Word: australian
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...With the bland looks of a small-town accountant and an even blander style of oratory, Rudd, 51, doesn't fit the typical mold of an Australian man of action. A former diplomat and veteran technocrat, he often seems more comfortable roaming the international halls of power than pressing the flesh with laid-off workers or drought-stricken farmers in the Outback. Rudd is the consummate globalized citizen, and makes a point of reaching out to those in other nations who share his sense of international community. "He'll put in a full day in the Parliament and then, because...
...kind of bloke with whom you'd want to have a beer, Rudd comes across as more buttoned-up than many of his predecessors. Talking to TIME, he dropped in a casual reference to Burke (that would be Edmund, the conservative philosopher, not Robert, the doomed Australian explorer). His Twitter feeds - a sample from April 14: "Working hard in sunny Canberra today" - have been mocked as terminally boring...
...powerful ones, cannot rely on go-it-alone approaches. "I am acutely conscious of what happens when you simply allow things to drift to unrestrained nationalism," Rudd told TIME. "[I want to] avoid long-term strategic drift, avoid the possibility of America drifting away from Asia." And, as an Australian, he believes he has the power of "a creative middle-power diplomacy [that is] friends of all, enemy of none...
...Rudd's proposal creates a neat triangle that joins him with Obama and Hu. There is, to be sure, a certain amount of ego involved in his vision. But it also speaks to a general truth about Australian identity. "Australians really do want to exert maximum effort to be taken seriously in the world," says William Tow, an expert on Australia's Asia-Pacific relations at the Australian National University in Canberra. The Lowy Institute's Fullilove puts it another way: "Australians are joiners. We're always thinking about what new international organizations can be established so that...
...with the way Australia has changed. While the reflexive xenophobia of conservative politician Pauline Hanson, who warned in 1996 that Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians," has retreated from politics, Asia's presence and influence in Australia still provoke controversy. Some Asian, Middle Eastern and African Australians complain that they are somehow considered less truly Australian than those who came from, say, Italy, Greece or Croatia. An influx of foreign students into Australian universities - many of them Asian - has heightened tensions. In an ugly series of incidents in Victoria in recent months, Indian students have been attacked...