Week two down in Australia's election campaign

One way to frame the foreign policy debate is to ask, if other countries had a vote, who would they support. When the US president, George W Bush, was in Sydney for the Asia Pacific summit last month, he was quite open about backing his friend, the prime minister, John Howard, the staunch ally he calls a "man of steel." Mr Howard might be behind in the polls, but according to Mr Bush, he is a hard man to knock out.

The opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, has emphasised his support for the US alliance, but has also argued in the one leaders' debate that Iraq is the greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. So both sides of Australian politics cling to the alliance, with Mr Howard closer to an embattled US president.

Turning to Asia is where it gets more interesting and a little different.

A provocative way to label the Asian dimension would be to describe Mr Howard as the Japan candidate, versus Mr Rudd as the China candidate. This simplistic notion does get a little closer to the real fault line opening up in Asia and the policy inclinations of the two leaders.

Mr Howard's embrace of Japan has been the relatively unnoticed element of his Asia policy. The prime minister's enthusiasm for creating a three-way alliance with the US and Japan has caused deep unease in Beijing. The Chinese fulminate against any attempt to create an "alliance of democracies" as an attempt to isolate China and introduce a new division in Asia.

On the sidelines of the last month's APEC summit, the president of the US and the prime ministers of Australia and Japan held the first leader-level meeting of the trilateral security process launched five years ago.

Mr Howard's past praise for what he calls the "quiet revolution in Japan's external policy" came to fruition this year when Tokyo and Canberra signed their joint declaration on security cooperation. The document was stating an existing reality when its first paragraph affirmed "the strategic partnership between Australia and Japan."

Now to Mr Rudd, the Mandarin-speaking diplomat who had a posting in Beijing.

Mr Rudd showed his qualms about the Japan trend when he stated that Australia should go no further in its security ties with Japan. The Labor leader says Australia should not unnecessarily tie its security interests to an unknown policy in North East Asia." That is certainly China's view.

The differences over Japan take on significance because of the larger areas of unspoken bipartisan agreement on Asia. The political contest is more about fashioning narratives to claim original ownership of what is really a common approach to America and China.

It is hard to find any loud China sceptics in the senior ranks of Labor or the Coalition. The continual Washington policy war over China - the battle between the panda huggers and the dragon slayers - has no counterpart in Canberra.

Both sides of Australian politics are united on the importance of the 55-year-old alliance with the US and the growing significance of China, now overtaking Japan as Australia's most important trade partner. It is the weighting and the hierarchy to be given to those giants that hints at the differences between the Howard government and the inclinations of the Rudd-led Labor party.

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