Rudd upbeat on Copenhagen
In a room adorned by paintings by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, I interviewed Kevin Rudd this morning on the prospects for the Copenhagen summit. Along with the Mexican President Felipe Calderon, he's been appointed a "friend of the chair", and is therefore set to play a leading role in the negotiations. He says that there will not be a legally-binding treaty at Copenhagen, but there will be what he calls an operational framework agreement - the hope being that a political agreement will be codified into an international treaty sometime in 2010.
I asked him about the prospects for a political agreement, since two years of negotiations have so far failed to produce one, and he was upbeat. I also probed him on what, to many international observers, is his highly anomalous position: urging others to sign up to an agreement while at the same time leading a country with the highest per capita emissions of any developed nation and the world's biggest exports of coal. Moreover, he's committed his government to an unconditional emissions target of just a 5% cut by 2020 - rising possibly to 15%, depending on what other countries do - which by international standards is small. He's also piling a lot of federal infrastructure money into the expansion of the coal export facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.
I was asked by Justin Webb on the Today programme whether Mr Rudd was a good man for the job. His friendship with Barack Obama certainly helps, I said - a senior administration official is on record as saying that Mr Obama feels more comfortable with Kevin Rudd than any other leader. His Mandarin might help him sway the Chinese - although it has not translated into warm relations between Beijing and Canberra. Quite the opposite, in recent months.
But three other things might stand him in good stead. First, his round-the-clock work ethic (he's been staying up late for video hook-ups with other key negotiators ahead of Copenhagen). Second, his fluency in, and enthusiasm for, jargon (there will be a lot of it at Copenhagen). And finally, his love of detail. Most people find it rather devilish. For Mr Rudd, it is something almost heavenly.
You can watch an excerpt of the interview , so you can make up your own mind on what he had to say at the beginning of a week in which the Rudd government is hoping to push its emissions trading scheme through parliament...



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