would we lie to you?

But is their new premise even accurate? WOULD our withdrawal from Iraq reduce our resource security? Are they saying that the USA™, our Great And Powerful Friend® who is busy just stealing the oil anyway, and who has every intention of continuing to do so for at least the next thirty years or so, are going to cut off our pipeline if we take and bat and ball and go home? Or are they suggesting that the great experiment is a washout and that IRAN, having annexed Iraq, will deny us the black stuff?

Both scenarios are fairly far-fetched. Exxon et al don’t care who buys their products and Iran/Iraq, if and when the US hightails it out of Dodge, will be selling to all comers to finance reconstruction and because they can. Anyhoo, if all else fails there’s always the Saudis! Or Kuwait! Or Hugo Chavez! Or them democracy-forsaking Ruskies! Or learn to live with less.

But there was something even scarier in Nelson’s message – that it was important to support the ‘prestige’ of the US and US, a comment which is nothing less than an admission of defeat; he is saying that this thing cannot be won –if he thought it could be he would not be talking in these terms – yet he and the rest of the COW™ continue their madness.

So there’s another cat out of the bag – thousands of people are dying, innocent civilians and coalition troops, for pride, a society is being blown apart and world peace is being destabilised for generations to come for the sake of prestige, religious fundamentalists are being recruited and encouraged, on all three sides of the great Abrahamic divide, to kill each other and those of us who reckon all three can keep it to themselves, to maintain for the coalition’s honour.

The world is being slaughtered on the altar of profit and superstition to preserve George Bush’s dignity, and so the only solution is for Bush, Cheney, Howard and Blai – too late, he jumped, what a clever fellow – to be removed immediately. Continuing to protect the US and UK’s ‘prestige’ will not, by its very nature, ever end and ever succeed; it can only doom us all to an everlasting war fought purely out of hubris, and nations that wage war in order to keep up appearances will never win – the very best they can expect is to not lose. On the other hand, as the USA™ gets to define ‘losing’ then what would ordinarily look like a loss could turn out, in these Orwellian times, to be a win. Who knows?

But it certainly doesn’t look like Tip or Johnny are in any hurry to ship out of Iraq; the Australian Federal Government have ordered up more military toys in the past ten years than ever before, and although most of them will be next to useless they do make us look pretty damn tough and our fearless leaders are sure talking the talk.

However, it has been mooted on other darker and dingier corners of the internets that given the recent movements in the USA™, with more and more Republicans jumping ship every day, that Bush might well be about to leave Howard in the lurch by announcing a troop withdrawal in an attempt to bolster his party’s chances in the 2008 election, and in the process dooming Howard in 2007. As Nixon crucified McMahon in 1974 by visiting China a month after McMahon roasted Whitlam for doing exactly that, so Bush may well catch Howard somewhat on the hop.

Johnny, unfortunately, has not yet cottoned on to this scenario and so is still singing from the current sheet music thus:

‘The region will see further turbulence and Iran's nuclear and wider regional ambitions remain a point of particular concern. In these circumstances, it is all the more critical that the coalition succeed in establishing a stable, democratic Iraq.’

‘…WILL see further turbulence…’ tells us quite plainly that Johnny has no intention of going anywhere and is actually rather relishing the prospect of dealing with that naughty Iran, a state which indeed has ‘wider regional ambitions’ due to the COW™’s shenanigans.

Furthermore, Howard says he wishes to establish a ‘stable, democratic Iraq’ but that will take, literally, half a century or more. Stable AND democratic is a tough ask; Palestine is a democracy but not exactly stable while Singapore is stable but not really democratic, and the fact that both of those nation states have been working on their stability and democracy since the end of the British Empire and WW2 demonstrates just how hard stability and democracy are to achieve.

Tip tipped in to this one too:

‘The Middle East will never resolve the endemic problems that it has ... until you can see a system of government which takes into account the views of people which is responsible to the ballot box rather than the bullet.’

Never mind that that the ‘endemic problems’ that the Middle East has ‘will never resolve’ are due squarely to the constant meddling by the way-out West over the centuries. The west are periodically prone to poking the beehive of Islam with a sharp stick and complaining when they get stung while ignoring the fact that, left alone, the occupants of said hive are relatively harmless and really quite productive.

And as for the ‘system of government which takes into account the views of people which is responsible to the ballot box rather than the bullet’, the aforementioned Palestine has had all sorts of troubles making the transition from one to the other, and no thanks to the west either. Palestine was encouraged to hold elections, where the west hoped that nationalist lefties Fatah would be toppled by a more moderate force; alas for the west, the people of Palestine elected feared ‘terrorist’ organization Hamas, whereupon the west started supporting their former foe Fatah.

The message this sends to budding Middle East democracies is not good – basically, it says that we will respect your elections s long as we like who you elect, which of course is highly undemocratic. No wonder they don’t trust us!

Tip once said, without a trace of irony, that an Islamic theocracy in Iraq would be a terrible outcome and it would be far better to install some sort of ‘secular strongman’ to hold the place together. In that case, maybe it may have been wiser to pry lose their former friendly strongman and organise another one a little more benign. It would have been cheaper and tidier for all concerned.

So either the USA™ administration really did believe in its impossible dream of Geneva on the Tigris, or knew that it would all end in tears but went in anyway, never intending to leave, as it is entirely possible that the White House/Pentagon knew perfectly well that once Saddam had been successfully contained (in a coffin), the Sunni and Shia would set to with whatever implements of destruction came to hand, thus creating a convenient smokescreen behind which the COW™ can swipe all the oil it needs.

