Kevin The Catastrophist

STILL in search of a myth-making crisis - and apparently existentially offended at not having encountered one in John Howard's Australia - Kevin Rudd announces the country "can be a greater force for good in the world." Yes it can. Just think of the role Australia played in the liberation of Afghanistan from Taliban governance, the freeing of Iraq from the late twentieth century's most bloodthirsty tyrant, the high risk but morally righteous intervention in East Timor, the prompt and munificent response to the 2004 Tsunami Disaster. Now consider the post-Howard additions to this catalogue: the meaningless signing of the failed Kyoto Protocol and the dumb-as-a-post antagonisation of Japan and India. Mr Rudd's pre-departure insistence on benevolent advancement, then, is not so much the enunciation of a fresh moral direction so much as it is - or should be - a personal aide memoir.