Australian Prime Minister One Week from Oblivion

If this story proves true, some of my Australian blogger friends will be celebrating, particularly Magic Bellybutton who holds John Howard in at least as low of regard as I do the Chimperator. From following some of the Australian newspapers, etc., Howard has appeared to have tried to impose a regime agenda very much parallel to that of the Chimperator. Like Bush, he seems to be no friend of the LGBT community in Australia. Thus, I hope he goes down to defeat - the Aussies deserve someone more progressive. Here are some highlights from the Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-week-left-to-save-pms-political-skin/2007/11/15/1194766869599.html):

JOHN HOWARD has a week to engineer a dramatic shift in voter sentiment or suffer defeat at the ballot box, the latest Herald/Nielsen poll shows. It confirms the Coalition has made gains since the campaign began five weeks ago, but not enough to win the election if it were held now. Conducted from Monday night to Wednesday, the poll shows the Coalition campaign launch failed to deliver a significant boost and Labor still holds an election-winning, two-party preferred lead of 54 per cent to 46 per cent. It leads on the primary vote by 47 per cent to 43 per cent, a slight improvement for the Coalition since the last poll a fortnight ago.

As if this was not bad enough for the Howard Government, a week from polling day a report arrived from a global committee of scientific experts on global warming. The findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do little to take any pressure off Howard. On the contrary, the panel's summary assessment only adds urgency to the global negotiation to set up a new action plan.

"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," said the panel's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. It just so happens that Howard has proposed that carbon trading, the mechanism for tackling emissions in Australia, should begin in 2012. Howard's allies in the Bush Administration tried to remove some of the more alarming elements of the report in negotiations with the panel, but failed. "We have to make sure that scientific truth is not suppressed," Pachauri said.