what's going on?

mood: not the right one for tidying up this brothel of a room.
state i'm in: epigastric pain.
tune: seals and croft "summer breeze"... makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.


what's going on, mr howard?

a year ago, almost to the day, prime minister john howard addressed the 50th anniversary dinner for 'quadrant' magazine, a bastion of conservative authorship, and declared that of the organisation's causes it has chosen to take up arms on behalf of, "none is more important to me than the role it has played as counterforce to the black armband view of australian history". he is here referring to the treatment of indigenous australians over the past 200 years - the fairly widespread opinion that it has been a mistreatment. these comments, and many such comments made by mr howard over his time in public life, are in accordance with his steadfast refusal to grant a public apology to indigenous australians.

so you can imagine the surprise i felt when i read of comments made by mr howard today in an address to think tank 'the sydney insititute'. he admitted he had struggled with reconciliation in his time as prime minister, and accepted responsibility for his part in so-called "low points" in relations between indigenous and non-indigenous australians. could this be a softening in his position on this aspect of his so-called 'culture wars', a 'road to damascus' experience for the prime minister of sorts.

mr howard went on to give grounds for his stance over the years as its being "an artefact of who i am and the time in which i grew up". he admits the paramount struggle as being "that reconciliation required a condemnation of the australian heritage i had always owned". in a nihilistic, almost mother teresa-esque moment, it appears as if mr howard lays bare his admission that the beliefs that the man publicly clings to so strongly are based not on rational thought, not on any rock of evidence, but on ideology and emotion - and thence highly likely to be false. is this a man, who, in the throws of defeat, is begging the coming annals for mercy.

today, mr howard announced that:

if re-elected, i will put to the australian people within 18 months a referendum to formally recognise indigenous australians in our constitution - their history as the first inhabitants of our country, their unique heritage of culture and languages, and their special, though not separate, place within a reconciled, indivisible nation.

indigenous affairs, as with other concerns aptly labelled by political journalist laurie oakes as 'boutique issues', have long been the stronghold of the ALP. as far as the major parties go, areas like the environment, the arts, GLBT rights and indigenous affairs are areas where the electorate sees the ALP as more often associated with being supportive and progressive, regardless of whether their policy reflects that perception or not. over recent years we have seen a steady shift of the electorate in opposite directions: poorer, less educated working class folk are now more inclined to vote for the coalition then ever before, whilst the ALP has never experienced such popularity with the wealthy and educated, the intelligentsia and the cultural elite. perhaps mr howard's attempts to encourage us to "find room in our national life to formally recognise the special status of aboriginal and torres strait islanders as the first peoples of our nation" is merely a ploy to win back some in the upper echelons of society who may have lost faith in the party after their recent paternalistic and regressive interventions in the northern territory.

can this claim of mr howard to be indigenous australia's new playfellow really be taken seriously? for a man of such strong cultural conviction to suddenly change his tune almost entirely begs demands of an explanation, and not a simple response of "oh, he's finally come 'round". but then knowing mr howard, and having read the speech, i am inclined to think that this is a combination of "well, i tried to" sentiment, with a healthy dose of "he's just so full of shit".