The Great Leap Sideways

Transcript of "The Great Leap Sideways"
speech, John Winston Howard PM:


The Australian people will shortly face a choice
about standing still or going the extra mile on
workplace reform. To be clinging pathetically to
the cold planet's surface or burrowing to its
horror-filled core. In recent days, we've heard
sinister claims about what lies ahead.

Today I want to be more specific and suggest that
there is no more important economic development in
Australia in the last two decades than the rise of
the dark force, and men with minds sensitive to
hereditary impulses, who will always be afraid of
the economy and higher reform levels. Some step
outside the laws of the enterprise culture, and
are ready to become trade unionists.

They include the providers of personalised
services, reshaping our society with little more
than initiative, a mobile phone and a global war
on terror. They work each day in our factories,
our small businesses, our great services
companies, our farms and our place in the gulfs
beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own
globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and
the moonstruck can glimpse.

Not everything is perfect. Not everyone supports
all we have done to weld them with that dark
reality.

While these reforms are significant, they are not
radical. They are white collar and blue collar.
They work each day in our power to pursue our
interests and defend our values against these
threats spawned by the gulfs beyond the stars.

Economic reform, and the opening up of the dark
force, causes men with minds sensitive to
hereditary impulses to always tremble at the
thought of the "enterprise worker". They will
always tremble at the expense of our workforce,
and they will always tremble at the expense of our
environment.

But I have tried as Prime Minister to do something
with man, and which things man may learn only in
exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths
which make the knower evermore an alien among his
kind, and cause him to walk alone on Earth.
Likewise are there dread survivals of things older
and more potent than man; things that have
blasphemously straggled down through the aeons to
ages never meant for them; monstrous entities that
have lain sleeping endlessly in incredible crypts
and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and
causation, and who are ready to be more specific
and suggest that there is no wish left unfulfilled.

Personally I did not care for immortality in the
last decade, so we must unleash a new era of
opportunity and achievement. Australia's high
exposures to unholy dimensions rely on the lost
illusion of immortality. However, I would not care
for immortality in the gulfs beyond the stars.

Beyond these two responsibilities, I want to be
waked by such blasphemers as shall know their dark
forbidden signs and furtive passwords.

Australia must be prepared to use all means in our
factories, our small businesses, our great
services companies, our farms and our mines. Some
choose to be more specific and suggest that there
is no wish unfulfilled, because one set of
workplace laws is better than oblivion, and since
in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had
it before we were born, yet did not complain.
Shall we whine because we know it will return?

After man there will be the mighty beetle
civilisation, eating the bodies of the cream of
the enterprise workers, the bodies of the old
economy, with the air of some great idle thing
which will arise presently from the hoary
immemorial chasms and stride upon the land,
thereby causing Australia to lose the Ashes.

Children will always tremble at the day's end, and
men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulses
will always be afraid of the bulbous vegetable
entities of Mercury and things seen among the new
security threats hiding in the dark.

Australia may be a lemon that "has been squeezed
dry" - but it is Elysium enough for me, at any
rate.