Celebrating Kevin Rudd

Remarks to Kamener Oration Lunch, Ormond College, 23 August 2026

Talking about Kevin Rudd is a task, to quote the title of his memoir, Not for the Faint-hearted. But having known Kevin as I have, I think, for longer than anyone here other than Glyn Davis, and lived to tell the tale, I guess I have no alternative but to plunge in.

We first got to know each other in the late 1990s when Kevin was a newly minted back- bencher (though already with a substantial career behind him, first as a fast-rising young diplomat and then as principal adviser to the Queensland Premier), and I was languishing with Relevance Deprivation Syndrome in opposition after having been a cabinet minister for thirteen years. We bonded over our mutual passion for foreign affairs, with Kevin professing – with a straight face – to regard me as his great mentor in that respect (though the notion of Kevin ever wanting or needing a mentor about anything does not, I think, pass the pub test).

When I asked him one day how he was going to spend the next parliamentary break, he told me that he was going to North Korea, and I said that I would love to join him, never having actually visited there myself. But Kevin was rather less thrilled with this prospect than I had expected him to be. As he describes in his memoir, ‘my first opportunity for diplomatic glory as one of the few Australians to visit North Korea since 1975, when the last Australian Embassy was expelled, had just gone up in smoke. I was going to be Gareth’s third secretary instead.’ But he did gracefully concede that my credentials as a former foreign minister opened some doors that would otherwise have been closed to him, and our trip was in fact a great success.

I have followed Kevin's subsequent career with huge interest, and also huge admiration for everything that he has achieved, albeit tinged with a little sadness at some of the what- might-have-beens.

Let me say at the outset that in terms of sheer intellectual grunt, I continue to regard Kevin as probably the smartest person that I have ever known in public life (and I say that without adding Malcolm Turnbull’s usual rider ‘apart from myself’…). His capacity to absorb, analyse, organise and communicate complex information and ideas, and do so in multiple languages, when combined with his ferocious work ethic, and instinct for policy decency, has produced a really quite extraordinary body of professional achievement.

Of course, though I’m not sure that Kevin would be completely comfortable with this observation, none of us is perfect.

Neither Kevin nor I have, we should acknowledge, temperaments of the cloth from which Zen masters are cut. And that tends to make us ever so slightly cantankerous when we are frustrated by things – especially small things – beyond our control: with Kevin I suspect sharing my longstanding position that if you don’t occasionally give loud vent to that frustration you will erupt in boils.

I think Kevin might also now be prepared to concede that his time at the political top might have been a little less fraught if his approach to other people's time priorities, and not just his own, had been just a teensy bit less idiosyncratic. I can’t help but recall in that context my own experience when, just a few days after winning the 2007 election, he asked me to join him for lunch at Kirribilli House to discuss his foreign policy agenda. Arriving at the appointed 12:30, I was ushered out to the veranda to await the great man’s arrival. Where I waited… and waited… and waited – until at last, around 1:20, I spotted a figure in shorts armed with a towel strolling down the adjacent lawn to the Admiralty House swimming pool. But arrive he eventually did, hair still damp and only an hour and a quarter late, greeting me cheerfully: ‘Great to see you, Gareth. Lots to talk about. Let’s go.’

But to get back to the main story, Kevin really does have a quite outstanding list of professional achievements to his credit. They include:

• As Party leader, proving a formidably popular and effective political campaigner in winning the 2007 election in a landslide, and in saving much of the furniture which might otherwise have been lost in the 2013 election
• As Prime Minister, playing an absolute blinder in response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, both domestically with a stimulus package which led to Australia being almost the only developed country to avoid recession, and internationally in the leadership role he played, acknowledged by President Obama and others, in developing the G20’s coordinating role
• In his post-political role, as a globally respected China scholar and international relations analyst, being chosen to head the prestigious and influential Asia Society, based in New York; and
• As Australian Ambassador in Washington, under the Albanese Government, playing another blinder in navigating the decrepitude of Biden’s administration and the craziness of Trump’s, above all – albeit in a cause that I personally regard as wholly misguided, but that’s another story – in winning and sustaining Congressional and Administration support for the AUKUS submarine project.

To me, among the most admirable of Kevin’s stances (although maybe here I’m succumbing to that well-known temptation to find most agreeable someone who agrees with me…) are:

• his consistent attachment to the values of liberal internationalism
• his strong commitment to addressing the great existential risks of our time to life on this planet as we know it: climate change, pandemics and nuclear holocaust
• his strong belief, to which he gave clear voice as PM and FM, that being and being seen to be a good international citizen should be regarded as a core national interest, ranking alongside the traditional duo of security and prosperity; and
• his genuine attachment to the United Nations as an indispensable source of good (and in that context I have to say that – although they later kissed and made up to make common cause against Rupert Murdoch – the refusal of Malcolm Turnbull to support Kevin’s candidacy for the post of UN Secretary-General was indefensibly shameful).

But above all else what I find most admirable about Kevin’s character and achievements is his total commitment to decency in the context of Indigenous Australians, with his absolutely finest hour being his very first parliamentary act as Prime Minister, his speech of Apology to the Stolen Generations, which I think ranks alongside Paul Keating’s Redfern speech as one of the most moving ever made by an Australian Prime Minister:

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants, and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

Kevin continues to burst with intellectual and moral energy and creativity, with strong opinions on just about everything. We are privileged to have him join us today, and I am sure we are in for a treat with the conversation he will have with Glyn Davis this afternoon. I warmly thank Larry and Marty Kamener, as always, for making this event happen, and Areti Metuamate and his Ormond College team for hosting not only the Kamener Oration but this splendid lunch.