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.

Casting ourselves like the old South Africa, against the world

Climate policy is where our current leaders demonstrate the determined qualities shown by the leaders of old apartheid South Africa. See in this report how we resist pressure to be constructive about the future.

There is an entrenched cultural tendency in Australia to sneer at thoughtfulness, which combines with a tendency to make up arguments to suit prejudice. As is the case with the Prime Minister's business adviser as he argues among other things about climate change.

It's depressing then also that the Labor party in opposition is too timid, too burned, to carry the case that the government is wrong.

This week APEC in Beijing and then the hosting by Australia of the G20 in Brisbane. Another international burden thrust upon this conservative government by the previous Labor government along with membership of the Security Council which the conservatives so disparaged in opposition but which has with war and plane crashes given them so much space in which to march up and down and whip chauvinist sentiment in this centenary of the beginning of the First World War, without focus on the fact that the world fell into WWI through pigheaded focus on hard, old, military mindedness.

When you are at a turning point in history only the twisted remain steadfast against change.