John Howard: 100412: SMH News: 10th of April 2012: Images shows former Prime Minister John Winston Howard recieving an Honorary Doctorate at Macquarie University this afternoon. Photograph by James Alcock.
A new world order ... Dr John Howard. Photo: James Alcock

A QUARTER of a century after urging Asian immigration be ''slowed down a little'' to preserve ''social cohesion'', Dr John Howard yesterday told 260 new university graduates - half of them Chinese - that they were integral to a ''hugely optimistic'' Australian future.

''Australia is blessed in so many ways,'' Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister and new doctor of letters told the graduating class of business and economics at Macquarie University. Australia had inherited all the great doctrines of Western civilisation, ''we live cheek by jowl with the fastest-growing economic region of the world'' and ''we have a very big and enduring relationship with the most peaceful and remarkable country mankind has seen - the United States''.

He ventured an opinion on one of the more delicate issues confronting Australian foreign policy. Is Australia pro-China or pro-America? ''We do not have to choose between our history and our geography,'' Mr Howard said. ''We can have the benefits of both.'' He said he'd held this view for years. It signals one of the few issues on which he agrees with the federal government, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bob Carr, in particular.

Later Mr Howard said the placement of US marines at Darwin - agreed to last year between Julia Gillard and Barack Obama, and begun last week - was sensible. When he was prime minister, he said, the United States had never demanded his government choose one or the other and had always been relaxed about Australia's growing economic relationship with China.

The Chinese, he said, had a much more sophisticated understanding of relations with Australia and the Australia-US relationship than many commentators exhibited.

He told graduates that the global financial crisis (''rightly dubbed the North Atlantic financial crisis'', he said) would not dominate future reviews of today's world economy, ''important as they were''.
''The event that will stand out from the last 30 to 40 years has been the remarkable transformation of so many parts of the world towards greater prosperity.'' More people had been lifted from poverty than at any time since the Industrial Revolution and the centre of gravity of the world's middle class had shifted inexorably to Asia.

He said this was the result of free enterprise. ''It was enterprise, effort and entrepreneurship that had built the prosperity of so many nations in our region, that has lifted so many from poverty.'' Some was due to the 1978 pro-market reforms of the Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping, he said.

Graduates later queued to be photographed with an obliging Mr Howard, among the most awarded Australian prime ministers. In January the Queen appointed him to the Order of Merit. George W. Bush had previously awarded him the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and Australia had made him a Companion of the Order of Australia. He previously received honorary doctorates from the Notre Dame, Bond and Hebrew universities but yesterday's conferral was the first by a public university.