sydney declaration
1. Mike Atherton's closure of England's innings at the SCG when Graeme Hick was 98 not out.
2. An aspirational emission of greenhouse gases not worth the paper it is written on.
It's over. Martial law is gradually winding down and Mister Iemma is Tearing Down That Wall. GW Bush has found the right exit and left Austria following the conclusion of OPEC.
This year is Australia's turn to host the APEC forums. Well and good. But why are the major conferences all being held in the Sydney central business district?
The prospect of a John Howard video turning up on Youtube at 5am is about as enticing as the news of a new Osama bin Laden video turning up on Al Jazeera's doorstep. Just as chilling a prospect and, for that matter, just as irrelevant in the final washup.
This took place during my downtime last month, and I had trouble tracing it back to its source, but John Howard used the D word for the third time on June 15. That's three times in the past six months, but none of them in a constructive light.
It was in an interview with journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald, and it was in response to a query about the foot-in-mouth Defence Minister Brendon Nelson's announcement that Australia would not be joining the UN peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Currently appearing on the Liberal Party of Australia's home page is this short, sharp, catchy summary of John Howard vision:
As the coconut dessicates, possibly terminally, John Winston Howard has uttered the D-word for, as far as I can tell, only the second time. (Here's my report of the first.)
It came in his virulent response to criticism of Australia's human rights record contained in the latest Amnesty International Annual Report (as I noted last week), where his use of fear for political purposes was compared to, among others, that of Omar al-Bashir.
Amnesty International does some spectacular name-dropping in the following paragraph from the foreword to their 2007 Annual Report, released yesterday:
Ever worried about all these new anti-terrorist laws? Ever worried that their wide-ranging discretionary powers would be used for entirely non-terrorism related reasons? Well, it happened in Australia this week.
The Australian cricket team was threatened with action under the Australian Passports Act 2005 if they went ahead with this September's planned tour of Zimbabwe.
JOHN HOWARD: Well the Government, through the Foreign Minister, has written to the organisation, Cricket Australia, instructing that the tour not go ahead. [..]
BARRIE CASSIDY: What is the legal basis for this? How can you put out that instruction?