How can bob carr became foreign minister

Mr Carr joins a distinguished list of federal politicans to assume the role, including former prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Billy McMahon and Robert Menzies. Ms Gillard said she was delighted that he had accepted, but she declined to go through the "many conversations" she had with people this week regarding the reshuffle. Mr Carr admitted that he had been "churned up" by "warring emotions" over the decision. He noted that he had been out of public life for six years - but said that Ms Gillard's voice had "roused him" from his slumber.

Mr Carr said that he had been through "a few" reshuffles before - and added that they had been "pretty grim", as they always featured argument, conjecture and people "thinking out loud". Mr Carr said that there would be inevitable differences between himself and Kevin Rudd in the portfolio but he wanted to honour his predecessor's achievements, including the UN Security Council seat bid, increased overseas aid and Burma.

He said there was a "cautious optimism" around the bid. He echoed Mr Rudd's previous sentiments in saying that it was about Australia's commitment to multilateralism. Mr Carr said that he could "mobilise" the things he had learnt in his career in his new role. He said the opportunity to speak about and represent Australia was a "great honour".

He said that the gap between Labor and Coalition was not as great as the gap had been on several previous occasions. He said that, when voters focused on policy-making over "sloganeering", they would turn to Labor. This afternoon Mr Smith congratulated Mr Carr on his appointment and said he would be a terrific foreign minister and addition to cabinet. Mr Smith said he had no right to be disappointed about Ms Gillard's decision to give foreign affairs to Mr Carr.

This broadside is worth comparing with Carr's comments on Chinese media about that country's government under Xi Jinping. On April 12, Carr appeared on Shenzhen television to discuss the keynote address Xi gave at the Boao Forum a few days earlier. In a Chinese voice-over, the host introduced Carr as a former Australian foreign minister and distinguished professor "with a university specialisation in Chinese history" who was "exceptionally familiar with the history of China's Reform Era".

Carr may not have been personally responsible for this false wrap — all the more reason for caution when appearing on Chinese propaganda programs — but it did ensure that his comments on Xi Jinping would pass as the considered judgments of an international statesman and renowned China historian capable of appreciating Xi's significance in the sweep of Chinese history and in shaping the destiny of the world.

Carr obliged. Ahead of the interview a number of his comments on Xi's presentation had already made their way into the party's Chinese language media. One quoted Carr saying that Xi's speech showed he was a fitting successor for China's reforms, which were "a miracle for humankind".

Another recorded him referring to Xi's "visionary speech" which "changes China and changes the world". A People's Daily report had Carr going a step further in praising Xi Jinping himself as "a most wise and visionary leader".

Asked what he thought of Xi Jinping on Shenzhen TV, Carr responded that he was "impressed by his leadership, leadership for the world". What is remarkable about these claims is not their hyperbole but how commonplace this style of hyperbole is becoming among retired foreign dignitaries enticed by the party to tell good China stories. Xi's leadership for the world, or "leadership of global governance", as Beijing prefers to call it, is a common refrain in party briefings for foreign dignitaries.

Carr's comments on Xi's leadership for the world lent an Australian accent to an ascending chorus of retired officials from around the world declaring their support for the world leadership of Xi Jinping. Carr is just one of an expanding cohort of retired foreign officials competing for preferment in a competitive sub-field of Sinology that Hong Kong China scholar David Bandurski calls "the science of Sycophantology". As a rule, practitioners know very little about China but enough to appreciate that public acclaim for its Communist leadership and expressions of regret over the failure of the West to "understand" China can open doors and land opportunities.

They are lavishly hosted on visits, offered lucrative board positions on Chinese entities, generously supported in their academic positions and presentations, and expected at a minimum to return the favour by complimenting their hosts. To help them frame their compliments, party cadres present them with a standard litany of propaganda phrases — World Anti-Fascist War, for example, or Community with a Shared Future for Mankind, A Better World, Leadership for Global Governance, Belt and Road Initiative, and Great Power Relations among others — that do not carry a lot of credibility in the mouths of local officials but sound vaguely plausible when intoned by foreign dignitaries.

