Rudd and Wikileaks: never mind the bollocks

You can be sure that Canberra's diplomats are still eagerly waiting in line to chat to the Foreign Minister. That's their job. It doesn't mean that anyone likes or respects him.

What's more significant is that this affair blows apart the coalition that Gillard was engaged in stitching-up between the left and the right of the party.

The news that right-winger Senator Mark Arbib was volunteering information to US diplomats that he was denying to Australians won't have helped mend any fences.

Rudd, a founding member of the so-called Australia/US "leadership dialogue", had perspicaciously noted that the Cold War with Russia was over, but that a new one with China was rising from the ashes. Instead of working to pour the cold water of rapprochement over this potential conflict, Rudd was blowing the embers and fanning them.

He even warned the US that it might be necessary to send a military message to Beijing. There can be no recovery from a blunder such as this.

The other, more serious division that's been opened up across Australian society concerns the notion of authority. With the possible exception of the Arbib revelations there is little that is new in the documents that have been released. What has changed is the authority of the source.

Some journalists (like ABC television's Barry Cassidy and radio's Fran Kelly) twigged somewhat late to the change in the way Rudd was being viewed within the party. It apparently required David Marr's excellent (and now award-winning) Quarterly Essay to permit a redefinition of the framework that could be used to perceive reality. But some other journalists possessed a far more intimate understanding of the nature of Labor in power.

It was former Canberra Times journalist Phillip Dorling who unearthed these facts, providing them with the prominence they deserved.

The former diplomat was working as a policy adviser to Labor’s Laurie Brereton when his house was raided during the Sydney Olympics by police searching for leaked documents about East Timor. Of course nothing was found, but quite possibly that was irrelevant. The aim may have been simply to intimidate.

Then, eight years and three days later, Dorling was again subjected to another fruitless and pointless search by police. It was widely believed that Rudd or Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, who'd been significantly embarrassed by Dorling’s reporting, must have authorised the raid.

Within a year, further revelations by Dorling had led to Fitzgibbon's resignation. Even the reshuffle after the election failed to see the MP offered his spot back at the Cabinet table, although he's a close friend of Gillard's.

This week it was Dorling, not Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who extracted from the masses of cables the relevant sections relating to Australia: the same ones that have so disastrously effectively ended any chance Rudd may have had of pursuing a UN career.