Australia

Why do we still care what this man thinks

I wish the media would just stop letting this has-been steal oxygen. There are other people with way more relevant opinions.

No shit.

Crusty old white man expects others to change but not himself.

The irony is that it is the waves of migration of people from different backgrounds and cultures that has made Australia the place it is today.

No one but Howard looks back on the boring, white bread, meat and three boiled veg culture that was Aus in the 1950s with any sort of nostalgia.

Remember the good old days, when, straight off the boat, Giovanni would change his name to John, and schoolboys would be caned for playing soccer rather than rugby or Aussie Rules? Howard does.

6Howard always implied a distinction between Asian countries and Australia's Asian communities. As Brett (Citation2003: 151) reminds us, Asian-Australians were consistently presented as individuals instead of members of cultural groups. As such, and by virtue of the fact that they had brought in values like family, hard work and entrepreneurial flair – not coincidentally the restricted pool of ‘Asian values’ that overlapped with Howard's cultural outlook – ‘Australians of Asian descent’ could aspire to be ‘as honoured citizens as any other section of the Australian community’ (Howard Citation1996).This circumstance allowed the ‘integration’ of Asians as individuals maintaining the separateness from Asian countries from the identitarian point of view.

8In a speech to the Heritage Foundation – often overlooked supposedly because it was given three years into his ‘retirement’ – Howard (Citation2010: 5–6) stated that ‘the values that bind the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … are deeper and more abiding … than the bonds between any other countries’ and that ‘one of the errors that some sections of the English-speaking world have made in the past few decades has been to confuse multiracialism and multiculturalism’, to conclude that ‘the English-speaking nations have made an enormous contribution  … in excess of any other grouping of countries – to the defence of liberty in the last two hundred years’. Howard thus appropriated the whole intellectual body underlying the Anglospherist perspective in its entirety.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10361146.2014.965658

Emphasizing “shared values” in international relations and emphasizing the closeness of “values” with similarly anglo-sphere nations.

The “shared values” rhetoric is a very thin wrapper hiding outright white supremacism.

Bigots generally do.

Conservative of politics, but really rather radical of eyebrow.