The oppressive, other-worldly throbbing sound of helicopters has long faded from the skies over Sydney, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum has wound up for another year

And while the dust may have settled on the protest-riot-that-never-was, two images continue to stick in the mind, subtly riffing off one another.

The first is of Labor leader Kevin Rudd addressing Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Making inoffensive jokes about naughty children and freshly imported pandas—in fluent Mandarin, no less—Rudd stands smiling warmly in front of the Australian and Chinese flags. In this image, everything Paul Keating ever said about Asia and our place in it comes true.

The second image, by comparison, seems lifeless and uninspiring. In it Prime Minister John Howard stages a joint press conference with US president George W. Bush, the former playing the straight man to the latter's bumbling buffoon.

Howard vows to keep the troops in Iraq: "This is not the time for any proposals of a scaling down of Australian forces." Bush says he is looking forward to lunch: "I'm a meat man." Indeed.

Bush isn't stingy when it comes to praising his antipodean counterpart. Howard, he says, is courageous, a battler, a political warrior. We can feel the love up there on the world stage, even if we don't share it ourselves.

And increasingly, the statistics say, we don't. A recent survey conducted by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney shows that 63 per cent of respondents lack confidence in the United States' ability to manage global problems, with 48 per cent wishing Australia would take a more independent line and march to the beat of its own drum.

Australians, the survey found, have not had a lower opinion of the US in over 30 years. Understandably, this could be a problem for John Howard.

The US-Australia alliance has been at the heart of Australia's foreign policy since we tore ourselves from the breast of Mother England in the wake of World War II.

One gets the sense, however, that the alliance has been reduced over the last seven years—and in the fourth term of Howard's prime ministership in particular—to little more than a personal friendship between two white, conservative men. This was forcefully brought home earlier this year when Howard made the ill-considered move of attacking US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

No matter what the economists tell you, this year's APEC summit was all about the domestic—about showing off Howard's diplomatic credentials and bringing them to bear upon his government's increasingly sick-looking standing in the polls.

It was an unmitigated disaster and it was always going to be.

Bush's popularity in Australia is almost lower than that of the Coalition's, and Bush's silly-sounding rhetoric does little more than exacerbate popular suspicions that, when it comes to the United States, Howard is not his own man.

There is nothing more ironic than Bush's favourite term of endearment for the Prime Minister. Dubya calls him a 'man of steel'. But there is nothing particularly steely about Howard's parroting of US policy on everything from the deeply unpopular war in Iraq to (until recently) climate change and the incarceration of David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay.

Throw into the bargain the fact that each of these issues is (or was at some point) a hot-button topic in this year's never-ending election campaign, and the effect of Howard's two-man alliance on debates and trends in domestic politics becomes all the more apparent.

This is not a unique phenomenon. Bush, it seems, needs only to look at a political leader for them—or at least their career—to turn into a pillar of salt.

As was noted recently in Newsweek, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, Spain's José María Aznar, and, most recently, Japan's Shinzo Abe—who resigned a mere three days after APEC ended—all found their popularity plummeting in response (at least in part) to their support for the President. Tony Blair's relationship with Bush was an unpopular blot on his prime ministership until the very end.

Hence, it was ultimately Kevin Rudd who emerged from APEC with a certain glow about him.

Daring to stand up to Bush on Iraq and asserting Australia's independence, the new kid on the block had tapped into what Howard still hasn't after eleven and a half years in power.

There is popular sentiment, ever growing, for a new kind of US-Australia alliance.

ElectionTracker, 18 October 2007