Now, however, despite whatever encouraging noises Howard and Tip might make, the jig may well be up for the COW™.
The costs of the Iraq War are spiralling out of all control, with no end in sight, while Army numbers are down and the American public are becoming increasingly over it, and it has been pointed out by heads far wiser than Elroy’s that the time is coming when the USA™ will need to make a fundamental choice between being a democracy or an empire.

It took WW2 for the British to realize that that they could not do both, and so chose the former, but what will the USA™ do? Holding together its extensive network of 725 bases across the world, along with waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, will stretch American resources to breaking point, so either the administration gets a little more authoritarian and REALLY starts telling everyone what to do or pulls back and accepts that it is not as exceptional as it wants to believe and that its manifest destiny is not to rule the whole world after all.

But the chances of this are so remote as to not really be worth serious consideration. The USA™ will not relinquish its mantle of omnipotent world policeman and give up its empire without a titanic struggle, and so the rest of the world is doomed to make whatever we can of the USA™’s failure in Iraq. The ramifications of the debacle are starting to flow through as we speak; now that the world knows that the emperor has no clothes, the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Russia and Europe are just now beginning to comprehend just what the USA’s defeat in Iraq means to the old New World Order™ order and what their place might be in the post-New World Order™ order.

So yes, the war is about oil but it is abut so much more – it is actually about the future of the world. Nothing too much to worry about then.

*Peter Costello earned the epithet 'Tip' from former Prime Minister Paul Keating a couple a weeks ago when he said Pete was 'All tip and no iceberg.'Ah, Paul, you had yer faults, but we do miss you. Sic 'em agin soon.

Ejected, Neglected And Unelected – Blair, Howard, Bush And What Awaits Us – REDUX! NOW WITH ADDED BLACKWATER! (See paragraphs 43 -50! It's worth it!)

Hi kids! Sorry about the wait! Anyhoo, here’s what’s going down here in the GSS (Great Southern Sunburnt Country©) and beyond. Things are hotting up some in the Anglophone members of the COW’s (Coalition Of the Willing™) pre-election campaigns as the MOW (Masters Of War®) try anything to cling to what is left of their ever diminishing power.

Australia, Britain and the USA are all up for RC (Regime Change™) over the next eighteen months and, as the MOW® begin to realise that for them the road ahead is hard, yea, and the mountain high, so they start to strategise on how to at least keep their relative parties in control if not themselves.

For Noo Labour’s Tony Blair, the answer was pretty obvious – cut and run. He knew that running in the next election would result in the biggest Labour thrashing since the evil Baroness Thatcher took down a befuddled Jim Callaghan and commenced her ROT (Reign of Terror©) over the hapless Britons back in 1979, and so laid the ground work for his disappearance a couple of years ago by declaring a timetable for surrender.

He now manages to be Labour’s longest serving PM and to leave office with his rep. violently savaged but not entirely negated, while poor Gordon Brown, long-time Blair hostage, tries to convince the wary, jaded, disappointed and downright furious Poms that he isn’t Tony, really, not Tony, Tony who? So Brown gets to either lose the next general election and thus be blamed for throwing away the largest majority in British parliamentary history, or be the guy that ‘lost’ the Iraq war. Actually, in old Blighty, this is probably the best move he could make.

And Tony gets to go and be the new head of the World Bank, or whatever other saving-the-poor role he can rustle up, in an attempt be the friend-of-the-people, finder-of-peace-in-the-Emerald-Isle, dictator-vanquishing saviour-of-the-third-world he wants history to demand that he is.

This quitting-before-the-bucket-of-shite-falls-on-yer-head approach to leadership is a luxury of the Westminster system that Honest John is starting to wish he’d indulged in too. And he may well; Crickey! has reported a few juicy rumours about Little Johnny, one of which is that he will just quit when Parliament heads for their respective ski-lodges come June.

Any excuse would do, dog died, whatever, because folks, don’t forget that he didn’t earn his ‘Honest’ for nothing – it was, and always will be, ironic. And this way he gets to go out on top and avoid the likelier-by-the-day scenario of being the only the second Prime Minister to lose his seat, but as this would also reveal himself to be nought but a craven, trembling coward, Elroy thinks he go to his Waterloo loins girded for a shellacking of the worst possible order.

And the theories continue to swirl around Howard’s ‘We’ll all be ‘rooned!’ speech to the party room last Monday where he said that the Liberals ‘…would not just lose but be annihilated’. What was he up to? Was he just putting a ferret up the trousers of his party and its fan base? After all, Howard never says anything he doesn’t exactly mean; it is very rare for him to just blather off the top of his head and don’t forget that the fear factor is weapon he knows how wield all to well. Or was he, just for a change, actually being honest?

Another thesis correlates with Elroy’s predictions in March, that Howard, win or lose, will bail soon after the election. Elroy still has the house on the Costello, Abbott and Turnbull trifecta for the Liberal leadership, taking turns like good little sausages until someone wins the glittering prize.

However, it has also been ruminated that Howard’s comment about Treasurer Peter Costello and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s eleven-year gigs being a ‘weakness’ in reality meant ‘Time’s up!’ for Pete and that, if Johnny was to lose the election then, then the Liberal Party must start its own ABC (Anyone But Costello®) and plonk Abbott in the job. Manipulating the party to gip Cossie out of his dearest desire be Howard’s final act of revenge against a man who has hated him for years but was ever too gutless to take the challenge implied by Howard’s famous mantra ‘I’ll remain leader as long as the party wants me’.

That is if there is a Liberal Party left which whose new party room is not a phone box. Recent media reports say an in-depth examination of the polls reveal a 10% swing to Labor that could mean sayonara to not only Howard but also Costello and Turnbull; the Liberal/National Coalition have been estimated to lose forty-nine of their eighty-nine seats, giving Labor a thumping seventy-two seat majority and sending thirteen of the Coalition’s twenty-three ministers off to an interview with CentreLink.

