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Last updated on July 24th, 2017 at 12:56 pm
What if Latham had triumphed? It might have turned out a little different than Mungo MacCallum imagines. Feel free to offer alternative visions of a Latham-led Australia.
Something like this?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 09 05 at 04:05 PM • permalink
Does Mungo MacAllum not even read his own papers? Does he still, at this stage of the game, that that bitter, angry, violent little man would have been an effective leader of Australia?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 09 05 at 05:15 PM • permalink
I would expect that our relations with the US would be at a historical low (public gloating by the new PM about Katrina wouldn’t help), interest rates at 10% and climbing, we’d have just ratified Kyoto regardless of cost (‘regardless of cost’ being the new ALP motto), tensions with Indonesia at an all time high after PM Latham gave them a public and populist bucketing over Australian drug runners and defence spending at an all time low (worse than in Beasleys time).
The Navys shipbuilding curtailed and whats left diverted into union approved construction (Collins class fiasco anyone?) projects.
Medicare Tin already in a state of collapse.
Public servants bailing out of the treasury dept like rats from a sinking ship.
Every town told to make room for a monument to Gough Whitlam, to be supplied at public expense.
The people smuggling boats starting to sail again now that mandatory detention was dropped.
The Aboriginal community would have received a grovelling apology and much surprise would have been generated when it was revealed that it hadn’t improved their lives one iota.
Ah, but they’d be happy days…
Posted by Harry Buttle on 2005 09 05 at 05:56 PM • permalink
rog2 — Do you think they know what “fulsome” actually means?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 09 05 at 06:34 PM • permalink
What gives with these people, paticularly the Left-overs, they seem to produce nothing but a never ending story of wet-dream fantasy worlds and call it “comment”. If its not Mungo its “my last territorial demand” Phil or another Marred story. It confirms that their entire world view is nothing but forlorn fantasy and the more bizarre it gets the more sure the sensible people of Australia dodged a bullet last election.
Posted by missinglink on 2005 09 05 at 06:48 PM • permalink
Actually, your future would be very simple.
You’d all be speaking Chinese.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 09 05 at 07:27 PM • permalink
CANBERRA, Sep 5. Prime Minister Latham expressed his sadness and condolences following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
At a doorstop visit in front of the the Bowral RSL, the Prime Minister said, “I am deeply saddened by the death and destruction in New Orleans. But I warned them about electing that arselicking suckhole Bush McHalliburton Hilterchimp. I’m just so sorry that they are such idiots.”
Every Australian city a New Orleans.
Posted by Susan Norton on 2005 09 05 at 09:36 PM • permalink
What on earth was the point of the article if not as public masturbation?
A similarly self-indulgent article appears in today’s Australian from our usual supect Phillip Adams. url=http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16501141%5E12272,00.html]
He raves on about how unfair it is that people are still picking on his mate Paul Keating even though he has been out of politics for nearly a decade.
Personally I hope they (whoever they are) keep picking on Paul because that useless excuse for a Treasurer nearly sent the country (and me) broke without any compunction or remorse.
Frankly though I haven’t noticed any “Kick a Keating” campaign happening but I’d love to partake in one.
The conga line of lefty suckholes yearning for some mythical socialist Garden of Eden just keeps getting longer and longer and longer and….
Posted by Jay Santos on 2005 09 05 at 11:10 PM • permalink
- What does fulsome mean?
Now there’s a good question.Some dictionaries will tell you that it means “insincere”.But as modern educators keep telling us, language is a living thing, and the meaning of words keeps changing.
Michelle Grattan has used the “fulsome” to mean “lots of”. Didn’t know she was a RWDB or lackey of the Libs.
I’m so old I can remember when “celibate” meant “unmarried”.
(single mums in France are called “mamans celibataires”)Now we have people (even married ones) saying “I was celibate last week-end” as a fancy way of saying “I couldn’t get a root.”
Anyway, but when a politician uses a word it means whatever s/he wants it to mean.
When Latham calls a woman a “skanky ho” it means “highly competent newspaper columnist”.
Posted by pog-ma-thon on 2005 09 05 at 11:40 PM • permalink
If Latham had been elected, the momentum would have swept John Kerry into office in the United States, and whoever that other guy was in the UK. The one who was neither a Tory nor Blair. An honorable, principled man of great integrity, a man I’d follow into the mouth of Hell. He was the guy with the beard, right? Or was that some other guy? Anyway I think he was against the war or something. A statesman on the heroic scale of… of that one guy who had the funny hat, in the old pictures.
