Posted by Sigismund on March 1, 2008, at 18:57:29
In reply to Re: Kevin Rudd » Sigismund, posted by fayeroe on March 1, 2008, at 18:02:39
Under our constitution, though you might not have realised it under Mr Howard, the Queen of Australia is the head of state and the Govenor-General is her representative in Australia.
We had a real moral example with Sir William Deane. (Sincere Catholic, strong sense of moral justice, zero self-promotion)
Mr Howard was in such a hurry to get rid of him that he put in an Anglican Archbishop, Peter Hollingworth, who immediately became embroiled in one of those sex in the churches scandles, and he had to resign.
Then Mr Howard put in a military man no one had heard of before or has since, and whose functions he could perform himself.
So that is what conservatism came to here.
There was an article in the papers here that looked at the difference between triangulation (Hawke, Clinton, maybe Keating) and wedge politcs (Howard, maybe Bush).
The fun thing with Mr Howard toward the end was that he ended up wedging his own side of politics.
Before the election he used global warming to set up an enquiry into nuclear power to wedge the ALP.
But it was too close to the election (who wants a nuclear power station next to them?) and weged his own side (Did we really need them? Maybe we could do something else?)But the guts of the article was that triangulation left you in control of the political agenda and wedge politics did not.
(Can't get a link I'm afraid.)In that sense I am perhaps wrong to say that the current US administration is reactive in nature.
Maybe Mr Howard was closer to Mrs Thatcher?
He certainly liked his culture wars.
He called it getting rid of political correctness.
poster:Sigismund
thread:815250
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20070708/msgs/815619.html