The Rodent, as my grandmother calls him
Apr. 6th, 2009 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This will make sense to the five Australians reading this blog, so the rest of you might need to turn away. My mother sent me the DVDs of The Howard Years (a four-part ABC documentary about Australia's former government) and I've been watching them.
I watched the series out of order, for no particular reason. I began with the 2001 election (Tampa, national security) and followed it with the 2004 election (Mark Latham is a lunatic) and the final term of the Howard government (the WorkChoices industrial relations reform) and gleefully watched the 2007 election and Howard losing his seat to Maxine McKew (a former ABC journalist after my own daughter-of-two-ABC-journalists heart). Then I watched the 1996 election (attacks on intellectuals, a republic, closer ties with Asia and Aboriginal reconciliation - that is, attacks on everything that is good, and just and right) and the 1998 election (the waterfront dispute and the GST).
It was a very good series. They managed to get just about every major player - from Howard down - in interviews. As I was watching it, it began to make me feel ill, watching all of them justify the horrendous things that they did to Australia.
Howard came across as dictatorial, Costello as cowardly and friendless. Alexander Downer was like a grinning schoolboy gleeful at receiving praise from the headmaster (he was also very candid - clearly he doesn't care anymore). Peter Reith came across as an absolute cretin - but then I'd always known that anyway. I felt sorry for John Anderson and Amanda Vanstone, and even sorrier for Petro Georgiou and Bruce Baird, who were always too decent for the government of which they were members. On many occasions I felt like flinging things at the computer screen.
It was odd to hear my dad's voice every so often when they would replay archival news stories.
But what really struck me was how distant it all seems. When they showed the protest demanding intervention in East Timor, I remembered sneaking out of school to go to that protest - but then I remembered I was 13 at the time. Even the 2004 election, which was my first taste of the disappointments of democracy, seems far away. It seems insane that there was a time when Mark Latham seemed like a viable Labor candidate.
So did it all matter? You bet. However much Rudd's transformed things (and I can't really say, being on the other side of the world, where the only time Australia features in the news is if someone's been attacked by a crocodile), those 11 years left a scar. A government sets the tone for the country, and the Howard government did its best to make me - and pretty much everyone I know - ashamed to be Australian. It is unfortunate that things turned out the way they did in 1996. I do have a tendency to romanticise what Keating was about (as only someone who was a child when he lost power and then spent the next 11 years being told by every adult around her what a difference Keating would've made can). But I do believe we had an opportunity then to become a more modern, outward-looking, intelligent country - and we squandered it all on a mean, tricky government that was stuck in a parochial, 1950s mindset. It really was a shame.
Okay, my rant's over. It's safe to come back!
I watched the series out of order, for no particular reason. I began with the 2001 election (Tampa, national security) and followed it with the 2004 election (Mark Latham is a lunatic) and the final term of the Howard government (the WorkChoices industrial relations reform) and gleefully watched the 2007 election and Howard losing his seat to Maxine McKew (a former ABC journalist after my own daughter-of-two-ABC-journalists heart). Then I watched the 1996 election (attacks on intellectuals, a republic, closer ties with Asia and Aboriginal reconciliation - that is, attacks on everything that is good, and just and right) and the 1998 election (the waterfront dispute and the GST).
It was a very good series. They managed to get just about every major player - from Howard down - in interviews. As I was watching it, it began to make me feel ill, watching all of them justify the horrendous things that they did to Australia.
Howard came across as dictatorial, Costello as cowardly and friendless. Alexander Downer was like a grinning schoolboy gleeful at receiving praise from the headmaster (he was also very candid - clearly he doesn't care anymore). Peter Reith came across as an absolute cretin - but then I'd always known that anyway. I felt sorry for John Anderson and Amanda Vanstone, and even sorrier for Petro Georgiou and Bruce Baird, who were always too decent for the government of which they were members. On many occasions I felt like flinging things at the computer screen.
It was odd to hear my dad's voice every so often when they would replay archival news stories.
But what really struck me was how distant it all seems. When they showed the protest demanding intervention in East Timor, I remembered sneaking out of school to go to that protest - but then I remembered I was 13 at the time. Even the 2004 election, which was my first taste of the disappointments of democracy, seems far away. It seems insane that there was a time when Mark Latham seemed like a viable Labor candidate.
So did it all matter? You bet. However much Rudd's transformed things (and I can't really say, being on the other side of the world, where the only time Australia features in the news is if someone's been attacked by a crocodile), those 11 years left a scar. A government sets the tone for the country, and the Howard government did its best to make me - and pretty much everyone I know - ashamed to be Australian. It is unfortunate that things turned out the way they did in 1996. I do have a tendency to romanticise what Keating was about (as only someone who was a child when he lost power and then spent the next 11 years being told by every adult around her what a difference Keating would've made can). But I do believe we had an opportunity then to become a more modern, outward-looking, intelligent country - and we squandered it all on a mean, tricky government that was stuck in a parochial, 1950s mindset. It really was a shame.
Okay, my rant's over. It's safe to come back!
