Sunday 16 November 2014

an extraordinary reprimand of Australia by the United States

Let the record state: never has a United States president reprimanded Australia on Australian soil and never has an American president so bluntly and firmly as a positive ally told Australia it is strategically in the wrong.***

We are a country in which the major parties fervently support the alliance with the United States, for reasons positive, obtuse, opportunist, cringely, take your pick, pick your moment.

The overturning of the mean spirited and stupid policy perspectives of the Abbott government on several issues at the G20, the pigheaded and fantastically misguided imagination that they could change the world by being their stubborn ideological selves, as hosts who insist that guests eat old pig and drink plonk, has come a cropper.

Read and admire:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/15/g20-obama-puts-climate-change-in-spotlight-as-australian-agenda-sidelined

Of course, of course, Abbott and his team will say this is just a passing moment in American president, this president will be washed away by the tea party in the Congress now and the presidential elections in two years time. But this is to fail to understand history and become entangled with US politics as not before. I wrote in an earlier entry that a very important thing for any new government is to understand the feasible and know how to get it. They have not learned from the bitter lessons of their budget, and indeed Abbott, playing anti-statesman, has whined to the G20 about his failures. And will be scoffed here and abroad. If I were there I would leave early like Putin may or may not.

*** Nixon and Kissinger despised the Whitlam Government but did not make it a centre point of any speech. Nor did they take the opportunity to address a receptive Australian audience in Australia to lay it all out and get swooning support for things the Australian government hates.

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