Australians and Septic Tank Yanks

pa href=https://www.cato.org/people/paul-matzko hreflang=undPaul Matzko/a
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/pdiv data-embed-button=image data-entity-embed-display=view_mode:media.blog_post data-entity-embed-display-settings={quot;link_urlquot;:quot;https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/global\/2022\/06\/22\/international-attitudes-toward-the-u-s-nato-and-russia-in-a-time-of-crisis\/pg_2022-07-22_u-s-image_1-01\/quot;,quot;link_url_targetquot;:1} data-entity-type=media data-entity-uuid=6a5d0bba-ab6a-4445-af00-ef972fa92dd7 data-langcode=en class=align-center embedded-entitya href=https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/22/international-attitudes-toward-the-u-s-nato-and-russia-in-a-time-of-crisis/pg_2022-07-22_u-s-image_1-01/ target=_blank



img loading=lazy src=/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/2023-07/Screenshot%202023-07-10%20at%209.28.44%20AM.png?itok=rzhb1Tyi width=538 height=1300 alt=Global Public Opinion of the US class=image-style-pubs-2x component-image //a/div
pThis global public opinion poll asking respondents whether they have a favorable view of the USA has been bouncing around the interwebs. The topline finding — the US is pretty popular! — surprised many American cultural critics who remember the bad old days of the Iraq War when global criticism of US imperialism surged./p
pI find the handful of countries where the opinion of the US remains more negative just as interesting. Hungary’s worst‐​in‐​Europe result is amusing given how the far Right in the US fetishizes Viktor Orban’s reactionary politics. American Hungary stans suffer from sublimated self‐​hatred, wishing they could be as xenophobic and culturally chauvinist as team “Make Hungary Magyar Again.”/p
pBut the other outlier country on this list with a marked dislike of the US might be more of a surprise to Americans: Australia. We’re almost underwater Down Under. This is in sharp contrast with how highly Americans think of Australia; if you combine all positive responses from this a href=https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/public-opinion-in-the-united-states-and-australia-compared#australia-and-the-united-states-as-allies rel=survey/a, Americans consider Australia their warmest ally. Which means the gulf between how Americans and Australians view each other would be one of the widest in the world!/p
pAs it so happens, I spent eight summers as a teenager living in Australia. That certainly doesn’t make me a country expert — and it’s been two decades since I was last there — but it does mean that Australian antipathy towards the US doesn’t take me by surprise./p
pThat dislike was very much on the surface when I was a 10 or 11 year old trying to make Aussie friends. The most popular country singer in Australia at the time was the man, the legend, John Williamson. I’ve written about Australian country music a href=https://paulmatzko.com/american-vs-australian-country-music/ rel=elsewhere/a, but I can still sing many of Williamson’s top hits from memory, including his rip‐​roaring nationalist anthem “a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n1bU5cwbLY rel=A Flag of Our Own/a” (1991). Williamson was a republican, which meant that he believed Australia should leave the British Commonwealth, reject the monarchy, and take the British stripes off the Australian flag. Here’s the song’s chorus:/p
blockquotep‘Cause this is Australia and that’s where we’re frombr / We’re not Yankee side‐​kicks or second class P.O.M.sbr / And tell the Frogs what they can do with their bombbr / Oh we must have a flag of our own/p
/blockquote
pLet me decipher that for you. P.O.M.s stands for “Prisoners of Her Majesty,” or Brits, which is often amended with an adjective such as “whingeing POMs” to a href=https://www.economist.com/asia/1997/05/22/those-whingeing-poms rel=describe/a those who yearn for ye olde country and constantly complain about Australia’s supposedly backward ways. This was a particularly popular complaint in Australia in the aftermath of Australia’s 1975 a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis rel=constitutional crisis/a. The Australian Governor‐​General — a crown appointee in a mostly symbolic role — had invoked a long neglected royal power and replaced the elected left‐​wing prime minister with a conservative. (For comparison, imagine the hoopla if King Charles III were to kick British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak out of office and install a Labour prime minister!)/p
p“Frogs,” of course, are the French, who were on the radar of Aussie nationalists in the 90s for conducting nuclear testing in their Polynesian colonies — which Australia considered its own backyard — and doing so without regard for the effects of nuclear a href=https://ny.fes.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Pacific-Downwind-PosObs-Country-Report-12-2h0qcbp.pdf rel=fallout/a on surrounding islands and Australia itself./p
pThat leaves us with Yankees, commonly shorted to “Yanks,” which quickly becomes, via Australia’s penchant for rhyming puns, “Septic Tanks,” or then shortened further to “seppos.” (Aussies are world leaders in a href=https://www.roughguides.com/articles/a-rough-guide-to-australian-slang/ rel=slang/a. It’s like if Cockney wasn’t just the lingo of one neighborhood in London but had been exported en masse via prison ships, transported to the other side of the globe, and then had taken over an entire continent. Oh wait…)/p
pMaybe you’re wondering why America made that opprobrious list alongside the POMs and Frogs. We weren’t testing any nukes in the Pacific (at least, we hadn’t for a a href=https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/ rel=while/a) and we weren’t meddling in their domestic politics (though a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal rel=blaming the CIA/a for the 1975 constitutional crisis remains popular among Aussie conspiracists)./p
pBut when this song was released in 1991, the Australian military had just participated in the US‐​led Gulf War. Although suffering no combat casualties, Australian nationalists saw this as yet another example of Australia blindly serving the interests of foreign superpowers, from dying at the command of callous British generals in the trenches at Gallipoli — the subject of a 1981 a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eeijbtbnjQ rel=blockbuster/a starring a young Mel Gibson — to the failed fight alongside the Yanks in the jungles of Vietnam./p