And as Elroy has previously mentioned, with Federal Liberal sitting in the same gutter as State Liberal, powerless, irrelevant and ripping each other’s eyes out, the Liberal Party will simply implode. Who will take its place? Well, Elroy hears that Pauline Hanson’s back in business and she ain’t frying chips – we welcome to the stage the anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-globalisation Pauline's United Australia Party! Hmm. The words 'Populist' and 'Demagouge' come strangely to mind...

Bush, however, faces a different state of affairs. George Bush can quit if he wants to, but that as would put him an ignominious club which at the moment consists soley of Richard Milhous Nixon, Elroy can’t see it happening. Bush can’t run again anyway, so his most pressing task is ensuring the success of his successor.

There is plenty of debate over whether Bush should have ever been elected president in the first place or the second place, the 2000 and 2004 elections being full of suspect behaviour, and the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and a list of other high crimes and misdemeanors that should, by rights, see BushCorp take that long bus ride to the Big House, have irredeemably poisoned the US voting public against the Republican Party for possibly generations to come.

With a popularity rating at twenty-eight per cent and no end in sight to a deeply unpopular war, elections just aren’t going to cut it for the GOP (Grand Old Party™) but they cannot lose; there are not, Elroy believes, enough shredders with the requisite grunt or just enough shredders anyway, in all of Washington and surrounding states, to munch through the evidence so something else will happen.

But what? Aha! Let’s ask Elroy for some wild supposition! Here are a few scenarios: Stealing the next election is going to be most troublesome as they’ve used up all of their tricks; ‘caging’ lists, dodgy electronic voting machines, disenfranchisement of every persuasion, all of their little stunts have been rumbled by a growing army of voters who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Furthermore, even if the Republicans did pull out every stop in their possession, they can’t take the chance that it wouldn’t be enough – the 2006 midterms weren’t lost for want of trying – and so we move on the next proposition.

Kill George. It’s simple enough. Assassinating George would generate a huge wave of sympathy for the Republican Party and maybe they could surf that wave back into power, especially if the patsy was a Muslim patsy. As if he’d be anything else! On the other hand, that would make Dick Cheney president, not a good look for the Republicans going into an election; one the other hand, he’s the president anyway so what’s the diff?

However, assassinating George would mean they couldn’t assassinate Obama, as the electorate couldn’t stand two assassinations in one year – it’s ain’t 1968, y’know – and knocking off Barak would steal George’s thunder, but as they have to kill Barak, well, they’re going to have to think of something else.

What? Of course they have to whack Barak! And will! Don’t look so shocked! Waddaya think, they’re gonna let him become president? Puh-leese!

Or, and this one’s really out there, they could just have an election with Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate and lose it, which the market will hate, and the fall-out from the subsequent scandals, impeachments, imprisonments and looming real estate meltdown will be catastrophic for the world economy as China and the Royal House of Saud pull their dollars out of the US and convert them into Euros, a move which will, in turn, panic President Clinton into fast-tracking George W. Bush’s of establishing the NAU (North American Union™) out of the USA, Canada and Mexico in order to institute the Amero as a counter to the Euro’s dominance and thus sparking the second American Civil War as various redneck militias, Canucks and wetbacks up pitchforks and head for the final hoedown.

This next cunning scheme is the nuttiest, the craziest, the most whacked-out piece of pre-emptive conspiracy theorizing Elroy has ever deliriumed and one, by the way, that is already happening. On May 9, George W. Bush signed the NSAHSPD (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive™) which granted him virtual dictatorial powers in the event of a declared CNE (Catastrophic National Emergency™) such an emergency being defined as ‘any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.’

This directive is in direct defiance of the provisions of the NMA (National Emergency Act™) and the directive’s language negates any requirement that Bush submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists and implements the president’s powers without congressional approval or oversight.

Congress can supposedly ‘modify, rescind, or render dormant’ the authority if it reckons the pres has acted inappropriately but the new directive, drafted and signed to supersede the National Emergency Act, makes no reference to Congress; instead it creates the new position of NCC (National Continuity Co-ordinator™), who plans for NEF (National Essential Functions™) by arranging for private sector organizations and all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments are function under Bush’s directives in the event of a CNE, without any specific act of Congress authorizing it.

In short, this Executive Order allows Bush to assume power to direct any and all government and business activities without congressional approval or oversight. He has now put in place power to arbitrarily and unilaterally impose martial law, suspend the Constitution, assume virtual dictatorial power, deploy under his command military forces into U.S. cities to round up citizens declared by his regime to be enemy combatants or security threats, and to retain control of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, military personnel, law enforcement agencies, and private sector organizations until the CNE is declared over, and who declares the CNE over? That’s right…

Meanwhile, the rhetoric ramps up. The fear factor is back as Bush suddenly remembers about that Osama guy. Never forget what George said in ’02, not long after he vowed to get OBL ‘Dead or alive’:

‘Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.’

‘But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became -- we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al-Qaida killers anymore. And if we -- excuse me for a minute -- and if we find a training camp, we'll take care of it. Either we will or our friends will.’

Now, far be it from me to call George II a flip-flopper – a murderous, narcissistic, deluded, functionally illiterate alcoholic sociopath would be far more accurate – but the other day he said this:

‘In the minds of al-Qaida leaders, 9/11 was just a down payment on violence yet to come. It is tempting to believe that the calm here at home after 9/11 means that the danger to our country has passed. Here in America, we are living in the eye of a storm, all around us, dangerous winds are swirling and these winds could reach our shores at any moment.’

‘Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: He calls the struggle in Iraq a 'war of destiny. The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.'

Who? Osama wha? Ain’t he that there dee-moh-krat? For a guy Bush isn’t too concerned about, he seems pretty damn concerned. But there’s one more ingredient needed for such a situation, and of course the White House has not let us down.

