Another Bush buddy bites the dust

John
Howard crushed in Australian election

By
Max J. Castro                                                                        Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com

Aznar,
Berlusconi, Blair: One by one, all the leaders who played a major
role in enabling Bush’s war in Iraq have suffered political
disaster. There was one exception to the trend, however, John Howard,
the Australian Primer Minister, a national leader who seemed fully
capable of surviving the Bush-Iraq curse. But that was a mirage that
dissipated last Saturday when Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party handed
Howard and his Conservatives a crushing defeat in the country’s
national elections.

Labor’s
victory was so decisive and Howard’s defeat so disastrous that the
Prime Minister even lost the election in his own district, thus
becoming only the second sitting PM in Australian history that has
been booted out of Parliament by voters.

John
Howard was not the only big loser in last weekend’s Australian
election, however; George W. Bush lost big as well.

Howard
has been a vocal and material supporter of the Iraq war. He staunchly
resisted pressure to pull out the 550 Australian combat troops
serving in the war. In contrast, Rudd has promised a phased
withdrawal, joining a string of countries that have already pulled
out their troops, such as Spain and Italy, or that are planning to do
so in the near future, including Poland. Thus the “coalition of the
willing,” mainly a symbolic cover for U.S. troops from day one, now
shrinks to virtual oblivion.

That
is bad enough for Bush, yet the Iraq war was not the only issue on
which John Howard continued to stand shoulder to shoulder with the
increasingly isolated U.S. president against most of the world. The
Australian PM also joined Bush in a stubborn refusal to sign the
Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming. Now Bush is really alone: Rudd
has promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol upon taking office, leaving
the United States as the only developed country yet to join the
agreement.

And
there is more. In handing Howard a stinging defeat, Australian voters
were not only sending a message about the importance of climate
change and the folly of the Iraq war. They were also turning their
backs on a political ideology and style.

The
Australian press has described John Howard as a divisive leader and
the country’s most ideological Prime Minister. And, Howard’s
ideology, like George Bush’s, has been decidedly right-wing.
According to Paul Keating writing in the Sydney
Morning Herald,
“when
Howard decided to go after workers with his Work Choices legislation,
he did so not out of any economic necessity, as the economic record
for wages and inflation attests. He did it simply to break the back
of the unions. His motivations were ideological and spiteful…”

The
same type of ideological motivation and spite rather than economic
necessity was behind Bush’s failed attempt to undermine and
privatize Social Security which had to be destroyed not because it is
failing or doomed to bankruptcy. The program is sound now and will
remain sound far into the future with only relatively minor
adjustments. Social Security had to be destroyed for sheer
ideological reasons, namely that it is an extremely successful and
popular government program the existence of which continually belies
the Republican myth that the state is incapable of doing anything
well. To add insult to injury, the fact that Social Security is
publicly-administered at a low cost means that Republican supporters,
private profiteers on Wall Street and beyond, are denied the colossal
fees that would come from managing a colossal pool of money.

The
rout of Howard and the Conservatives in Australia may hold another
kind of message for the Republican Party in the United States,
especially for GOP presidential candidates trying to score political
points by coded appeals to racism framed in the language of
opposition to “illegal immigrants.” Shortly before the election,
possibly out of desperation, Howard made a coded racist appeal to
Australian voters. As Keating describes it:

“In
The
Sun-Herald
on November 18, John Howard nominated the putting asunder of
political correctness and the celebration of our Anglo-Celtic past as
the pinnacle of his social, indeed national, achievement. He was
nominating as a virtue political incorrectness of a kind that gave
some the right to speak and behave towards others in terms
disparaging of their colour, religion, class or social standing. In a
country of immigrants, such a view emanating from the Prime Minister
is social poison.”

Devoid
of any positive political message, saddled with an unpopular war and
President, Republicans now running for the White House are plying
voters with this very poison. It is a dastardly tack; it may also be
a losing one, and not only in Australia. The same tactic failed in
California more than a decade ago. There, Republicans demonized
undocumented immigrants in the 1990s; they are still suffering for it
politically. Scapegoating immigrants for political profit also failed
more recently and in a much more conservative state than California.
Republican candidates in Virginia played the anti-illegal immigrant
card relentlessly in last month’s elections for state and local
offices. The result was that the GOP lost control of one chamber of
the legislature and just managed to avert the same fate in the other. 

John
Howard’s political demise, which represents a defeat for a selfish
and aggressive foreign policy unconcerned with international law or
global environmental stewardship and for a mean-spirited domestic
policy that systematically favors the most powerful and privileged,
raises the hope that it might be a harbinger of things to come in the
United States