Doing Australia Proud

Australia is, if we are honest, a little self-concious about how the world views us and whether they even know we're here and not bordering Germany. Citizens look to our leaders to advance a positive image of our nation and to embody our most cherished virtues. Unfortunately our current PM has made his career out of discovering and cynically manipulating our nations most unattractive qualities, so when he's thrown into the international arena the results are not often to our tastes.

AID/WATCH is highlighting this interesting editorial in the Melbourne Age. One of the most powerful clubs of nations, the G8, met recently to discuss debt relief. "British Chancellor Gordon Brown called for the cancellation of multilateral debt to the most impoverished nations in Africa" a region being decimated by HIV/AIDS, and he had the support of Tony Blair, president of the G8, and Bill Clinton. There was a clear mood that it was time to act definitively to fight poverty and disease in the Two Thirds world.

So where was Australia in all this good will, this love fest?

John Howard was the puppet sent in for the No case, and not only did he play follow the leader to an absent George W Bush, he went in to bat for Bush's terrorist-seeding poverty promotion policies and attacked any and all criticism with the fairly undiplomatic label "ridiculous".

But what's truly ugly is Howard's own politics when it comes to the poorest, most desperate nations on earth:

At the closing session, he rejected moves for debt relief and increased aid, saying that Third World countries must earn assistance from the developed world by expunging political corruption. In the meantime, he maintained, the best way to help poor nations was to eliminate trade barriers.

Could he be any more patronising? The generous John Howard who's sent our national aid efforts plunging, despite official commitment to a target of 0.7% of GDP, and in boom times for Australia, claims he'll condescend to toss some shrapnel towards third world AIDS victims and their starving families if they stamp out corruption... what are they meant to pay these new corruption watchdogs with? Their firstborn?!

The 'corruption' excuse is flimsy because there are numerous examples of highly effective transparency and monitoring measures implemented by other wealthy nations like Germany in just these debt relief type programs.

John Howard is just tight-fisted and mean-spirited and too cowardly to admit it. In that he is a projection of the nastiest elements of the Australian character, concentrated and writ large on the world stage. Australians wonder how Americans can be so oblivious to what the world thinks of them, but are we seen any differently?

What would you think of a country of which this could be said:

the Government allocated $ 1.8 billion to assisting poorer countries reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development last year, Australians spent about $ 2.2 billion on their pets.

Sure, you'll tell me that Australians were ever so generous with the Tsunami, but what was amazing about the Tsunami was not that Australians gave so much, but that we gave anything at all. Even the corporate media could barely conceal their surprise, before they started the usual stroking and fairy claps for anyone who coughed up and especially any company that decided to (very publicly) cash in on the media attention.

We voted John Howard in because we like his small-town lawyer ways of getting out of our moral obligations(and his), usually on technicalities, and because he promised to keep the yellow peril across the sea away from our virgin shores. It took one of the most devestating disasters in a century and constant televised exposure to incredible suffering to remind Australians that we do have a heart and that the people we lock up for crossing that channel in search of a little opportunity or refuge from violence are in fact human just like us.

And then, when the images stopped, we forgot them as we knew we would and John Howard went back to throwing those foreigners a bone to chew every now and then... and the occasional squeaky toy.

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