In America, right now, internment camps are being constructed by, of course, Halliburton, on a contract from the DoHS (Department of Homeland Security™) awarded in 2005 worth $385m to be used for immigration, disaster relief or the troublingly vague’ ... to support the rapid development of new programs’. Eek! John Ashcroft said they could be used for American citizens who were deemed ‘enemy combatants’ and guess who says does the deeming? Gimmie a ‘G’! Gimmie an ‘E’! Gimmie an ‘O’! Gimmie an ‘R’! Gimmie another ‘G’! Gimmie an ‘E’! What’s that spell? Fucking lunatic! What’s that spell…

Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said that he “could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country. If they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.’

So it’s not just Elroy! The chances that anti-war dissenters and other neer’do-wells would avoid a holiday in such a facility are about the same as the Republicans winning 2008, so should we be afraid? Not down here, yet, but the denizens of our GAPF© (Great and Powerful Friend©)? Oh boy.

So what is Elroy getting at? Have you all done your sums? Take one election that cannot be lost at any cost, add surreptitious executive orders allowing George to govern by presidential fiat, mix with 600-odd domestic concentration camps, stir in a generous amount of boogey man paranoia and what do you have a recipe for? 9/11 Redux!

No wonder they didn’t want to catch Osama! He’s one pre-selected patsy! Who else would fit the bill? Who else would fit the bill? Ahmadinajad? Hugo Chavez? (Um, memo to self – re: Next 9/11: Possible perpertrators…)

The only reason AHBASNE (America Hasn’t Been Attacked Since 9/11!™) is that the terrorists haven’t needed to, but now they are being threatened with RC maybe they will act. A mini-nuke in the White House? 9/11 is a hard act to follow, but they’ll think of something; another 9/11 would certainly do the job, in fact it’s probably the only way to do the job. Everlasting Bushiness!

There is, however, one more option left open to the Republicans, and for that we cross over to a certain Dr Thomas Sowell – free-market economist, major influence on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a syndicated columnist in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and sundry other mainstream establishment organs. He’s a lovely chap, and he wrote this not long ago in the National Review:

‘When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.’

Whoa, Jimmy! Say what? Hey, don’t sugar coat it doc; tell us what you really think!
And he’s not kidding, either. On that bastion of Fair And Balanced™- ness, Hannity & Colmes, he expounded further ‘I’m very serious about whether or not the country can be saved at all’ he intoned. When asked what crisis would precipitate such an action, Sowell said ’If the political system becomes ever more irresponsible, if the education system becomes ever more degenerate, if the race hustlers polarize this country and the schools and intelligentsia dismantle the values on which it’s built’

Indeed, if BushCorp finally get rumbled for their 9/11 chicanery this might well the only option left open to them, and there’s no shortage of military types to put their hand up for such an insurrection, good Bushies more than willing to take up the cudgels for Christ and cast that ‘goddamn piece of paper’ known as the ‘Constitution’ in the fires of hell from whence it was spawned.

Take General William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin; he is obviously no great fan of democracy or even America’s vague semblance of it. He has no time for elections per se – as far as Boykin is concerned, the only vote that needs to be counted is the one cast by the Big Cheese Himself. ‘Why is this man in the White House?’, Boykin asks audiences about the unikely ascendency of KIng George II, ‘The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?’ Hmm. Good questions all, Jezza! So, what’s the scoop? ‘And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.’ Eek!.

Now, be aware, be very aware, that again this guy is no fringe-dweller, no retired old curmudgeon who can’t shut up; from April 1998 to February 2000 he served as the Commanding General, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from March 2000-2003 he was the Commanding General at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, and in June 2003 he was appointed Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and he’s still is. Gulp!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Elroy, you’re a fucking idiot. How’s he going to do that? Arm Sunday school teachers?’ No, Elroy’s afraid, very afraid, that the last piece of the infrastructure is also already in place. Obviously someone will have to round up the traitors, the dissenters, the A-rabs, the ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and other ‘enemies of the state’ and it won’t be the military – Bush has busted all his soldiers – it will be Blackwater.

Ever heard of Iraq’s ‘private security contractors’? The USA has paid $4 Billion out to ‘private security contractors’ so far, and the biggest of them are to mercenary armies what Halliburton is to meals-on-wheels. There are at least 30,000 Blackwater soldiers of fortune in Iraq, some say more, along with another 100,000 other private suppliers of logistical support working for various other operators.

Incredibly, ‘private security contractors’ in Iraq are not subject to any laws, American or Iraqi, civil or military, which means that there are an unknown or at least undisclosed number of heavily armed, highly trained, utterly lawless mercenaries roaming Iraq with no confines whatsoever at rates of pay many times that of government regulars. 40c of every $1.00 spent by the US in Iraq goes inauditably to the private sector – the world is at outsourced war.

And Blackwater does not just supply soldiers. They run their own training camps in Iraq, have a 7,000 acre facility in North Carolina, another in Illinois and yet another under construction in san Diego, twenty-odd aircraft and helicopter gunships, contracts from the US Federal Government upwards of $750m and are currently setting up an intelligence arm, Total Intelligence complete with their own drone spy planes. Private military intelligence? Uh oh.

But surely this bunch are for helping out in foreign affairs? Not to be taken internally? Export only? Domestic consumption prohibited? The Louisiana National Guard were in Iraq during the Hurricane Katrina debacle, but hundreds of black-clad Blackwater goons in wraparound sunnies toting AK47s were on the streets of New Orleans way before any federal or state military with orders to guard uptown mansions and generally ‘kill looters’, a service which cost the Federal Government $240,000 per day.

