Awarding John Howard with an Order of Merit has diminished a once prestigious honour, says senior correspondent Barry Everingham.
There has been much written about the decision of Queen Elizabeth to appoint John Howard to the Order of Merit, and of course in doing so Her Majesty has soiled that once prestigious honour.
And every Australian has a right to know — just who put forward Howard’s name?
After all, Australians do not, as a rule, accept foreign honours, although George W Bush – America’s most intellectually challenged president – did give his egregious partner in the crime of the Iraqi invasion a high US gong for his duplicity and lying along with Tony Blair.
Queen Elizabeth II acts only on the advice of the Government of the day.
And it’s impossible to believe that Julia Gillard would have nominated the likes of John Howard.
So just who did?
Queen Elizabeth is known to be a woman of total integrity, so it’s unlikely she would have made a unilateral decision to give the gong to Howard — the reports of successive British high commissioners in Canberra would surely have crossed the Queen’s desk and would certainly have been frank about the type of man Howard really is.
Needless to say, Professor David Flint’s personal blog is waxing ecstatic about the honour and has commissioned somebody by the name of Simon Frame to write a critique of a gushing book The Order of Merit by Stanley Martin.
Howard is among such distinguished OM’s as Joan Sutherland, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Yehudi Menuhin, Lawrence Olivier, to name just a few, none of whom unilaterally decided, as Howard did, to go to war on the assumption of a blatant lie and whose decision cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens.
The Bush/Blair/Howard folly has made Iraq one of the most unstable countries on earth and terror and terrorism is festering away because of the warmongering trio.
Now back to this “Matchless Honour” — God save from such ridiculous hyperbole in the 21st Century.
It’s a comparatively new gong, which was the brain child of King Edward VII — the lecherous adulterous great-great-grandfather of the Queen.
He is also great-great-great-grandfather of the next King of Australia and, wait for it, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of our next Queen, Camilla Parker Bowles, who is the result of an adulterous union between one of her ancestral grandmothers and the lecherous Edward.
Is it any wonder that the royal couple behaved the way they did with those genes running around their DNA!
I am not focusing anymore on Howard and his OM — it is far too distasteful.
But I will say, I find it incomprehensible that this foreign order, with little or no significance to Australia, takes precedence over the highest honour in the Order of Australia — the AC-Commander of the Order of Australia.
This is something which must be rectified before our country becomes a total laughing stock.
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