This was the most historically significant visit ever by a US President to Australia. It was serendipitously bookended by a preceding APEC meeting in Hawaii and a subsequent East Asia Summit in Indonesia.
Obama used his address to Australia's Parliament to set out a comprehensive strategic vision for a reinvigorated US presence in the India-Pacific region, in every sense: politico-military, economic, and on human rights. He spoke from Canberra to the whole region. His carefully nuanced words will be pondered closely in Beijing, Delhi, Tokyo and Jakarta.
His firm messages to China were: The US will stay a major Pacific power. He can be very tough when challenged (Obama used North Korea as proxy example). Our global military pullback will not affect our great power in the Pacific. We are legitimately involved in issues of freedom of international commerce and navigation in the South China Sea. But we are not trying to contain China's growth as a major world power. We welcome China as a partner and friend, but we insist China must play by international rules — in foreign relations, trade relations, and even (with noteworthy boldness here) in observance of universal human rights.
All these messages would have broad bipartisan support in Australia, and the President's reception in Parliament House was warm and exuberant.
For Julia Gillard, the visit marks a turning point: she now has a better chance of leading Labor to re-election in 2013. The Obama visit could be a circuit-breaker from some of the infernal dead-weights besetting Labor as a party, and Gillard as leader.
These two somewhat embattled leaders at home were clearly very comfortable with one another. It is electorally good for Gillard to draw strength and dignity from their close contacts over many days. Not good for Tony Abbott, or for Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd (students of political symbolism will have noted Obama's short courtesy greeting with Rudd, followed immediately by his longish chat with Tanya Plibersek.)
Both leaders would have been glad to forget the European sovereign debt imbroglio. The EU is out of either leader's control, as the unproductive G20 meeting showed. The good news is all in the India-Pacific region now.
More important in the longer term is the visit's impact on Australia's search for our correct balance in the crucial US-China relationship, and, indeed, the impact on the region's perception of Australia. The visit locks in Australia and the US as best allies, partners and friends. It inevitably complicates Australia's delicate engagement with China, and even with Indonesia and India.
The Darwin US basing decision (2500 Marines rotating permanently by 2017), carefully wrapped as it was, will cement regional views of Australia as an utterly accommodating US junior military partner in Asia.
With a large ADF and border protection presence garrisoned there, Darwin had already become Australia's militarised northern frontier outpost, our Pearl Harbor. This permanent US presence will make it more so.
Hillary Clinton, Rudd, and Kim Beazley — hawks all — desired and designed this outcome. A standing US military presence in Darwin and the NT marks a quantum escalation in ANZUS for good or ill. It is not important which government first pressed for this: it suits both governments' present strategic and domestic agendas.
Australia is now indelibly associated with Obama's strong messages to China in Canberra. The US will continue to promote other Asian powers — especially India, also Japan and the ASEAN countries (almost all of which Obama politely referenced by name) — as balancing factors to Chinese power, in an envisioned multilateral concert of powers on the C19 European model.
This will take much finesse if it is not to be seen by China as hostile containment. It is too early to say if Obama's efforts here will succeed.
Was Australia used by the US? Yes, we were, and pushed on uranium sales to India also. But our government wanted this, because it will all be popular with the middle-ground, former Labor voters Gillard is trying to win back from Abbott and the Greens.
Uranium sales to India, and enhanced Australia-India relations, is a third big plus for Labor. Indian pride was rightly outraged by Australia's mishandling of the student security issue. Now, uranium sales to India will be approved by Labor after robust conference debate. They will build slowly in dollar value but, both with India and domestically, the political benefit to Labor is immediate, especially in resources-based electorates.
Both the Darwin and uranium policy announcements dramatically demarcate Labor from the Greens. Labor wants this, now that the carbon tax is in. It is a planned move to the Right. And Gillard hopes Labor's long-running purgatory of minority government might thereby end in 2013.
On the new proposed Trans Pacific Partnership regional free trade initiative, not much will happen soon. Australia will make no headway on beef or sugar access into protected US markets. But we will come under harsh US pharmaceuticals lobby pressure to raise prices of generic national health medicines, to harmonise with US intellectual property rules. I doubt whether any TPP the US could accept would be a good deal for Australia.
For all Obama's inspiring oratory about human rights in Asia — and he truly has a magic way with words — spare a final thought for brave whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Finding a way for our two governments to deal justly and humanely with them is part of the job of cleaning up the mess Bush, Blair and Howard left. Protection of their human rights tests the decency of our ANZUS alliance's common values.
Their present abusive treatment ought to have been privately discussed by the leaders — but probably wasn't.
Tony Kevin is the author of Crunch Time, a book exploring Australia's inadequate policy responses to the climate change crisis.