'Not Happy John'..new political party in Australia to combat Bush/Howard

[the Kelly Gang]

a new political party has been launched in Australia as a direct response to PM John Howard's slavish following of George W.Bush.

significantly, it is headed by John Valder, the former President of tthe Liberal Party..John Howard's very own party.

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Prime Minister John Howard is also the subject of a stinging attack in a Sunday feature this week, from the man who first engineered his ascent to the Liberal leadership in the mid-1980s — former party president John Valder. Valder accuses Howard of being "the principal villain" in damaging the Liberal Party by taking it progressively to the far right over his years in power. He describes him as autocratic to the point of being a tyrant and says he has destroyed the tradition of democracy in the Liberal Party. Graham Davis reports on the man who's launched a "Not happy, John" campaign in a bid to unseat the PM ...

Transcript
JOHN VALDER (IN STREET): My name is John Valder, I've been around a long time.

GRAHAM DAVIS: He's the grand, old man of the Liberal Party, its former federal president, someone who engineered John Howard's rise to power. Yet now, John Valder has turned on the Prime Minister and is doing all he can to remove him not just from the Lodge, but from the Sydney seat he's held for 30 years.

JOHN VALDER (IN STREET): In the parliamentary party, if Howard lost his seat, I think there'd be a big sigh of relief 'cause they've all been under his thumb.

GRAHAM DAVIS: Valder is conducting a "Not happy, John" campaign in Howard's electorate of Bennelong - the slogan borrowed from the new book of the same name by Fairfax journalist Margo Kingston. Today, he's in Eastwood Mall in the most vulnerable part of the Prime Minister's seat, now significantly Asian, and which returns a Labor member to the NSW Parliament in the form of Police Minister John Watkins.



http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/feature_stories/article_1620.asp