IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.
Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.
An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.
There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.
It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".
The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".
The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".
For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.
Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.
China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.
"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.
And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.
In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.
Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.
Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.
But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.
Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."
I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)
Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.
WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.
"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."
The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.
But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.
The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.
It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.
Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.
Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."
But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.
In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want
an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."
Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.
