Eddie Walsh responds to Sam Roggeveen's post on Australia's international reputation in the aftermath of Labor's latest leadership change:
While I enjoyed your short post yesterday on the Labor vote, I found it failed to address the central question: Australia's international reputation with whom? The referent object certainly matters in this debate. One of the most obvious candidates is of course Australia's major partner countries, including the United States and China. For those countries, the issue of concern is not whether there is a deep political divide within Labor politics. Nor is it the party's falling fortunes in domestic politics. Instead, it is whether the recent domestic political developments will significantly impact their bilateral relations with Australia. In the last Labor go around, Gillard's survival did not radically alter the status quo in those relations. The question now is whether the upcoming elections will.