But would this operation put itself on the line for Bush? Well, apart from the fact that he is their best customer (although they are setting up an international branch in the conveniently tax-lite Barbados), its founder is one of the faithful. Ex-US Navy SEAL Erik Prince inherited $1.3 billion in cash after the sale of his family’s car-parts manufacturing operation and put it to good use, as befitting a good Dominionist Christian.

Dominionists are to Christians what Islamists are to Muslims; they believe that there is no law but God’s law and seek political means to introduce it – they are, for all intents and purposes, a Christian Taliban and there are millions of them, including the owner of the biggest private army on the planet and, sadly, most of the White House staff and the President of the United States. Worried yet?

So there you go, folks; in a climate where presidents can declare themselves to be above the law, where civilian prison camps can be openly constructed, where even respected men of letters like Thomas Sowell can advocate the establishment of a military junta and not be ridiculed and sidelined but lionized and feted,where top brass generals can openly regard the democratic process as some sort of affront to the will of God and not be cashiered and sent to a home form the terminally bewildered, where an alternative private partisan army can be raised and maintained on taxpayers' millions, well, nothing is beyond speculation. At least the military coup option does away with the need for subterfuge and patsies, and it would sure shut the conspiracy theorists up.

This has been a special souvenir edition of Let’s Ask Elroy!™. Cut it out and keep it, read it again from the bunk of an internment facility near you and remember where you read it first. Before, that is, they take you out the back and…

Back To The Future? We'll All Be 'Rooned!'

Once again, Australian trade unions are under siege from the forces of an ever-desperate conservatism seeking to scare the population into believing that any number of reds are hiding under any amount beds in order to steal the peoples’ money for their own nefarious ends.

Conservative Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard, of the Liberal Party of Australia, claims to represent a new age of industrial relations when he is really plunging us back to standards comparable with those of pre-World War One; The Australian Labor Party’s Kevin ‘That Nice Mr’ Rudd, on the other hand, says that workers must be represented fairly by their respective union bodies in order for a mature, progressive society to move forward in a serious and meaningful fashion, and if this means tearing up Australian Workplace Agreements, so be it. Howard says we must go forward into the past – Rudd says we must go back to the future.

The unelection campaign is hotting up down here in a sunburnt country as Honest John ramps up the rhetoric against That Nice Mr. Rudd. Industrial Relations (IR) has become the latest blood-soaked battlefield as Labor promise to wind back some of the more onerous provisions of a satirically titled ‘WorkPlace Relations Legislation Amendment (More Jobs! Better Pay)’ that no one voted for. The notion that his cunning plan to roll the rights of Australian workers back to those in place at Federation might be usurped has the honest one fair sputtering on his ’45 Lafitte in indignation, but luckily the plucky PM has the business lobby to hold his hand and make the appropriate noises.

Leading the charge is such altruistic and civic-minded concerns as Rio Tinto, BHP/Biliton and that tireless advocate of workers’ rights, The Australian Mines and Metals Association (AMMA). They are shrieking to the highest heavens that the ‘WorkChoices’ legislation and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) are the only things propping up Australia’s mining boom and without them the entire world mineral market will collapse, bringing a pestilence and blight upon the land and nothing to do with India and China becoming the planet’s one-stop services and manufacturing shops.

AWAs are individual contracts that employees must voluntarily sign with their employers. The theory – and Elroy just loves conservative political theory – is that employees and employers will come together mano-a-mano, on that good ol’ level playing field so beloved of free marketeers without those big, bad boogey-man union nasty-pasties getting their two cents worth, strike a deal that makes both parties want to plant a sloppy WorkChoice smooch on one another and pledge everlasting individual agreement adoration.

Both parties are then supposed to trip merrily back though the sweet-smelling meadows of industrial contract law to their workstations various and harvest the blossoms and blooms of a deregulated labour market, bosses rueful about the concessions that wily Afghan refugee screwed out of him and said refugee safe in the knowledge that she has fully protected her rights despite the fact that she speaks only Farsi.

As Honest John will waste absolutely no time in telling you, the greatest impediment to peace, goodwill and an IR environment so harmonious as to render doves redundant are those utter, utter beasts the unions. Unions are, as we all know, the scourge of all mankind, venal and corrupt axis’s of evil that prey on the pay of those dispensing honest sweat and fair dinkum toil to feather their own nests and drink their members’ blood in orgies of satanic delirium. Obviously, workers’ interests are best protected by those bodies that have a vested interest in them, like the Australian Chamber of Commerce.

The problem for unions is that they have doomed themselves to irrelevance by dint of their success. 100-odd years ago, unions were an absolute necessity for workers as they fought tooth and nail for rights that are now taken for granted, and therein lies the rub. People now do not realise that the rights they enjoy are because of the unions, and so resent paying their dues, but the price of liberty is eternal vigilance I tells ya!

Honest John Howard’s idea of progress is to take us back to time which is now before living memory which is being painted as being nice, different, unusual. Some workers’ have been duped into thinking that the capitalist classes just live to make their employees’ life worthwhile, ignoring that without union intervention they too could be working for one to five dollars a day like their third-world comrades.

Some people have made an analogy between unions and business, that unions are ‘labour corporations’ selling man-hours on a level playing field with employers, but the owners of t’ means o’ production, lad, have always had and will always have the upper hand, unless workers stay strong. The Liberal Party whine that it should all be ‘Fair And Balanced™’ but it can’t be. Capital has the power. The only bulwark the worker has against this is the union. Is that fair? Probably not. But capitalism isn’t fair, the system isn’t fair, and as capital has no morality per se, business will only fight fair when they are forced to.

