The Little Sheriff Cocks His Gun - Australia's Howard runs amok
But today, the "little Johnnie Howard" taunt is looking even more credible, as Howard completed yet another Asian foreign policy gaffe on the weekend. From comments about being the "little sheriff" for the US in Asia, to telling an interviewer at Coolum that he was being consulted "among with other VIPs - important - people", the image of being a little man trying desperately to box his own way out is being developed much faster than by way of Keating's snakepit taunts.

Howard, of course, is in power by default - paradoxically courtesy of a man called Osama bin Laden, and a boat load of Afghan refugees. For a year before the last election the return of the conservative coalition was always going to be unlikely, and three months before the election opinion polls predicted a landslide to the opposition Labor party. Osama bin Laden succeeded in scaring the whits out of people in the Western world who felt their advanced status and security isolated them from growing troubles in the world as a whole. The Afghan refugee crisis allowed the conservatives to make immigration an electoral policy plank, and on very flimsy evidence later proved completely false by a Royal Commission, spun the tale that refugees were so un-civil they would throw their own children into the sea to force their own passage into the promised land.

Since the election, the Bali bombing further uncovered Osama's hand. Suddenly, not only wealth, but also geographical isolation was no protective bulwark from a world increasingly shedding barriers of trade, geography, and culture, putting into relief the one barrier that was indeed not changing - the gulf between rich and poor, and those who had benefitted from capitalism and the global order, and those who were yet to.

Australians in their own small concession to internationalism - tourism to Bali, were finally caught up in the flak, and an Australia that had for years grown accustomed and comfortable with their relative isolation are still struggling to come to terms with it.

Howard himself was made uncomfortable by accusations that the government had failed to consider warnings, including those from Bali itself, that Australians may be at risk. And like the US, Howard has looked after number one first - his own domestic political survival. Warnings against travel to Asian countries, visible targeting of ethnic scapegoats - all were aimed to convince an Australian electorate that all possible was being done for their security.

Howard forgot something though. Unlike his more savvy predecessors, he forgot that in a world increasingly influenced by regionalism rather than nation states, like it or not, Australia is in the Asia Pacific camp. He still thinks that Australia is an outpost of Western values in an Asian region. Interestingly, his nemesis in Asia, Malaysia's Dato Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, thinks the same, spinning Australia to Malaysians, other Asian nations, and the world as a whole as small and insignificant racist and a Western lackey for the US and UK. Mahathir has already issued his own travel warnings to Malaysians against traveling to Australia - stating that Muslims in Australia were unsafe. And unlike in Australia, a significant group of Malaysians believe anything their leader says.