KEY POINTS:
For a moment of hope, the omens were not good. As senior ministers from 12 nations gathered in Canberra to form the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November 1989, the skies opened.
Inside the grand art deco Hyatt Hotel, the ceilings failed. The great and the powerful
trudged through flooded carpets to their meetings. Outside, amid security laughable in comparison to next week's lockdown in Sydney, journalists huddled in a huge, steaming marquee.
Now, 28 years on, Apec appears likely to be rained on again: literally - the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting showers - and figuratively. Protesters are gathering without, and critics within are complaining that the organisation has lost its focus, has become too cumbersome and has yet to produce any significant outcomes.
Critics maintain that central deadlines on trade are unlikely to be met, there are divisions between rich and poor and east and west, its functions overlap without benefiting other regional groupings, and its structure is failing to reflect the momentous shifts in power across the Pacific.
Yet the leaders of an Apec expanded to 21 members will again set aside their own pressing demands to fly to Sydney. Despite rumours of a possible last-minute cancellation, the absence of his wife and a truncated visit, United States President George W. Bush intends to be there. So do the leaders of China, Japan, Russia and a host of smaller players, not least among them Helen Clark.
For John Howard, the first Australian Prime Minister to preside over a leaders summit since they were initiated by his Labor predecessor, Paul Keating, it is a bright moment in the sun in the lead-up to an election the polls predict he will lose. Howard will be looking for real and significant initiatives, especially on climate change, but will almost certainly be disappointed.
Behind barricades protected by troops, police, jet fighters, armoured vehicles and water cannons, a secondary and potentially violent circus is gathering.
On Thursday a handful of demonstrators protested outside the offices of New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma against special police powers granted for Apec. Yesterday opponents of the Apec agenda held a public forum at Sydney's University of Technology, to be followed today by a conference of international labour, conservation, aid and community delegates.
Many thousands more will join them in the coming week.
Hosted at a cost of more than A$300 million and besieged by critics, Apec needs to find a new relevance. The forum was formed as the Cold War thawed, economic power began shifting towards Asia, new trading blocs began to emerge and the global economy became increasingly enmeshed in interdependent currencies, investment and capital flows, communication and trade.
For Australia, the world was a threatening place. Picking up on an idea already in circulation but then without form, Prime Minister Bob Hawke pushed the concept of Apec in what became a triumph of diplomacy. Among key obstacles, Japan and other players were reluctant to admit the US; Washington desperately wanted in, to cement itself in the emerging Asia and to counter the growing might of China.
Even in name Apec began as a compromise. Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans described it as four adjectives in search of a noun and with a broad commitment to free trade and consultation on cooperation in measures to boost regional growth and development, enhance the flow of capital, research and technology sharing, and in the environment, energy and tourism.
At the Bogor, Indonesia, summit in 1994 Apec leaders agreed to achieve free trade, including the removal of all tariffs, by 2010 for developed members and 2020 for developing countries. Neither target appears likely to be met.
There have been successes. Allan Gyngell, executive director of the Sydney-based Lowy Institute for International Policy, two years ago wrote that Apec was teetering on the brink of terminal irrelevance. He now believes the forum has moved back from the edge.
In an analysis for the foreign affairs journal The Diplomat, Gyngell said the Apec business advisory council and its business leaders had been integrated far more effectively into the organisation's mainstream work, and that it had realised that internal reforms were often more important than such formal trade barriers as tariffs.
Gyngell also said the forum's finance ministers meeting and the economic committee had now undertaken valuable work on transnational issues such as avian flu and energy security, while bureaucratic reforms had strengthened the role of the secretariat.
Apec has also provided an important opportunity for leaders to meet, sometimes in response to crisis: the 1999 Auckland summit, for example, which resulted in the Australian-led intervention in East Timor.
In Sydney, Howard and Bush in talks separate from Apec are expected to sign an agreement on the production of ethanol from wild grasses and to further Australian membership of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, established to develop a new generation of fast-cycle reactors producing far less waste than existing plants.
Howard is also expected to sign major energy and natural resources agreements with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
But the real outcomes of Apec talks are expected to be modest.
The US wants to use the summit to move the foundering Doha Round of World Trade Organisation off the shoals of farm subsidies and manufacturing protection, while China is hoping for progress on climate change, regional economic integration and reform of Apec itself.
Howard, presiding over the agenda, wants substantial progress towards an international framework to address climate change, but limits his expectations for an understanding on aspirational goals on greenhouse gas emissions.
Ambitions for an Apec free trade area will also be discussed, but are unlikely to produce any real results, as much because of divergent perspectives between developed and developing members as national objections.
Divisions over the extent and pace of reform were shown clearly in the Bogor debate, when developing economies viewed with concern the potential for open borders to hammer the development of new industries. Those reservations continue.
Psychologically, developing members tend to see themselves as being disadvantaged when interacting with developed countries because of the great imbalances in resources and capacities, Hadi Soesastro, director of Indonesia's Centre for Strategic and International Studies wrote in The Diplomat. Apec cannot ignore this.
Nor are the priorities of Asian nations necessarily the same as those of fellow members Chile, Mexico or Peru, half a world away.
Allied with this is a further shift of power. Gyngell noted: The rising power of China and India is, literally, unlike anything we have seen before. It represents the largest growth in the quantum of economic power in all human history.
Soestastro also wrote: (Apec) dialogues and exchanges largely focus on economic policy and technical matters without sufficiently taking into account political and strategic developments.
Suggestions that Apec develop a security perspective have not been welcomed. Apart from further diluting and diverting focus, Apec is fraught with complications: China and Taiwan, Chinese and Russian efforts to counterbalance the power of the US, the endless friction of the Koreas, and distrust of the US-Japan-Australia alliance.
And Apec's boundaries will always be framed by the domestic constraints of its members, in turn subject to national political realities. In an era when globalisation is increasingly seen as a threat to employment and living standards in both the developed and developing worlds, governments need to step warily.
This will be made clear in Sydney, where extreme measures have been put in place to protect the city from terrorism and to contain protests expected to attracts tens of thousands of demonstrators.
Although mainstream protest groups have pledged peaceful demonstrations, more radical elements have said they are prepared to break the law and risk violence.
The forces arrayed against them are awesome. In addition to thousands of police, 1500 troops will patrol the streets, supported by Blackhawk helicopters and warships. RAAF F/A 18 Hornet jet fighters will enforce a no-fly zone above the city.
Police have been given extraordinary powers and water cannons to deal with protests, jails have been cleared of criminals serving periodic detention to free 500 places for Apec arrests, a secret list has been compiled of people banned from downtown Sydney, and a massive 2.8 metre wall will isolate Apec from the world.
For the nation that gave it birth, there is no fattened young bull for the the return of the prodigal Apec.
