IS RUDD AUSTRALIA'S OBAMA?

Looks good, sounds good but empty-headed. Four current articles below



The new Mad Hatter

Rudd is just a bureaucrat trying to remake himself as a policy wonk. Comment below by Greg Sheridan

KEVIN Rudd is in danger of turning what should be his greatest strength into a serious weakness. I refer to his weird and increasingly ratty habit of announcing foreign policy initiatives of soaring ambition and utterly amorphous content on the run, half baked, with no detail and no credible prospect of success. In the past week alone we've had Rudd threaten to "take the blowtorch" to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to produce more oil and lower prices, nominate Dick Woolcott to reform Asian security and trade structures, and now appoint Gareth Evans to head a commission to end nuclear proliferation and secure nuclear disarmament.

If you announce twice a week that you're going to save the world and you manifestly lack the means to give the slightest effect to your pronouncements, the world soon loses interest. The chief casualty is your credibility. In foreign policy, Rudd at the moment rather reminds me of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad. Now I yield to no man in my appreciation of the redoubtable Malaysian's many complex qualities, just as I appreciate our own beloved PM. But through the years Mahathir earned the reputation in foreign policy of shooting his mouth off to no particular consequence. Rudd is not as silly or offensive as Mahathir at the end of his tenure but, then, Rudd has been PM for only six months.



I remember Mahathir wanting to bring peace to Bosnia, not to mention Palestine, reform the Organisation of Islamic Countries, establish developing nations' solidarity, set up an East Asian economic caucus and much more. Malaysian journalists were required to cover all this stuff in deadly earnest. Internationally, people stopped paying attention and none of Mahathir's grand schemes amounted to a hill of beans. Where he did do well was in managing the Malaysian economy, although it is spooky that his biggest economic mistake was his insistence on a Malaysian car. Will Rudd one day christen a greenhouse-friendly Neutron to match Malaysia's Proton? And it is positively freaky that Rudd has stolen Mahathir's slogan, Vision 2020.

It is impossible to take Rudd's foreign policy initiatives of the past week seriously. How is he going to apply the blowtorch to OPEC? This formulation is so nutty it gives populism a bad name.

Then there is the Woolcott mission. Let's be clear. Woolcott is a fine man and an outstanding diplomat. But it has been revealed that he was given his mission, to create an Asia-Pacific union, only a couple of hours (if that) before Rudd announced it in a speech. What was the rush for? Simply to get it into the speech? That is not the way to make good policy.

At one level Rudd's speech was unexceptional. We need to make the region's institutions work better. But it was intentionally ambiguous about whether this involved a new institution or merely greater co-operation and effectiveness among existing institutions. So the proposal is entirely woolly. No serious policy work has been done on it. Key international interlocutors have not been properly sounded out. Woolcott's mission is maddeningly vague. Indeed, what would Rudd have done if Woolcott had said no?

The new commission to end nuclear proliferation and bring about nuclear disarmament is the silliest and least prepared of all. Rudd compares it with the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, set up in 1995, whose report had absolutely no consequence at all on these issues. But when the Keating government announced the Canberra Commission, it also announced all its members, its mandate and its timetable. It was a silly proposal, but at least it was a well-prepared silly proposal. Not like this week's effort. Not even the Japanese had committed to participate in Evans's commission before it was announced. We have no idea who the commissioners will be or what, really, will be their mission.

Woolcott last week. Evans this week. Pretty soon Rudd will run out of living national treasures to appoint to commissions and reviews. Surely Kim Beazley, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and perhaps Gough Whitlam himself will soon be pressed into the service of planetary reform. Can Dame Edna be far away?

Nuclear disarmament sounds wonderful but is a self-contradictory, inherently absurd proposition. You cannot disinvent nuclear weapons. Even if the US destroyed every single one of its nukes, it would still possess ballistic missiles and be in a position, with its large nuclear industry, to reconstitute weapons very speedily. Nuclear proliferation, on the other hand, is a deadly serious business. But on the very few occasions when nations have given up nuclear weapons programs, it has been because they changed their whole political orientation, such as South Africa in 1990, or because they are scared of US power, as in Libya recently or even when Taiwan abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

The US-led Proliferation Security Initiative has been pretty effective in preventing North Korea from engaging in nuclear and other smuggling, but it is based on tough, military enforcement, not the sort of feelgood, do nothing, blah blah of multilateral talkfests. The inherent politics of proclaiming nuclear disarmament suggests that somehow the nuclear weapons held by the US and other Western nations are illegitimate, whereas if you want to promote effective counter-proliferation policies you would be well advised to try to maximise US power.

