I didn't realise I had a mind to change about Laura Bush until I read Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife. While she was apparently one of the most popular first ladies in history, I gave her negligible thought — a perfectly-coiffed president's companion doing the usual first-wifely things for her powerful husband – that was about as far as I got. My love of a good novel, however, unravelled my studious indifference.

American Wife is a story about the life of Alice Blackwell, a first lady around the time of George W Bush's presidency. It's a fictionalised account, but constructed using the edifices of that presidency (the wars, the political dynasty) and some central events in Laura Bush's real life. 

So there are some pivotal elements to Alice's story which were transposed from Mrs Bush's own experiences: a car crash in her teens that killed a young friend, her career before meeting her husband (a librarian and teacher with a love of books and passion for education and literacy), and her work as first lady (campaigning for literacy and childhood development programs, for global health issues and breast cancer awareness).

But because it's fiction, we get some tantalising glimpses of what the thoughts, motivations and feelings of someone like Mrs Bush might be, which could be hinted at, but never credibly asserted, in a biography. And there are several, such as Ann Gerhart's 2004 biography The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush. 'People who knew Laura socially or worked with her on projects,' Gerhart wrote, 'came to assume she was far more liberal than her husband, although there was never any hard evidence for this.' 

American Wife got me thinking about the strictures on the life of a political spouse, how differing political views might play out in a marriage, and casts this notorious episode in America's political history in a slightly different light. All this in a work of fiction. Worth a read over the holidays, if you dare...

Photo by Flickr user Westbank Library District, used under a Creative Commons license.

Another hard luck story about the general lack of consular support Australians receive from their government when travelling and living overseas — this time from an Australian couple running a resort in Samoa, who are getting agitated that the Australian government has not done enough to assist them in their recovery from the Samoan tsunami two months ago.

The couple, originally from Queensland, say that they have had no assistance yet from the Rudd Government, but that they 'expect that to change because [they’re] starting to get unhappy and ruffle some feathers'.

The overblown and sometimes hysterical expectations of Australians who find themselves in trouble overseas, fanned by hyperbolic media reporting, are something we’ve written about on several occasions. In March this year, we argued for more resources for the overstretched consular service overseas in our Blue Ribbon Panel Report on the state of Australia’s diplomatic infrastructure, Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit.

Back in late 2007, Hugh White’s Lowy policy brief, Looking After Australians Overseas, foreshadowed a serious mess if our government’s ability to deliver good foreign policy continues to be hobbled by its shrinking resources and mounting consular workload. And here’s another along the same lines.

Strangely, Australians who travel or live overseas expect far more assistance from their government than they would if they were living or travelling in their own country. read more

Over the last century only three US Presidents have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (the first Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded in 1901).

Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906, for his work in bringing about various treaties including the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan. He had been President for five years.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson won it in 1919. He founded the League of Nations. He had been president for six years.

Jimmy Carter won it in 2002 (21 years after the end of his presidency) for 'his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development'. He was President from 1977-81.

Just out of interest, here's a look at some of the US Presidents who didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize:

• Franklin D Roosevelt (President 1933-45), who stewarded the US through the Great Depression and World War II, and who drove the creation of the UN.
• Harry S Truman (President 1945-53), responsible for the Truman Doctrine (containing Communist power in Europe after the war), and the Marshall Plan, which helped stimulate economic recovery in post-war Europe.
• Ronald Reagan (President 1981-89), who sought to achieve 'peace through strength', and who negotiated treaties eliminating intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe and reducing strategic nuclear arsenals (the INF and START I Treaties).

And now for a brief look at some of the other notable Peace Prize winners this century:

The AFP is to conduct a war crimes investigation into the 1975 killing of the Balibo Five. This follows the NSW Coroner's finding late last year that the five were 'tracked and targeted by the Indonesian military before being killed by the invading force in Balibo'. According to the Coroner, the Indonesian military attempted to pass them off as combatants – trussing them up in military uniform with guns, photographing and then incinerating them.

These are serious allegations against former high-ranking officials, which deserve to be tested in a court of law. As with pursuits by various international criminal tribunals for atrocities in WWII, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, to name a few, it is open to aggrieved nations to seek justice. My colleague, Fergus Hanson, has researched in-depth the issue of war criminals living in Australia and has urged the Federal Government to act to fill legislative gaps and to adequately resource the task of bringing war criminals to justice, no matter the passage of time.

Last week, Trade Minister Simon Crean announced that 'the Australian Government will spend $20 million over the next four years to deliver a new international brand for Australia.' In his press release, he asserts that 'we need a cohesive brand that captures the essence of Australia and underscores the quality of all that we have to offer in sectors such as trade, investment and education.'

It seems to me that Mr Crean is seeking something which does not, and should not, exist. To try to capture the essence of Australia in one 'cohesive brand' would be to sell ourselves short and trivialise the message, in the same way that the 'Where the bloody hell are you?' campaign did.

