View the article on the Daily Telegraph website.
MORE than anything else, the Australia-US alliance is a mateship between the Australian and American people.
Experts call it a defence pact, a strategic partnership or a free trade agreement. But the alliance is really about industrious people, young nations and positive attitude.
In fact, the thing I admire most about Barack Obama is how he always talks about hope, not fear.
It is a lesson for us given the negative, cynical tall-poppy-chopping we witness in Australian politics. Learning from good friends is part of most people's lives and such lessons are trusted because Australian and American soldiers have fought on the same side in wars since World War I. In 1941, during the darkest days of World War II, one of Australia's greatest prime ministers turned to Washington for help "free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom".
With such words John Curtin encouraged an effort from the US that saved Australia from invasion. Between 1942-45, when our population was seven million, about one million US servicemen came to Australia.
The legacy of American servicemen in Australia can be still found in some of the most simple, charming ways.
Go down to Harry's Cafe de Wheels at Woolloomooloo and you will see the black-and-white pictures of navy boys from the US chatting to impressionable Aussie girls over a pie and sauce, or going for a stroll along the shores of Sydney Harbour. Through much of the 1940s the US baseball and gridiron results would be published prominently in the local newspapers. Australians were introduced to hot dogs. Many years after the war, there were still stories of New York cab drivers who knew Australia well and spoke warmly of their wartime visits. For years, letters between Australia and the US went back and forth between pen pals following up friendships developed during the war.
It is good that APEC has been hosted in Hawaii in recent days, because long after World War II ended the Hawaiian Islands have remained very much the part of the US most closely associated with Australia. Not only do many Aussies choose Hawaii as a holiday destination, Hawaii has long been the part of the US security umbrella most integrated and interested in our Asia-Pacific region.
That Obama lived in Hawaii as a boy is further evidence that his mind is surely open to the possibilities of our region like few before him.
But lessons can go both ways. Australia has unique special lessons introduced years ago such as Medicare, universal superannuation and the minimum wage.
Our health system isn't perfect but it's one of the best in the world. Medicare ensures Australians substantially get to live on an even playing field. Our retirement savings system gives Australians a prospect of comfortable retirement.
Superannuation for the past 20 years has caused Australian savings to grow to become the fourth-largest funds under management in the world. If Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr had made the retirement savings system decisions the Hawke and Keating governments did in 1985 and 1992, the US would now have about $13 trillion in national savings. Imagine how good that economic treasure would be in protecting America from the difficulties of the current global financial volatility.
Our minimum wage system ensures that people who go to work in low-paid jobs still enjoy regular, if modest, increases every year. This protection is in stark contrast to the scenes in the poorer parts of America.
Institutions such as Medicare, superannuation and the minimum wage make Australia a great place to live because they are pillars of a safety net all about people. They are about people being comfortable in their retirement and looking after them when they become unwell.
When American friends of mine always remark positively about unique Australian institutions they don't just mean the kangaroo, emu and platypus. Our constant striving for a fair go counts, too.
I believe former Labor leader Kim Beazley was right when he reflected some years ago that it is vastly more important to be the ally the US needs than the ally any particular American administration might want. Beazley says that honest advice on the wisdom of a course of action is what delivers the respect of our friends, because mates talk straight.
And that's the thing the alliance is really about: Not formal-sounding agreements or institutions but our people and the friendly sounds echoing from our story.