The visit to Japan by Australia's Labor Party prime minister, Julia Gillard, reminds us that Australian foreign policy has never been known for its consistency.

She will, of course, go out of her way to talk about Japan-Australia friendship. But for many years Canberra was strongly anti-Japan. At the Tokyo war crimes tribunals it sought to impose the harshest punishments possible. Its 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty determination to force Japan to give up all prewar territorial acquisitions did much to create the Northern Territories dispute with Moscow and the Takeshima dispute with Seoul.

In exchange for agreeing to a peace treaty it demanded and got the U.S. to agree to a treaty - the ANZUS Treaty - to counter feared future Japanese aggressions - a detail many prefer to forget nowadays.