Waltzing Matilda with me

The entry linked in the title to this post has been getting some notoriety of late from the 'Pundits at least: Insta and Vodka. And with good reason.

On October 8, Australians had their election for Parliament. Like most British political progeny (other than the US, which rejected a monarchy), the Aussie head of state is HRM Queen Elizabeth II and she is served by her ministers in the Australian Parliament (a happy fiction -- the Aussie Parliament has the real power over Aussie affairs). The Australian Parliament has two main parties: the Labo(u)r Party, led by John Kerry and Jose Luis Zapatero friend Mark Latham; and the Liberal Party Coalition (the right-center parties of the Australian National Party and the Liberal Party), led by John Howard. And just as in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, etc., the party that obtains the most seats in the House of Commons will select its Prime Minister and subordinate ministers.

Australia is about as laid-back politically as a country can be. This year is different. Howard has been even more stalwart and supportive of the US in the past 3+ years than even Tony Blair. Simply put, Howard UNDERSTANDS the dangers of Islamofascist terrorism and the need for the free and the strong democracies to prevent global terror attacks. Latham is an appeaser and a wimp.

As Mike Jericho notes in his essay I linked above:

The real importance of [this] election lies in the foreign policy changes that would be instituted under the Labor Government of Mark Latham. The man who once broke a taxi-driver's arm, and ran Liverpool's (a suburb of southern Sydney) municipal council into historic levels of debt and political chaos now has an opportunity to shape Australia's place in the world.

The shape it would take can be speculated upon by the remarks Mr Latham has, in the past, made about the President of the United States. "The most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory" he declared about the American President who overthrew two tyrannical regimes in a single term. Latham then went on to label his Australian conservative opponents as a "conga-line of suckholes" for having originally supported the United States in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like Senator John Kerry, Mr Latham has prevaricated and occasionally made complete reversals of policy on what Labor would do in Government. "All the troops home by Christmas" was the original clarion call. Then it became some of the troops. Their position hasn't been clarified for some weeks, and thanks to Labor's compliant fifth columnists -- the media -- it isn't likely to be placed under any scrutiny, any time soon. But the fetid stench of appeasement wafts through the air, and it is unmistakable.

Charles Krauthammer noted that in the last 100 years only the Aussies have been in every foxhole with the US from World War I to Vietnam and the two Gulf Wars. The nation of less than 20,000,000 people punches far above its weightclass on the world scale and is the great ally that Canada used to be. A Latham win would kill that alliance. Here's hoping Howard gains his fourth term and the Aussies retain their sanity.