Kevin Rudd’s diplomacy proves persuasive

KEVIN Rudd has adroitly applied his diplomatic skills to come through the first international meeting he has hosted as Prime Minister with wins on the major proposals for which he fought.

The big-ticket items agreed to unanimously yesterday by Mr Rudd’s fellow leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum summit in Cairns were a call to action on climate change, a compact on aid to Pacific nations, a push to extend the region’s free trade area to Australia and New Zealand, and keeping Fiji in the “sin bin”.

Mr Rudd remains chairman of the forum for a year, until the next annual leaders summit in Vanuatu; thus he takes ultimate responsibility for ensuring the leaders’ decisions are implemented.

Flanked by the other leaders, he said the need for climate change action was “not just a matter of importance or of urgency but of national survival for some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, many of whose leaders are standing with me on this platform”.

The forum agreed on a “call to action” to global leaders to agree at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December to reduce emissions by at least 50per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, setting the world on a path to limit the increase in average temperatures to 2C.

Australia was contributing $25million, Mr Rudd said, to help the islands replace “the enormous cost” of imported fossil fuels with renewable energy.

The forum also agreed on a compact to co-ordinate aid, including $1 billion a year from Australia, going to Pacific countries, where 2.7million people, more than a quarter of the whole population, still live in poverty. Mr Rudd said the importance of aid had increased with the global economic downturn. But it was proving a growing challenge for hard-stretched island governments to handle the “spaghetti bowl of conflicting and sometimes competing” aid programs on offer.

Sometimes, he said, ministers in those countries discovered half their staff were travelling offshore on trips funded by donors. “We can’t wait for this to get worse and worse,” he said.

The forum also agreed to retain Fiji’s suspension from the forum, Mr Rudd said, until the military-installed regime “give us any confidence” of its desire to return to “the family of democracies” that comprise the other 15 countries of the forum.

Fiji strongman Frank Bainimarama flew to Port Vila, Vanuatu, last month and appeared to win the support of his fellow leaders of the Melanesian Spearhead Group countries — Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — for his continued rule. Mr Bainimarama was vociferous about the impossibility of extending the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER Plus) to Australia and New Zealand.

The forum agreed on an early start to negotiations to extend the free trade area covering the island countries, to the region’s economic heavyweights, Australia and New Zealand