When, at Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s invitation, the US Navy - the Great White Fleet - visited the new Commonwealth in 1908, crowds of half a million cheering spectators lined the shores of Sydney Harbour. As the Sydney Morning Herald commented at the time: “It is likely enough that America may be the first line of defence against Asia.” The experience of World War II - when Curtin turned to Washington for help, “free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom” - and the negotiation of the ANZUS treaty cemented the alliance.
Ever since, one important strand in Australian foreign policy - on the part of both major parties - has been a continuing tension between a fear of the implications for us if the United States loses interest in this part of the world and associated efforts to make sure this does not happen, and a nervous concern about how to manage the US and its expectations of us when it does start paying attention.
The ambivalence is reflected in public attitudes. In February 2005 and June 2006, the Lowy Institute conducted the first two of an annual series of public opinion surveys of Australians’ views of the world (details of which can be found on the Lowy Institute website). The Australian public, it turns out, sees the United States with a mixture of dependency, respect, disenchantment and in some cases resentment.
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In 2005, we asked respondents to say whether they had positive or negative feelings towards a list of 15 countries, without being more specific. The United States scored 58 per cent positive feelings (and 39 per cent negative), placing it below ten others on the list, including Japan (84 per cent), China (69 per cent), Malaysia (62 per cent) and Papua New Guinea (60 per cent).
We changed the form of the question in 2006 (largely to conform to the practice of our partners in an international survey) and asked people to give each listed country a score out of 100. We took the mean figure as the overall result, with a score of 50 considered neither positive nor negative. Because the question and the list of countries were slightly different, the two sets of responses are not directly comparable, but this time the United States was out-rated only by Great Britain, Singapore, Japan and Papua New Guinea. Even so, the US score of 62 per cent was, within the margin of error, effectively the same as China’s (61 per cent).
These findings match those of other surveys. In 2003, the US-based Pew, Research Center conducted a multi-country study of views of the United States. In that survey, 60 per cent of Australian respondents had very favourable (16 per cent) or somewhat favourable (44 per cent) opinions of the US.
The story gets more complicated, however, when you ask Australians about the degree of influence the United States exercises over us. In both Lowy Institute surveys, we asked whether Australia takes too much, too little or the right amount of notice of the views of the US in its foreign policies.
About two-thirds of Australians (68 per cent and 69 per cent respectively) thought that, on the whole, we take too much notice, and 29 per cent that we take the right amount of notice.
Those results are consistent with another result from the 2005 survey, which, asked respondents to rate a series of potential threats to our vital interests. One of the ten options was “US foreign policies”, which rated sixth overall - only marginally less worrying than Islamic fundamentalism and ahead of world population growth, illegal immigration and refugees, and failing countries in our region, with China’s growing power coming in last place. (It’s hard to get a good “yellow peril” scare going in Australia these days.)
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In 2006, a strong majority of Australians (79 per cent) agreed that the United States is playing the role of world policeman more than it should be, and almost as many (69 per cent) thought it did not have the responsibility to play that role at all. This finding is consistent with the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, which showed that nearly three-quarters of respondents either strongly agreed (38 per cent) or agreed (35 per cent) with the statement that “the United States has too much power in world affairs”.
Australian opinion is heavily divided on American trustworthiness. More Australians (19 per cent) lack trust in the United States’ capacity to act responsibly in the world than in the potential of China (11 per cent), India (8 per cent) or Japan (7 per cent) to do so, although an equal number (19 per cent) also believe that the United States can be trusted a great deal - more than China and India, and equally with Japan. In general, older respondents are more likely to trust the United States a great deal, and 18 to 29-year-olds are more likely not to trust the United States at all.
A big question, of course, is how much these attitudes are shaped by perceptions of President George W. Bush and his administration.