John Howard’s servility to the US is even greater than Tony Blair’s and has earned him the nickname Bush’s deputy sheriff. The conspiracy between Washington, the media (a nascent Israel lobby in Australia is bolstered by media mogul Rupert Murdock, an Australian Zionist - MQ) and politicians is eroding the country’s freedoms.

[Excerpt…] Above all, it is the control of dissent that has changed Australia. Rupert Murdoch’s influence has been critical, far more so than in Britain. Whenever Howard or one of his more oafish ministers want to bend an institution or smear an opponent, they carry out the task in alliance with a pack of rabid mostly Murdoch commentators. As Stuart MacIntyre describes in a new book, Silencing Dissent, the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist, Andrew Bolt, conducted a campaign of ridicule against the independent Australian Research Council which, he claimed, had fallen into the hands of a “a club of scratch-my-back-leftists” whose work was “hostile to our culture, history and institutions”, as well as “peek-in-your-pants researchers fixated on gender and race”. The then minister of education, Brendan Nelson, vetoed one project grant after another without explanation.

The National Museum of Australia, the national child benefits centre, Aboriginal policy bodies and other independent institutions have been subjected to similar intimidation. A friend who holds a senior university post told me: “You dare not speak out. You dare not oppose the government or ‘the big end of town’ [corporate Australia].”

As embarrassing corporate crime rises, the treasurer, Peter Costello, has blithely announced a ban on moral or ethical boycotts of certain products. There was no debate; the media was simply told. One of Costello’s senior advisers, David Gazard, recently distinguished an American-run seminar in Melbourne, organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, at which those paying A$595 were taught the tricks of conflating activism with “terrorism” and “security threat”. Suggestions included: “Call them suicide bombers . . . make them all look like terrorists . . . tree-hugging, dope-smoking, bloody university graduate, anti-progress . . .” They were advised on how to set up bogus community groups and falsify statistics.

Schoolteachers who do not fly the flag or music concert organisers who discourage the attendance of racist thugs wrapped in the flag are at risk of a dose of Murdoch poison. Equally, if you reveal the shame of Australia’s vassal role you are deemed “anti-Australian” and, without irony, “anti-American”. Few Australians are aware that Murdoch, who dominates the press, abandoned his own Australian citizenship so that he could set up the Fox TV network in the US. The University of Sydney is to open a United States Study Centre, backed by Murdoch after he complained about the inability of Australians to appreciate the benefits of the bloodbath in Iraq.

This is a must read article.