KEY POINTS:
A majority of Australians believe the world is less safe due to the eight years United States President George W Bush has spent in the White House.
Though Americans are the ones heading to the polls tomorrow to vote for a new US president, Australians are excited by
the prospect of change at the top in Washington.
A survey by UMR Research, which polled 1,000 people online, found 60 per cent believed the past eight years of US foreign policy had made the world less safe.
Another 18 per cent thought it made no difference, while nine per cent believed the world was safer.
The Bush years have also seen Australians' opinion of the US deteriorate, with 64 per cent saying their opinion of America was worse because of the time Bush had spent in office.
The UMR study mirrored other Australian polls showing overwhelming support for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.
It found 72 per cent of Australians preferred Obama over his Republican rival John McCain. In contrast, only nine per cent favoured McCain as the next US president.
Another Australian study on the US election, by Essential Research, showed that 68 per cent of people thought the Bush presidency had been bad for the world.
Six per cent believed he'd been good for the world, and 11 per cent thought his presidency had made no difference.
Nearly half of the 1,000-plus respondents thought an Obama presidency would be better for Australia, with 48 per cent choosing the Illinois senator against seven per cent backing McCain.
Australia's chief representative in Washington, ambassador Dennis Richardson, has met, and is impressed, by both candidates.
"They're both tremendously impressive people," he told Fairfax Radio Network.
"They've got incredible life stories. They've got the intellectual depth and the toughness you'd expect in someone running for office."
And both, Mr Richardson says, are familiar with Australia.
"Senator Obama, when he was a young kid living in Indonesia, he used to travel between Indonesia and Hawaii, where his grandparents were, via Sydney," he said.
"So he's actually got a sense of the place.
"Senator McCain has a long involvement with Australia. His father was head of the US Pacific command and his parents used to go to Australia quite regularly."
While most attention is fixed on who will be the next US president, the political argy-bargy is focusing on a conversation between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Mr Bush about the global financial crisis.
Details of the conversation, which canvassed the use of a G20 meeting to discuss the global turmoil, were leaked to a national newspaper.
The newspaper report suggested that Mr Bush had asked Mr Rudd: "What's the G20?", a claim denied by both Mr Rudd and the Bush administration.
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull again called on the government to come clean about how details of the conversation were leaked to the media.
And he moved to blunt an attack by Mr Rudd over comments by former prime minister John Howard last year that an Obama win would be a victory for terrorists.
"For the record, I firmly believe that the next president of the United States, whether it is Senator Obama or Senator McCain, will be resolute and robust in dealing with the threat to free societies posed by terrorism," Mr Turnbull said.
Mr Rudd earlier called on Mr Turnbull to apologise for coalition attacks on Obama.
"It is extraordinary that one side of politics could make such extraordinarily partisan remarks," he told reporters.
- AAP
