Sydney: Prime Minister John Howard has committed yet another embarrassing gaffe that will further erode Australia's strained relationship with Indonesia.
Only last week, Mr Howard prematurely threw his weight behind Megawatie Sukarnoputri in her failed bid to become the new Indonesian President.
Now Mr Howard has further angered the new leadership team of Abdurrahman Wahid in Jakarta by telling an Asian business forum here that he deeply wished former President BJ Habibie was still Indonesian leader.
"Doctor Habibie was probably the only world leader who really looked up to me," Mr Howard lamented.

Melbourne: Senior police here have defended their tactics in the week-long standoff at Parliament House with former Premier Jeff Kennett.
Mr Kennett has barricaded himself in his parliamentary office, refusing entry to new Premier Steve Bracks even though the Labor leader was sworn in as Premier more than a week ago.
Over recent days, Mr Kennett has appeared at his office window regularly to shout :"I am not a loser!" and "The Victorian people didn't mean for this to happen!"
A spokesperson for the Victorian police commissioner scoffed at rumours that police who have cordoned off the building might resort to violence to end the political stalemate.
"Look, our marskmen could get a clean shot away any time we wanted, but there's simply no way in the world we're going to end this by shooting Mr Kennett with this amount of media on hand."

Brisbane: The popular Queensland-based Magnifikat Meal and Bretharian sects are to merge, in the hope that followers will eat a little more sensibly.

Brisbane: One Nation's state conference has voted in support of heroin users’ shooting galleries being set up in Brisbane, with delegates arguing they’d love to shoot as many of the dole-bludging bastards as possible. In another strange development, the conference also called for more Asian imigration. “Without those types, we wouldn’t have anyone to blame for our own lack of achievement,” spokesperson Hiroshima Nagasaki-Smith said.
Nagasaki-Smith was later seen in the Queen Street mall with party leader Pauline Hanson, cajoling a Japanese tourist into saying ‘election’ to the merriment of onlookers.

Report: Brisbane correspondent Geoff Nicholson