Jack Robertson rant

An impromptu ‘rant’ by Webdiary veteran Jack Robertson is the latest piece to be featured on the WD frontpage. Robertson, it may be recalled, contributed an excellent chapter to Margo Kingston’s book, Not Happy, John.

As one commenter put it about Jack’s rant, “some of it’s sweepingly generalisingly wrong”. Quite right indeed, some aspects of it can be pulled apart like a roast chook. Then again there are some pearls of insight there as well. Anyway, it’s an interesting and often amusing read. The following is from a comment I posted on the thread.

One of Jack’s more pungent themes is the “scaredy-waredy” leadership with which the Free World has been encumbered. His take resonates somewhat with my own view of the sycophancy of the Prime Minister’s relationship with the US President, and by inevitable extension, of Australia with the USA.

For a central theme in the Australian pro-war narrative has been that JWH’s apparently visceral commitment to GWB’s ‘war on terror’ is due to the fact that JWH was in Washington DC on September 11 2001. What’s more, folks, he had visited the Pentagon a mere matter of hours before it was devastatingly struck by Flight 77.

But hey, give it a rest! Is the possibility that “JWH could’a died, mate” really a serious basis for surrendering any part of Australia’s foreign policy to a seriously flawed US administration?

Sure, as a relatively transient issue, it might give one pause to ponder whether JWH really is so indispensable as some of his marginal-seat backbenchers seem to believe. But to elevate JWH’s ‘brush with death’ as some kind of human-interest justification for bone-headed foreign policy is just too much altogether, a kiddies’ gross-out on fairy-floss.

The truth is that Mr Howard ‘blinked’. Our (then prospective) man-of-steel failed to exercise the ticker he claims to possess. Or, to borrow Jack’s idiom, JWH kacked his trackies and ran shrieking to GWB to “pwease make it aw bettah, Mummy Guvment”.

No, I don’t want to hear any more of Mr Howard’s puling whine about his weawwy fwightening existential cwisis. From 2001 on, I waited to hear him explain how his government would calmly and rationally assess the nature and extent of the threat. And what steps he would take to calmly and judiciously deal with a complex problem. And how he would project Australia’s middling but erstwhile-respected influence in the world to achieve real and decent outcomes. And to say “no” to Mummy Guvment when it was appropriate and sane to do so.

Instead we got disaster, ignominy and fragmentation. Disaster on two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the makings of it on several others. Ignominy in allowing the threat to change us.

And fragmentation? Well, to begin with, perhaps watch this thread, or visit others on this or related topics. One may catch frequent glimpses everywhere, for example, in arch-Howard supporter Paul Gray’s call for “someone” to actually apologise to Mark Latham, because the latter got it right on Iraq while the man-of-steel got it so wrong (The Australian, March 21 2006).

Hell no, folks, I’m not a Howard Hater. Just a Howard Sceptic. But it really is time for the old man to retire. No, not in favour of the dolt Costello; I reckon Turnbull could make a halfway-decent Head of Government – at least, quite possibly a lesser evil. Ahh, just a thought.