In which the pond partakes of a festive Caterist bonus ...

 

 

Regrettably the pond must enter the home Xmas straight with a final warning ...

The pond is deeply appreciative of all the onion muncher has done for political harmony and stability during the year, and celebrated pictorially yesterday on The Insiders ... but if he's to maintain his place as a pond headliner he must pick up the pace.

Sadly the panellists seemed to think that he was a dropkick loser, a tragic irrelevance, a has-been, a wannabe past his prime and his time ...

The pond believes that he still has much to offer political harmony and stability, aided and abetted by the failing lizard Oz business model ... but he must try harder, even at the risk of losing what might be the last shreds of his battered, tattered, pathetic reputation ...

And so to the news of the day ...

Uh huh ...who could that man be?

It's particular fun, given what the pandering, forelock-tugging shill Mark Ritson scribbled today ...

Quality press? Presumably he's not referring to the Minerals Council propaganda rag ... which would throw up a press release disguised as a column at the drop of the hat ...

And now, given the way that there seems to be a dire absence of Oreos - what, no Xmas treat? - the pond decided it needed a dose of Caterism, and by sheer luck there was a chance to indulge on the weekend ... and better late than never ...

Now of all the dropkick failed Liberal leaders, attempting to revive Harold Holt's reputation must be the trickiest ... almost as hard as turning Billy McMahon into a statesman, or even a decent politician, let alone a treasurer ...

Menzies, as a sensible and cunning politician, had removed, promoted sideways, sent overseas, or obliterated any of his rivals who showed either ability, or capacity, and in so doing, posed a threat to his own position as fearless leader.

After his long reign, all that was left was kowtowing detritus of the Holt kind ...

As treasurer, Holt's most memorable achievement was the credit squeeze in 1961 which almost cost Ming the Merciless his job...

Holt sanctioned Treasury's monumental decision in February 1960 to remove virtually all import restrictions. The failure, however, to maintain strict fiscal and monetary control, and the preference for gradual measures to halt a speculative boom, led in November to another important decision which nearly reversed Holt's steady evolution to the top. He and the Reserve Bank of Australia announced a package of measures amounting to a 'credit squeeze' which drove the economy into a recession and saw unemployment rise to 131,000 by January 1962. On Treasury's advice, Holt argued against early remedial action on the expectation of a quick recovery and on the assumption that inflation was the real enemy. Complaining that the government had acted too late in disciplining the economy and too drastically when it did so, business turned on Holt, the treasury secretary Sir Roland Wilson and finally on Menzies himself. 

As a result, the government just scraped back in the December 1961 elections and Holt's vote in Higgins fell by 6.5 per cent. Many Liberals and Liberal-supporting businessmen demanded his removal from the Treasury. Menzies insisted that the credit squeeze was a government decision, and so Holt survived. The prime minister, with the treasurer at his shoulder, sought to retrieve the situation by consulting with business leaders in February 1962 and implementing policies which, very slowly, helped the economy to recover. Holt carried some scars, and he looked nervously at the reaction to his subsequent budgets.

When he got his hands on the levers, Holt spectacularly backed the wrong horse ...

Holt's personal plunge into the war was also fired by what Zara called 'Harry's most spectacular friendship' with the American president Lyndon Johnson. His off-the-cuff remark at the White House in July 1966—assuring Johnson that a staunch friend would go 'all the way with L.B.J.'—occasioned him embarrassment back home, yet, for Holt, an expression of loyalty did not denote servility. Rather, it reflected the genuine, whole-hearted and unsparing relationship between two men who shared many characteristics, and who fortified each other in the face of growing domestic criticism of the war. This hostility distressed Holt without affecting his resolve and its impact was eased when Johnson visited Australia in October 1966, one month before Federal elections which Holt won with a record majority. 

Whereas 1966 was a good year, everything seemed to go wrong in 1967. The death of his brother Cliff in March—'a terrible blow'—unsettled him, though he had a natural or developed immunity to sadness. Relieved that he managed to get to Sydney in time for the funeral, he left immediately for a scheduled Asian tour. In Canberra, Whitlam had replaced Calwell as the leader of the Opposition, and his debating skills and quick mind gave him an ascendancy over Holt who, as the year progressed, lost his customary equanimity while he struggled through his tangled speeches. Labor's by-election victories in July and September hurt him politically. So did his failure to carry the May referendum to break the nexus between the numbers in the House and the Senate, though the simultaneous proposal—to include Aborigines in the national census and to empower the Commonwealth to legislate on Aboriginal affairs—won overwhelming approval. 

