Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd jetted into Kuala Lumpur last Thursday following the grandiose failure of the G8 so-called summit in Japan. Typically, he spilled his pitiably vile guts on a pitiably vile regime that has ruled Malaysia since 1957.

Unlike former prime minister John Howard, Rudd gushed effusive praise on the sizably compacted Umno-dominated regime’s management of the “transition” to democracy following the March general elections.

First, a comment; then, a question. Let’s be very clear: Kevin Rudd is no Al Gore. At least Gore had the guts to launch a tirade against Malaysia’s former pitiably vile dictator premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad for the way he allowed the completely gutless and totally corrupt Malaysian police to cook up evidence against his once erstwhile and trusted lieutenant Anwar Ibrahim.

kevin rudd and anwar ibrahim Rudd, though, has ignored Anwar as much as he has all the other rot that has been piled on by the most corrupt regime Malaysians have ever had to endure.

The fact that they have by and large, despite recent well-orchestrated protests led by Anwar and PKR, says only that Malaysians remain ever watchful of the regime wielding a large stick that it is prepared to use on political dissenters.

If this is not state terror of old, and Rudd cannot see it, then he strode into Putrajaya with blinkers on, to meet his pathetic lame duck counterpart Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Perhaps Rudd was playing at diplomacy. But why? It’s not as if Malaysia is vital to Australia’s core regional national interests. If Malaysia wants to continue to block Australia’s membership to the worthless Asean, go right ahead.

Australia is past being hung-up about Asean. Howard made that very clear years ago. And if Malaysia thinks it is the vital link, the conduit, to Australia’s enlarged engagement with Asia, that’s another old story.

asean meeting Get with it. Nobody in the world cares about Asean. Even Asean citizens don’t give a damn about Asean. Asean does not represent the people’s interests. Asean represents the interest of the vile political elite of its member states and of their business cronies.

Cronies and corruption on a grand scale infest Asean. It is a membership of idiocy, ruled by idiocy. Look back over Asean’s formation in 1967 and ask what significant achievements it, as an organisation, has amassed and you’ll see the point. Zilch. Nada. Kosong.

As far as Southeast Asia goes, the more important regional relationships from Australia’s perspective are Singapore and Indonesia. Not Malaysia. But you can see the sucking up Rudd employed whilst on his eight-hour official visit to Kuala Lumpur:

“In Malaysia, we have an extraordinary exemplar, a Muslim society and a Muslim country...” Blah, blah, blah.

Because it quickly dovetailed into a typical, standard First World-Third World tryst of developmental cooperation as though we are suddenly back to reliving the Colombo Plan put together by the First World for the Third World to somehow assuage the historical ‘white man’s burden’. But the slothful and pointless Abdullah lapped up Rudd’s empty generosity nonetheless.

Diplomatic praise or lies?

After all, having not shown one ounce of true leadership after the retirement of his former boss Mahathir, who quickly turned on his chosen one the way he had on Anwar, Abdullah could use Rudd’s bare-faced lies couched as diplomatic praise to show Malaysians he’s still there, if nothing else.

najib abdullah 100408 The fact that Abdullah will step down as premier in 2010 is two years too late. He should disappear now. But should Malaysians then stomach Najib Abdul Razak as prime minister?

Here’s the best part. Rudd called Malaysia a “vibrant democracy”. Democracy is not just alive and well in Malaysia but flourishing, Rudd added. If you’re puking at this, then join the club, because there will be at least 10 million Malaysians who would be puking too. All must wonder if Rudd thinks this seriously enough or if he spat this up through his blowhole.

It must have been the same blowhole he used to lavish praise on the Chinese regime which continues to brutalise Tibetans in their occupied homeland and the same kind of praise he poured on the Japanese whilst they hunt and murder whales.

But what “democracy” in Malaysia? And when? Seriously. Or is this grand delusion? Perhaps Rudd sleepwalked his way in and out of Malaysia. What will wake him up from his mindless slumber is the same big stick the regime uses on its critics. Rudd has conveniently forgotten the despicable use of the Internal Security Act against critics of this reviled regime.

Perhaps Rudd thinks, like the pretentious evangelic dreamer that he is, that the more we are told Malaysia is a democracy, therefore it is or, at the very least, will become one. But anyone who has read Malaysian history will say, in no uncertain terms, that democracy was stillborn in 1946. If not, it certainly died in 1969 in the wake of the race riots. Odds are that Rudd read from a different script - one written by his harebrained minders in Canberra.

This is revisionism at its best. Worse, it is deliberately so. Next Rudd will say the Holocaust never happened, that it was a pack of lies by the Jews, a cruel Jewish hoax or, in the predictable racist, anti-Semitic parlance of Mahathir Mohamad, a Jewish conspiracy.

Why not go further and say that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were benevolent? So too Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe.

MANJIT BHATIA is an academic and writer and an associate partner of AsiaRisk, a risk analysis consultancy, with specialisation in international economics and politics. His writings have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Business Times Singapore, International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and elsewhere.