The "Blunder From Down Under" Returns

In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer “Back Channels” column, Kevin Ferris tells us of former Australian PM John Howard’s recent visit to the American Enterprise Institute.

I’ll spare you the exceedingly tedious details and just try to highlight some major points instead (the West must hold fast to its values and resist “vacuous” calls for change, Howard “modernized” Australia’s economy partly through labor law changes, the Archbishop of Canterbury is wrong to state that “some acceptance of sharia law was inevitable in Britain,” each of our countries must be “culturally assertive” in a manner advocated by Maggie Thatcher and The Sainted Ronnie R, and of course, Iraq and Afghanistan are both fronts on the GWOT against “Islamic Fascism”; this is a recording).

Yeah, I can remember Howard being “culturally assertive” all right when he said here that Osama bin Forgotten was “praying” for Barack Obama to win the U.S. presidency, earning Howard a swift rebuke over his country’s troop presence in Iraq which was virtually nonexistent when compared to ours.

(Oh, and speaking of Iraq, I’d still like to find out about that little alleged “quid pro quo” whereby Howard sent more troops to Iraq if we in turn didn’t look into some of the “financial relations” between Saddam Hussein and the Australian Wheat Board here).

And Ferris tells us of another wonder of Howard’s tenure, which was his “tax reform” that, apparently, actually helped his country’s economy (Wikipedia tells us here that part of that supposed reform was Howard’s institution of a Goods and Services Tax during his second term, something he said he wouldn’t do when he first ran for prime minister.

However, it seems that the issue that trumped all for the Aussies in last year’s election was the environment, made so by that country’s seven-year drought, as noted here; Howard was defeated by Labor party opposition leader Kevin Rudd who was aided in no small part by Peter Garrett, law graduate and environment spokesman and also former lead singer of the band Midnight Oil (it’s hard to blame Howard for the environment, but he can be faulted for sucking up too thoroughly to Dubya…and by the way, Howard and his coalition lost big last year, giving up 23 seats in Parliament – it was an unusually decisive blow given their electoral history).

And Ferris noted that Howard said the following to his sympathetic AEI audience...

Some would counter that the West, particularly Bush's America, is already too arrogant, too willing to ignore the needs or values of other cultures and nations. Why not give a little?

"We should not think that by trading away some of the values which have made us who we are will buy us either immunity from terrorists or respect from noisy minorities," Howard says.

"If the butter of common national values is spread too thinly, it will disappear altogether."

Yep, just like Howard’s career in public life, apparently (and he and Ferris know a thing or two about “noisy minorities,” I’ll admit).