The more serious wounds were self-inflicted. Holt was not prepared to discipline his own party or the coalition, animosities were rife, and he resisted party pressure for a much needed cabinet reshuffle. He also bungled the 'V.I.P. flights affair' in which the government was accused of misleading parliament over the existence of passenger manifests. Loyalty to a friend, Peter Howson, the minister for air, left Holt obviously floundering in the House. Disloyalty, possibly involving Holt's chief whip, and rumours of health problems, were fuelling doubts about his capacity to lead. 

'Young Harold' appeared to reach his nadir with the half-Senate elections on 25 November 1967. The government's share of the popular vote of 50 per cent in 1966 fell to 42.8 per cent at a time when hostile anti-Vietnam demonstrations were clearly unsettling him...

Now all that is courtesy of the ADB, here, where there's plenty more, but enough of the mood-setting, please, a bray of trumpets and wheel in the tinkling brass of the Caterist ...

Well that header is a straight-out bit of fraudulent misrepresentation for sure. Holt didn't have a clue about uniting Liberal values with a changing world, unless the Caterist means fornicating like an adulterous wildcat in the years of hippie free love ...

As for establishing the Australia Council, is that the very same body that Liberals have ever since resented and attempted to degut, or in the gorgeous George manage, take over and direct grants and funding to buddies?

The list of Holt's achievements is long? It might be not the right sort of metaphor, but Holt's government spent much of its time treading water, trying to get its head above the waves that kept crashing down on it ...

By way of an alternative, the reptiles also ran a long piece by Troy Bramston on Holt ... an excerpt ...

He cried in bed at night? Well he was the one who cried all the way with LBJ ...

And now back to the Caterists, doing their best ...

That's the best the Caterists have got?

That's what the taxpayers kick the can for?

Handwringing, and portentous, pompous talk of Burke and Paine ...?

Here's the thing. Holt was as careless of himself as he was careless of Australia ... cue Troy again ...

Anyone who has contemplated isolated Cheviot Beach, even on a mild day, might wonder why Holt behaved with such unseemly over-confidence, in a way that went on to produce all sorts of comical rumours ...

Back to the ADB ...

The party then went to Cheviot Beach where Holt changed into his swimming trunks, said that he knew the beach like the back of his hand, and, soon after midday, entered what everyone later agreed was a fierce and high surf. Harold was seen swimming freely out to sea when turbulent water suddenly built up around him and he disappeared....

...Considerable speculation followed Holt's disappearance. Every summer, Australians of all ages do foolish things in the water, and drown. Some commentators, nevertheless, found it impossible to believe that a prime minister, who was not in fact a strong swimmer, who had a sore shoulder and who entered a dangerous sea, could have acted foolishly. His customary fearlessness, a desire to 'show off', the likelihood of his being stunned or dragged down by debris, a simple miscalculation: these explanations were considered insufficiently momentous to match the gravity of the event.

Actually, Holt's capacity to act foolishly and impulsively was old news ... and a man who refused to take care of himself wasn't the sort of leader a country needed to take care of it ...

After all the comedy routines about his death are over, it's enough to know that, like many other Australians, he knew how to act foolishly in the sea ...

As for the rest, he meant well enough, but he only got to where he was, because Menzies had killed off many better rivals ...

Well there's only a couple more pars of Caterist reconsideration ... and no doubt there will be more elevated blather about a man who liked a fuck and talked of women as ripe peaches to be eaten without delay ...

Actually Holt didn't have the first clue about what to do about the changing zeitgeist, or how to respond to it, and his prime ministership was on a slow and steady decline, prior to its abrupt, and unexpected termination. 

The Liberal party spluttered on for a few more years, but the changing zeitgeist needed an entirely different response, and it got it ... and then that too faltered ...

So it goes, but history is better served by acute observation than sycophantic flattery, window-dressing and blather ... or Caterists, who might have been a little more aware if they'd actually lived in country at the time ...

Or perhaps we're better served by cartoons ... with Rowe signing off for the year, but more Rowe here ...

And so to a few cartoons celebrating the joys of young Harold ...

"I didn't expect anything like this when I said 'all the way with LBJ'!"

"The most booming recession? ... The most recessive boom? ... I'm looking for a formula."

They want to know what they're voting for? Is this wise?