Word: rudd
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...Rudd's next initiative is equally expansive. A year ago, he proposed the formation, by 2020, of a new Asia-Pacific Community that would bind the U.S. and Asia together in a regional security forum that would encourage stability in what Rudd says is still a "brittle part of the world." The bloc would build on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) birthed and nurtured by his Labor predecessors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In 2008, Rudd's proposal sounded like a pipe dream. Today, he argues, the need for such a grouping is all the more important because...
...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...
...Raised on a dairy farm in rural Queensland, Rudd might seem an unlikely global citizen. But as a child avoiding work in the cowshed, he would retire to the farthest reaches of the farm with a book on Asian archaeology. Rudd majored in Asian studies in college. Diplomatic postings in Sweden and China followed, and his internationalism captured a changing national mood. For the better part of two centuries, Australia's self-perception was that of a chunk of the West that unaccountably found itself floating in the South Pacific. Today, China is Australia's largest trading partner, with Japan...
...Australia's complexion, too, is changing - literally. Until the 1970s, an exclusionist White Australia Policy kept out most Asian immigrants. But today, around 8% of Australians are of Asian descent. (If nothing else, Rudd jokes, the changing immigration pattern has catalyzed a culinary revolution in a country where Irish stew was once considered haute cuisine. "At last," says the Prime Minister, "we have some decent food...
...them Asian - has heightened tensions. In an ugly series of incidents in Victoria in recent months, Indian students have been attacked in so-called "curry bashings." (Indians are the second largest group of foreign students in Australia, after the Chinese.) The attacks caused a storm in India, and when Rudd called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to congratulate him on his recent re-election, Singh brought up the assaults. (See pictures of Australia's apology for its past aboriginal policies...