Australians' anti-American sentiment runs deeper than it looks to Canberra

I don't want to give the impression that the responses are monolithically uniform. There is a lot of nuance in just what people are concerned about.

A lot of the concern is deal-related. Many Australians think that the US will get the upper hand in negotiations. There is also concern about cultural imperialism - the invasion of the country by US cinema, books and music, and a fear that the ABC may be under threat. Added to that is a perception that US environmental, health and labour regulations are inferior to ours and that we may be forced into a race to the bottom. Participants did not appear to buy the argument that we would become the 51st state of the US, as heavily promoted by Doug Cameron in his argument. Their concern was not that we would become a part of the American empire, but that we would become a satellite third-world country of it.

Since getting the results I have done the taxi driver test on them, and they pass. Scratch a taxi driver and you make an anti-American bleed!

This has serious implications for Australian domestic politics and policy. It also limits the power and might of the US. Bush made much of his coalition of the willing but what would US power be without any significant first-world allies? This is a serious question because John Howard and the Liberals could easily become a victim of US success at the next federal election, particularly if the FTA is signed.

There is evidence that some elements of Labor realise the potency of anti-American feeling in the country. One such piece of evidence is the paper that Paul Keating delivered to the Local Government Unlimited Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Labor can't stop some of its supporters talking about the war, and it has a vocal support base that it has lost and needs to mollify - those turning to the Greens - who want to talk about very little else. If it can craft its discourse in terms of concerns about the US, then it has a chance of at least neutralising the effect that this issue has on its vote replacing distrust of Labor with distrust of the US, and by association, the Howard government.

From Labor's point of view, ratification of the Free Trade Agreement should also be a positive. The benefits of an FTA are almost impossible to demonstrate. Even the favourable economic models predict an advantage of at most a few billion dollars per year, which will be hardly noticed in an economy the size of Australia's. So, when there is economic bad news on exports, the FTA will be to blame, and when things go well, it won't get any credit. It's a tails you lose, heads I win proposition for Labor.

There are signs that Howard understands this. Recently, Trade Minister Mark Vaille has been using tough rhetoric in describing the course of talks with the US. When it comes to votes this is a ruthless government (ask the asylum seekers), and it would jettison the FTA before it would damage its prospects at the next election.

All of which poses problems for the US. Paradoxically, size appears to have it limits. There may well be a point that the US has passed, where try as it might to get larger and more powerful, the result is that it actually declines. Maybe all things have their natural limits.