In a week of horrors, there was one shred of good news for the Government: with iron self-discipline, Peter Costello has learnt to control that Cheshire Cat grin which so irritates everyone. Appearing on The 7.30 Report on Wednesday, he managed a brisk seven minutes with Kerry O‚Brien without smirking once, a credit to his imagemeisters. I predict great things for him. Not so the rest of them. A government which should be riding high on the Treasurer‚s masterly economic performance has, instead, descended into a shambles, propelled there by a poisonous combination of stupidity, arrogance, prejudice and cynical opportunism.

Not all of this can be blamed upon the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the block-headed Senator John Herron, and his hair-splitting denial of the stolen generation. Poor Herron is now a risible figure, a pathetic Pooh Bear of very little brain, bumbling about the landscape, upsetting hives of bees and getting his head stuck in honey jars.

But he is, at bottom, the creature and instrument of his Prime Minister, and it is John Howard himself who has brought on this week's disaster, with a jaw-dropping ineptitude that has split not only the nation but the parliamentary Liberal Party. If this is wedge politics, as some gurus suggest, then the thin end cleaves right through his own backbench

Howard's besetting fault is that he will abandon the larger responsibilities of national leadership, without so much as a forward glance, if he thinks it will bring him a quick political fix. Bugger the Vision Thing. As a survey of business tycoons reported in the Financial Review this week, the Government is mesmerised by "short-termism". It is driven by the opinion polls, tossed about on the tides of cheap populism.

Worse, this is a mean administration, a miserly, mingy, minatory bunch if ever there was. It has a head but no heart, a brain but no soul. Without generosity of spirit, devoid of compassion, absorbed in narrow political self-interest, the Howard Government has no concept of anyover-arching duty to articulate the aspirations of the governed and to lead them, with some hope, to a happier and more complete nationhood. If the polls slump, how easy it is to play the Hansonite politics of greed and envy, to send in the bovver brigade: Herron to cosh the boongs, Tony Abbott to drop-kick the unemployed, Jocelyn Newman to savage those on social welfare.

This is not government, it is mere management, a very different thing, and it is what will do for them in the end. A cold and bloodless lot, their veins run with piss and vinegar.

I suppose the Prime Minister will take comfort that his troupe of media toadies has obediently wheeled into line in the matters of the stolen generation and mandatory sentencing. Or mantry sensing, as it is pronounced by Stan Zemanek, the radio philosopher and wit.

Forests of newsprint, rivers of hydro-electricity have been devoted to the proposition that mere handfuls of Aboriginal kiddies were separated from their parents, all for their own good. On the loftier heights of absurdity, a few of these well-padded hacks are drivelling that many black children were actually packed off to boarding school, conjuring up an image of beaming piccaninnies in Riverview straw boaters and Abbot-sleigh hat and gloves.

Nowhere have the media lick-spittles been more obedient than on the subject of the United Nations. When our troops were in East Timor, they were there to bring peace and democracy to lesser breeds without the law, under the noble blue and white flag of the international community.

Australia would show an admiring world how it was done. Our most significant commitment of troops overseas since World War II, said the Prime Minister, thus blithely contriving to insult the memory of 339 dead in Korea and the 500 of Vietnam. Job completed, how we basked in the thanks of Kofi Annan.

But at the first hint of criticism of mandatory sentencing from a UN committee, with little Alexander huffing out the door, all high heels and handbag, the toadies changed direction with the instinctive precision of a shoal of fish, to clamour that the UN was the wicked instrument of China, Cuba and other evil dictatorships. How amusingly perverse.

The torrent of racism is remarkable, the urban myths extraordinary. In radio, the most direct, the most responsive medium of communication, you are a lightning rod for every demented ratbag within shouting distance.

At the mere mention of the word "Aborigine", literally dozens of them are driven to ring the open-line switchboard and to pour a frenzy of racist filth and obscenity into the ears of the hapless operator before slamming down their handsets. Some of it literally beggars description.

Most do not get to air. The less furious ones do. On Wednesday, I had an angry caller who demanded to know how come Charlie Perkins had gone to Newington. "My father was there with him, and I was there with his son," he snarled, with convincing certitude. "Tell me, how can he reckon he was underprivileged?"

I confess l was taken aback. A scholarship, perhaps, from kindly Methodist missionaries? A quick call to Perkins established he had not been able to read and write until he was 10, had begun school in the Alice Springs police compound, had then been shunted around various institutions as a homeless teenager, and had worked his way through university on a pittance as a professional soccer player. "I have been past Newington," he said wryly.

This fear and loathing is the genie that has been uncorked by the Howard Government, with its bland insistence that it is merely trying to establish a few facts. The damage may take years to undo.

The Sydney Morning Herald

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