There's a whole heap they fail to mention there... the right honourable mister howard has also achieved the following:
- he's completely demolished and underfunded the public university system making higher education the domain soley of the wealthy, then wondered why we have no skilled workers and allowed big business special visas to import them cheap from other countries
- he instituted a wage reform system that over 70% of the population didn't want because it removes any right to group negotiations for wages and allows employers to sack workers for refusing to sign contracts that reduce their wages and benefits
- he's covered up numerous scandals such as the "children overboard" farce where he deliberatly misled the public in an effort to gain votes in an election he might have other wise lost, as well as his current game of hide & seek where he's trying to convince us that his government knew nothing about a semi-government body paying 30 million dollars in kickbacks to saddam hussein in a rip-off of the UN's food for oil program
- he's propped up the national telephone carrier (telstra) by pouring millions of tax-payer dollars into it in an effort to make it look profitable to he can sell it off to private enterprise. So far he's sold off 49% mainly to "mom & dad" shareholders who bought shares (at his recommendation) at a face value that's double what they're worth today.
- he's poured even more taxpayer money into a huge advertising campaign to get people to take up private health insurance in an effort to reduce the demand for our free public health system which produced great results for insurers, then allowed them to increase their insurance premiums at 2-5 times the rate of inflation every year for the past five years
- he instituted draconian gun control laws making it almost impossible to own so much as a BB gun (which of course drove all the weapons underground and encouraging a thriving black market that makes illegal weapons even harder to locate by authorities)
- he's taken australia into a war that no-one wanted, simply so he could stick his nose further up george w's texan rear end (no offense intended to the lone star state or it's residents)
- he's put illegal immigrants (or anyone who looks like one) into "detention centres" (he can't call them prisons coz these people haven't been legally arrested) in the middle of the desert for up to five years before even reviewing their applications. This includes entire families along with young children. How would you like your son or daughter to spend their first 5 years in a prison in a desert?
- and he's consistently run the highest taxing government in australian history.
Yes, howard has brought about economic stength and encouraged the free market, but he's done so at the cost of individual freedoms, common decency, and increasing the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots". This is a government that has an 11.9 billion dollar surplus (and that's AU billions, we have an extra zero compared to US billions) yet can't cough up 300 million to upgrade a stretch of federal highway that turns into a parking lots for five hours every day.
There's more to running a country well than turning a profit.
Matt
