An Interview with The Honorable Kevin Rudd, President of the Asia Society Policy Institute and 26th Prime Minister of Australia
The Fletcher Forum sat down with Kevin Rudd to talk about the state of the liberal project and its future.
Fletcher Forum: On the rise of nationalism – could you speak a little about this notion of disrupters, do you think there is space in the political spectrum for disrupters? Or do you think merely by the fact that they operate in extremes, that they only can campaign, but they can’t govern?
Kevin Rudd: There is a certain political arrogance around the concept of being a disrupter and the arrogance is this – to assume that your disruption creates more benefit than it does damage for the greatest number of people. We could point to many disrupters in history, from Attila the Hun on, (there’s a separate debate as to whether those disruptions have been good or not) in terms of the advance of civilization. So when people talk today [about] whether disrupters are somehow new or by definition benign and not malign, I think [it] carries with it a range of assumptions.
Liberal democracies should always be open and wide enough to embrace new ideas and new technologies about how to do things better. But, subject them to proper deliberation through our proper democratic electoral processes as to whether they are sustainable to the country, the economy and the world. There is no automatic good in disruption.
And finally, if we look at history, a minority of disrupters have been good governors but that is not necessarily essential. A disruption of one form or another can create a new set of political forces which others then rise to the challenge of leading. Take for example, the history of the reformation – Luther was not a political figure. However, he gave rise to a large number of social, economic and political forces in Europe in the 16th century which flowed through to create the ground which was then tilled for the enlightenment. Was Luther a good governor all the way thorough? He certainly was a disrupter and if you believe in the enlightenment project, he was a positive disrupter. As for those in politics who believe themselves to be positive disrupters because of their ability to harness campaign technologies – it is utterly specious to claim that such a person by definition has a new form of politics or government which again delivers a greater benefit to the greatest number of people in the country, against any objective measure.
FF: On people who are tapping into this same anger against the establishment and are alienated from society, do you see any cracks in such a divide?
KR: The core question of the disrupters is this – you can disrupt, but unless you are a political disrupter, capable of delivering real outcomes for the people who have supported or voted for your disruption, then it will come to nothing. The key challenges to ask those who are, as it were, professional manipulators of the political process to point out what’s wrong with the current order and why it needs to be replaced is to ask these questions: Replace what, with what and for what reason? And secondly define how that is better or worse for people.
We should be very cautious about where that road takes us - in terms of long term health of our democracies. If populists are elected to government and fail to deliver, do we then see the ultimate de-validation of the democratic project period rather than simply an intelligent mature retreat to the center?
FF: And what do you believe?
KR: Well, it isn’t so much as being predictive, I am an actor. I’m acting for the reformist center, for the liberal domestic and international project and racial inclusion. I’ve never taken the view that I’m a passive analyst. I can reflect, and I think that the current state of our liberal democracies is poor - I see the current challenges to our liberal democracies as being great, and I do not see the movements to the center yet capable of inventing a new reality of the center which re-includes those who have fallen outside the social contract without destroying the values of the center.
FF: And do you think our institutions will be the last bastions of holding on to the liberal agenda?
KR: All of our founding fathers and mothers had a view about institutional protections. However, the institutions can only take us so far. In history, institutions can be totally corrupt. The institutions of the Weimar state were taken over by the Nazis and the institutions continued to function as Nazi institutions and so there was nothing fail safe about them. That’s why the debates that we must have now [are] about our broad culture, about the broad universal values that underpin our cultures that have given rise to generations of young leaders – women and men of the future who can sustain those projects and enhance them across the world. That is, in my view, more important than simply relying almost defensively on pre-existing institutions to defend the polity against the assault of a given demagogue.
FF: Would you say that our faith in institutions was attacked – such as the financial systems or the church – that may have actually caused this divide? How have we come to a place where we have no clue of the news that the other side is consuming?
KR: I think one of the core challenges of our democracy today is to ensure that there is a reinvestment in the public commons of communication. The technology and the market will take us in the exact reverse direction, towards increasing bifurcation. Increasing balkanization of everything that is a thousand media points, a thousand different audiences creating the warring tribes or rather the permanency of warring tribes.
It’s kind of what we had before the rise of the modern nation state – the modern nation state arose through the Germans and the Gutenberg Bible and the printing press in the 1460s where suddenly you had the ability to communicate with one language to one people.
In my country of Australia, the critical role of public broadcasting remains essential and with a public institutional safeguard which prevents it from being politicized by one side or any side of politics against its own independent charter. That becomes one of the most critical fail safes for the future, because unless there is a common platform for discourse on any of these questions, then it will be a cocktail of Fox News trying to rip our heart out, followed by Breitbart.
FF: And finally, any advice for our liberal readers?
KR: The liberal international order is worth defending. And not just worth defending, it’s worth advancing. When we use the word defend, we’re already into a defensive posture. These are good universal values and we’ve only arrived at them relatively recently in history. I don’t think it’s smart to return to a period of barbarism to re-discover their value.
Image "Prime Minister of Australia Addresses General Assembly" Courtesy United Nations Photo/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
About the Interviewee
Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister (2007-2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010-2012). He led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis, reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major developed economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd helped found the G20 to drive the global response to the crisis, and which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into depression.
As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the U.S. and Russia in 2010, and initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20 percent mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. He represented Australia at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit which produced the Copenhagen Accord, for the first time committing states to not allow temperature increases beyond two degrees. He was appointed a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Global Sustainability and is a co-author of the report Resilient People, Resilient Planet for the 2012 Rio+20 Conference. Mr. Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for 2012-2014. His government also saw the near doubling of Australia’s foreign aid budget to approximately $5 billion, making Australia then one of the top ten aid donors in the world. He also appointed Australia’s first ever Ambassador for Women and Girls to support the critical role of women in development and reduce physical and sexual violence against women.
Domestically, Mr. Rudd delivered Australia’s formal national apology to indigenous Australians. In education, his government introduced Australia’s first-ever nationwide school curriculum, undertook the biggest-ever capital investment program in Australian schools with the building of thousands of new state of the art libraries across the country, as well as introducing the first-ever mandatory national assessment system of literacy and numeracy standards. In health, Mr. Rudd in 2010 negotiated with the Australian states a National Health and Hospitals Reform Agreement, the biggest reform and investment in the health system since the introduction of Medicare 30 years before. His government established a national network of leading-edge cancer care centers across Australia, before introducing the world’s first ever plain-packaging regime for all tobacco products. To improve the rate of organ and tissue donation, he established Australia’s first National Organ and Tissue Transplant Authority. In 2010, his government introduced Australia’s first-ever paid parental leave scheme and implemented the biggest increase in, and reform of, the age pension since federation. He also founded the National Broadband Network to deliver high-speed broadband for every household, business, school, hospital, and GP in the country.
Mr. Rudd joined the Asia Society Policy Institute as its inaugural President in January 2015. ASPI is a “think-do tank” dedicated to using second-track diplomacy to assist governments and businesses in resolving policy challenges within Asia, and between Asia and the West. He is also Chair of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism where he is leading a review of the UN system over the 2015-16 period. In 2014, Mr. Rudd was a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where he completed a major policy paper U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping. He is a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in Chicago. Mr. Rudd is a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s Group of Eminent Persons. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and serves as a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and he co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s China Council.
Mr. Rudd in his private capacity has established the Australian National Apology Foundation to continue to promote reconciliation and closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. He has also established the Asia Pacific Community Foundation to promote the cause of regional economic, security, and environmental collaboration across the region.
