Mr. World: Kevin Rudd

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Photograph for TIME by David Dare Parker

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A Man Apart

Rudd's popularity — in polls, he has an enormous lead over Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party — is at first sight surprising. After more than 17 years of sustained growth, Australia is flirting with recession; the economy grew just 0.4% in the first three months of 2009. And for a nation that often measures a leader by whether he's the kind of bloke with whom you'd want to have a beer, Rudd comes across as more buttoned-up than many of his predecessors. Talking to TIME, he dropped in a casual reference to Burke (that would be Edmund, the conservative philosopher, not Robert, the doomed Australian explorer). His Twitter feeds — a sample from April 14: "Working hard in sunny Canberra today" — have been mocked as terminally boring.

Yet working a crowd of working-class Australians near Perth, Rudd isn't as stiff as he's sometimes portrayed. In moments of crisis, his emotions resonate. When wildfires, some sparked by arsonists, ravaged drought-ridden Victoria earlier this year, killing more than 170 people, Rudd broke down on camera, momentarily speechless as he blinked back tears. Angrily, he equated arson with "mass murder." And he knows how to combat bureaucratic timidity with the power of grand gestures. Two of his first actions after taking office were making a landmark apology to Aborigines who were essentially stolen as children from their families, and putting Australia's signature on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which Howard, like his pal George W. Bush, had declined to do. (See pictures of the deadly wildfires in Australia.)

Rudd's next initiative is equally expansive. A year ago, he proposed the formation, by 2020, of a new Asia-Pacific Community that would bind the U.S. and Asia together in a regional security forum that would encourage stability in what Rudd says is still a "brittle part of the world." The bloc would build on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) birthed and nurtured by his Labor predecessors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In 2008, Rudd's proposal sounded like a pipe dream. Today, he argues, the need for such a grouping is all the more important because the global financial crisis underlines how individual countries, even supremely powerful ones, cannot rely on go-it-alone approaches. "I am acutely conscious of what happens when you simply allow things to drift to unrestrained nationalism," Rudd told TIME. "[I want to] avoid long-term strategic drift, avoid the possibility of America drifting away from Asia." And, as an Australian, he believes he has the power of "a creative middle-power diplomacy [that is] friends of all, enemy of none."

Rudd's proposal creates a neat triangle that joins him with Obama and Hu. There is, to be sure, a certain amount of ego involved in his vision. But it also speaks to a general truth about Australian identity. "Australians really do want to exert maximum effort to be taken seriously in the world," says William Tow, an expert on Australia's Asia-Pacific relations at the Australian National University in Canberra. The Lowy Institute's Fullilove puts it another way: "Australians are joiners. We're always thinking about what new international organizations can be established so that we can join them."

The Push — and Pull — of Asia

Raised on a dairy farm in rural Queensland, Rudd might seem an unlikely global citizen. But as a child avoiding work in the cowshed, he would retire to the farthest reaches of the farm with a book on Asian archaeology. Rudd majored in Asian studies in college. Diplomatic postings in Sweden and China followed, and his internationalism captured a changing national mood. For the better part of two centuries, Australia's self-perception was that of a chunk of the West that unaccountably found itself floating in the South Pacific. Today, China is Australia's largest trading partner, with Japan second and four other Asian nations rounding out the top 10.

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