pBear in mind that Australia’s anti‐​Vietnam War protests in 1970 were the *largest* a href=https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/vietnam-moratoriums rel=protests/a in their history; by contrast, the much feted anti‐​Vietnam war protests in the US don’t even crack our a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstrations_in_the_United_States_by_size rel=top 27/a! Australia’s involvement in the Iraq War did little to assuage critics who believed Australia should stop playing second fiddle to the US, especially after a href=https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/iraq-dossier/ rel=leaked documents/a showed that the Aussie government’s primary purpose for sending troops was to cozy up to the US. All the talk about eradicating weapons of mass destruction and promoting democracy was merely “mandatory rhetoric.”/p
pHowever, when I was a teenager in Australia in the late‐​90s, especially while visiting rural communities in Northern Queensland, the complaint I heard the most often revolved around US trade policy, specifically US tariffs on the import of Australian lamb meat. I remember riding around the bush in a ute (flatbed pickup truck) with a local a href=https://www.iatp.org/news/us-lamb-tariffs-hypocritical-australians-say rel=farmer/a who was spitting mad about US tariffs and who said that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was Bill Clinton getting his just desserts for harming Aussie sheep farmers. What a thought! Australian a href=https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/australia-up-in-arms-over-us-lamb-tariffs rel=headlines/a from the time were simply scathing in their critique of Clinton’s hypocrisy in signing a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico while slapping new tariffs on Australia./p
pYet other than the mad cow panic, meat import policies — let alone veal tariffs, lol — have never been a major political issue in recent US national politics. But they sure mattered a great deal to Australia, which is the second largest sheep exporting country in the world (Australia and New Zealand combine for an incredible 93% of the global a href=https://www.tridge.com/intelligences/lamb/export rel=market/a). In any case, US trade policy in the 1990s fit with Australian nationalists’ broader critique of the US as a bully who simply expected Australia to meekly comply with its broader geopolitical agenda regardless of whether it was in Australia’s own national interest./p
pSo Australians’ mixed opinions regarding the US are grounded in real, pragmatic considerations. It’s yet another situation in which our imperial entanglements and trade protectionism have provoked blowback./p
pIt’s possible that in the future those feelings might revert towards the more US‐​positive, Australasian mean given Chinese economic and military expansionism in the region. Up until now, Australia has been insulated from the downside risks of Chinese expansion — funnily enough, the intervening Indonesians have been a more significant target for Australian jingoism — while benefitting greatly as a a href=https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3196775/australia-urged-entrench-role-chinas-indispensable-commodities-supplier-after-trade-bans-fail rel=supplier/a of raw materials for the post‐​Mao Chinese economic miracle. Until the pandemic, Australia hadn’t experienced a a href=https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/08/australia-has-gone-27-years-without-a-recession.html rel=recession/a in nearly thirty years (!)./p
pOn a more speculative note, if a href=https://open.substack.com/users/8243895-noah-smith?utm_source=mentions rel=noopener target=_blankNoah Smith/a and other India boosters are a href=https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia rel=correct/a, Australia’s role as a potential trading partner with India could matter as much for that country’s success as its trade with China has for the past three decades. Last year, Australia signed a new free trade deal with India and a href=https://www.smartcompany.com.au/finance/economy/free-trade-deal-with-india-australia/ rel=expects/a its exports to triple by 2035. And given the ongoing decoupling of global investment from the Chinese market, Australia could benefit from a major boost of foreign investment given its proximity and ties with India, Vietnam, and other high growth South and Southeast Asian markets (a href=https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/03/03/these-countries-could-lure-manufacturing-away-from-china rel=nicknamed/a “Altasia”). There’s little in the way of Australia enjoying another thirty years of torrid economic growth./p
pThe US should forge a new, peer relationship with Australia, signaling that it takes Australia seriously as a vital regional ally rather than treating it as a junior partner in our foreign misadventures. We have a golden opportunity to do so right now. As Doug Bandow has a href=https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/australia-faces-angry-china-what-america-donoted/a, China has foolishly kicked off a trade war with Australia, and while Trump a href=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/business/trump-australia-tariffs.html rel=considered/a following suit with new tariffs on Australian exports, he was finally persuaded not to. We should take advantage of China’s mistake by expanding our 2005 free trade agreement with Australia and lower rates on a href=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/business/china-wine-australia.html rel=agricultural/a a href=https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Agriculture/China-tariff-on-Australia-s-barley-reshapes-global-trade rel=products/a that are feeling the pinch from Chinese tariffs./p
pemThis is a crosspost from the author’s a href=https://matzko.substack.com/p/australians-and-septic-tank-yanksSubstack/a. Click through and subscribe for more content on the intersection of history and policy./em/p