It seems that Rudd wants an announceable out of almost every foreign policy speech. That is just silly. I thought Rudd's pre-election promises of endless reviews indicated a taste for sound process. Half-baked ideas to fit the timetable of endless speeches is the opposite of that.

The most devastating piece of journalism in the Rudd era was written by my colleague, George Megalogenis, when he described Rudd as our first federal premier, governing by the gimmick-a-week rules of state politics. Certainly that is the way he's doing foreign policy at the moment. The sole ambition seems to be three headlines a week. It involves high-level tactical innovation and complete strategic anaemia. Who would have thought it of Rudd?

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Rudd's Green car and credulous climate policies

Comment below by Piers Akerman

Giving Japanese car manufacturers millions to build green cars in Australia is the 21st Century equivalent of paying people to paint rocks white. It is yet another example of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's propensity to make up expensive, meaningless, policy on the run. This stream-of-consciousness decision is the latest in an exponentially expanding list of Ruddelusions that would be marked as harmless except for the fact that they all come with a huge price tag for already suffering Australian consumers.

In this case, the ticket to dream costs $70 million in federal and Victorian government funds -- a huge bonus for carmaker Toyota which was planning to build hybrid cars here with or without such a generous subsidy. One of the 20-somethings running Rudd's office should have asked the Japanese before flashing the chequebook but that is not the way of this shoot-from-the-lip adolescent team's approach to management. Again, they have ignored the best advice from the Productivity Commission which has also warned against the idiotic FuelWatch program and ploughed ahead, tossing away taxpayers' hard-earned dollars as fast as the Mint can print the stuff.

There are other problems, too. Even though Rudd and Victorian Premier John Brumby have guaranteed Toyota sales into their car fleets (ignoring the usual tendering processes), current sales of such hybrids are extremely limited. Even if the price of fuel continues to rocket despite the Rudd Government's pledge to keep downward pressure at the pump, as well as keeping a watch on groceries, housing affordability, whales, nuclear disarmament, OPEC, Asian region diplomacy, and the number of NATO troops in Afghanistan, the reality is motoring experts claim small diesel cars are more fuel efficient and emit less greenhouse gases than hybrids.

This is by no means the end of the anthropogenic global warming madness inspired by Rudd's friend Al Gore, who also makes it up as he goes along. Rather than listen to the growing numbers of eminent scientists who challenge the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Rudd Government has bought its line in the face of numerous peer-reviewed scientific reports which find that none of the so-called evidence on which the IPCC's reports were based confirms a relationship between emissions of greenhouse gases and any harmful climate effect. Let's face it, so-called consensus science can get it wrong. It was wrong in its prediction of global starvation in the '60s, it was wrong in its forecast of an AIDS pandemic in the '70s and it was wrong on the Y2K virus.

In a thoughtful speech delivered in Canberra last week, the Liberal MP for Tangney, Dr Dennis Jensen, looked at the damage and cost to consumers of the Rudd Government's short-sighted policies. He listed the removal of the condensate exemption, which will result in a net gain of revenue of $2.43 billion but will significantly damage the international competitiveness of the resources industry, and the decision to reintroduce the CPI increase on the diesel excise levy, which will result in increased (and inflationary) costs to transport, increased costs to mining (and reduced productivity and hence the tax take) and increased (and inflationary) costs to agriculture, threatening farmers' livelihoods.

He saved his big attack for the Rudd Government's approach to energy and the environment, where he said the Government "is shown to be clueless hypocrites". "Look at Labor rhetoric on carbon dioxide emissions and contrast that with their actions," he said. "State Labor governments in NSW and Western Australia have decided to build new coal-fired power stations. What happened to gas, never mind renewables or -- God forbid, in the eyes of some Labor and particularly Greens members -- nuclear power? "This seems to be a pattern: A lot of whingeing about problems when in opposition but nary a solution when in government. Labor's spin puts youths with hotted-up cars doing burnouts to shame."

