Porch light on for Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama

US-AUSTRALIA-OBAMA-GILLARD

IMAGINE these events: Queen Elizabeth making her last official visit to Australia, President Barack Obama making his first official visit, and the greatest number of heads of government visiting Australia in a series of meetings that highlight the nation's past, present and future.

All these options are not finalised. There is, however, a reasonable chance they will occur between October and November. Such international meetings will generate fresh opportunities, tests and risks for Julia Gillard as they push the comfort zone of her prime ministership.

The two big dominoes are the Queen and the President.

The Queen is coming and the President may come. Either event will be significant for different reasons but taken together, just a few weeks apart, they offer a compelling portrait of Australia's cultural, political and constitutional bonds.

The Australian government is encouraging an Obama visit some time in the November 13-17 window. Gillard, obviously, would be delighted. Given that Obama was planning to visit on two different occasions in 2010 and had to cancel both times, this issue is highly delicate and will be seen, inevitably, as a judgment on the President's foreign-policy priorities and how he sees Australia.

The Queen's visit is based upon the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in October where she will host a dinner for the leaders. But this is no ordinary visit by the head of the Commonwealth and Australia's head of state.

Buckingham Palace has given the Australian government the message that this visit is, almost certainly, the last to Australia by the Queen, now aged 85. It will be a time of high emotion and some insiders predict a large turnout as the Australian public realises this is the final opportunity to see an icon of monarchy, one of the longest serving British sovereigns and the longest-serving Australian head of state, who first travelled to Australia in 1954, the inaugural visit by a reigning monarch to this country.

For the record, and for republicans and monarchists alike, the Queen, not the Governor-General, is our head of state, a somewhat elementary point we need to get right.

So when the Queen acts as Queen of Australia she is not acting as Queen of the United Kingdom, a mystique that would have thrilled Walter Bagehot .

Apart from her CHOGM commitments in Perth, the Queen will travel east to visit Canberra along with some other states. The visit will be framed as "possibly" her last to Australia. This is not a commentary upon her health, just the reality of age. It is also a message of courtesy for her subjects, supporters and cheer squad.

With the monarchy more fashionable after the recent wedding of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, the Queen's visit will threaten a tabloid spectacular. Republicans, no doubt, will remain subdued, hopefully reflecting upon their self-destruction at the 1999 referendum that gifted our constitutional monarchy another generation at least.

An Obama visit is privately being described as a "possibility" in Canberra. Such a visit would be a huge event given Obama's popularity in Australia and the present high tide of Australian-American relations.

Obama and Gillard have a warm relationship. The PM's pro-US credentials have been conspicuous almost beyond the call of sound policy. Apart from their bilateral meetings, Gillard and Obama have had a number of phone calls, some running longer than scheduled. Late last year Obama visited India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea.

The truth is that if Obama made another regional visit and ducked Australia this would become a political embarrassment for the Gillard government. To understand why, consider his calendar. Obama hosts the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in Honolulu over November 12-13 and then attends the East Asian Summit in Bali over November 17-19.

If domestic affairs permit, the logic is a visit to the region in the interim. Obama has a standing invitation to visit Australia. The White House has said he wants to come. He is compelled to visit Bali anyway.

If Obama visited the region between the Honolulu and Bali meetings but avoided Australia the imagery would look bad, very bad. The Australian media would use the label "snub". They would be right and this would gather momentum.

The diplomatic context is vital. Gillard has offered unqualified support to the Afghanistan mission even after Obama's announcement of limited US force withdrawals. Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith support greater US use of Australia's military facilities in the context of the rise of China in what is likely to become the most significant re-interpretation of ANZUS in the treaty's history.

For Gillard, playing host to Obama would be a golden opportunity to show her leadership credentials. It would be folly, however, to think this event could reverse her political decline. Australian politics doesn't work like that.

The end-of-year summit season for Gillard reveals the sheer extent of the heads-of-government global and regional connections Australia has established. More than 40 heads of government are expected to attend CHOGM, including British PM David Cameron and Indian PM Manmohan Singh. Some will make, in addition, bilateral visits.

After presiding at CHOGM, Gillard will attend the G20 leaders meeting in France over November 3-4 and then both the APEC and EAS meetings.

Each of these meetings is a monument to past Australian diplomatic achievements: the APEC meeting arose from Paul Keating's initiative, our EAS involvement was one of Alexander Downer's achievements and Australia's role in the G20 followed an extraordinary campaign by Rudd when he was PM.

In foreign policy Gillard is still learning. There is an axiom she should remember: in the modern age no Australian PM succeeds at home if seen as a foreign policy failure.

The message, in summary, from this series of meetings is that talk about Australia having to make exclusive choices in the world is phoney and has forever been phoney.

Australia added the US on to its ties with Britain. It added Asia on to its ties with Britain and America. Its diplomatic history is a story of adding value amid dynamic shifts in power, not picking the future by repudiating the past.

These meetings coincide with a dramatic shift in global power to Asia. That is in Australia's interest. The key to maximising our influence lies in our domestic economic performance, our skills as a regional and alliance partner and in the power of our ideas.