Become a saudi style client, um no, just no.
Australia basically plays both sides, we sell crap to China and have a nice economic relationship with them, and we hedge against China militarily by giving token support to America whenever they want to invade some country far, far away (joining every american war doesn;t mean much when your contribution is next to nothing) and consequentially adding US military weight to any calculations involving Australia from a certain large, ideologically threatening state in eastern asia.
Also the editorialist is an idiot with no idea of Australian foreign policy at all. Furthermore in international relations no state in its right mind acts contrary to its own interests. Sure interests coincide (and in this case they do) but when they don't Australia will continue doing whats in its national interests and damn what the US says. We ditched the British for the US when they no longer fulfilled our interests, that should tell you how much "special relationships" mean to Australia (or any country) when it no longer serves the interests of the nation, especially when the guarantor of security is becoming relatively less and less powerful as time goes on. I would say that Australia will continue with its current course of sitting in the middle and siphoning off the best of both worlds (economics = china, military support = US) going about its own independent foreign policy of taking advantage of our pacific client states and bashing on those few pacific states who don't do what we tell them to do. (like Fiji for instance)
