Australia's Labor Govt: Free-thinking or Unthinking?

I was amused to read P.S.Suryanarayana's 'Australia: a free thinking ally of the U.S.' today. The general tone appears quite laudatory of the Australian labor party PM Kevin Rudd. Why the great enthusiasm for his leadership? For two reasons it appears: his willingness to stand apart from the US and his desire to put his country's relationship with China on a special footing.

This is the same guy who pointedly indicated before his election that his government would under no circumstances sell uranium to India. True to his word, he has reversed the previous conservative government's position and since then stuck to the view that India would be entitled to the standard benefits of the NPT provided it signs up as a non-nuclear member state, something it would obviously never do. He has also clearly indicated that he values the relationship with China far more than India. He has been anxious to involve China as an active dialogue partner in all economic and security related matters in South East Asia. He has also shown a decidedly lower level of enthusiasm in bringing India into those equations, something that stands apart from the previous John Howard government's attitude. Some of these facts also happen to be mentioned in this article.

Yet, he is described as 'free thinking'. One could ascribe to him the quality of being a thinking PM if he did something novel or principled such as standing up for a cause of some kind even at the risk of acquiring the ignominy of others. I see absolutely nothing of the kind here - he has simply sought to revert his country back to the classical European world view that it has long held before George Bush's ascent to power. Non-proliferation dogma, appeasement of China, pro-environment/anti-climate change, faith in a multipolar world (read that as reigning in American unilateralism) - all of these are standard leftist talking points that every European PM adheres to. With the decline of the Bush administration's power, he has simply taken the opportunity to return Australia, long a bastion of European political correctness to its former ways. Refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, failing to recognize India's unique situation vis-a-vis proliferation and rejecting the promotion of democracy as a worthwhile foreign policy goal are all gospel for socialists and are neither new nor particularly principled and certainly cannot be termed 'free thinking' - indeed, parroting the same positions does not amount to thinking at all.

He says that Mr. Rudd is anxious to cooperate with Japan which 'has taken a leadership role' in create a planet-sustaining environment. Japan was actually a hold-out at Kyoto for quite a long time and is still strongly opposed to any curbs on whaling, a practice it continues to engage in often covertly under the guise of research efforts on whales. Greenpeace has had a long running battle with Japan on this issue. I agree that Japan is an important industrialized power that needs to be taken along for climate change efforts to succeed but leadership would not be a word I would use for a country that has been anxious to water down hunting regulations. Mr. Suryanarayana is obviously so excited that Australia is actively making efforts to build alliances such as China and Japan even if it is not particularly keen on including India within its calculations that he is probably willing to overlook such minor things that might run contrary to his thesis of a 'free-thinking' nation on the move.