newzealandinc.com Informed. Influential. Indispensable.
newzealandinc.com couldn’t resist giving KRudd’s famous video one final airing after the Aussie Prime Minister called on “our friends in Beijing” to get on with the FTA with Australia.
(The amusing video was leaked by the Gillard camp when they set out to roll Rudd in 2010).
But that was then.
Rudd has now called on China – Australia’s largest trading partner – to conclude a stalled free trade deal according to Reuters.
“This thing has been moving across the Sahara at the pace of a slightly lame camel,” Rudd said after reclaiming the prime ministership from Julia Gillard. “I’d say to our friends in Beijing, let us conclude a free trade agreement between China and Australia.”
Negotiations have stalled over Beijing’s concerns over opening their markets to Australian food and Australia’s concerns over China’s intellectual property protection. The two sides held the 19th round of talks earlier this month.
Reuters reported Rudd, who speaks fluent Mandarin and is known in China as “Lu Kewen”, his Chinese name, said China had no need to worry about the impact of agricultural imports on its vast rural territory, as Australia’s total farm production would only meet the extra expected demand from a single Chinese province.
This earlier extract from David Marr’s insightful Quarterly Essay Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd, on the breakdown of the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations didn’t help Rudd’s image as PM.
“Those Chinese f@# !ers are trying to rat-f@#!
us,” declared Kevin Rudd. As snow fell on Copen-hagen – on its palaces and squats, on police and their dogs, on protesters rugged up against the fierce cold and on the big, bland Bella Centre where the largest gathering of world leaders in history sulked and plotted – the prime minister of Australia faced the collapse of old dreams.
This was the little boy fascinated by China, the kid who longed to be a diplomat, the man who believed a better world might be built through international agreement, and a prime minister struggling to meet “one of the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenges of our age”. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin–rudd-that-is-20100607-xnv5.html
Let’s hope for KRudd’s – and Australia’s sake – he is over his verbal incontinence phase.