In March 2008, newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced plans for a two-day national summit to be held in Canberra. The Australia 2020 Summit brought together 1000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest brains’ to develop long-term strategic policies for Australia. Of these participants, 100 were given the task of presenting a strategic vision and recommendations on ‘Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world’. The 2020 Summit seemed to be one of the defining images of Prime Minister Rudd’s term of office from 2007 to 2010. It certainly marked a new development in the formation of Australian foreign policy. The summit was supplemented by school summits, a Youth Summit, various community summits, regional town hall forums and an open submission system that allowed all Australians directly to submit their policy ideas and recommendations. The inclusion of the broader public in a dialogue about Australia’s future role in the world was a notable departure from traditional foreign policy-making.

‘The times will suit me’, John Howard proclaimed some months after he won the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1985. He was convinced that Labor’s attempt to reconstruct the economy through an agreement with trade unions was doomed to fail, and expected a mounting crisis of national solvency that would turn voters to a statesman prepared, like Reagan or Thatcher, to apply the same reforming vigour to the labour market. On regaining the Liberal leadership a decade later, Howard played on the hardship inflicted by the recent recession: ‘The Australian people cannot understand why they should have to suffer the indignity, the denial and disappointment of a bare five minutes of economic sunlight’. Over the past decade, as one prime minister after another has had to introduce herself or himself to counterparts at international gatherings, Australia has gained the reputation of ‘the coup capital of the democratic world’. Each change of leadership is dressed up in policy differences that fail to hide the personal nature of the rivalry and the fickle loyalties of parliamentarians who switch their support according to calculations of the best chance of electoral success.