Australia's international ghosts
With the Tibet's Dalai Lama about to visit, Australia again reviews its ethical relationship with China, a nation that has become one of its biggest trading partners. Radio Australia's foriegn affairs correspondent, Graeme Dobell, looks at the issues.

In the unusual universe that is Parliament House, Canberra, it's known as "making the ghosts walk." Old words are paraded, to show-up a current position.

So, the ghost of Kevin past came back to haunt the Rudd of today. As opposition leader, Kevin Rudd was ready to snub the Dalai Lama when he visits next month. When he was foreign affairs spokesman in 2002, Mr Rudd took a different view - meeting the Tibetan leader and suggesting the foreign minister was kowtowing to China.

These were Mr Rudd's word from five years ago, that walked again last week: "My own view is that I think it's pretty weak of Foreign Minister Downer to have somehow fabricated this excuse that he's somehow too busy to have met the Dalai."

The prime minister pounced on the ghost and on what he called Mr Rudd's weak character, and Mr Howard said he might now find time in his diary to see the Dalai Lama. Mr Rudd immediately responded and performed that most uncomfortable political manoeuvre, known variously as the zig-zag, the U-turn or the back flip.

The problem for both sides of Australian politics is the hard choice between a religious superstar and a rising superpower. The Dalai Lama brings out interesting aspects in even the toughest operators. Witness the veteran TV journalist, Paul Lyneham, 15 years ago, getting a chance to ask one of the great questions: "Dalai Lama, what is the meaning of life?"

[Dalai Lama responds]: "Meaning of life, I consider the happiness and usefulness is the purpose of our life, meaning of our life. The very existence of our life is surely not for trouble, not for suffering."

You'll go far in the media age, if you can do the meaning of life in a TV soundbite. The Dalai Lama drama is one element in the Canberra version of what's described in Washington as the war between the panda huggers and the dragon slayers. How do you deal with China? Kevin Rudd, the Mandarin-speaking ex-diplomat, has always been a panda hugger.

John Howard started his prime ministership with just a touch of the dragon slayer. The first foreign policy crisis as Mr Howard took office in March, 1996, was China firing missiles into the waters around Taiwan as a direct political threat. And so the prime minister did meet the Dalai Lama in 1996.

This meeting, along with Taiwan and the US alliance, brought Beijing crashing down on the new Howard Government. China delivered some tough lessons about the pain it can impose - the diplomatic version of the death of a thousand cuts.

And Mr Howard shifted quickly from dragon slayer to panda hugger - a policy of pragmatic engagement designed, as the Prime Minister put it at the time, to overcome, absorb, handle, massage, differences with Beijing. The US alliance would be embraced, but China would be dealt with separately, almost equally. By the time the Dalai Lama came back again in 2002, he saw neither the prime minister nor the foreign minister.

One of the wins achieved by the Howard Government has been to be so close to the Bush administration on almost every other issue, Canberra has been able to take a much softer line on dealing with Beijing than that advocated by the hardliners in Washington.

With the Dalai Lama heading this way again, Australia's leaders may test whether their recent vigorous panda hugging means they can get some similar latitude from the Chinese side.

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