LuisTeodoro.com

Among other unflattering names, Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard has been called a racist and a bigot.

One Australian journalist (Phillip Adams) has described him as “the least comprehending, least compassionate [Australian] prime minister of the modern era.”

Elected on the crest of a conservative backlash in 1999, the policies of Howard’s ruling Coalition on a broad range of domestic issues—Aboriginal rights, Asian immigration, the environment, women’s rights—have been firmly committed to keeping Australia white and its corporations happy.

A leading member of the Howard Coalition in parliament once described Asians as “slanty-eyed.” He did not apologize, and other members of the Coalition rushed to his defense by claiming that the remark had been “taken out of context.”

Out of context or not, the fact is that Australia detains illegal immigrants from Asia in concentration camps—a practice that has been widely denounced by human rights groups—while largely ignoring overstaying British and American visitors (estimated now to number over 50,000).

Australia has also made it a policy to refuse entry to Asian boat people escaping political persecution in their countries of origin. The Howard government’s Border Protection Bill permits the Australian Navy to intercept the vessels of asylum seekers from Asia before they reach Australian waters.

It did exactly that in August 2001, when some 400 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, with a sprinkling of Indonesians, were intercepted aboard a Norwegian vessel off Australian waters, and kept there for weeks until Nauru agreed to accept them for a fee.

Australia has described the Kyoto Protocol, which commits the industrialized countries to take measures to arrest global warming, as “not to Australia’s advantage,” a statement widely interpreted in Australian liberal circles to mean it would not be good for business.

Under Howard’s leadership Australia was the first and only country in the region to send troops to Afghanistan in support of the US war. It has loudly proclaimed its support for the impending US war on Iraq despite the United Nations—and in support of the Bush “First Strike” Doctrine. Under the Howard government, Australia, in short has become a country that happens to be in Asia but might as well be part of North America.

Howard’s statements the other day, made during an interview with Australian radio, should not have surprised anyone, specially Philippine officialdom, if they’ve been doing their homework.

Howard said Australia would be prepared to launch “preemptive strikes” against terrorists in Asia should they threaten Australian nationals and interests. It should not be a surprise to either the Philippines or its neighbors because there has been Down Under since 1999 a government that disdains Asians, whether in its own territory or abroad, and regards White Australia as the rightful first power in the region.

Never a bunch known for their independence, or their zealous defense of Philippine sovereignty, Philippine officials have variously described Howard’s statements as “arrogant,” “bizarre,” “hasty,” and “violative of Philippine sovereignty.”

Some of the reactions to Howard’s remarks, among them those of Senate President Franklin Drilon, referred to the country’s not allowing others to fight its wars, and rejected the implication that it would require Australian intervention to root out terrorist cells and bases in the Philippines.

These same officials, however, are not saying the same thing about the involvement of U.S. troops in the anti-Abu Sayyaf campaign. At the moment they were being made, Philippine military officials were in fact also announcing that “a small number”—they refused to reveal exactly how many—of U.S. troops were on their way to the country supposedly to train Philippine troops and to serve as advisers in the Armed Forces’ anti-terrorism operations.

This “small number” would augment the 140 left in the country from among the 600 engaged in the Balikatan exercises of January-July this year—in which the involvement of US troops was justified as “necessary” to defeat the minuscule Abu Sayyaf Group.

Neither have any of these same officials, beginning with Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, reacted with the same intensity to George W. Bush’s own preemptive strike doctrine, of which Howard’s is a mere carbon copy. Howard’s would apply only on a limited (Asian) scale, and does not include the option to use nuclear weapons. Bush’s would apply to the entire planet, and includes the option to use nuclear weapons first.

Howard is, in short, merely replicating on a smaller scale his intellectual guru George “Duh” Bush’s own Bonapartist visions. Unlike Bush, on the other hand, he has suggested that the U.N. Charter be revised to permit powerful states, among which he includes Australia, to launch military operations in other countries in response to terrorist threats.

If that sounds like a lame attempt to blunt the imperial edge of his remarks, that’s because it is. No one, least of all Howard, expects that to happen, the U.N. in the view of Howard as well as Bush being no more than a nuisance whose existence in the world arena one has to now and then acknowledge.

His being a Bush copycat notwithstanding, however, Howard’s remarks should be taken seriously by the countries of the region, as indeed they have been by Thailand and Indonesia, both of which have protested the implications on their sovereignty of the Australian proposal. Malaysia has gone further, describing any such action by Australia as an act of war.

The Philippines may be expected to say little else. Indonesia and Malaysia have the military capacity to put their money where their mouths are. The Philippines doesn’t, given the abysmally limited capacity of its armed forces to defend it against anyone except unarmed women and children.

There is something the Philippine government can do, however, and it is—National Security Adviser Roilo Golez is right for once—to carefully rethink Australia’s proposal for an anti-terrorism pact in which that country, under the benighted rule of Howard’s racist Coalition, can include a rider that would permit it to launch military strikes in the territories of other countries. If the Arroyo administration can’t defend Philippine sovereignty from the United States, it should be able to protect it from the white supremacists of Australia.