Ant reported earlier on Andrew Bolt’s ejaculative response to John Howard’s Irving Kristol lecture in the USA. Since then Bolta has added a few updates to his text, closing his second update with this sentence.

Missing him already.

Get a room, you two.

I’ve been having a read of the full text of Howard’s speech and it’s quite interesting to see how much hubris and arrogance this man has despite spending eleven years in office telling us he has none of either. Oh, and he’s still a dickhead.

Before pulling out some of the highlights here’s a tag cloud of the speech.

The major theme of Howard’s speech is that “values” are crucial to strong Western societies and that non-conservatives (leftards) and their ways are values-free.

Important though that history of military cooperation may be, important though our political, economic and cultural ties might be, they are dwarfed by the commonality of the values that we share.

They are the values of personal liberty and individual freedom.

Perhaps he’s talking about the personal liberty of wicked asylum seekers fleeing persecution and the individual freedom of citizens to own guns? Two things his government fought hard to protect.

Howard engages in a fair bit of blatant revisionism and draws some stunning conclusions.

On the social front we emphasised our nation’s traditional values, sought to resurrect greater pride in her history and became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.

When we left office in November last year Australia was a stronger, prouder and more prosperous nation than it had been twelve years earlier.

That’ll be a surprise to the massive chunk of Australians who lost pride in their country under Howard’s reign and the massiver chunk for whom the prosperity of which Howard speaks was never within their reach.

And then there’s this awesome bit of fence sitting.

In my country at present interest rates are heading in the opposite direction from that in the United States. Sixteen years of unbroken economic growth plus increases in food and fuel prices have put some upward pressure on inflation with implications for interest rates.

Read: “We were awesome for the economy, even though our awesomeness was bad for the economy.” Two words for you, John.

Despite all of Howard’s talk about economic liberalism and small government he outlines how he wasn’t afraid of using economic policy to drive his conservative social policy.

Taxation laws should promote, not penalise, marriage. The taxation system should generously recognise the cost of raising children. This is not middle class welfare. It is merely a taxation system which with some semblance of social vision. The tax/payment system must also support choice for parents about who cares for their children.

“This is not middle class welfare”. Laugh? I nearly cried.

It should come as no shock to GrodsReaders that his rant on education really got my blood up.

Maintaining a cultural bias in favour of families also means that governments should reinforce the role of parents in choosing what form of education their children receive.

Australia has largely succeeded in maintaining a good quality publicly funded education system.

Parallel with that there has always been a robust non-government school sector. In the last dozen or so years in Australia there has been strong growth in that area. Now some 33 per cent of Australian school children are educated at independent or non-government schools, the great bulk of which have a religious affiliation.

There is no constitutional barrier in Australia to governments giving direct help to schools with a religious affiliation provided there is no discrimination between religions. The bulk of the schools receiving this help are Christian denominated schools. Jewish and Muslim schools receive similar help. All of these schools must adhere to curricula laid down by state education authorities.

The major growth sector amongst independent schools has been in the low fee independent Christian category. This is a direct result of more liberal funding arrangements initiated by my government. It is hard not to see this growth as other than a collective search by parents for a more values-based education experience for their children.

Our funding policies have, in practice, produced the same outcome as education vouchers by significantly expanding the choices available to parents of relatively modest means.

Having… trouble… writing… teeth… clenched. Of course parents are “choosing” private schools over public schools because public schools are desperately underfunded and the Howard government spent eleven years bashing them mercilessly to create the impression that they were the gates to hell. Howard admits it: “Australia has largely succeeded in maintaining a good quality publicly funded education system… It is hard not to see this growth as other than a collective search by parents for a more values-based education experience for their children.”

And to finish off his hour-long, self-congratulatory, unilateral masturbation Howard emulates Andrew Bolt — whose right to free speech is forever being threatened by the imaginary “them” — by lamenting the uphill battle faced by poor conservatives like him who never get the chance to express their views in public.

Those who hold to conservative values continue to face a major ideological battle.

The left liberal grip on educational institutions and large, though not all, sections of the media remains intense.

It’s nice to know that Howard dedicated one of the last paragraphs of his speech to me.