Bringing down a corrupt system
Peter Boyle
So the Howard government has been forced to admit that a cable was sent in 2000 to a variety of its ministers, including PM John Howard and then-defence minister John Moore, warning of kickbacks in the Australian Wheat Board's dealings with Iraq.
Howard insists he did not personally see those cables, but in 2003 his foreign minister signed off on a $100 million aid package that channelled $45 million to Alia, the Jordanian trucking company at the centre of the AWB scandal.
A Sydney Morning Herald poll on February 28 showed that 59.5% do not buy the Howard government's story. Yet, as SMH political editor Peter Hartcher pungently noted in his March 3 column, Howard is "up to his bum in it, but still sitting pretty".
Commentators and academics have been discussing why, despite Howard's serial liar status on the reasons for the invasion of Iraq, the children overboard affair and now the AWB corruption, there is so little public scandal. Have we, the public, lost or abandoned our moral compasses? Have we been bribed or blackmailed into tolerating corruption as long as the economy is booming?
Perhaps we have come to expect governments — Coalition or Labor — to be corrupt. Few of us need to be convinced of the gross and chronic corruption of the capitalist system and the systematic lying of its apologists. We are beyond being shocked at the corruption of politicians.
Visit the Greens-initiated and -maintained website <http://www.democracy4sale.org> and you'll drown in proof that both major parties are systematically bought off by the big corporations.
But who pays for those who are fighting this corrupt system? Not Lord Michael Ashcroft of KCMG, who donated $1 million to the federal Liberal Party last year. Not Malcolm Turnbull, who donated $138,468 to the NSW Liberal Party. Not property developer Terrace Tower Group, which donated $112,975 to the NSW Labor Party.
You can guess the rest of this column. Institutions fighting this corrupt system, like Green Left Weekly, are funded by ordinary people like you. To keep us fighting the system all year we are trying to raise $250,000 — less than the $263,700 that the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) donated to the NSW Labor party last year (no prizes for guessing why!)
Last week we raised $2048, bringing the total we have raised so far this year to $28,963.89 or 12% of our whole year target. If you can help with either one-off or regular donations to the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund, please send your donation now to PO Box 515, Broadway 2007, phone it through on the toll-free line 1800 634 206 (calls from within Australia only) or donate online at <http://www.greenleft.org.au/fogl.htm>.
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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