Gideon Polya, “Breasts & Mass Murder. What Religious Right Australia doesn’t see”, MWC News, 29 August 2007.
Breasts & Mass Murder. What Religious Right Australia doesn’t see
AUSTRALIA is all agog with pre-election campaigning, even though the election due for later this year has not yet been called officially. The major opponents are the neo-con Bush-ites (the Liberal Party- National Party Coalition) who are in government and lead by obsequiously Bush loyalist Prime Minister John Howard versus the Australian Labor Party Opposition lead by Kevin Rudd.
Rudd and Howard are both right wing, avowedly Christian politicians, are slavishly pro-American and pro-Zionist and have both courted the Religious Right. The Bush-ite Coalition has been supported by fringe Religious Right groups, most notably by the Exclusive Brethren sect who don’t even vote (from religious conviction) but who are campaigning against Labor. Both politicians voted against life-saving stem cell research on religious conviction grounds earlier this year.
The election campaign was recently “spiced up” with the revelation that 4 years ago the now Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd got drunk with another Member of Parliament (MP) and visited a New York strip club called “Scores” with the editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post.
Most normal people would say “so what?” but in view of the Religious Right vote and his clean Christian image, Kevin Rudd was put on the defensive when grilled about this unexceptional evening. In short, he “confessed” to have been so drunk that he couldn’t quite recall anything much, did not admit to seeing any breasts, was finally cornered into stating that he had not seen any lap dancing and stated that he had “confessed” his “inappropriate” presence at such a venue to hjs wife the next day.
Getting drunk and visiting a topless bar and lap dancing joint while on a taxpayer funded trip are the least of Religious Right Rudd's (R3's) inappropriate actions - he has done some things that are far worse in his poll-driven pursuit of power as listed below. R3
1. supports the continued devastation of Tasmania's remarkable forests in order to garner the timber workers’ votes (environmental vandalism);
2. supports Australia's war criminal occupation of Occupied Afghanistan (post-invasion excess deaths 2.4 million; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 1.9 million, 90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance violation of the Geneva Convention; about 100,000 people globally and 400 Australians die each year from opiate drug-related reasons, largely due to the US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry) (see The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2007 );
3. claimed that "61,000" Iraqis have died post-invasion (the best estimate from top medical experts and the UN is about 1 million) (see "The Cost Of War" on MWC News );
4. supports expanded Australian uranium mining and exports to nuclear weapons states, but not to India or Pakistan (high level radioactive waste in the world now totals about 100 billion Curies, about 100 times more than the radioactivity due to uranium in all the world's oceans; and the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) lists the nuclear threat as one of the most acute dangers facing humanity in addition to global warming and poverty);
5. supports continued digging up of coal in opposition to overwhelming scientific, technological and economic evidence otherwise and Australia's appalling climate criminal and climate genocide position as the world's biggest coal exporter and world's big country with the worst annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution (see "War on Terra, Climate criminals, "Terra" painting” on MWC News );
6. got his party to back the Bush-ite Coalition's Northern Territory Intervention Bill which violates the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act, and the corresponding International Laws and Conventions in a race-specific way (thereby trashing Aboriginal Land Rights, Aboriginal human rights and Australia's international reputation; see: "Racism in Australia. La Trobe, "Bundoora Arabesque" & Aboriginal ethnocide" on MWC News).
Don't get me wrong - I most definitely DO want Kevin Rudd to win a landslide in the forthcoming elections and to kick out the racist, child-abusing, Bush-ite, war-mongering, war criminal, climate criminal, militant extremist, radical Bush-ite Coalition Government.
However items 1-6 above raise serious problems for decent, anti-racist, anti-war, pro-environment, pro-sustainability Australians (especially those with children and grandchildren) who want to see the end of the racist, pro-war, climate criminal Bush-like Australian Coalition Government - but who now realize that the only realistic replacement is profoundly compromised on all these matters.
Nevertheless, Australia's preferential voting system means that decent, anti-racist, anti-war, anti-Bush-ite, pro-environment, pro-Child Australians can have their cake and eat it too. Such decent folk can in good conscience vote for the decent, anti-racist, anti-war, pro-environment Australian Greens and Australian Democrats and give their second preferences to cowardly, irresponsible, poll-driven Labor, thus helping to ensure a “much less bad” outcome in this year’s elections. The Australian Preferential Voting System is GREAT – it means that if your preferred party doesn’t win in the election for a particular seat then your vote goes to the score of your second preference candidate.
The real scandal in this story is Kevin Rudd getting drunk with an editor of a war-mongering, xenophobic American newspaper run by the so-called “Dirty Digger”, media mogul and former Australian turned US citizen, Rupert Murdoch.
The Australian Greens leader and Senator, Dr Bob Brown, has pointed out the huge moral disparity between 2 events of 4 years ago - (A) Kevin Rudd getting drunk with friends and kicking on to a topless, pole dancing bar VERSUS (B) John Howard, stone cold sober, deliberately invading a distant foreign country, Iraq, based on untruths (notably the false assertion of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction).
(A) is utterly unexceptional (except for Religious Right Rudd's astonishing assertions that he cannot recollect seeing any semi-naked women dancing in “Scores” and that he confessed to his wife the next day (for NOT seeing semi-naked women dancing?) whereas (B) has involved post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq totalling 1 million and the trashing of Australia's international reputation.
Religious Right Rudd (R3) - loyal supporter of the US-UK occupation of Afghanistan - needs to go back to the Bible (his asserted major source of guidance) and discover "thou shalt not kill" and then go to the UNICEF website where he will discover that 370,000 under-5 year old Afghan infants die every year (i.e. 1,000 each day) - 90% avoidably and due to gross Australian and US alliance war crimes in horrendous violation of the Geneva Conventions (notably war criminal provision of total medical expenditure only amounting to a genocidal US$20 per head per year in Occupied Afghanistan as compared to about US$3,000 in Occupier Australia).
Meanwhile, Australia – both Religious and the functional agnostic Mainstream, revels in the Rudd “scandal” but resolutely IGNORES the horrendous post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories totalling (as of March 2007) 1.0 million and 2.4 million, respectively (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”; for details see MWC News).
If we approach the globally-important problem of climate criminal Racist White Australia in a spirit of compromise (by way of respecting “traditional Australian values”), we could assume for the purposes of argument that this current national obsession with Rudd going into a topless, lap dancing bar is as important as the number of post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories - in which case both Rudd and Howard should be asked (a) how many female breasts they have seen in their Religious Right lifetimes and (b) how many under-5 year old Occupied Iraqi and Afghan infants cease suckling each year because of untimely death . The answer to (b) is about 0.5 million or roughly one every minute – passive mass murder by the war criminal Occupiers. But Racist White Australia simply looks the other way - it simply doesn’t want to know.