President got met with a good sized protest in Canberra. The signs were witty: "Thank you very much, Now Bugger Off." Others were lame: "Bush sucks." The most significant protest came inside the Australian parliament where two Green Party members shouted at the president. Bush's retort — "I love free speech" — got a good ovation.
Australia's loving being in the center of attention. The Chinese leader Hu Jintao is here today in Sydney and he'll be the first Chinese leader to address the country's parliament. Australia has started work on a free trade agreement with China and just signed one with Thailand. With its population becoming more Asian, the land down under isn't a bad model for the U.S. on how to assimilate immigrants and reach out to the world.
People in Canberra couldn't be nicer. Don't tell my employer but they did a wine tasting for us in the press center. The pampered media also got a chance to buy some local fare like opals, the national stone, and stuffed Kangaroos. It's early Spring below the equator and there's a bracing crispness to the air. It's reviving after sweltering Southeast Asia. Canberra itself is a planned capital, pleasant like Bonn or Bern or Brasilia but it's not a happening city like Sydney, Berlin, Geneva or Rio. Only about 300,000 people live in this city on Australia's east coast. By contrast Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide all have over a million. A couple of nice parallels with D.C. though: I met a lobbyist within a couple of hours of being here. Despite all the shrimp-on-the-barbie gusto, a journalist here tells me, sadly, that a little pub for journalists, actually built at the site of the Parliament, has had to close for lack of interest.
I came here with Bill Clinton in 1996. Five days versus 16 hours, including a nice visit to Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef. I'm not sure Clinton got more done here but I know it was more fun for the rest of us. Bush, the first MBA president, treats travel as a duty, not pleasure. And so we breezed through Asia, as I said in an earlier missive, with the same manic pace with which his father played golf. He's been telling aides the last couple of days that they're going to be grumpy but they'll be glad to get home. He could be talking about himself. Or me.
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