Mr Rudd was introduced by the great-grandson of president Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt IV.
Rudd push for global power shift as PM praises China on climate
The Australian | Sep 24, 2009
by Dennis Shanahan
New York – KEVIN Rudd has appealed to world leaders, specifically to US President Barack Obama, to act after 65 years of international organisational stagnation and to form a dynamic and effective “driving centre” of nations to create a new world order.
Only hours before he was due to address the UN General Assembly and a day before a summit on the global financial crisis and reforms of the International Monetary Fund in Pittsburgh, the Prime Minister has described those international bodies as static, stalemated and too large to be effective.
Mr Rudd also praised new offers from China and Japan on cutting greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the Copenhagen climate change conference, but gave only limited approval to the offering by Mr Obama.
Speaking at the UN, Mr Rudd, who chaired a roundtable discussion on climate change, said: “We can no longer afford to wait for action on climate change; the time for action is now.
But Mr Rudd again turned to Mr Obama to exercise world leadership to form a new order with the Group of 20 – which includes Australia and the huge developing economies of China, India and Brazil, as well as Muslim nations – at the centre.
In a speech prepared for the Foreign Policy Association of New York, before his evening address to the UN General Assembly, Mr Rudd says: “Our global institutions have largely remained static while the world they were designed to serve has been dynamic beyond anyone’s imagining.”
Mr Rudd’s speech is the culmination of months of economic and diplomatic persuasion and world travel to ensure any evolving G20 group, of which Australia is a founding member, continues to include Australia as a key player and is not overtaken by “old Europe” and the world’s biggest economies.
Australia has been forging a closer relationship with Latin American nations and India, as well as enhancing its relationship with the US, to build a middle order, non-European-dominated group to influence the G20.
Mr Rudd says the effectiveness of a smaller group than the UN but a more diverse group than the eight largest industrialised economies, such as the G20, has been shown by its ability to make quick and competent decisions to deal with the global financial crisis and to avoid another Great Depression. In the speech, Mr Rudd takes aim at the bloated membership of the UN – which has quadrupled to 192 from its original 50 nation members – and “its proliferation of non-state actors” and the IMF’s inability to deal with the global financial crisis.
“The new and pressing functional demands of a rapidly unfolding global order are now rubbing up against the increasingly dysfunctional nature of global institutions that are either out of their depth, insufficiently empowered, or reduced to a negotiating stalemate by the politics of the lowest common denominator,” he says.
“We have seen this in a number of global institutions. We have seen this in the UN Security Council. We have seen it on nuclear disarmament.
“And, most critically, we have seen it recently with the IMF impeded by its limited and now almost ancient mandate, and by the limited resources made available to it to deal with a financial and economic crisis of the type we have had forced upon us these last 12 months.
“The global financial crisis has demonstrated one core point: that the formal institutional architecture established to deal with a potential systemic collapse failed when put to the test and had to be rapidly superseded by the emergency actions of central banks and executive governments acting through the agency of the G20,” he said.
He says the global economy of today “has become a truly global economy unimaginable to the relatively autonomous economies of the immediate postwar period”, and that “the global institutions have not kept pace with the rapidly changing global reality”.
“The new and pressing functional demands of a rapidly unfolding global order are now rubbing up against the increasingly dysfunctional nature of global institutions that are either out of their depth, insufficiently empowered, or reduced to a negotiating stalemate by the politics of the lowest common denominator.”
But Mr Rudd, who was introduced by the great-grandson of president Theodore Roosevelt, says the inability of the institutions to keep pace is “not an argument for their wholesale replacement”.
“It is, however, an argument for their comprehensive renewal,” he says.
And that renewal can occur only through US global leadership which, he says, is a force for good in the world.
“American leadership must also be supported in this new endeavour by a new driving centre of global politics and the global economy (with) a group of nations, both developed and developing, sharing a broad commitment to make the existing institutions of global governance solve the problems faced by the global order rather than simply avoid them,” he says.
At a meeting with former US president Bill Clinton yesterday Mr Rudd said that in the “21st century it makes no sense to have an institution of global economic governance that excludes China, India, Brazil, Mexico and the Muslim world”.
Mr Rudd said that while the G20 had its imperfections, its composition included five countries from the Americas, five from Asia, five from Europe, and five “including guys like us that don’t particularly belong anywhere”.
But he said the diversity provided greater legitimacy than the smaller groups of rich and industrialised nations, such as the G7, and that having emerging economies involved changed the “centre of gravity of the discussion”.
“That’s really important – poverty is discussed; the question of development is discussed,” he said.
Mr Rudd said the G20 meeting in London had done a lot to stop the fall of business confidence during the global financial crisis but the challenge was now “to craft the long-term recovery, and that’s what Pittsburgh, under President Obama’s leadership, is all about”.
Former US President Bill Clinton claimed today that the “vast rightwing conspiracy” that hounded him and nearly drove him from office has set its sights on Barack Obama.
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