Rudd is a bit player on the world stage

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd had a short-lived and undistinguished career in the Australian diplomatic service and now we know why. He wasn't very good at diplomacy and the prospect of working for a Queensland Labor premier, Wayne Goss, obviously seemed vastly more attractive.

It's not that Rudd lacked the ability to liewith conviction - a prerequisite for most diplomats and politicians; he just never seemed to master the skill to do so with the necessary sincerity. Just a week ago, Rudd was announcing with some fanfare that he had managed a major diplomatic coup at a meeting of the G8 nations in L'Aquila, Italy, the scene of a devastating earthquake earlier this year. Australia doesn't actually belong to the G8, though the ordinary person would not have been aware of that from the ebullience of Rudd's performance. In the G-strings of nations, Australia falls into the G20, somewhat further from the power core. While Rudd was claiming some victory on climate change at the meeting - to which he and representatives from some 30-plus other nations were invited to avoid upsetting egos _ something more fundamental was taking place but, again, Australians cannot be criticised for not learning about it from their Prime Minister. What the G8 nations decided was to expand their grouping to another G-string, the G14, by including the G5 nations (China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) and Egypt to make the G8 more inclusive _ but not, apparently, inclusive enough to accept wannabe global influence Australia. The G20, to which Australia belongs, is the G14 plus Colombia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the European Union, which is represented by whichever nation holds the rotating presidency. The expansion of the G8 to G14 was the most important outcome of the world body, but only one Australian newspaper appears to have mentioned this in its coverage of the L'Aquila meeting _ so completely does the Rudd spin machine smother the Canberra press corps. The G8 and G14 were not the only bodies to give Rudd the cold shoulder, however. The Mandarin-speaking PM's Chinese friends, with whom he boasts a special relationship, also told him to get lost inlanguage that required no special translation when he made some inconsequential remarks about the seizure of Rio executive Stern Hu in Shanghai. The holding of Hu without the presentation of charges represents a gross breach of convention. Some apologists for the Rudd Labor government and the Chinese totalitarian executive have laughably claimed Hu's arrest has some equivalence with David Hicks' detention by the US. But nothing could be further from the truth. Hicks, a self-avowed terrorism supporter, implicated himself as a warrior inthe global jihad and aligned himself with Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that expressed a desire to murder not only Indians in the disputed territory of Kashmir, but also allnon-Muslims and particularly those of the Jewish faith. The problem for Australia is that Rudd, the former low-level diplomat, still insists on running foreign affairs from his office. That leaves Foreign Minister Stephen Smith looking on awkwardly from the sidelines like a jilted lover. When Hu was taken, neither Rudd nor Smith were able to offer more than what the world had already managed to glean from the Chinese newspapers and the international wire services. It has been left to the US to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the Australian Government in this matter. And the Chinese endof whatever special relationship Ruddmay have thought that he had with Beijing has not responded. The renewed terrorist bombing campaign in central Jakarta, attributed by most experts to the Islamic fundamentalist Jemaah Islamiyah group, inevitably raises questions about the quality of the Rudd government's current relationship with Australia's nearest neighbour. Observers indicate that the US under President Barack Obama _ who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia _ hasadvanced its role with Jakarta at theexpense of Australia. A long-time member of the Australian diplomatic corps said Rudd's activeinvolvement in the foreign affairs portfolio was creating a damaging paralysis inits operations. ``Ever since Rudd personally blocked [Australian diplomat"> Hugh Borrowman's appointment to Berlin after he had been nominated by the Foreign Minister, no onewants to make a decision which the PM might overturn,'' he said. Rudd blocked Borrowman's appointment on the basis of his ``language skills'', even though the experienced diplomat had ``qualifications'' in German. It subsequently emerged that Borrowman and Rudd knew each other when they were students at the Australian National University and that this had probably counted against Borrowman. Former prime minister John Howard, who praised Borrowman, said the diplomat had been ``very intelligent and highly professional. He had an excellent grasp of all foreign affairs issues''. In the Borrowman case, as with the G8 grandstanding, Rudd appeared to be acting in a petty and personal manner, not as the professional he likes to portray himself as. Whereas under the previous government, Australia let its actions speak for themselves when it successfully took decisive global initiatives, under the Rudd government it's all talk and irresponsible and damaging action.