Dr Jensen, originally from South Africa, didn't dwell on negatives, he leapfrogged Labor's nihilistic debate and asked why Australia is not investing in the Sasol oil-from-coal process which his native country was forced to rely on when South Africa was subjected to trade sanctions which cut its energy supplies. According to Dr Jensen, the process, which uses the Fischer-Tropsch process, developed prior to World War II, was used by Germany to produce synthetic fuel during the war. Largely ignored by the rest of the world during the era of cheap fuel, it produces an extremely clean fuel and in the current climate is extremely cheap -- producing oil for between $27 and $55 a barrel.

Australians are now beginning to realise to their cost how expensive their experiment with Rudd Labor is but it will really hit home when Ross Garnaut delivers his report on the cost of carbon emission trading. Rudd's ministers are already referring to him as Ross Mugarnaut, in a savage comparison with the destroyer of Zimbabwe, as they speculate on the damage his report could do the nation. In hindsight, white rocks will be seen to be less harmful than a fleet of green lemons.

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Rudd's grand international gestures: Doomed from the outset

Comment by Andrew Bolt

Kevin Rudd's ministers were starting to worry about his erratic performance even before his latest big announcements. So how do you feel today, boys? Truth is, I'm alarmed, too, by the Prime Minister's latest thought bubbles - a new Asian union and a new committee to rid the world of all nuclear weapons. (Yeah, right.)

Can't the man do something I could praise, if only to let me show I'm fair? Instead, Rudd is tossing off one half-baked scheme after another in what seems an increasingly manic attempt to distract his growing band of critics. Consider these two latest plans - and Rudd's terrible misjudgment in visiting the Hiroshima shrine.

Rudd last week announced, with no warning, that he wanted to create a new Asian union so that China, India, Japan, the US, Australia and the rest of the region could form policies on security and economics. It wouldn't be like the European Union, he added, "but what we can learn from Europe is that it is necessary to take the first step". But as even former Labor prime minister Paul Keating said in rebuke, even the EU's first step in forming a regional government - its European steel plan - was "not necessarily an appropriate one" for Asia. How could nations ranging from democracies to totalitarian regimes form any union in which they gave up some sovereignty? Why would nationalistic China want to? And why would we surrender any rights to countries not democratic?

It may well be that Rudd had no such notion, but his plan was so light on details who'd know? In fact, it seemed so hastily cobbled together that few, if any, neighbours knew it was coming. Even more damning, it was only two hours before his announcement that Rudd asked former diplomat Richard Woolcott to be the regional envoy for the plan, and sell it to the rest of Asia. Why Woolcott? He may have been a top diplomat, but he's also 80 - and Rudd's plan is to have his union in place by 2020, when Woolcott would be in his 90s. Did Woolcott just happen to be free that afternoon? Here was another plan that seemed a passing thought, unnecessary for anything other than to distract the press from Rudd's FuelWatch fiasco.

I say unnecessary because we already have APEC, for instance -- which discusses economic issues, but whose members refuse to add security to the agenda. So why reinvent the wheel? Was it because a new body would had the virtue of being something dreamed up by . . . Rudd?

That may be too harsh, but it fits with his second big announcement of the week - a new international committee, headed by Australia, to scrap all nuclear weapons. Yet again, Rudd had invented what already exists. Australia is already a member of the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament, which lists as its first goal the "cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament". Nor has that been the only such international group working on this. The Lowy Institute's Rory Medcalf, a disarmament expert, yesterday listed some: "The 1995-96 Canberra Commission; the 1998-1999 Tokyo Forum; the 2005-06 Blix Commission; the ongoing work by various US advocacy bodies spearheaded by elder statesmen Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn; a February 2008 Oslo conference; a June 2008 New Delhi conference . . . the world is well served by studies, discussions and blueprints, government-sponsored or otherwise, on why nuclear disarmament is a vital global security imperative . . ."

The reason why all those efforts have failed, as will Rudd's, is that none of the eight known nations with those weapons is remotely likely to give them up. Would China? The US? Russia? Israel? Pakistan? India? That means Rudd's plan is just more of what he's now infamous for - more make-busy bureaucracy that will churn out nothing but paper.

But here is the real worry, beyond the complaints by public servants and (privately) Labor politicians that Rudd is frantically busy doing nothing but spin. It's that he's tailoring even our foreign policy for easy applause. Which brings me to his visit on Monday to Hiroshima's peace park, built to commemorate those who died when the US dropped a nuclear bomb to hasten the end of World War II and prevent the killings of countless more.