Business has been hollering ‘We’ll all be ‘rooned’ since slavery was abolished (another feat not due to the largesse of corporate interests), and it just wants to be happy and safe in the knowledge that they can hire and fire at will, and drive down wages to wherever makes the most profits for their poor widdle put-upon shareholders, the people who are, after all, the backbone of society and the only ones to which the corporation must be responsible. Investors must have certainty! The workforce can just blunder on from day to week wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from, but INVESTORS MUST HAVE CERTAINTY!!!

However, free market ideologues that quote Friedman are as much Utopian nutters as any commie they may care to mention. If workers are not represented by a single entity then they will be picked off and exploited. Divide and rule. Elroy has a friend (Yes! Apparently it’s true!) whose employer was bought out recently, and as result the workers there were ‘moved’ into the new corporate structure, which meant that their contracts were torn up and AWAs were put in place. They were all called in to ‘negotiate’ individually, in a process known in the real world as ‘sign or resign’. Not ‘re-sign; resign.’

They were told not to discuss the content of their contracts with anyone. Elroy’s pal stated that she could not sign the AWA due to an unconscionable clause and, in spite of corporate directives, discussed it far and wide. All the workers in her department refused to sign and the company backed down. Fortunately they were skilled workers and so had something to bargain with. God help them if they had been Sudanese cleaners.

Unions are a necessary evil; without them we’d all be buggered because business cannot be trusted to be reasonable and they have proved this time and time again. If they did behave properly the unions would not be, or would ever have been, required. But the nature of capitalism requires that enterprises do all to they can to maximise profits. That means increasing productivity and reducing input costs by any method available, and labour costs are part of that equation. Why do companies relocate overseas? To reduce labour costs.

Monetarist policy demands that a certain percentage of the labour force, between 5%-15%, is unemployed at any one time. Of course, the victims of this system are blamed for their predicament, but it must be that way to keep labour at each other’s throats and a free kick for capital. Some bright spark from the ANZ admitted this the other day when he said that jobs had been scarce over the past thirty years, blowing apart the lie that the work was out there but the unemployed just couldn’t be bothered looking for it.

So having conned us then as now, how’s it looking now that a labour shortage maybe on the horizon and labour might have some bargaining power? The goalposts are moved in order to help business some more. Conservatives love to scream from the rooftops that the country is being held hostage to the unions’ demands, but is it?

Yes. It is being held to ransom by unions, by staunch, militant unions whose tentacles reach far up into the echelons of power. The government are in the pockets of these unions; politicians argue their case for them and the government uncritically do all in their power to mollify these institutions. Their wishes are the government’s commands. There can be no doubt that they legislate on the unions’ behalf; the Australian Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations are in the box seat of power and they don’t feel much like moving.

They are the correct analogy for workers’ unions. As business colludes, so does labour, and business does collude; anyone that thinks that they are constantly fretting about ‘competition’ is also waiting for the Tooth Fairy to show up.

If Labor is in the pocket of the ACTU, then Elroy would rather that than a government that was in the pocket of the ACC. In the end, trade unions represent the people. Business associations represent vested interests. One is fundamentally orientated toward enriching the great unwashed, and one is orientated toward enriching the corporate elite. Elroy knows which he would prefer. What about youse?

If the Liberal Party is somehow mysteriously returned to power at the end of the year then it will be big business usual, but once those AWAs really start to bite the punters will flock back the unions and the 20th Century IR battles will have to be rerun. Ho hum. Go foward to the past to get back to the future? We'd rather not, but if we have to – we will.

In Iraq They Call It Monday.

Well well, it happened again, and although everyone is shocked, at the same time no one is particularly surprised. Another ‘loser’ snaps and bingo! Dead people.

There are so many questions raised by this catastrophe that its hard to know where to start, and although Elroy is pretty sure that everyone in the bloggerhood has had a crack at it he also feels the need to opine.

The problems are many fold. Society, education, the health system, that bloody second amendment, popular culture, history, all of these have a bearing on what brought Cho Seung-Hui his point of no return, and as Elroy doesn’t mind a bit of depth, deep into these issues he will go. Crack an ale and order pizza – this might take a while.

Of course, the more authoritarian among us have got it all pegged. Cho was evil. Simple as that. No more to see here, move along please, evil is as evil does. However, Elroy finds it intriguing that, no matter what improvements are made in audio/visual technologies, some people will always see the world in black and white and the answers to life’s questions on the rear bumper of an SUV.

It is true that Cho Seung-Hui was pretty severely messed up, and maybe he shouldn’t have been wandering around unsupervised, but could it not be argued that this tragedy is a consequence of the conservative philosophy that denies any positive influence that the ‘nanny state’ may bring and demands that individuals be ultimately responsible for their actions?

Cho certainly took responsibility for his actions in one respect; his blew his own head off. He didn’t say ‘I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me! I mis-shot! I ’m going into rehab!' I don’t quite recall the exact massacre to which you refer!’ No, instead he understood that there would have to be a price paid for his rampage, and although Cho probably considered blowing his own head off quite a bargain in comparison to the alternative, it cannot be denied that he suffered for his crimes.

But where conservative, or rather neo-conservative, ideology has contributed to this fiasco is in the cult of the personal, the perversion of autonomy. The right like to blame this concept on the hippies of the 1960s, but seeing as said counter-culturalists were also busy advocating communal living, a general end-to-capitalism-as-we-know-it and adventures in the land of the psychoactive pharmaceutical, it’s hard to see how conservatives apportion the blame quite so easily. Unless they are covering for someone.

Which of course they are. The individualism of the ‘60s, the simple wish to able to follow one’s dreams and wishes without too much undue interference from the man, is a very different kettle of lentils to the marauding isolate that straddles the globe today; as the lady once said, ‘the central message of Buddhism is not “every man for himself”’.

