Asia Times: Howard pushed closer to the finish line


	February 23, 2002	atimes.com

Oceania

Howard pushed closer to the finish line
By Alan Boyd

SYDNEY - Australian Prime Minister John Howard's much-vaunted air of invulnerability has been punctured by a series of political miscalculations that could undermine government support in the key upper house of parliament.

In the past week the conservative coalition has been forced to backtrack on sensational election claims that boat people from Asia had thrown their children into the sea in a desperate ploy to obtain asylum. Then Howard came under intense pressure to sack Governor General Dr Peter Hollingworth, the British queen's representative in Australia, for his handling of charges of sexual abuse against children when he previously served as an Anglican archbishop.

It is the first time Howard's leadership has come into question since he earned a teflon-like reputation for political survival by engineering a brilliant election victory for his incumbent conservative alliance in November, despite trailing badly in early opinion polls. His election trump card was a harsh crackdown on the several thousand boat people, mostly from Asia, who wash up on the north coast each year after transiting from Indonesia. Arrivals were shipped to detention centers on Pacific islands under the new "Pacific Solution" strategy and denied access to legal appeals in Australian courts. Eligibility criteria for those already in Australia were tightened as a further deterrence.

Human-rights and relief agencies reacted savagely to the withdrawal of legal safeguards, as did the domestic and international media. But local opinion was staunchly behind the Howard coalition, partly because of a carefully stage-managed publicity campaign that portrayed the boat people as queue-jumpers and a blatant security risk in the wake of the September terrorist attacks in the United States.

One of the most emotive pieces of documentary evidence supporting the government's stance was a collection of still photographs taken from video footage in early October that purported to show boat people throwing their children overboard to evade detention. The obvious message was that these people, mostly refugees from dictatorial regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, could not be trusted even to protect the lives of their own families and were thus unfit for resettlement in Australia.

Doubts were raised over the reliability of the photographs even before their publication; however, Howard went on record vouching for their accuracy on the eve of the election in a speech that is credited with having sealed the coalition's triumph.

This week, though, senior armed forces chiefs said he had been wrong. They testified before a Senate inquiry that a top cabinet minister had been informed one month before the poll that the photos were not what the government claimed. What they actually showed was boat people being rescued by naval personnel when their overloaded vessel sank in northern coastal waters. There was no evidence anyone had been thrown overboard.

After consistently denying that the government had been alerted before publication of the misleading pictures, Howard is now shifting the blame to his former defense minister, Peter Reith, who quit before the election. Reith now says he failed to pass the armed forces denial on to Howard, an explanation that convinces few political observers, even within the government itself.

Hollingworth's predicament will be no easier to resolve, as the revelations have broken just ahead of a planned visit to Australia by Queen Elizabeth II, who is the nominal head of state in Australia. He was originally accused only of acting too softly with a bishop who was alleged during Hollingworth's tenure as head of the Anglican Church to have sexually abused a 14-year-old girl two decades earlier. But Hollingworth compounded the error by arguing in a national TV interview that the girl had been at fault. The bishop retired last year and has never been charged, despite having admitted in 1995 that he had a "consensual" relationship with the girl.

Howard has taken most of the political backlash for standing by his decision to appoint Hollingworth last year and for dismissing the allegations as grounds for his resignation. "He's not committed any crime, he's not been guilty of any immorality. You have to put the errors of judgment against a lifetime of service," Howard told the House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament.

Neither of the two issues is likely to threaten the government's comfortable parliamentary majority, especially as public opinion is still firmly against any leniency on the treatment of boat people, whatever the legitimacy of the contested photographs. However, it could hasten the prime minister's much-anticipated departure from the helm and frustrate the passage of government legislation through the Upper House.

Howard has made it clear he intends to step down well before completion of the four-year parliamentary term. The timing has always been unclear, but might now be influenced by how well he handles the fallout from the Hollingworth affair. The prospect of having to contend with a hostile Senate dominated by the liberal Democrat Party and Greens, which have seized upon the photographs saga as a denunciation of the government's strategy toward boat people, could also force his hand.

Evidence from the Senate inquiry may not do much damage to the coalition's public standing. But a government is only as good as the policies it has sanctioned, as Howard is acutely aware.

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