Kevin Rudd has accused Scott Morrison of hypocrisy for pushing for stronger inspection powers for the World Health Organization just months after warning against “negative globalism” and excessively powerful United Nations bodies.
“Well, Scotty from marketing, you can’t have it both ways. It’s one or the other,” Rudd said, while suggesting the prime minister was criticising UN agencies as part of “a far-right domestic political agenda”.
Morrison has been critical of the WHO’s performance in handling the coronavirus pandemic and indicated the government is close to completing a broader audit of how Australia engages with global institutions.
The review stems from the prime minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute last year when he warned against “a new variant of globalism that seeks to elevate global institutions above the authority of nation states to direct national policies”.
Morrison argued at the time that Australia should avoid “any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community, and worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”.
More recently, Morrison has floated the idea of reforms to the WHO to ensure public health investigators could visit member countries to verify key facts about disease outbreaks, in powers that he likened to those of weapons inspectors.
In an interview with Guardian Australia, Rudd described Morrison’s idea as a “thought bubble” that needed more detail, but said it was inconsistent with the prime minister’s political positioning on global bodies.
“We have Morrison arguing on the one hand, ‘I, Morrison, want a more powerful and interventionary WHO’,” Rudd said. “Well, hallelujah! That’s what people like me have been arguing for for a long time.
“But on the other hand he is arguing how terrible it is for multilateral institutions under the United Nations, these ‘unelected globalist bodies’, effectively undermining Australian sovereignty.”
Rudd said he was sceptical of the government’s review of Australia’s engagement with global bodies because it appeared to have been launched “with a preconceived and quite cynically driven political agenda” and followed a “Trumpian playbook”.
Around the world, he said, centre-right and far-right parties saw attacking the UN and its alleged erosion of national sovereignty as “good raw meat to throw out to the would-be nationalist political constituencies within your countries in order to bolster your own domestic political base”.
While it remains unclear whether Australia will follow the US in cutting funding to certain international agencies, Rudd said conservative governments had a track record of acting “really hairy chested [by] defunding a whole bunch of UN institutions”.
“You’re either going to recognise that these institutions advance the Australian national interest and can be used for that purpose and resource them accordingly, or you play the cheap-jack opportunist line of permanently bashing the UN, bashing unnamed globalism in pursuit of a far-right domestic political agenda – and as a consequence, lose your credibility within those institutions and your ability to influence their direction,” Rudd said.
Senior members of the government have previously denied that the prime minister was channelling Donald Trump’s rhetoric, with the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, saying Morrison was simply arguing global institutions must “work for all countries, not just some”.
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For his part, Rudd said the WHO needed to investigate the possibility of “a future sanctions regime against states who do not honour their obligations under the terms of the original treaty and of subsequent international health regulations”. He likened this to the World Trade Organization’s ability to make rulings on international trade law violations.
Rudd said reform was difficult, but not impossible, and would likely take several years to achieve. He said any institutional reform required unanimity “so that’s why you’ve got to push hard at it”.
“As far as China is concerned, they should conclude that WHO reform is in their interests both in terms of resourcing, powers and the independent voice of the director general,” he said.
Rudd also said there was no evidence the Australian government had done anything to vigorously pursue the recommendations of numerous past reviews into the WHO’s handling of the Ebola outbreak.
In 2017, the International Commission on Multilateralism – chaired by Rudd – published a policy paper warning that the Ebola crisis had revealed serious flaws in the capability of the global health architecture to respond to crises. That report called for improvements to the WHO’s accountability mechanisms, operational capacity, structure and funding.
“That’s just one of frankly many such reviews,” Rudd said. “So my core question back to the Australian government is – pardon my French – what the fuck did you do about any of this?”
The health department’s latest annual report noted Australia was currently serving a three-year term on the WHO’s executive board, which allowed the country to influence the global health agenda. That has included pushing for a strategy to eliminate cervical cancer as a global public health problem.
The review into global engagement is being conducted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Morrison has recently portrayed its focus in practical terms, saying Australia was “always going to consider where we put our funds and we always want value for money”.
Morrison has also said the issues with the WHO had “only reaffirmed” the views he expressed in the Lowy Institute speech last October.
“What happens at the upper echelons of these organisations, and how they operate, I think is in need of change,” Morrison said last week, while praising the WHO’s on-the-ground work to help Australia’s Pacific neighbours.