There is a reason that Rudd was the first serving Western leader there. As politicians who've been there have told me, to visit is to encourage the offensive notion that the Japanese were victims of a Western crime, and not of their own insane militarism. I do not accuse Rudd of having that view. I think he was just over-eager to have a success in Japan, which he'd offended by snubbing on his last world tour, wooing rival China instead.

Well, the Japanese sure are happy with Rudd now, and will give him some little reward to make another day's happy headline. But for those who want a government that lives beyond one day's headlines, Rudd's flightiness grows ever more alarming.

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Tariff wobbles: More Rudd kneejerk policy coming?

He knows and understands nothing of the subject but still looks like ignoring advice from those who do

Kevin Rudd likes to project himself as the heir of the Hawke-Keating reform agenda. But Bob Hawke and Paul Keating reformed even when it hurt politically. The Government's own data shows that automotive industry assistance and tariffs are costing the economy the equivalent of almost 30,000 jobs. Rudd and Innovation Minister Kim Carr should demonstrate the same ticker for reform by phasing out tariffs.

Last Thursday the Productivity Commission released its report into the economy-wide modelled effects of removing automotive tariffs and support. The commission's modelling found that the benefits could be as high as $500 million, with most of the gains coming from removing tariffs. The present tariff rate is 10 per cent and is scheduled to be reduced to 5 per cent in 2010.

The commission's report coincided with the announcement by Holden it would cut 500 jobs at its Fishermans Bend plant. Following the announcement, Carr gave the strongest hint yet that the Rudd Government would act to protect jobs by freezing the tariff phase-out. A tariff freeze would be a disaster for the Australian automotive industry and Australians generally. The problem the industry has suffered from is that government support has shielded it from the need to adapt to changing consumer demand. It isn't until consumer demand collapses that the industry faces a crisis and adapts. During the past 20 years consumer demand has shifted towards smaller vehicles and sports utility vehicles.

Advocates of a tariff freeze believe it will protect jobs. It won't. Instead it costs sustainable jobs in viable industries. Australian Bureau of Statistics data demonstrates the cost to jobs caused by tariffs. In the 1980s, tariffs were as high as 57.5 per cent and Australia exported slightly less than $400 million worth of road vehicles. Since then tariffs have been gradually phased down to 10 per cent. In 2007 Australia exported $4 billion worth of road vehicles.

Rudd and Carr should let the numbers speak for themselves: higher tariffs equal fewer exports, lower tariffs equal higher exports. Analysis of the Government's data shows the true cost of protection. Import duties on passenger cars and light commercial vehicles in the 2006-07 financial year totalled $1.2billion. According to the latest ABS data, the average full-time Australian income is $57,860.40. A simple calculation shows tariffs have cost the Australian economy the equivalent of 20,740 jobs. Similarly, between 2001 and 2015 the industry will receive $7.2billion of assistance through the Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme. This program amounts to about $480 million a year in assistance. The ACIS program alone costs the equivalent of 8296 average Australian jobs.

Advocates of tariffs will argue that losing these 30,000 jobs comes at the expense of saving the present 61,200 jobs in the industry. But such an argument is based on false logic. In the absence of existing jobs, the capital used to pay their wages would be redistributed to other sections of the economy, creating sustainable jobs elsewhere. Government trying to protect jobs during a skills shortage is absurd. Australia is importing labour from across the world to fill a growing void. Yet the Government thinks it is appropriate to act to protect jobs for workers who are in dire need in other industries.

Tariffs are also unduly cruel on those working in the industry. Temporarily propping up jobs creates disincentives for workers to reskill and adapt to the changing market. Instead they are encouraged to stay in their present jobs until the industry falls apart. Then they are left high and dry. They have only the Government's tariffs to blame.

But, ultimately, the cost of tariffs are felt by ordinary Australians. They are the ones who have to pay higher prices for vehicles because of tariffs. Now the Government is going to splurge a further $35 million of taxpayer money to subsidise Toyota to build hybrid cars in Australia. Doing so is building an industry on false foundations. It is a symbolic measure so Rudd can appear as if he is doing something to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to support jobs.

Rudd shouldn't go weak at the knees because Holden has finally cut unsustainable jobs. When the automotive industry review's report comes to cabinet, Rudd should prove his commitment to reform, promoting innovation and reducing the burden on working families. He can do all of this by opposing a tariff freeze.

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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH