Bush made world less safe: Aussie poll

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 on Tuesday 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.