‘Last week's events give further proof of what the Right do best.  

 

They divert and distract our attention from what they are up to with wars, and rumours of wars. 

 

Last week should have seen an assessment of Whitlam's policies and his legacy. Free university education, a rich robust ABC, an empowered, resurgent Aboriginal minority, an empowered union movement, an artistic renaissance, a new film industry and so on should have been discussed and praised and criticised.  

 

But what we got was raids and arrests of Muslims, and headlines about bomb-making, and terrorist atrocities in major cities narrowly thwarted. 

 

No discussion of what Whitlam did took place, and what it was worth, whom it helped, harmed, empowered and liberated. 

 

No discussion either of the IR tyrannies or the new terror laws that say I can go to gaol for two years, and so can my wife, if we say our son is missing, and so can Terry Hicks. Little discussion of that - only terror, and terrorists, and bombs and arrests, a man shot resisting arrest and who the culprits are. 

 

This is what the Right always do. They divert our attention while they rat the till. 

 

Because of the bangbang-slimy-Arabs-how-dare-they-not-love-Australia kerfuffle we are no longer talking of the fifty million Howard spent praising laws as yet unwritten, a sum that would keep three theatre companies running for
a thousand years.

 

We are no longer talking either of the new Sedition laws which will, if carried out, put Bill Leak, Max Gillies, Mike Carlton, Gerry Connolly and Malcolm
Turnbull in gaol for bringing monarch and government into ridicule.  

 

Only of crazy towelheads suiciding in football stadiums in extra time. 

 

This is what the Right always do. They silence the opposition. General Jaruzelski of Poland, for instance, when he saw a Solidarity uprising was imminent, cut off all the nation's phones so they couldn't confer with each other.

 

 

Mrs Thatcher forbade the broadcast of IRA voices, requiring actors to dub them out of synch, and made them look buffoonish. 

 

'We must deny the terrorists,' she said, exposing her method, 'the oxygen of publicity.' The US Republicans diverted attention from Clinton's masterful management of the economy by accusing him of eleven acts of assisted masturbation in the Oval Office toilet, correctly as it turned out.  

 

George Bush's minders diverted attention from his military incompetence, economic recklessness and God-bothered lunacy by stirring up gay hatred and calling, wrongly, his opponent John Kerry a war criminal. 

 

John Howard has learned well how to do these things. His attempt to hide the IR laws, and then the terror laws, under the Melbourne Cup are just two examples of this.

 

The children overboard, the loss of the SIEVX, and the 'coincidence' of the start of the Afghan war and the start of the 2001 election campaign, are better examples.

 

Busy thy subjects' minds with foreign wars, Shakespeare's Henry IV on his deathbed tells his son Prince Hal.  

 

This is what John Howard does. For the noise of war and the fog of war obscures discussion of his policies. For his policies of course are evil and they cannot stand in the light. If any of them are not evil, let someone say which ones they are.  

 

All right, constable, I'm coming. It's much like what happens in Guantanamo Bay. 

 

You are deprived of light. You are terrorised with big, monstrous dogs. The only information you get is of your comrades' defeat. You are made to feel
impotent. You are not told when your ordeal will end. You become convinced
there is no way out.  

 

The smugness and the violence and the injustice of your captors make you feel suicidal.  

 

You begin to believe that you are the only person that thinks this way.  

 

This is what the Right do best.  

 

They switch off the light, and make you jump at noises in the dark. 

 

I write this on November 11, and verily, verily I say unto you, comrades: maintain your rage.  

 

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’ 

  

Bob Ellis