olive, you need to open your other eye. We have two fairly similar protagonists in our political back yard. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. On Q and A last Monday, Tony Abbott mentioned previous Australian governments had ensured our good position in the scheme of things... he included the Hawke-Keating regime, as well as the Howard- Costello team.
But let's not believe Tony's opinion. This is what Stanford University's Hoover Institution had to say on the economic management of Australia over the last 20 or so years....
"Keating had been treasurer in the Labor government of Prime Minister Bob Hawke, which had come to power in 1983. At their best, these two politicians led one of the most impressive Australian governments. From the left, Keating drove the structural reform of the Australian economy that the previous right-of-center government had made necessary through its neglect. Keating deregulated banking and the financial system, floated the Australian dollar, cut trade tariffs and began to privatize state-owned banks and airlines. Defeating Hawke in an intraparty coup during a recession for which, as treasurer, Keating could have expected to receive much of the blame, he launched a cultural offensive to redefine Australia and its place in the world.
The title of a 1992 speech, Australia and Asia: Knowing Who We Are, says it all. Keating ridiculed Menzies, describing his premiership as an almost endlessly regressive era [which] sunk a generation of Australians in Anglophilia and torpor, and he opened up on his countrymen: My criticism is directed at those Australians or more accurately that Australian attitude which still cannot separate our interests, our history, or our future, from the interests of Britain. He instructed Australians to learn from what he called the geophysics of the situation: geophysically speaking this continent is old Asia theres none older than this. Its certainly not going to move, and after two hundred years it should be pretty plain that were not going to either. The answer therefore was for Australians to embrace Australias destiny as a nation in Asia and the Pacific.
If Tony Blair could not succeed in persuading the British people that Britain is actually a European country, the task of persuading Australians that Australia is an Asian country was even greater. It is a proposition that Asian leaders themselves reject Australia is seen as located in Asia but is not of Asia and it perplexed Australians to hear their prime minister telling them there was something wrong with what they thought about themselves. But it played brilliantly among the cultural and intellectual elites, many of whom still regard Paul Keating as Australias lost leader. For them, Canberras most important bilateral relationship should be with Jakarta or Beijing rather than Washington.
Keating continues to provide this audience with the intellectual case for their Asian vision of Australias future. In a 2003 speech on Australias geopolitical and economic positioning, Keating argued that the Chinese economy a $3 trillion economy generating $200 billion of new wealth annually will propel the next stage of global growth: While the twentieth century was the century of the Americas, the chances are the twenty-first century will be the century of Asia and we may see, for the first time, a real eclipse of American economic power. Keating predicted that one day China would be the only country with the cultural and military unity to deal with the United States. This would leave Australia marginalized and isolated, looking wistfully for U.S. protection. Keating questioned the benefits of a free trade agreement with the U.S., and while he thought Australia should maintain the alliance with the U.S., Australia should, he thought, make its own luck.
To Keatings Asian model of Australia John Howard counterposed his own. Where Keatings model could be termed an either/or dialectic, Howards is additive. It absorbs Australias political and cultural endowments from Britain rather than attempting to exorcise them. Howards model explicitly rejects the idea that Australia must choose between its history and its geography. On coming to power, his government, Howard said, was convinced that it was not only possible but essential for Australia to build and maintain links with major centers of global power and influence, whilst ensuring that key regional relationships were kept vibrant and strong. We should aggregate our advantages and our opportunities, he told a British audience in 2003. I have found it entirely counter-productive to have seen my country go through a process of saying, well, in order to make yourself more welcome in one part of the world, you had to be ruder to the other parts of the world and you had somehow or other to cut umbilical cords.
Howard challenged Keatings notion that the United States will go into relative economic decline. In pushing for a free trade agreement with the United States, Howard argued that the United States economy will be more and not less important to Australia as time goes by. The significance of the United States in the world economy will grow over the next fifty years. That view does not preclude deeper economic links with China, and Howard has also flagged a free trade agreement with China."
