As part of the fundraising appeal for the tsunami, I offered to write sincere praise for John Howard, at a rate of 100 words for each $50 pledge. The offer was taken up by commenter 2dogs, who generously gave $50. As I plan to try this shameless stunt again, I’m going to do the easiest 100 words first, focusing on the last few weeks. If you want to see praise for Howard on some other topics, wait for the next fundraiser when the offer will be reopened (or until he does something I regard as praiseworthy enough for a post). In the non-adversarial spirit of the exercise, I’ve closed this post to comments, but if you have something to say on the topic, you can comment here. With those preliminaries out of the way, here’s my 100 words.

Howard’s response to the tragic tsunami disaster has been virtually faultless. He was the first national leader to offer significant financial assistance and the size of the offer, coming from a small country like Australia, helped to shame bigger countries into offering more. The decision to focus our aid efforts on Indonesia was the right one, both in terms of need, and of our national interest. At times like this, we see John Howard at his best. His reactions to such disasters are pretty much those of the average Australian and, nine times out of ten, that’s a good thing.