John Gormley (Dublin South East, Green Party)

The Australian Greens do not have a good relationship with Prime Minister John Howard. My Australian colleague, Senator Bob Brown, has been one of his harshest critics. Mr. Howard is on the same side as George W. Bush on a plethora of international issues. Australia has not signed up to the Kyoto Protocol even though global warming is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Mr. Howard has been a supporter of the Iraq war and while he said during the campaign that no further troops would be allocated to Iraq, that promise was broken. He claimed, together with George Bush and Tony Blair, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which of course turned out to be a lie.

This was not the first occasion where we saw Mr. Howard's tenuous relationship with the truth. The famous "children overboard" story also turned out to be a lie, which was unscrupulously exploited during a campaign to make people fearful about what was perceived as an invasion by foreigners.

He also has a poor relationship with the gay community in Australia.

In November of last year, he tried to introduce the anti-terrorism Bill, again stoking fears, and a number of raids were made on houses throughout Melbourne and Sydney. As the Greens said on that occasion, this showed anti-terrorism legislation was not required because sufficient powers existed in any event to perform raids and so forth. Others have alluded to his total contempt for the trade union movement which has resulted in approximately 560,000 people demonstrating on Australia's streets in protest against many of the legislative proposals Mr. Howard is introducing.

Mr. Howard is a neo-liberal who, I believe, is changing the world for the worse. I would certainly like the opportunity, as would my party leader, Deputy Sargent, to articulate some of our concerns to him. We will not get that opportunity but we will be happy to sit here and listen to what he has to say. However, as far as his politics are concerned, we in the Green Party are very critical of the man.

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