In the May 13 edition of the Spectator magazine, the feisty Melanie Phillips asked, “Just what was that ghostly and unfamiliar noise we heard over the weekend?” She answered her own question, “Good heavens—it was the sound of a country’s political leader actually exercising leadership.”

The subject was Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

The occasion drawing Phillips’ comment was a national leader declaring a daring, non-politically correct stance for his nation against one of this world’s most rapacious dictators. The field of interest was one of Australia’s most beloved and entrenched institutions, the hallowed sport of cricket.

“The Australian prime minister, John Howard, ordered his nation’s cricket team to pull out of a scheduled tour of Zimbabwe in September, and even threatened to suspend the players’ passports if the sport’s governing body did not abide by his decision,” Phillips explained. “His reason was that the proposed tour would be an ‘enormous propaganda boost’ to Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, a ‘grubby dictator’ who was behaving ‘like the Gestapo towards its political opponents.’”

Writing during a visit to Australia for an earlier edition of the Spectator, Phillips observed that the strangely scarce commodity of real political leadership in Western civilization was still alive and well in the land Down Under. Contrasting this with the destructive liberalism of government in her home country, Phillips declared, “Coming from Britain to Canberra to interview members of the Australian government is like leaving a fetid malarial swamp to be douched with fresh cold water from a mountain spring. These guys are so on-side in the great fight for civilization against barbarism that they make ‘Bush’s poodle’ Tony Blair sound like a Harold Pinter wannabe on a bad day in Basra” (March 15). Now there’s a lady who tells it like it is!

Oh that there were more John Howards in this world! Such leaders are an obviously powerful inspiration to their subordinates. Melanie Phillips notes this phenomenon when she observes Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s statement that “The claim that brown guys don’t do democracy is just outrageous. So if you happen to be Asian or Arab you’re supposed to enjoy oppression? Just bring on the evidence!” (ibid.). Phillips then comments, “One can’t help wondering how this most neo-con of foreign ministers would fare if transplanted by serendipity into those temples of overseas appeasement in London’s King Charles Street or Washington’s Foggy Bottom.”

True to form, Melanie Phillips places her finger right on the button when it comes to the real cause of today’s weak, ineffectual political leadership in the West. “Throughout the West, there is currently a major problem of political leadership. The political class is incapable of disinterested statesmanship because it is no longer sure in what—if anything—it still believes” (op. cit.).

The last time that Britain fielded a leader with real depth of conviction in a clearly demonstrable system of timeless virtues was when … you guessed it … a woman was elected to lead the nation.

Say what you like about Margaret Thatcher, but no one can argue the power of conviction that she had in the basic virtues on which a better Britain had once been built. Thatcher was blessed to have been brought up under the positive influence of a Victorian grandmother who inculcated into her character the sound virtues that built Victorian Britain into the greatest empire in history. The connection between Britain’s greatest state of blessedness and those basic Victorian virtues was not coincidental.

Of her education into this system of values, Thatcher observed, “We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness was next to godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught to always give a hand to your neighbor. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values” (Evening Standard, April 15, 1983).

And that’s the strength of the leadership of one of the West’s last real, effective, political leaders, Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Phillips noted, “Mr. Howard, in sharp contrast [to today’s British leaders], is entirely free of such absurd and crippling cultural cringe. He believes in Australia and its Western values. He thinks these values are superior to any alternatives. And it is this total absence of equivocation in upholding the national interest which explains his robust defense of both Australian identity and Western civilization against attack.”

Some consider Australians a hard-bitten bunch. But there’s no doubt that, despite liberal socialist opposition within the country, such strength of leadership as that demonstrated by John Howard does give a country real backbone.

Take the case of the Australian troops, caught in a situation similar to that of the 15 British marines that simply gave in to Iranian militia earlier this year. Not for the Aussies the white flag of surrender! They simply pointed their weapons at the Iranians and told them in no uncertain terms to get packing! Those Australian fighting men knew that their prime minister was the type of man who, when confronted with the news that certain nations had pulled out of the alliance against terror, simply announced immediately that he would commit more Australian troops to the war.

Is John Howard literally the last of the true statesmen among the English-speaking peoples? It appears so.

Australia is very conscious of its status as an enclave of predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking people in the midst of vast hoards of overpopulated Asia eyeing its great empty spaces from the north. And Prime Minister Howard is determined to preserve that English-speaking enclave in the great south land of Sinim, as the biblical record names it.

To the north of Australia lies the most populous of all Islamic countries, Indonesia. Melanie Phillips notes, “In 2001, [Howard] courted huge controversy over his eye-watering immigration laws designed to stop the illegal arrival of the Indonesian ‘boat people,’ who were duly sent to detention camps on small islands in the South Pacific while their claims were processed.”

Now the Howard government has gone even further to protect Australia’s heritage via an endeavor of a nature unmatched by any other Western government. The Sydney Morning Herald reported last week that the “compulsory citizenship test that measures understanding of Australian values will include questions on Australia’s Judeo-Christian background, as well as its geography and the color of the flag …” (July 24).

The Australian Immigration Department’s senior official, Andrew Metcalfe, stated, “I think without doubt you can ultimately trace our values and beliefs back to the body of knowledge that derives from the Old Testament and upon which the Judeo-Christian background is based” (ibid.).

How’s that for a roundly politically incorrect clanger!

Metcalfe continued, “We are talking about questions that go to Australia, our values, our history, our geography, our political system and national symbols. Part of Australia, its values and its history would go to our belief system.” And the point is, immigrants who aspire to Australian citizenship are obliged to answer correctly each and every question on Australia’s system of traditional values, or they simply fail the test!

How refreshing!

While the British are busy apologizing for their great colonial past; while so much of the rest of the Western world is busy apologizing for the richness of its Judeo-Christian heritage and for the clear superiority this has yielded in terms of possessing every blessing under the sun compared to all other cultures; while the Anglo-Americans are busy appeasing a “peaceful” Islamic religion under whose banner innocent men, women and children are blown to bits daily, the world’s largest island and smallest continent, Australia, thumbs its nose at bleeding-heart, politically correct liberalism and stakes a claim for the fundamental biblical values on which the nation was founded!

Beaudy bottler, mate!

Oh that Britain and America would only look south for some refreshing inspiration to motivate their political leaders to break the hold of their continuing, demoralizing surrender to the destructive voice of foreign peoples intent on stealing their nations’ wealth and destroying their traditional values!

But they won’t.

And the odds are stacked even against Australia continuing on its current courageous course once John Howard leaves the scene. For the prophecies declare this present era of global disorder as the God-ordained “time of the Gentiles.” These prophecies in your Bible speak of a time when the great blessings of the English-speaking peoples will be overtaken and plundered by a foreign people, people of a strange tongue: non-English-speaking people. People unfamiliar with the great biblically based values upon which the English-speaking peoples built an empire that was literally gifted to them by the Creator Himself.

You need to know this reality!

What’s more, you need to know the outcome of this present crisis of the English-speaking peoples.

Simply request your own personal copy of our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, and it will be sent to you gratis. The reality of today’s world scene, its history, and its inevitable future, is all contained in summary form within the pages of that book. Not only will you find it enlightening, but it will arm you with knowledge guaranteed to give you real, genuine hope in the tumultuous months and years ahead!