No, for the 21st Century’s manifestation of greed and selfishness we need look no further than Levi Strauss and his fawning acolytes, two of which did more damage to the fabric of society than I care to imagine, ladies and gentlemen I give you…Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan!

It is their ‘individualism’ that has poisoned the community well, not that of The Furry Freak Brother, it is their vision splendid which spawned the grotesque gargoyle of consume-or-dieism that gives not a flying fuck for his fellow man, not the amiable bumblings of Mr. Natural, but this is typical of conservatives' idea of personal responsibility – that everyone else should take personal responsibility for the havoc their ideas and subsequent actions have wreaked.

Conservatives are always yearning for some golden past, particularly that post-war utopia where everyone was nice to everyone else, always, forgetting that this brief epoch of alleged harmonial bliss was brought to them courtesy of none other than huge tariffs, strong unions and John Maynard Keynes, not free markets, a ‘flexible’ labour force and Milton Freidman.

Thirty years ago the promise of computers was that we would all have more leisure time. Well, that happened alright, it’s just that it was stolen and called unemployment, which enabled the powers-that-be to blame the people whose jobs were exported like so many woodchips for the consequences of those exports.

Making citizens fight for scraps instead inviting them for dinner was always going to end in tears; instituting self-preservation as the driving force of the people has led to a culture whereby the priority of the self is the self, an I’m-alright-Jack society which does not think it owes anything to anybody, let alone the community at large. And as the thought that that they should do something for nothing, however small, is anathema to the prevailing ethos, the great unwashed has withdrawn from society to tend only to its very nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even them.

There is another neo-con tactic in the arsenal of devide and rule, that of ‘starve the beast’– defunding the state-run services they can’t sell outright, like schools, hospitals, housing and transport – and it is active across the word, leading to a flight from all things public for a citizenry who are now too scared to risk them. This has left these institutions to either the most dogged ideologues or those with no other choices, and the resulting breakdown in education standards are nothing short of criminal.

Many public schools in the USA are only just holding on; in the poorer districts, students come from homes and backgrounds which are, shall we say, challenged in many ways, and the workload on teachers just keeps on growing. No Child Left Behind has increased schools’ paperwork and makes them to concentrate on attempting to pass the various tests that new legislation requires as schools that fail them are forced hire private education ‘consultants’ to supplement the teaching staff.

This puts an extra strain on already busted budgets, as the White House failed to actually fund NCLB. So now that educators are snowed under by having to get students through tests that are designed to see if the kids can pass tests, unimportant things like ‘critical thought’ go to the wall, nothing gets learnt and bored students start to entertain themselves in other ways, like bullying and ostracizing whatever misfit just happens to wander past.

This funding drain has been trickling the lifeblood from public schools for decades. Governments, particularly those of the Anglophone countries, say that ‘It’s no good just chucking money at it’ but Elroy says that sounds like a pretty good idea. Chuck money at education. Lots. All the time. And if that doesn’t work, chuck some more – it works for defense departments! We spend less on educating children than we do on killing them.

Another of the problems with the conservatives’ miserable mantra of ‘individual responsibility’ is that it was extended to citizens who could not, by no fault of their own, be entirely responsible. Now, on no account think that Elroy is advocating a return to the nuthouses of old, but the he does think that the state has a far greater obligation to those with a mental illness, and by the extension the rest of society, than it is currently fulfilling. Not that asylums don’t exist anymore; on the contrary, more and more and built each year, it’s just the name has changed – now they are called ‘penitentiaries’, ‘prisons’ and ‘gaols’.

In Australia they called it ‘care in the community’, which is all very well, but the problem was there was no money to pay for it. The savings made by closing institutions went straight into higher profile and more glamorous projects, but someone forgot to tell the suffering that the ‘community’ would be looking after them now, so those not lucky enough to find refuge with what services remain are either left cowering in motels, hotels, hostels and whatever other flophouses find themselves ill-equipped enough to take them in, are in jail, are taking their long-suffering families down with them or are camped out in a cardboard box near you.

If people were lying on the streets with blood pouring from open wounds, a civilized society would put them in a hospital (for free!), but the doctrine created by the current world order dictates that we must leave anyone with a mental illness to die in the gutter. If anyone else gets harmed along the way, well, it’s still cheaper that the alternative, and anyway, it’ll be all their fault. Somehow.

So is this about the second amendment? Oooh, that second amendment! It’s a tricky one! What does it actually mean? Well, for a start, which one do you want to use? There are, it would seem, two versions.

Here’s the one signed and ratified by the states:

‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’

And here’s the version hand-written at the time that hangs in the National Archive:

‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

Oh, what a difference a comma makes! To Elroy, and others, this alters the meaning significantly but it’s a complicated issue, a matter of semantics and how English was written, used, and phrased in 1776. What the hell did it mean?

Elroy doesn’t pretend to know what was in the minds of the Founding Fathers as they negotiated the wording of the US Constitution way back when – indeed, that document’s inherent vagueness has kept many a law professor in Harris Tweed ever since ratification – but he would hazard a guess that the challenges faced by a collection of sparsely populated agricultural sharecropper colonies seeking to overthrow a monarchy manifesting itself as an absentee landlord and a ruling elite that put itself above the law are somewhat at odds with those facing a highly industrialized independent federation that wields supreme power with the largest economy and standing army on the face of the planet.

And it seems to Elroy that the gun lobby are as confused on this issue as anybody, if not more so. On the one hand they claim that the second amendment is sacrosanct to protect citizens against being taken over by the Federal Government, but on the other hand they say it is so citizens can protect themselves from each other. Or protection against marauding Muslims hordes. Or Mexicans. Or someone. Or something. Whatev.

Elroy reckons the second amendment was inserted to allow citizens to bear arms in order to maintain a militia in the absence of any state mandated facilities – y’know, armies and that –and if you ain’t in the militia, you don’t get the guns, but that’s just Elroy.

