There's a Toast to Don John of Bennelong! Deputy Sheriff of the South Pacific

It is one thing to inveigh against the character and re-election of George Bush and his creatures for a 2nd term from the safety of Bali, where the number of Americans are few and Republicans among them rarer than hen’s teeth. It is quite another, in fact it is asking for trouble, for a Pom such as myself to venture any remarks at all about Australia. Nevertheless, here I go.
 
How on earth does such an unprepossessing little man like John Howard get to be Australia’s Prime Minister for four terms? That’s already Australia’s second longest serving PM after his hero from the 50’s Robert Menzies.
 
How does a small-time solicitor with no particular oratorical or other visible talents so dominate the political process of his country for what promises to be well over  a decade? Leaving Australia’s Labour party to thrash about in the wilderness with no prospect of winning power anytime soon?
 
The man must be a bloody brilliant politician, that’s what….!
Whatever you think of the man, you gotta respect that, if nothing else. Howard is “organisation-man” par excellence. Australia currently rides the crest of a wave. The economy has never appeared so good, nor for so long. Never mind the fact this prosperity is based on the de-regulation of the economy instituted by Labour under the Hawke/Keating administrations and comes at the price of a housing price bubble, massive household debt, a huge current account deficit and the worrying sale of Australian assets to foreigners. So far, these are problems for the future.
 
John Howard has managed to position himself somewhere to the left of the now discredited Pamela Hanson and with his feral Right secured dominates the Centre of Australian politics at will. As soon as anyone criticises Howard the attack dogs of Murdoch’s gutter press, talkback radio and some of the major broadsheets all howl them down. In fact any mildly progressive views are lampooned as soon as uttered. Like Dubya, Howard has been ruthless in stacking of public bodies with his political hacks, from the High Court to Australian Broadcasting (ABC), censors at the Office of Film & Literature and the Heritage Commission to name just some.
 
From the start Howard has been masterful at riding topical issues and appealing to the less admirable concerns of the Australian voting public, articulating them in such a way as to make them acceptable, if not noble.
 
He refused to say “Sorry” for the injustices suffered by Aborigines over past generations, but managed with reluctance to express “regret”. That’s almost certainly as far as the majority of Australians were prepared to go. Most Australians would have a pretty conflicted view about Aboriginal land rights and would probably prefer the whole question would just go away. An apology after all admits you were wrong and has legal implications. It means you may need to do something about it. 
 
His treatment of the referendum on the Monarchy in 1999 was masterful. A monarchist through and through, it was pretty clear most Australians thought it was time they became a republic and severed the remaining political ties with Britain. Overt support for the monarchy was a sure election-loser for the Liberals. However clear about this most Australians may be, they are not fools and in the event preferred to continue paying a tenuous if not invisible fealty to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and her brood rather than have a party hack or “pol” foisted on them by parliament, for according to the terms of the referendum any president was to be appointed by vote in parliament, not direct election. Result: the monarchy was retained by a substantial majority and Howard got back for his second term having astutely sabotaged the Republican initiative. He probably deserves and has a hankering to become Australia’s first Duke. Duke John of Bennelong?
Nah, “Sorry”. Don’t fink so Yer Grace.
 
Next it was the asylum seekers from Afghanistan and boat people from elsewhere in Asia, washing up on Australia’s sparsely populated Far North, touching that longstanding sore nerve in the Australian psyche. A vigorous legalistic policy of putting them in camps, pushing them back out to sea, not letting them land and shipping them off to Pacific Islands went down well with most voters, tipping Howard into his third term.
 
This time around Howard rode the wave of prosperity in Australia to his 4th three-year term in office.
 
The main appeal of John Howard, and something he grasps and plays like a maestro, is to be found in the essential small “c” conservatism of Australians stemming from their Anglo-Celtic background, less than 20 million of them,on a vast empty continent way down there in the Southern Seas.As an immigrant nation open sea and air lanes are vital to Australia’s prosperity and security. Since Federation Australia has always supported its allies Britain and the US in all military engagements over the past 100 years. That is unlikely to change. So it should be no surprise that most Australians, even if reluctantly, support their active military involvement in the American and allied interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and become nervous when their leaders are portrayed as distancing them from their traditional Western allies.
 
Where Howard and his pit bulls in the media have been so smart is in painting Labour as a party of the Loony Left. Absurdly the impression has been given that the ALP wants to make over Australians and Australia so that they somehow become “Asian”. Labour politicians are portrayed as going cap-in-hand to a bunch of authoritarian and corrupt Asian leaders begging on bended knee to be let in on various Asian economic forums. Even more humiliating, they are roundly told to “sod off” by the likes of Malaysia’s ex-PM, Mahathir Mohamad , who liked nothing better than to bring Australians down a peg or two and treat them like the white trash of Asia given half a chance. In short, the tabloid media howled, Labour was betraying all that Australia stood for and was kissing Asia’s arse. In reality the vision of Hawke and especially Keating kowtowing to the likes of Mahathir, let alone bestowing salutations upon his hindquarters, is hilarious.
 
Despite giving the impression that he was rejecting the policy toward Asia adopted by his predecessors, smart politician and strategist that he is, Howard is very well aware where Australia is geo-politically situated. If anybody has been kowtowing to the Middle Kingdom, it’s Howard who’s visited China four times already.
 
 “ The nations of Asia have the most direct influence on our strategic environment and they are our largest export markets and source of much of our investment and imports”, he told the Sydney Institute in July, 2003. And again to Channel 9 at the time, “the close relationship we have with the United States is not at the expense of our relations with countries like China and Indonesia”.In truth the Chinese President Hu Jintao, got a much warmer welcome from both sides of the house in the Australian parliament  than ever Dubya did when he addressed the parliament a few days earlier.
 
Smart though he undoubtedly is, Howard is not an inspired orator, bit of a plodder in fact, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in Australia where being too smooth doesn’t go down that well. He surely erred back in 1999 when he declared that his country was the US’ “deputy sheriff” in the region, an own goal bid to equal Blair’s status as Bush’s poodle. Imagine what the Australian tabloids would have made of that had a Labour politician made the remark?
 
For now at any rate, it is hard to see how Labour can buck the cultural trend to the Centre Right in Australia. With a politician as smart as Howard covering all the angles and with a booming economy, what’s left to Labour? Give more money and land back to the Aborigines? Pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Suck up to China and become a non-participating member of the Western alliance like New Zealand?  None of them great vote winning strategies I’d say. Reckon they’ll have to await an economic downturn or for the Liberals to become besmirched in corporate sleaze.Not impossible in an administration in its 4th term.
 
Meantime Don John can bask in the easy but meaningless bonhomie of his buddy Dubya, while swapping his blazer, club tie and grey flannels for dude ranch duds.
 
On hearing about the fuss about the “sheriff” remark Bush promptly promotes Howard,
 
“ He’s not  a deppity. He’s the Sheriff!”,
 
“ He’s a Man of Steel “,on Howard’s visit to the president’s Crawford Texas ranch.
 
And finally, “I’m looking forward to visiting Australia. They tell me it’s like Texas”.
 
Lovely stuff, which I’m sure will make all Australian hearts swell with pride. Just to keep things in perspective tho’, Don John should remember that Bush’s staff  referred to him in their briefing notes as John Major, the less than stellar former British Tory PM defeated in 1997.