Go read this piece on the vitally important Australian elections taking place this weekend, and the potentially catastrophic consequences for Australia if Mark Latham becomes Prime Minister, at A Western Heart: Count On Us Today, But the Day after Tomorrow?

I can’t vote in your election, Aussie friends and allies, but I’ll be watching—and hoping the well-known, justly famous good sense and toughness of your people prevails. Don’t let the appeasers win.

The hysteria that the Australian press has been whipped into, most significantly over Iraq, has radically altered the shape of the coming election. The left is always ludicrously vehement, about everything, but for the first time in Australian history, we have seen conservative “Protest Warriors” take to the streets of Sydney, openly opposing the goose-stepping minions of the trade unions, communists and various other perpetually discontented lunatic-left entities. I don’t think this signals a strong new trend of the “silent majority” towards open activism, but in a country as laid-back politically as Australia, it is a shift worth continued observation.

The real importance of tomorrow’s election lies in the foreign policy changes that would be instituted under the Labor Government of Mark Latham. The man who once broke a taxi-driver’s arm, and ran Liverpool’s (a suburb of southern Sydney) municipal council into historic levels of debt and political chaos now has an opportunity to shape Australia’s place in the world. The shape it would take can be speculated upon by the remarks Mr Latham has, in the past, made about the President of the United States. “The most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory” he declared about the American President who overthrew two tyrannical regimes in a single term. Latham then went on to label his Australian conservative opponents as a “conga-line of suckholes” for having originally supported the United States in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Senator John Kerry, Mr Latham has prevaricated and occasionally made complete reversals of policy on what Labor would do in Government. “All the troops home by Christmas” was the original clarion call. Then it became some of the troops. Their position hasn’t been clarified for some weeks, and thanks to Labor’s compliant fifth columnists — the media — it isn’t likely to be placed under any scrutiny, any time soon. But the fetid stench of appeasement wafts through the air, and it is unmistakable.

What a terrible blow to Australia this would be historically. I once sent Thomas Friedman of the New York Times an indignant email, after he had published a column claiming that America had no true ally it could count on. I pointed out to him that America has no more staunch ally than Australia; that we had willingly endured every major world conflict — including the ones those intrepid Brits sat out — together, and had repeatedly sent a higher percentage of our male population than even the United States itself. We have earned a reputation as a fierce and proud fighting nation, one that wars in the cause of righteousness and freedom, and has been partly responsible for the liberation of many nations, and almost entirely responsible for the recent liberation of East Timor from Indonesian oppression. To his credit Mr Friedman wrote back to me and apologised for the oversight. Recently, I was heartened to see this theme echoed by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post (who it must be said, has the advantage of an Australian wife) who wrote:

“Of all our allies in the world, which is the only one to have joined the United States in the foxhole in every war in the past 100 years? Not Britain, not Canada, certainly not France. The answer is Australia.”

This is the real risk that we run as a nation. This is what we took a hundred years to earn, and in a single day, we might lose it forever. Big governments can be tolerated, tax increases endured, and all the attendant nanny-state interference coped with. But the single most important factor of this election — Australia’s conduct of foreign affairs in the War on Terrorism — could signal the end of our place of relevance in the world. With Latham in power, we would become a closed, protectionist sneering nation, an international leftist pariah state like New Zealand, and as irrelevant on the global stage as Canada is swiftly becoming. That is by far the most serious peril that we face.

We cannot allow this to happen. The 88 Australians that died in the Bali Bombing, and the ten Australians that forever vanished amid the rubble of the World Trade Center cry out to us, and plead with us not to abandon them, to not forget them, or the lesson their deaths impart. The war on the murderers that killed a hundred children in Beslan, and thousands of our American cousins on September 11 cannot be simply walked away from. This is our fight, as much as anyone else’s.