Let’s hit pause on appointing politicians as diplomats

1 month ago 4

Editorial

January 13, 2026 — 7.30pm

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s achievements in his latter-day career are open to interpretation, but his approaching resignation as Australia’s ambassador to the US is a salient reminder of the pitfalls associated with appointing retired politicians to diplomatic posts.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday was generous with praise for the man he appointed to Australia’s most important diplomatic post in January 2023, saying Rudd had achieved concrete advancements during both the Democrat and Republican administrations that fostered the economic relationship and ensured AUKUS was able to proceed. Also to be admired was his work to secure the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and negotiating a pact on critical minerals.

But never before has an Australian diplomat attracted so much coverage or controversy as Rudd during his 34 months in Washington.

Diplomacy may be the art of unobtrusively letting someone else have your way, and over the years, Labor and the Coalition have dispatched scores of retired politicians to diplomatic posts around the world. The high tide came during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years when so-called former MP “diplo-mates” occupied some 10 per cent of diplomatic posts.

Australia’s US ambassador Kevin Rudd is stepping down from the role.

Most of them gratefully accepted the sinecure before disappearing from public life. Not Rudd.

His ill-judged online digs at Donald Trump, starting in 2020, came to cloud his ambassadorship, just as his imperious self-regard saw Labor colleagues lose faith in his prime ministership a decade earlier.

It was all so futile. Rudd had been seeking to return to his old trade of diplomacy and been trailing his coat before Malcolm Turnbull for nomination for the UN secretary-general job in 2016. The Coalition would not have a bar of him, but instead of biding his time, he fired off his unwise salvos against Trump.

It is not so much that a former prime minister stooped to undergraduate-level attacks on an elected leader of our closest ally, but that Rudd’s smart alec persona made Labor vulnerable to Coalition broadsides.

Albanese spent the first 30 months of government without meeting Donald Trump, either as the Republican presidential front runner or president. He also suffered many near misses that threatened to become a national embarrassment as the US continued to ignore the prime minister while it announced new tariffs and reviewed AUKUS, matters of utmost importance to Australia

Waiting out in the cold allowed then-opposition leader Peter Dutton to claim that Albanese was paying the penalty for appointing Rudd. “The ambassador seems to be persona non grata. The prime minister can’t get a phone call or a visit to Washington, and that doesn’t bode well for whatever is coming next,” Dutton said last March.

When Albanese did meet Trump in October, Rudd overshadowed the bonhomie, if not the moment. “No, I don’t know anything about him,” Trump said when asked by the Herald’s North America correspondent Michael Koziol if he had forgiven the ambassador.

Rudd stepped down a year earlier than expected. The reasons are unknown. But already there are reports that former Labor ministers are under consideration as his replacement. Too soon, surely?

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.