Howard, Asia and books

Rowan Callick: A respected statesman in Asia | Opinion | The Australian

Today's piece in The Australian notes that Howard has established a strong relationship with China, and the dire predictions about how the opposite would happen:

Whole books were commissioned by excitable publishers on the theme - now too odd even to fill remainder trays - that we, Lee Kuan Yew's "poor white trash of Asia", were about to fall further into disrepute and doom on account of our leader's lack of empathy with Asians. His true sin, of course, was that he was not really "one of us", the cognoscenti.

Former diplomat Tony Kevin wrote in The Howard Years (2004): "It's a fact that Australia has lost most of its former sensitivity in its dealings with diplomatic associations of countries of the Asia-Pacific region." Another former diplomat, Alison Broinowski, wrote in Howard's War (2003): "We are now less in tune with our nearest neighbours than we have been since the 1970s."

Former prime minister Paul Keating said in 2000: "Australia's relevance to Asia, and our position and influence in Asia, has diminished enormously in John Howard's time."

Predictably, the criticism has been turned on its head, and Howard is being lambasted from the universities and elsewhere as an appeaser of Asian tyrants in Indonesia and China. He should be acting, they say, in a more Australian way and opposing the traducers of human rights in Papua and Tibet.

How true.

Just generally on the book trade, I am often surprised that publishers do commission books on political topics where the validity of the views expressed will soon be established within a short time of publication. Why do publishers take such gambles? For example, the flurry of books about Latham. The one by Micheal Duffy about Latham and Abbott was sort of a double whammy of dubious relevance, as Abbott's increasingly noticed religious views surely mean he looks less and less likely as a possible leader of the Liberals.