Editorial: Australia: Rumbles from Down Under - Brief Article - Editorial

National Review, Dec 3, 2001

John Howard's comfortable victory over the Australian Labour party in the recent election has been little noticed in our media-even though it was the third victory in a row for the conservative Liberal-Country coalition, achieved against phenomenal odds, and bearing great significance for the politics of America and the rest of the First World.

And that is understandable because in the eyes of international political elites it was the wrong victory for the wrong party on the wrong issue. Three months ago, Howard's party was trailing by as much as 20 percent in the polls; the economy was not delivering the strong growth generally needed for government election victories.

Then the SS Tampa, a Norwegian-owned ship, was seized in Indonesian waters by its Afghan and Pakistani passengers and ordered to head for Australia. The international community, led by such "eminent persons" as the U.N. commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, at once appealed to Australia to admit these "asylum seekers"-even though under international law the ship should have headed not for Australia but for the nearest Indonesian port. Most governments echoed these appeals. So did church spokesmen, "human rights" advocates, and the great and the good in Australia itself.

Ignoring these pressures, Howard instructed the Australian navy to prevent the boat from entering Australian waters-and promptly initiated a major political campaign to defend Australia against migrant- smuggling. He argued that, whatever international law said, independent nation-states had a right to control their own borders.

After September 11-when terrorists exploited loopholes in immigration policy to murder thousands-these arguments sounded not only courageous but farsighted. Howard won a third term of office with an increased majority.

If Howard's victory marks the first election decided on the refugee asylum and immigration issues, it will not be the last. There is a fast-growing trade in smuggling migrants from the Third World-over the Rio Grande into the United States, through southern Spain into the European Union, across the Indian Ocean to Australia, etc. Millions of people are hammering on the doors of the First World; voters are increasingly wary of admitting too many. As a result, the political importance of immigration, refugee policy, multiculturalism, and official bilingualism will surely rise.

These new battles will be bitter and unpredictable. Howard won; but a substantial minority despises him for it. There are powerful elites in the courts, the media, and the government bureaucracy that favor open borders and multiculturalism. They do not hesitate to stigmatize their opponents as racist or xenophobic.

But popular opinion will support the existing nation-state-with its own people, language, culture, and institutions-against those who would like to reshape it as a multicultural haven for ever-larger numbers of immigrants. Australia's Labour party lost a lot of its traditional blue-collar workers to Howard's patriotic appeal. But Howard probably lost some upper-middle-class voters, too-just as the GOP has lost upper-class WASP votes across the northern tier of the United States in recent years. The difference is that, by refusing to give political expression to popular discontent with open-borders policies, Republicans have largely missed the opportunities that John Howard has seized.