If a diplomat, as Winston Churchill once said, is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip, Kevin Rudd has proved himself our greatest. This is the man who told almost the entire parliamentary Labor Party to head off to Hades, to which they replied, after you.

With his friend Spanki Banki shuffling off into the sunset, Kevin07 is Kevin from Heaven to a desperate UN scouring the globe for a replacement secretary-general. As the Australian’s Rowan Callick recently pointed out ‘Rudd’s CV shines’! The arrogant style, poor policy choices, and failures of implementation that Callick singled out in 2010 as the cause of Rudd’s demise are incontrovertible evidence that he could run the UN every bit as effectively as his predecessors.

In April, Callick reported that Rudd might have a chance of getting support from Beijing if he stops ‘giving his opinions on China’. But if a secretary-general must stand up to superpowers, who better for the job than a man not afraid to call the Chinese rodentophiles behind their backs? Rodendum copuli Sina!

Conversely, Rudd must master the art of the blind eye, like Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a man so slippery, they had to name him twice. As Egyptian Foreign Minister, Boutros-Ghali approved secret multimillion-dollar arms sales to Rwanda, disguised as humanitarian relief and then, as Secretary-General, looked the other way as the Rwandans used the weapons to slaughter a million Tutsis.

Kurt Waldheim, a Nazi intelligence officer, spent most of World War II being unaware of civilians being summarily executed in close proximity, failing to notice the deportation of 40,000 Greek Jews to Auschwitz and signing off on leaflets that said: ‘Enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.’ Indeed, between 1942 and 1945 Waldheim was even unaware that he was in the army at all, let alone working on the staff of a war criminal.

That sort of experience is invaluable at the UN. As secretary-general, nobody was better equipped than Waldheim to say, ‘no comment’ when Uganda’s Idi Amin sent him a telegram applauding the massacre of Israeli Olympians in Munich as highly appropriate since it was where Hitler burned more than six million Jews.

And when the Israelis freed more than 100 Jewish hostages at Uganda’s airport, Waldheim responded, cool as a cucumber, that the raid was a ‘serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member.’

Rudd, as even his keenest supporters will admit, has zero experience in the genocide department. But washing his hands of his deadly pink batts program and blaming ‘push factors’ for the deaths of more than 1,000 people who drowned after he dismantled Australia’s tough border protection policies suggests he can master the art of lethal indifference when the situation requires it.

And Rudd has other talents. As Callick points out, under U Thant, the UN’s bureaucracy more than doubled in size, with a deficit reaching $US175 million, its entire annual budget. Rudd can more than match that, having left Australia with at least $153 billion in unfunded fiscal burdens and wasting $100bn of the community’s resources, according to the Australian’s Henry Ergas and  Judith Sloan. No wonder they called him ‘the costliest PM in Australian history’.

‘Like bad art, poor policy does not happen by accident,’ they wrote, attributing Rudd’s success to being ‘uninterested in economics, contemptuous of process, the most recent incarnation of “whatever it takes” man in a party tainted by corruption and cronyism.’

‘Yes, the Rudd circus may rise to new heights but the costs it inflicts will only rise with it’, they wrote, prophetically. And what better way to offset those costs than to make the whole world pay.

Obviously, the only three-ring circus worthy of Rudd the ringmaster is the UN.  Who better to crack the whip than the man who once warned former Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, ‘Jens, if you go beyond three minutes, your ODA goes up 0.1 per cent.’

Who better to run the world’s No. 1 generator of acronyms than the man born to babble about CSBMs, RoEs, EWSs, RTP, CCS and IFIs?

Who better to run the world’s biggest gabfest than a man who enthuses about ‘parallel ideological synergies, vis-a-vis the development opportunity momentum in our own constituencies’ and was the first to say, ‘Let’s proceed on parallel tracks between an open chicken market and an open carbon market.’

The man who brought us the 2020 Summit should be empowered to summiteer for the globe, tackling the greatest moral challenge of our time, saving capitalism from itself, bringing peace to the Palestinians, and doing anything else that seems like a good idea at the time.

Such is Rudd’s humility that he never boasts of his UN apprenticeship, bringing toilets to the downtrodden as chair of the Sanitation and Water For All partnership. Like his hero Gough Whitlam, Rudd found the Third World unsewered and hopes to leave it fully flushed. What could be more appropriate for a man who has so often moved so many to move their bowels?

In view of all this it is more than passing strange, as the Australian’s Greg Sheridan put it, that Prime Minister Turnbull didn’t nominate Rudd. Who could argue with Ergas when he writes that ‘the Coalition needs to take a long, hard look at itself.’ Certainly, not Sheridan, who had already thundered that in denying the UN Rudd’s services, ‘The Liberals under Malcolm Turnbull now resemble Labor at its worst in the Rudd-Gillard years…’

Obviously, the only thing Turnbull can do to make amends, and I’m sure I speak for Ergas, Sheridan, Callick, Julie Bishop and half the cabinet, is make Rudd PM again. And foreign minister. Kevin could balance the budget, put in an ETS and, in time, nominate himself for SG.

And yet surely, this, on its own, is not enough. With Kevin at the helm of the UN, wouldn’t it be truly wonderful, if Wayne Swan, the world’s greatest treasurer, were running the IMF? Come on, Malcolm, don’t break the nation’s heart, you know it makes sense.

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