Howard’s Bad Record On:
Education: The Liberal Party has left public schools underfunded. At the same time, it continually increases funding for private schools. This is stupid, as the word PRIVATE suggests, the government doesn’t have any obligation to fund these schools, which often charge $8000 or more per year, which means only a rich minority can afford to use them. To put it in perspective, government is funding schools with swimming pools and theatres, while public school students are attempting to study in dodgy “portable” classrooms. The funding of private schools only shows up the lack of quality facilities in public schools more, because it shows that it isn’t that the government doesn’t have more money to spend on public schools but that it chooses not to.
The Liberal Party with the guidance of their education minister Nelson is also increasing HECS fees for universities, making it riskier for those with less money to take up the option of university study. On top of this, they are adding full-fee paying places. Every full-fee place that replaces a HECS place is a place taken away from a poorer and more intelligent student to a richer and less intelligent one. (Since everyone has a UAI or equivalent ranking and nobody would choose the full-fee paying option if they made it into a HECS place to start with).
Environment: A month ago, Howard released a Coalition policy called “Securing Australia’s Energy Future”. Its strategy centres on encouraging the use of fossil fuels, although suggesting small steps industry can voluntarily take to decrease emissions, and sets up coal, oil, and gas to be used to meet Australia’s energy needs. And decreasing the cost thereby encouraging the use of diesel, an environmentally unfriendly fuel. There is a much smaller proportion of funds aimed at encouraging the use and development of solar, hydro, and wind energy
Howard also gave uranium mining in the Kakadu National Park the go-ahead. He has done nothing to stop the logging of old-growth forests, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef by chemicals, or to reduce air pollution. He has given genetically engineered food the go-ahead with practically no investigation into its effects, and his government decided that genetically engineered food does not have to be labelled. In fact the only thing I can think of that he has done is recently discuss water distribution with the State governments. It seems Howard is not interested in doing anything that might upset big business interests.
Employment: The government is supposed to legislate so that employees have fair and safe workplace conditions and are not ripped off.
The Howard government has made unions weaker and weakened workers’ bargaining ability by establishing “Enterprise Bargaining”.
Howard has also done nothing in the face of mass dismissals of thousands of people that big companies do in order to save money. Instead of trying to decrease unemployment, Howard has come up with dodgy ideas such as the Work for the Dole scheme, which allows the government to use unemployed as free labour.
Discrimination: Howard is racist. In 1988, he suggested cutting the numbers of Asians immigrating to Australia. In 2001, he said that he had been wrong about Asians, and actually, they had “fitted in” quite well. However, by 2001, he was concentrating his racism towards Arabs instead.
On top of this, the Liberals display something ranging from mild contempt to complete bigotry to all of the following groups of people: migrants, the poor, the unemployed, the young, homosexuals, the uneducated, single parents, future generations, non-Westerners, Aborigines. The Liberals consistently talk about not worrying about “minority groups”, and rant against “political correctness”. In fact, everyone is part of some minority group. Rich white lawyers are a minority group too.
Military: Howard uses our “defence” forces to attack other nations. This means more enemies and more terrorist attacks on us. At the same time, we will be less able to defend ourselves against genuine threats to us, including terrorism, because Howard is gearing our defence force towards being a complement to the American military, rather than a independent and adaptable defence force.
Health: The Howard government is wrecking Medicare. The slow destruction of bulk-billing means people will be less able to afford health services. They have changed the Pharmacetical Benefits Scheme so that people will have to pay more for medicine. At the same time, they have decided to give a 30% rebate to those rich enough to afford private medical insurance.
Economy: Howard has a terrible record on the economy. Twenty years ago when he was treasurer, he let the budget deficit blow out. In the last 8 years while he has been Prime Minister, he has been selling off public assets such as Telstra, eliminating an important source of revenue. On the plus side, the budget has been in surplus during his time as Prime Minister, and the economy has been expanding. On the minus side, the economy goes in cycles anyway. Under him, income distribution also became more unequal.
Taxation: The Howard Government is the biggest-taxing government in history. What is worse is how much of the taxes they waste. They have not instituted any major programs with this extra money, but instead are stripping money from programs that had already been established by previous governments. Instead of coherent government programs, they are fond of one-off payments and rebates. Such as the $50 payment for parents at the beginning of the school year, the First Home Owners payment, the private health insurance rebate, the baby bonus, and so on. The problem with these payments is that the money belongs to taxpayers in the first place, and by collecting it as taxes and then selectively distributing it again, they are wasting billions in administration costs, and also increasing the chances of rorts. If they are not going to spend money on government programs it would be much better to just tax everyone less.
They have also added the GST, while barely decreasing income tax. The problem with the GST is that it is regressive, with the poorest being hardest hit. It also costs businesses in administration costs and many small businesses went bust because of it. It would be much less wasteful to have just one taxation system which taxes more, not GST plus income tax.
Social Security: As above, the Liberals tend to go for throwing money around rather than having a coherent program. One example is the government funded maternity leave payments, where women who were earning more before taking time off for their baby get a higher payment than those who were earning less. Obviously a sensible and fair program would give social security on the basis of need, not previous earning capacity.
At the same time, the money never seems to make it to those who most need it. The government introduced or attempted to introduce measures to make social security more difficult to get, such as by redefining disability to take the partially disabled off pensions (a move that was blocked by the Senate).
Human rights: The Howard government has abused human rights by locking refugees including all the small children in the family up for years, just for “illegally” trying to immigrate.
War: The Howard Government has followed the US into a war in Iraq that virtually no other country supported. It has lied about Iraq in order to get support for the war, quoting claims the US made up about “weapons of mass destruction”, none of which were found. In the process, thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Westerners were killed. Now the US has installed another dictator in Iraq, who is supported by only 4.6% of Iraqis and has already banned demonstrations, “insiduous” groups, and reinstated the death penalty and so on. Howard has not spoken out against the new dictator’s actions, thereby negating any possibility he supported the Iraq war for humanitarian reasons. The only outcome has been more deaths, more destruction, more terrorism, and more contracts for companies from the “coalition of the willing”… suspicious.
