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The union movement in Australia has fought hard to protect Australians' rights to equal pay for equal work, without discrimination. However the Howard Government's Work Choices legislation seems to have undermined this.
There has been much vilification of Kevin Rudd's approach. But Labor was bound to produce someone prepared to run a colourless campaign, or it would risk watching Howard from the other side of parliament for four more years.
In July 2002, Australia voted against a proposal to strengthen the 1984 UN Convention against Torture. John Howard's friendship with George W. Bush has compromised and tainted our once reputable record on human rights advocacy.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously described the Senate as 'unrepresentative swill'. It's not easy for Labor to rebut John Howard's claim that Labor's former union official representation in Parliament is 'out of whack'.
The Howard Government must be given credit for increasing the size of our migration program, including the refugee and humanitarian component. But the deliberations of civil society should provide a fair go for all refugees, including those who arrive by boat without a visa.
Both Government and Opposition seem committed to economic reform. But the fact that the Howard Government's fiscal policy is currently being steered by a drunken sailor is cause for alarm, as is Kevin Rudd's lack of experience and seeming inability to come up with his own economic policies.
Interviewed a year ago for the biography John Winston Howard, Treasurer Peter Costello complained about the Government's binge spending. Since then, the PM has committed many billions more, and given every indication the pace of spending will increase enormously between now and the election.
The largely Protestant World Council of Churches reacted favourably to this week's perceived "one true Church" declaration by the Roman Catholic Church, calling it an honest sharing of divergences that helps the cause of unity. There are lessons for the Federal Government, which should declare its alleged Northern Territory "land grab" to be such, and in the national interest.
John Howard’s "relaxed and comfortable" approach to national life, then, was not simply a rejection of Paul Keating’s aggressive, deliberate reforms. It represented a vile pandering to our cultural inertia, an affirmation of our basest tendencies.
It couldn’t make it as an issue in the federal election campaign, but the Howard Government is now embarked on radical change in Aboriginal affairs.
Mr Howard is a master of talking over people he doesn’t want to hear from. By going on talkback, politicians can appear to be available in an open and unstructured forum, reaching out over the heads of the media to constituents.
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