The Mug Punter's

G'day punters, remember me? I'm the mug punter. I'm the bloke sitting at the pub tab on a Saturday arvo clutching a beer and studiously ticking off my win and place bets looking for the big win. Don't get many big ones, but when I do the whole pub knows about it. It's like election time at The Lodge.

As a matter of fact punters, I've just been looking over the form in the 2007 Federal election and I've found some serious deficiencies in the field. Quite a few pork pies are being thrown around too. (For those not up to date with punting parlance, a pork pie is a lie, a fib. Bending the truth. verballing - in other words not
telling the truth!).

Johnny Howard has bounced out of the gates like Santa Claus with a bottomless bag of promises. He's promising the world but we'll be lucky to get an atlas on his past form. Remember the 2001 election and the kids overboard caper - asylum seekers had thrown their children from a crowded sinking vessel? It reinforced Howard's hard-line policies on asylum seekers and helped him win the election. Then they revealed it was a porky. No children thrown overboard at all. A bit like Howard's promises that there would be no rise with interest rates, no GST or that he would retire after the 2004 election and hand over leadership of the Liberal Party to Costello. Yeah, we got rolled like Costello on those ones too.

And how could anyone forget the lamb-like fashion Howard sucked up to George Bush in 2003 by sending Australian troops into Iraq? The US-led war on Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction or Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda. It was all about Iraq's vast untapped reserves of oil. And of course there was the $290 million 'Wheat for Oil' bribery scandal in which the Australian Wheat Board directly contravened UN sanctions by selling directly to Saddam Hussein while Australian soldiers were deployed in the Middle East to enforce those UN sanctions. No Government Minister 'fessed up' to having any knowledge of that scam.

And who could forget Howard's arrogant attempt to break the back of the unions with Reith and his army of mercenary strike breakers during the 1998 waterfront dispute, then the 2001 Cole Royal Commission into the building and construction industry implemented the Building Industry Taskforce backed by harsh anti-union laws that were designed to crush unionism. The final onslaught was AWA's and Work Choice. The arrogant overconfidence was displayed by Industrial Relations Minister, Joe Hockey, who recently stated that unions were a thing of the past. Wrong! The unions are under the whip but they're still in the race battling on for their members.

But the final straw has to be the unwarranted bucketing Tony Abbott gave battling Bernie Banton, that staunch campaigner with terminal asbestosis, who tried to deliver a petition of over 17,000 signatures to Abbott?s Warringah office on 29 October, 2007. The petition called for the listing of a mesothelioma drug onto the PBS, allowing sufferers access to the pharmaceutical product.

Based on the form for the Liberal Coalition runners in the 2007 Federal election punters, I think it is about time Johnny Howard and his mates got put out to pasture. And stayed there.