Piers Akerman, evil Kevin Rudd, and the diplomatic skills needed to deal with the evil reds under our beds

(Above: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, dealing with a door the way Piers Akerman thinks the world should deal with Kevin Rudd).

It's always great when the pot calls the kettle black, because the likelihood is that if both have been over a camp fire for any length of time, both of them will be encrusted with a thick layer of soot.

I can't think of any better image for Piers Akerman than an encrusted layer of soot covering his visage, and he shows off his kinship with Chairman Rudd in Language of diplomacy eludes our PM.

In much the same way as the language of a diplomat eludes our PM, so it eludes Akerman, our very own fat owl of the remove, who is in a constant state of yarooh garooar when it comes to the diabolical Rudd.

It wasn't so long ago that our Piers found an enormous number of Chinese reds under our bed, our top military chiefs dumbfounded, and the lickspittle lackey CSIRO in a state of naive complicity by getting the Chinese to build antennae across this wide brown land for a price jealous competitors determined was commercially unrealistic.

This awesome scoop - one of those wonderful hold the presses scoops that even produced an editorial - heralded the way that the Chinese might have planted trapdoors in software which allows them to enter Western defence systems at will.

It was such an awesome beat up of the Chinese red menace that I had to go without fried rice for the rest of the month, so terrified was I to enter a Chinese restaurant for takeaway, since in all likelihood they would have been taking away all my secrets for use in a fiendish plot to undermine western civilization as we know it.

Strangely we haven't heard much about it since. The walls of Jericho thus far haven't tumbled down.

Flash forward a few weeks, and the big news is that the fiendish Chinese have now revealed to Comrade Akerman that they were much more comfortable with John Howard than with Kevin Rudd, for all his purported mandarin speaking skills (which for all we know sounds more like an orange than an actual language).

Forgotten is that perilous moment when there were reds under all our beds. Now Piers sheds a crocodile tear for the confused and hapless Chinese, misled, misguided and disabused by the fiendish Rudd:

``When Mr Rudd was elected, there was an expectation that a more intimate relationship between the countries would result, because he knows China so well and speaks Chinese,’’ Zhu, the deputy director of the School of International Studies at Beijing University said. ``But it has remained just at the commercial level. Bilateral relations as a whole are still far from intimate; they are undeveloped. We haven’t even agreed a strategic partnership, in the way we have with 24 other countries.’’

Under Rudd, the Australia-Chinese relationship has hit a few potholes, including the $26 billion Chinalco bid for 18 per cent of Rio Tinto; the defence white paper’s focus on China’s military rise; the secret visit of China’s propaganda chief Li Changchun to Canberra and Chinese-Australian businesswoman Helen Liu’s sponsorship of Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

No wonder China’s is confused. Are we courting Chinese trade or building an arsenal to deal with China as our greatest military threat, and if the latter is so, why is the defence minister living in a house owned by his Chinese sponsor?

I wonder if that's because Chairman Rudd took Comrade Pier's advice that the Chinese were simply diabolical spies that couldn't be trusted in any circumstance, and should be banished from the land?

One thing's for certain. If the Chinese turn to Piers Akerman for guidance or understanding, they might learn about bilious, grumpy men, but the confusion will quadruple. Why on earth would we want an intimate relationship with these filthy reds, who spy on us and win unfair contracts to build antennae, and take our minerals and generate an economic boomtime for us?

The rest of the Akerman column is pure Rudd bashing in his own inimitable way. How about taking a rumor started in sister paper The Australian for a way to close out the column?

With such ineptitude, Rudd shows himself to be admirably equipped for the top UN job, which he is said to covet. Given the general dysfunctional nature of the UN, and its myriad global failures, let no-one stand in his way.

Stoop and crawl through the gutter or the trashcan for any rumor that can be turned against the arch fiend? Sure thing. Because it's a two for one knockdown two dollar store value. Bash Rudd and the U.N. Sweet.

How about a way to start a column showing the due respect for the office of PM, as suggested by Gerard Henderson?

One of candidate Kevin Rudd’s big selling points - other than that he was not John Howard - was his experience as a diplomat.

We now know that he was at best a low-level paper shuffler, reaching third secretary status, which is just a rung up from the embassy chauffeur. Further, it is now blindingly apparent that he is not in the least diplomatic.

That's right, Australia is being run by a man just a rung up from a chauffeur. With the diplomatic skills of the always insulting Akerman.

The rest of the column is a tiresome and tired rehash of Akerman talking points, about the wondrous ways of that tinpot suburban solicitor John Howard, his skill with Indonesia, the dangers of a hundred boat people, low jinks in the attempt to get African votes for an Australian seat on the security council, and so on and on and on. 

He bangs the drum endlessly about our relationship with Asia and with the US and Obama (as if we should care about that librul socialist) and somehow imagines that the times Howard spent sucking up to George Bush were the golden days for Australian diplomacy under Howard. Sure thing, bomb the shit out of a country, and see how they respect you.

It would be so much simpler, and save readers so much time, if Akerman just wrote one line: I hate Kevin Rudd, and repeated it over and over until he ran out of space, a bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. All this scribbling over and over again, without any play, makes Piers a very dull boy.

(Below: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, brooding on the unfairness of Australia being run by a chauffeur).