But unfortunately for the many thousands who die while looking down the pointy end of a personnel pacifier, those-who-should-know have obviously interpreted it as meaning everybody automatically joins a militia at birth which means, in turn, that the USA’s psycho-turkey shoot ain’t gonna end anytime soon. It’s sad, for as good ol’ Ghandi once quipped ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’

It really needs to be asked if the Founding Fathers’ logic, whatever is was, is any longer truly applicable as the effects that the second amendment is having today, now, in the 21st Century, can no longer be tolerated. The USA’s firearm death rate is the highest in the world, five times its nearest rival, and it is a society where not only are there are 300 million people for 250 million guns but where the solution to that seems to be handing out the missing 50 million as soon as is humanly possible.

And along with this excessive reach of firearms is its attendant culture, a message sung out long and loud from all corners of the USA that says it all right to own a gun – hell! Better make it twelve! What should be a privilege is claimed as a right actively and positively encouraged by all stratas of society. The rest of west looks at the USA with bewilderment, unable to fathom why the Americans give guns away in cornflake packets and then wonder why people shoot them at each other.

This has always bothered Elroy. How you can arm 5/6ths of the population and not expect them to go ‘Bang!’ at each other every now and then? It’s what guns are for! The NRA argue that if you are going to ban guns because they kill people, then you must also ban cars for the same reason, but Elroy says nay!

Cars are designed to move from A to B – death is a secondary, unintended function – but for guns, death is the primary function. In fact there is no secondary function – they certainly don’t go from A to B, unless you chuck ‘em. They might double as a hammer, or maybe a paperweight, but their overall positive input to society is, as far as Elroy is concerned, nil.

The last part of this sorry puzzle is history, the history of immigration and the white man’s attitude to other cultures and ethnic identities. With WW2 still within living memory, the Korean War even more so, and considering it takes at least three generations for host cultures to love the immigrant ones, Elroy hazards a guess that American Koreans are subject to the same racism that Asians are subjected to wherever they go in the west, Virginia not exactly being a Mecca for the international Korean diaspora.

So, if you take a vulnerable, first generation immigrant, isolate him and insert him into a alien culture of overarching selfishness, an education system that has lost the faith of both those it seeks to help and itself and a society that encourages the use and ownership of firearms, and then bully and ridicule said immigrant sufficiently while failing to deal with any manifestations of mental illness, the chances are you will create the perfect storm. That, Elroy claims, is the tragedy that led to further tragedy, and that tragedy will only be compounded by even more unless we as a society do something. Soon.

So, what to do? First, admit that making China the manufacturing base of the world has not had an altogether positive effect on the west’s erstwhile labor force, and return to localized industries of all kinds. People live locally. They spend money locally. They want to educate their kids locally and they want to be employed locally.

Furthermore, concede that the income gap has been allowed, nay, encouraged to expand into a yawning chasm over the past two decades or so, and then do something about it, if for no other reason than to ensure that no one tries to break in and steal your telly.

Here’s a rough guide, a rule of thumb to tell how healthy your society is: if you have citizens that cannot afford a roof over their head, or breakfast, that are forced to commit crime in order to supply themselves with the basic necessities of urban survival, a prison population expanding at a greater rate than even your national debt and an elite which conspicuously consumes massive amounts or resources just because it can, the chances are your society could do with a dose of income redistribution.

Next, increase education funding; make public schools like palaces; pay teachers the same as doctors and lawyers; build more of them, smaller, more community based and throw so much money at them they drown in the stuff.

Ensure that sick people are made well, without sending them broke into the bargain, and that goes double for mental illnesses. Doctors and nurses should be like firemen – have so many of them they can be left to sleep in public hospitals built like five star hotels.

There are solutions for the gun thing too. Here’s one – amend the constitution! It’s been done before! After all, as GWB says, it’s just a piece of goddamn paper. Here’s another ¬¬– stick them guns in the crusher, like we did down here in Australia. Oooh, it were luverly! Crunch! Grind! Wrench! Sproing!

Or…don’t make anymore! Think of the money you’ll save! Money you could put into schools and hospitals, not that you’ll need that many more of the latter if you stop shooting each other!

But here's the best: stop making bullets. This way the 2nd amendment remains untrammeled, people stop dying in such vast and indiscriminate numbers both in the USA and the rest of the world, and no one’ll shoot anyone unless they really, really have to. And hopefully, not even then. Win! Win! Win!

And it is the rest of the world we really have to be worried about.
Elroy wonders whether this message of death and hatred for ones fellow man is truly what the world’s beacon of light and democracy wants to be broadcasting. Hey, here’s a scary thought – maybe it is!

Gun culture has spread to all four corners and every empty pocket on the globe; in some countries an AK 47 is cheaper than food. Sub-Saharan Africa is teeming with despots and their followers armed to their rotting teeth with a depressing array of hardware manufactured by either America, Britain, Russia France or China. But the chances of world peace are, sadly, remote, as it just so happens that the five countries with a permanent place on the United Nations Security Council, the five countries charged with promoting and keeping world peace are… America, Britain, Russia France and China.

And America is not just content with sending its hardware across the world, it’s sending its operating software too, although too much of that is being sent back to the manufacturer damaged, some of it in boxes. In Iraq, gun-toting maniacs are merely yet another impediment to buying bread, and events like the massacre at Virginia Tech happen several times a week, but they are both responses to the same malaise.

Both are acts committed by people driven so insane by a culture that flaunts its riches with such vulgarity and wanton disregard for human life that, rightly or wrongly, they felt they had no other option but to explode. The difference is, in America they call it a tragedy and in Iraq they call it Monday.