Adherents of the discipline are expected to learn and recite them by heart. Party propagandists casually boast of their success in planting these phrases on the tongues of foreign dignitaries. At the world's first "World Political Parties High-level Dialogue" held in Beijing in December , which Carr attended, p arty media reported that a number of Beijing's favoured propaganda expressions, including "A Better World" and "Community with a Shared Future for Mankind" "have become stock phrases among [foreign] representatives".

Washed through the mouths of foreign dignitaries, compiled into scholarly compendia and broadcast over China's party media, the chorus of international praise for Xi Jinping and recitation of his stock phrases invites people in China to concede that their authoritarian government is the answer to their own problems and possibly the solution to many problems besetting the world.

More than delegates representing nearly political parties and political organisations attended from over countries. No mainstream Australian political parties participated but Bob Carr was reported as attending and was prominently photographed alongside Wang Yajun, the assistant director of the party's International Liaison Department hosting the gathering.

By their presence, attendees signed on to a closing declaration that carried Xi Jinping's stock expressions and spelt out the steps to be taken to establish his leadership for the world. Participants in the World Political Parties dialogue helped to perpetuate another charade, that the CCP is a political party like the other parties represented at the meeting. It is not. The party's armed wings were carried over into the People's Republic after and party leaders still refuse to put the armed forces on a more conventional footing.

For another, the party constitution takes priority over China's national constitution which amounts to little more than a supplementary clause of the Party one. Third, preservation of Party power is defined as China's "number one core national interest" with the result that anyone who dares to mutter a word of criticism engages in effect in treason.

No entity that owns and controls a country's armed forces in perpetuity, that sits above the national constitution and the law, and that has prior claim over crimes of treason fits the description of a political party in any language. The CCP is not a political party but a corrupt and increasingly totalitarian oligarchical state. Bob Carr graced a spectacle intended to showcase the Chinese Communist Party as primus inter pares in a quasi-parliament of the world's political parties, overseen by the leader of the world.

People in China are accustomed to charades of this kind and go along with them because they have to. They laugh at foreigners who go along with them as charlatans and fools. Carr may imagine that he is gallantly taking up an honourable cause defending Beijing on Chinese media in an open debate with its critics.

There is no debate. Foreign dignitaries like Carr, who applaud Communist Party achievements and say damning things about their own governments, are the only outside voices to be heard in Xi Jinping's China. Then again, Carr presumes to speak on behalf of the Australian people in China, not because they have contracted him to represent them, but because Beijing grants him the rare privilege of a media platform denied to other Australians.

This is one reason foreign dignitaries who know China well choose their words with care when they speak for their people or government in China. Carr either does not understand, or understands and takes advantage of the privilege. Further, Carr's behaviour demeans Australia and harms the national interest. His comments run the risk of misleading Beijing about Australian government thinking on national sovereignty and security.

Speaking in China, Carr consistently mischaracterises the underlying problem in the relationship, misrepresents what Australian people think about it, and mistakenly implies that a change of government would return relations to where they were before Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister.

He even offers advice along these lines. In August Carr published an opinion piece in Hong Kong suggesting that Beijing could delay mending relations until after the next election in order to pressure Canberra to come around. This may be what Beijing wants to hear.

Now that will be a chance to do a compare and contrast between two loquacious and smart Australian Foreign Ministers. I leave it to others to comment on its contents, which will surely be valuable, because Carr is part of that rare breed in public life in Australia, the dedicated diarists who writes with an audience in mind.

They are usually derided for it, as R G Casey was, and still is. Casey provides a reminder that it is common practice for high-profile politicians who strut the world stage to toss off biographical books. So why are there demands for Bob Carr to explain and justify? Critics say foreign leaders will be embarrassed. Politicians are more likely to resent being ignored. Critics say the publication breaches the convention of a discreet Trappist interval after leaving office.

However, Wikileaks and Snowden have driven a coach through this. Meyer was immediately appointed Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission! For Australia, imposing a two-year interlude would risk injecting the author into the electoral cycle. Another objection is to memoirs breaching Cabinet confidentiality, of which the pioneer was the aptly-named Dick Crossman.