As always, successful foreign policies usually begin with pursuing the right priorities. For a country like Australia with a very wide range of national interests, there is rarely ever a shortage of causes to pursue, the challenge is always to set realistic goals and allocate the resources necessary to secure them.

 

Ever since taking office, the Rudd Government has been woeful at this task. At the precisely the same time as the prime minister was establishing a very ambitious foreign policy agenda – Australia as a ‘creative middle power’, a new Asia Pacific Community and a seat on the UN Security Council among many other things, he was slashing the budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), bringing our diplomats home from abroad and degrading our consular and diplomatic capabilities.

 

The accreditation of a resident Australian ambassador to the Vatican stands as a particularly egregious example of perverse policy priorities. After little consultation with officials and certainly not those within DFAT, the Prime Minister announced the decision during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Australia in July last year. In a city where Australia already has a considerable diplomatic presence, this misguided exercise in Australian Papal diplomacy will cost the taxpayer over $13 million in the next three years and include $3 million on the refurbishment of a new chancery, $14000 a month in office rent, $14000 in rent for the ambassador’s residence and the resources of a junior foreign service officer.

 

For a foreign service absolutely strapped for cash this is a bizarre allocation of priorities. Try as they might, the Prime Minister and his officials have always struggled to provide a convincing explanation for this diplomatic indulgence. In a recent newspaper interview however, our new man at the Holy See, the estimable former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, made it clear: he was there largely for inter-faith dialogue.

 

With ecumenical understanding always in need of some forceful advocates, few of us would doubt this to be a worthy, if rather fraught, ideal. But should it be the task of the Australian taxpayer to fund it under guise of foreign policy? 

 

And that is not nearly the end of the matter. Having installed a resident ambassador, one presumably more than willing to make himself useful, Rudd has now decided to ignore him and go himself to see the Pope, apparently to plead the case for Mary McKillop’s sainthood. Could Prime Ministerial intervention possibly advance the good lady’s virtuous cause? Given the theological protocols that dictate these things, it seems unlikely. In which case, why is Rudd not using his time on more worthwhile diplomatic endeavours?

 

Indeed, in the context of competing policy priorities, Rudd’s whole European itinerary deserves much closer scrutiny. Meeting G8 leaders and others in L’Aquila to discuss the precarious state of global finances and climate change ahead of Copenhagen will doubtless broaden the Prime Ministerial mind. And a visit with Chancellor Merkel will perhaps help to advance Australia’s bilateral relationship with Germany. But visits to Rome to call on the Pope and Zurich to see Sepp Blatter of the FIFA to spruik for the 2018/22 Football World Cup? For goodness sake, is that what Prime Ministers do these days – act as emissaries for religion and sport?

 

If Mr. Rudd really wanted to advance Australia’s national interests and get his policy priorities in order, he might have considered any one of the following: Brussels, where he could have reminded the EU of its solemn undertaking – now broken – not to engage in more trade protectionism. Or perhaps Vienna, where he might have caught up with the dedicated folk at the International Atomic Energy Agency and learnt more about the challenge of trying to advance the cause of nuclear non proliferation. Or perhaps the Prime Minister might have entertained a visit to Geneva where the International Organisation for Migration would have been more than willing, one suspects, to offer him a personal briefing on people smuggling, refugees and the immense challenges posed by the movement of people around the world.

 

Any one of these activities would have been a better use of Prime Ministerial time and energies than barren and wasteful visits to Rome and Zurich.

 

Really, it is all a matter of priorities.