Moving right along, Kerry would have followed Latham’s principled support for Kyoto by promptly voting 51 times for it in the Senate, ratifying it instantly and preventing this year’s hurricane season in the Atlantic.
The money saved would have been spent developing alternative fuel sources. The streets would teem with hovercars, hovertrousers, and indeed hoverprams within five years. Foul weather would never again menace our fragile Spaceship Earth.
The corporations would have been taught a good lesson. The law of supply and demand would be replaced with the law of compassion, by special decree. Economic justice would reign! All would have equal wealth, equal education, and equal health care after an equal wait!
And peace, and harmony, and stuff. No more war, ever! All you have to do to avoid war is not start one; isn’t it funny nobody ever thought to try that before? They can’t have, because if they had, obviously there wouldn’t have been any more wars (that’s called, you know, logic, okay? Like, that stuff we progressives do?) But we’ve thought of it now, by cracky!
People would be free, free at long last, free, to be… to be you, and even to be… me! Freed from the hellish restraints imposed by the market, there would have been an unprecedented outpouring of human creativity. Imagine a new Green Day album every year, and regular Springsteen tours with Dave Matthews opening. And giant puppet heads, in every city, on every street! Puppets for all! PUPPETS! PUPPETS!
But you fools in Australia threw it all away. You vicious bloodsucking reich-wing fascistic hallizioneoburton oil-using bastards, YOU ROBBED ME OF THE PUPPET HEADS! HITLERRRRRRR!!1!
Posted by P. Froward on 2005 09 05 at 11:55 PM • permalink
I mean, what I’m trying to say here is, imagine the Jetsons singing “Kubaya”, with the Flintstones swinging from a lamppost in the background.
That is the future Latham was ready to deliver.
That is the future that was so cruelly denied to us by a so-called “democracy” so utterly broken, so fundamentally ill-conceived, so criminally lacking in basic safeguards, that a majority voted for the wrong guy. How is that any different from the sham elections Stalin ran? The incumbent won! The parallels are striking!
Posted by P. Froward on 2005 09 06 at 12:13 AM • permalink
Cab companies begin trials of new uniforms for drivers.
Snooty private schools that were forever gloating about their high grades and the haughty successes of their over-scheduled student daaarlings are stripped of Federal funding by the visionary Labor Prime Minister Latham.
A stampede of parents rush to re-enrol their kiddies in the glorious mediocrity of a public edjacayshun system now flush with funding. This comes amid widespread euphoria amongst the newly liberated masses who are no longer subjected to class-driven guilt feelings associated with spending hard earned textbook money on gaming machines and cigarettes.
Historic Kirribilli House is sold for scrap iron and brickbats.
You know the bit in the book of Revelation, where the four horsemen of the Apocolypse ride out scattering death and despair over all of mankind?
Latham would kind of been like that, except with more swearing.
Posted by Stuart Lord on 2005 09 06 at 05:11 AM • permalink
He seems to have summed up this fantasy on his own:
it became clear that it was one of those ideas like controlled nuclear fusion: a laudable aim, perhaps, but one unlikely to be realised in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I was quite pleased at this:
a request [from the U.S. for more troops in Iraq] as preposterous as it was impertinent.
I thought our gravest sin was our arrogance. Never once did I so much as dream of reaching the level of impertinence.
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CANBERRA Dec. 30 – Relations between Australia and Asian countries delved into a new low when Australia Prime Minister Mark Latham nor his deputy, Jenny Macklin, didn’t issue personal condolences to the victims of Boxing Day’s deadly Indian Ocean tsunami that ravaged Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand, amongst other countries.
Instead, the third most senior ALP parliamentary, Senator Chris Evans, issued a statement at the aftermath of the deadly tsunami. Both current Opposition Leader Peter Costello and former Prime Minister John Howard issued statements of concern and concolence.
“Just months after Australia renounced the possiblity to pre-emptive strikes in its neighbours, they have decided to snob us at our time of need,” blared the Bangkok Post.
Even former Malaysian Prime Minister, noted for his sharp tongue, said, “Obviously, Australia after a few short months of optimism went back to its White Australia past.
“If [President George] Bush could make time from his holidays to issue a statement and begin their aid process, why couldn’t Latham?”
Furthermore, as demonstrations grow outside of Australia’s embassy in Jakarta, New Dehli, Colombo and Bangkok, many have noted wryly of Australia’s preceived hypocrisy. One of the protestors, Rania who like many Indonesians go by one name, said, “How come Australia was so free to immediately intervene in East Timor while so preoccupied in its holidays to bother about Aceh?”