FOREIGN Minister Bob Carr and Defence Minister Stephen Smith will sit down with their US counterparts in Perth on Wednesday in talks likely to touch on regional security and greater US use of Australian facilities.
Visiting Australia, possibly for the last time in their official capacities, will be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta.
Both will attend the annual Australia-United States Ministerial consultations held alternately in the US and Australia. The last AUSMIN meeting was in San Francisco.
This is the top-level forum for mutual consultations under the ANZUS alliance.
Ms Clinton and Mr Panetta are unlikely to make a big deal over reported US concerns about Australian defence budget cuts.
Defence Minister Stephen Smith said the issue wasn't even on the agenda, despite comments last week from a US official who said it would certainly be raised.
Mr Smith said Australia was going through a tough time with defence spending, as was the US, which faced half a trillion dollars of cuts over the next 10 years.
"But the assertion that somehow the United States are coming here to talk about our defence cuts is, frankly, a nonsense," he told the Ten Network on Sunday.
Mr Smith said the meeting would "traverse the challenges and opportunities", including regional security and the inaugural training of 200 US Marines in Australia's north this year.
"It's gone very well, and I think the review of the arrangement that we do in the course of our AUSMIN meeting will confirm that, and our meeting will essentially be a consolidation of the Marine arrangement," he said.
Mr Smith also mentioned a proposed expansion of visits of US aircraft, and HMAS Stirling, Australia's main naval base on the west coast, which is slated as likely to host increased US ship visits.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) executive director Peter Jennings said his experience of recent visits to the US indicated a large number of current and former US officials were concerned about Australian policy.
In particular, he said, they were dismayed about the quick reversal of the ambitious spending plans outlined in the 2009 Defence White Paper and commentary suggesting Australia needed to distance itself from the US in order to get close to China.
"AUSMIN would therefore be a good opportunity for both parties to reassure each other that they are staying the course on defence cooperation and that spending cuts won't be allowed to slow or reduce American Marine and Air Force deployments and the other proposed activities," he said in a blog on the ASPI website.
The US media is unlikely to be interested in Australia's budget difficulties.
More likely, it will be keen to assess the views of the secretaries on the sudden resignation of Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus over his affair with his biographer.
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