Australia will always be closer to the U.S. than she is to China because our values and political traditions are much closer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Of all the important relationships that Australia has with other countries, none has been more greatly transformed over the last 10 years than our relationship with China.
Australia is much more liberal in accepting de facto relationships than the U.S.
Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.
The goal of Australian foreign policy should be to promote the maximum harmony between the U.S. and China.
Australia is about as far away as you can get. I like that.
There is no place in the world like Australia. Not even its beautiful neighbor New Zealand.
What frustrates U.S. officials is that China sometimes seems more comfortable accommodating a strong United States, as it did in past decades, than partnering with an America that's less dominant.
I don't think of myself as either American or Australian really, I'm a true hybrid. It's a good thing for me because both of them are really good countries.
I wonder if it is Australia's great distance from more populated land masses that allows its inhabitants to be left to their own devices, to be incredibly creative and, at times, to be wonderfully weird.
You see, psychologically, Australia must understand it has to live in the region around it. Australia must find its security in Asia; it cannot find its security from Asia.