Who do you trust?
John Howard has been consistent.
He has consistently been a master at playing upon the fear of the electorate.
Most of the time, the fears and prejudices he has evoked from within the dark recesses of the minds of the populace have been ill conceived - but they have worked - they have kept him in power.
The sad thing is that it hasn’t just been the ignorant or uneducated who have fallen for the seductive speeches of the master of wedge politics - at some point, almost everyone has fallen for it, I know that I have, sadly it seems that the educated and affluent have fallen for it regularly. Some examples of the fears that he has played upon regularly are:
- Interest rates
- Refugees
- National security
- Economic prosperity
- Industrial relations/Unions
Look at the above five items, they are all issues that might be used emotively, that might be used to cause fear because they are all related to our sense of personal security.
Howard’s greatest lie is having succeeded in duping the electorate into believing that interest rates would always be higher under Labor despite having presided over 22% interest rates when he was treasurer in Fraser’s government. In fact, rates didn’t fall below 9% under John Howard as treasurer and were more often than not, in double digits. Have a look at the official Reserve Bank site or download the evidence here.
His as treasurer, keeping the economy protected and shying away from the tough economic decisions taken by Hawke and Keating that lead to the prosperous past decade is nothing short of disgraceful. It shames us as a nation that we believed his li(n)e at the last election.
The terrible tragedy though is that we don’t have a credible opposition in this country - even if people finally see through Howard and toss him out next year, will Beazley do a better job? He certainly has some talented ministers in Rudd and Gillard and their ilk but as a leader he is just as bad as Howard I would suggest.
Technorati Tags: John Howard, liar, interest rates, rate rise, refugees, Malcolm Fraser, Pinocchio, Hawke, Keating, ALP, Liberal
