Rudd and Wong: The earth is moving

PM Anthony Albanese has put the ‘old team’ back together with Penny Wong in Beijing and Kevin Rudd heading for Washington.

Penny Wong in Beijing and Kevin Rudd heading for Washington: twas the week before Christmas and who would have guessed at such simultaneous, truly climactic, developments.

Just to stress, that’s climactic with two C’s, not climatic with one: unusually for these days, there was nothing about stopping the planet from frying in either journey.

Quite the reverse, indeed, in particular with Wong’s ‘Back to a 1971 Icebreaker Future’ trek north.

Her trip, echoing in spirit Gough Whitlam’s journey to Beijing, was all about promoting the generation of more and more CO2 at both ends, China and Australia.

She, the government, want China to buy more of ‘our CO2-emitting stuff’ – stuff like iron ore, coal and gas, as well as barley, wine and so on; and we’ll happily repay the compliment, keeping the CO2-emitting Chinese factories whirring.

Now first off, none of this should really be a surprise: we see the ‘old team’ being put back together, this time under PM Albanese, whereas in 2013 it was under PM Rudd.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is Australia's next ambassador to the US. Picture: AAP Image/Darren England

When Rudd came back to ‘save the furniture’, initially only three ministers were sworn in: Rudd as PM, Albanese as deputy-PM and Chris Bowen as Treasurer, to join the ‘exclusive’ list of treasurers who never got to actually bring down a budget. A few days later when the full ministry was added, Wong was the leader of the government in the Senate. That quartet was the nation’s core leadership group – for all of 10 weeks or so.

So, now they are all back together again, in holding and molding the nation’s future – plus of course Jim Chalmers in the key role as treasurer, who back in early 2013 was yet to be ‘foreman material’.

Indeed, he wasn’t even in Parliament to be part of the short-lived Second Rudd Ministry; only riding in at the September election which swept Rudd and Co out, and in the case of Rudd seemingly into the dustbin of history. Not so, obviously, with his premier-level role in Washington all about geopolitics and his unusually strong personal relationship with the PM at this end, and his connectivity with both the ‘swamp’ – Washington – broadly and the Biden administration, at least for two years, more specifically.

Economic and financial issues are largely peripheral to Rudd’s role, which is clearly to be centred on the AUKUS partnership and the nuclear subs specifically.

It is of course the exact opposite with Beijing, where it is all about the economic relationship, albeit, true, importantly in the broader context of the geopolitics.

Very simply, Beijing blinked. By inviting Wong to Beijing, and doing so around the top level, Beijing was announcing it wanted our stuff and, more importantly, knew it did not have other alternatives.

The challenging questions are on two levels are two-fold. What’s changed? And what exactly does Beijing think it can get out of us going forward?

We’ve had half-a-decade of China playing tough with many of our exporters, while continuing to buy what it wants and can’t get from anywhere else. The single biggest is of course iron ore. China not only kept buying the vast volumes but was prepared to pay record high prices for it.

With coal, where it had ‘alternatives’ – including much inferior quality domestic production – it cut imports off completely.

Now China could have simply reversed its bans, if that’s its intent. It didn’t have to go through the elaborate – and potentially both shaming and self-weakening – kowtow theatre of the very public invitation.

Is Beijing announcing that we can have the deep and indeed deepening economic relationship while staying at geopolitical arms length and even hostility? Or will it still spring geopolitical demands? I suggest looking for the answers in events not analysis; Rudd’s presence in Washington becomes very, very interesting.

Originally published as Rudd and Wong: The earth is moving