To risk flogging a dead horse, the Senate Committee’s 2007 exhaustive report on Australia’s public diplomacy, which I talked about in a previous post, concluded that 'to be effective, Australia's public diplomacy must succeed in projecting messages that give greater breadth and substance to its image'. My emphasis, and note the plural.

Though prepared seven months ago, the Federal Government’s response to the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on Australia’s public diplomacy is still worth a look. The original Senate Committee report in 2007 was a gruelling 244 pages. Despite its length, there were some gems – this from a DFAT insider: 'The reality is that Australian public diplomacy has been relegated to a level of importance equivalent to that of Embassy gardens. It's now almost exclusively managed around the world by locally engaged staff.'

The preface to the recommendations in the Report spells out some of the issues the Committee identified in Australia’s rusted-on public diplomacy 'program'. The committee was particularly concerned about:

• the low level of interest in, or awareness of, Australia's public diplomacy by many Australians;
• the lack of methodical and long-term research into attitudes toward Australia by countries that are of significance to Australia;
• the effectiveness of Australia's whole-of-government approach to public diplomacy in producing a cooperative, coordinated and united effort by the many agencies and organisations that contribute to, or have the potential to contribute to, Australia's public diplomacy, including Australia's diaspora;
• DFAT's ability to meet the growing challenges of conducting public diplomacy in a fiercely contested environment including matters such the resources devoted to public diplomacy, staff training and the role of locally engaged staff;
• the need to ensure that those responsible for managing and delivering public diplomacy programs are taking full advantage of advances in technology to reach the global audience; and
• the apparent absence of appropriate performance indicators suggesting that DFAT does not have mechanisms in place to monitor and assess adequately the effectiveness of its public diplomacy programs.

The Australian Government has a bit of work to do on the overseas image of Australian education. That’s no surprise. What is surprising is the lack of visible public diplomacy from the Federal Government on what is becoming a severe problem for Australia’s lucrative education export industry. Education is Australia’s top services export. It is the third largest export overall (after coal and iron ore). But, as reported by the ABC this week, the international education trade from India has been decimated.  

Then, to add insult to injury, this week saw the collapse of a large private college in Sydney.

You’d think Australian Education International (the government entity responsible for international education in Australia) might be dealing with the issues in a public and prominent way. But no, here’s a snapshot of its home page as of late this afternoon. 

Nothing. No hotline, no fact sheet, no information service, no contact numbers, no hints.  Just a bunch of acronyms, logos and an oblique acknowledgement that something might be afoot with the invitation to apply for an 'International Student Roundtable'.

Huh?

So, another hard decision in the 2009 budget: $654 million over six years for 'border protection', AKA preventing illegal boat arrivals and protecting us from the 'vilest form of human life', people smugglers.

Only 711 people have arrived in Australia since September last year, according to a report by Paul Maley and Matthew Franklin in The Australian yesterday. That would work out at around 1,000 per year at the current rate. So we’re going to spend rougly $100 million per year on keeping them out, or $100,000 for each boat person.

Then we add the following (according to in the same article, which draws from answers to Senate Committee questions on notice):

When calculated over the October-February period, the numbers show authorities spent more than $5.3 million on the 141 people who were in detention as of February 28 -- or $38,000 a detainee'.

That total consists of charter flights, detention service providers, interpreters and immigration staff costs and allowances. That’s a grand total of around $140,000 for every boat person this year. A high price for 'protection'.

I went to the Nutcracker last night. For some reason it reminded me of the Defence White Paper. No, really. There was a China scene in it, and it’s fantasy, after all.

Photo by Flickr user Deadalready Collection, used under a Creative Commons license.

Here are some interesting numbers from the latest report from the the UN Refugee Agency which Mike Steketee cited on asylum trends in industrialised countries.

There was a 12 per cent increase in 2007 to 2008 in asylum applications to industrialised countries. But Australia accounted for only 1.2% (4,750) of the total (382,670). In the 2007-08 reporting year, only 25 boat people arrived illegally in Australia. 

While applications for asylum in Australia have increased somewhat in the last year, to read the news, the hyperventilating reactions of opposition parliamentarians and the polls, anyone would think we are being swamped. The comments of the Prime Minister were pretty inflammatory as well.

We are not one of the world’s top 10 ‘receiving’ countries for asylum seekers More...

The (not) Pauline Hanson pictures caused quite a stir on both sides of the Tasman recently. On a visit to Wellington, several amused observers commented on La Hanson’s longevity and, ah, attraction. The impression of our trans-Tasman friends was that Pauline still wielded significant political sway, as evidenced by our media’s prurient interest in the latest controversy.

Seriously, though, what was surprising was the lingering impression among New Zealanders of Australia as a fundamentally racist society in which Hansonism still flourishes.  

From my side of the sea, her influence on Australian politics is reflected in successive election results:  More...