THE National Press Club a few days before an election is neither the time nor the place for John Howard to put his hand on his heart and demand to be believed. This is, after all, where he delivered the most famous fib of his career before the 2001 poll: that the navy was still saying kids had been thrown overboard.
Whether Howard's denials hold up this time hardly matters. The Lindsay pamphlet was not a rogue operation. The officials and spouses involved knew they were campaigning for a party that brought the race card back to Canberra nearly a dozen years ago.
Howard calls this saving Australia from political correctness. Yesterday at the Press Club he was at it again, boasting how he'd done away with "the overdose of political correctness" afflicting the nation when he came to power.
That's when Howard's way with race came down from the Territory, with the pollster Mark Textor and Shane Stone, the former chief minister who became Liberal Party president. Toying with Pauline Hanson, sabotaging reconciliation and stopping the Tampa drove a wedge deep into Labor ranks.
Playing with race became Howard's trademark. So were his denials. His hand was always on his heart. The Prime Minister reassured us we were not racists. Nor was Hanson, as she denounced Asians and Aborigines. Nor were redneck Coalition MPs who never had his knack of dog whistling their messages.
Hammered by questioning yesterday Howard declared: "I do not think for a moment that racism is an attitude of mind of the Liberal Party."
Maybe not. But the last dozen years have seen the party under his leadership willing to use race as it hadn't been used in federal politics since the 1960s.
Howard knows this country intimately. When his favourite broadcaster, Alan Jones, was nailed in April this year by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for making statements "likely to encourage violence or brutality" in the lead-up to the Cronulla riots, the Prime Minister leapt to his defence.
"I don't think he is a person who encourages prejudice in the Australian community, not for one moment," he said. "But he is a person who articulates what a lot of people think."
He's dead right there. Many do. And John Howard will go down in history as the political operator who chose not to combat this dark side of our psyche but to exploit it.
Topic: Howard fiddles as racism flares (Read 1179 times)