Please don’t send Kevin Rudd home, Mr Trump. He’s our favourite export

For the love of our alliance, Mr Trump, please do not send Ambassador Rudd back home. Mr Trump – Your Elective Majesty, as the Founding Fathers considered titling your role – there is bipartisan support in Australia for Kevin Rudd to remain in Washington.

The political party that appointed him to the role is keen for him to stay. And our opposition – His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, as you might like to consider referring to your own, the demoralised Democratic Party – has prominent members who are advocating for his ongoing tenure. These include our former prime minister Tony Abbott and former ambassador Arthur Sinodinos.

It’s only words: President-elect Donald Trump and Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd.Credit:

There are so many good reasons why you should embrace Ambassador Rudd.

For a start, you are both brilliant men, much misunderstood. Anyone who has sat through either of your speeches can attest to this. There are many words. Oh, so many words, that mere mortals are sometimes unable to understand exactly what it is you’re getting at.

You, Mr Trump, have become known for “the weave”. You have defined this technique, saying: “I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen’.”

Ambassador Rudd, when he was our prime minister, went further. He impressed his professor friends – though he confounded his German audience – by coining “detailed programmatic specificity”. The genius of this term is that, like all great art and philosophy, venerated scholars still worry over its exact meaning. That makes it the world’s most succinct weave, Mr Trump. Together, you will make beautiful covfefe. (We’ll never forget that tweet of yours.)

You may not be aware of this, but Ambassador Rudd shares one of your bigger concerns. In 2017, shortly after you were elected for the first time, you identified the scourge of mainstream media as “fake news media” when they said things about you that you didn’t like. Your grievance is that media outlets lean towards the Democrats and underreport that party’s failings, while exaggerating yours. In campaigning for president this year, you suggested these “fake news” outlets should lose their broadcast licences.

Here, again, you and our ambassador will see eye-to-eye on eye-for-an-eye. Before he was forced to step back from the political fray to move to DC, Ambassador Rudd was leading the charge for a royal commission into News Corp and its owner Rupert Murdoch, whom he called an “arrogant cancer on our democracy”. Rudd is particularly incensed at the negative treatment he receives from Murdoch’s media outlets, which he claims act as a “protection racket for the Liberal/National Party”.

In the past – before you once again were elected president and his opinions about you changed overnight – Ambassador Rudd had in fact worried that we in Australia were “on a slippery slope to where the Trumpian universe landed us all – a land of facts and alternative facts and that there is no such thing as the objective truth any more”. Given the circumstances, suffice to say he now welcomes a Trumpian universe. Meanwhile, he has much to teach about taking to task the purveyors of fake news, who claim he was once hostile towards you. (He never was, of course. Just check his social media.)

I think you will find that you and our ambassador have similar thoughts on party discipline. Following Rudd’s first stint as prime minister, which was prematurely ended by his supposedly loyal lieutenants, he changed the rules his party uses to spill elected leaders. This has led to the fortunate circumstance in which our current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, cannot be replaced by his colleagues ahead of the coming election, despite already purchasing his retirement residence. Mr Trump, you are not subject to the checks on power of our Westminster system of government, but I’m sure you can appreciate our man in Washington’s impatience with these petty restraints.

On some things, in the past, our ambassador may have had some different priorities to yours, Mr Trump, but these can be overcome. There was a time when prime minister Rudd defined climate change as the greatest moral challenge of our times. But when he hit a few hurdles on climate change policy it turned out we had greater moral challenges. Which is handy because I know climate is not one of your critical concerns. However, those Chinese who derailed our efforts! Well, I’m sure you and Ambassador Rudd will bond over the story of how those rodent … somethings … tried to do something quite unmentionable to him at the Copenhagen climate change conference.

Best of all, while Australians always found Rudd’s way of expressing himself idiosyncratic, it makes much more sense in your great nation. Ruddisms such as “fair shake of the sauce bottle” and “gotta zip” sound exactly like lines a Hollywood writer might write for an American actor playing a typical Aussie. I am confident you two will throw another shrimp on the barbie of friendship.

Finally, I have to tell you, Mr Trump, we here in Australia are deeply grateful that Kevin Rudd is now stationed abroad. We have somewhat of a surfeit of former prime ministers in Australia and their jostling for legacy can sometimes crowd out other debates. Stationed in the US, Ambassador Rudd can build our alliance with the US and contribute to our joint strategic positioning with regard to China, yet is prevented from giving the long-winded but impotent interviews that frequently clogged up our domestic airwaves.

So please, I beg you, don’t listen to those who tell you that you won’t be able to work with Ambassador Rudd. In so many ways, Mr Trump, you and he are kindred spirits. And we value him there a great deal more than we do here. You could say that Kevin Rudd is Australia’s favourite export.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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