Bush's speech

The Australian ^ | October 24 2003

[knighthawk]

President George W. Bush came a long way to deliver a speech that did not address the issues that will shape the future of the alliance between Australia and the United States. The President's address to parliament yesterday failed to deal in any detail with the free trade agreement now being negotiated between ourselves and the US.

Nor did he set out a grand vision of how the US and Australia can co-operate to advance the cause of democracy and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific. Instead, Mr Bush focused on Iraq and the war on terror. It was a speech that did not substantiate the President's obvious high regard for Australia, and its Prime Minister, by setting out how the US wants to take the alliance forward into the new century. Despite these flaws, Mr Bush's speech - as well as those of those of John Howard and Simon Crean - served an important purpose. They all asserted the fundamental values that anchor this great friendship between our two peoples. And even in the light of the cheap theatrics of the alliance's opponents, they made an unanswerable case for its continuance.

The US alliance remains the foundation of Australia's foreign policy. As a small nation, we cannot hope to change the world alone. We can advance the cause of democracy - as we have in Timor and the Solomon Islands - and we can stand against tyranny, as we did in Iraq. But the US can do much more - it has the means to help peoples around the world to move towards democracy. As Mr Bush said yesterday: "We must decide our own belief: either freedom is the privilege of an elite few, or it is the right and capacity of all humanity."

The flourishes in the Prime Minister's speech were less elegant - as is the Australian way. Mr Howard looked back to focus on the alliance in adversity, from the battles on the Western Front in 1918 through the Coral Sea in 1942 and on to the terrorists' surprise attack on the US on September 11, 2001. But he also asserted that the alliance was based on a common core of beliefs - in the primacy of the individual and family life over the interests of the state, and the fundamental role of free enterprise. And while it was a message less grandly expressed than the President's, Mr Howard also enunciated a foundation belief of the alliance that Australia's enemies need to hear - "the worth of a person is determined by that person's character and hard work, not by their religion or race or colour or creed or social background". He acknowledged the divisions in Australia over the war against Iraq, but echoed Mr Bush's argument on the need to extend freedom's rule by asserting that removing Saddam Hussein, "that loathsome dictator", was for the good of the Iraqi people.

The Opposition Leader's was the most politically crafted of the speeches. Mr Crean had a difficult job. Labour has a long commitment to the alliance. As Mr Crean rightly said, it was a Labor leader, prime minister John Curtin, who first looked to the US for assistance in 1941. But equally, Labor opposed the war against Iraq, and it would have been hypocritical for Mr Crean not to mention it. His speech made clear what the President's overlooked: that alliances are never a love-in, and that competing interests, as in the trade agreement, must be dealt with. But like the President and the Prime Minister, the Labor leader asserted that the alliance was one between peoples, "something beyond political parties and administrations."

The two overarching themes that linked the remarks of Mr Bush, Mr Howard, and Mr Crean were the values that unite the US and Australian peoples, and the common need to defeat the threat of terror, which is an attack on those shared values. The times in which we live dictated an emphasis by all three pragmatic leaders on the dominating issue that confronts Australia and the West. The naysayers who argue that nothing has been achieved in the war on terror, or by the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq, would have been discomfited by Mr Bush's remarks, which demonstrated that decisive victories have been won. And the "root cause" industry, which seeks desperately for the Western failings that have provoked terror, must have cringed when Mr Howard reminded everyone that "terrorists oppose nations such as the United States and Australia not because of what we have done but because of who we are".

What was disappointing was that in a speech of over 2000 words, Mr Bush chose to devote only 30 words to the negotiations for a free trade agreement between Australia and the US. Those negotiations are now at the pointy end. Unless agreement is reached soon, an opportunity will be lost to integrate ourselves with the world's most powerful economy. But the agreement is unacceptable if it does not give our farmers full access to the tables of US consumers. With a tricky election looming, Mr Bush has shown a propensity during his Asian journey to play to protectionist interests back home. He got nowhere at APEC in the effort to drive down the value of the US dollar relative to the yuan, and it is crucial that we do not now become the sacrificial political lamb offered up to US farmers and unions. In an attempt to force the US side to get real, Mr Howard has secured new talks between Trade Minister Mark Vaile and US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.

Only the Greens chose to put politeness to one side and exploit Mr Bush's visit for domestic political gain. Excluded now from Chinese President Hu Jintao's address to the parliament today, it is revealing that the Greens chose to use their one protest card against the leader of the free world, not the leader of the world's largest authoritarian state. Make no mistake: their display yesterday was part of their unseemly struggle with the Democrats and One Nation for the fringe vote. But even many of the approximately one in 10 Australians who will cast their vote outside the major parties must have been brought up short by the behaviour of senators Brown and Nettle yesterday, and by the fact that they wore the photographs of David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. Mr Hicks fought for the Taliban against coalition forces, including Australian troops, and thus conforms to the definition of a traitor, while both men have been heavily implicated in al-Qa'ida, the group that undertook the September 11 atrocity and had a major hand in the Bali attacks. The Greens' grandstanding lionised these men, and makes a contrast with Mr Howard's effort behind the scenes to ensure their two cases are expedited.

Mr Bush's speech did not map out the future of the alliance, but all of yesterday's addresses in the parliament did explain why Australia's friendship with our good, great, and powerful friend must continue to form the foundation of our foreign policy.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[Always Right]

And even in the light of the cheap theatrics of the alliance's opponents, they made an unanswerable case for its continuance.

Funny, the cheap theatrics were the only part of the story the American media reported.