Kevin Rudd
speaker
641 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Kevin Rudd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, well, I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion.
So I was prime minister, then foreign minister, and then did a PhD, became ambassador, and now I'm running a think tank.
So it's one steady slide for me.
Why did I do a PhD?
A lot of folks in the world, and particularly my former counterparts as international political leaders, would ask me this question.
Hey, Kevin, you're a China guy.
What does Xi Jinping think?
And I thought I knew pretty well the answers to that until I began to have doubts myself about the authenticity of my answers.
So I decided to force myself to read everything that this guy had ever written.
And I thought the best way to force myself to read everything this guy had ever written was to enroll in a DPhil at Oxford at the age of 59.
And that's exactly what I did.
And the principle at play was this, the male vanity principle, which is it would be too humiliating and too embarrassing having enrolled in such a program to then withdraw because you'd lost enthusiasm.
Yeah, no, as a kid, I started first year university with modern Chinese language, classical Chinese language and Chinese history.
And so I'd done four or five years of that.
And then because I was essentially unemployable in the 1980s,
I found that the only place that had an interest in taking on my talents was the Australian Foreign Service.
And eventually, I ended up in Beijing.
As one of their better Chinese linguists at the time, they did send me to Sweden first just to make sure I would lose my language.
What year were you in Beijing at that time?
In Beijing from 84 through until virtually the beginning of 87.
Showing 1–20 of 641 · page 1 of 33
Next →