There’s something almost ritualistic about Kevin Rudd’s announcement of a push for an Asia-Pacific Union. Labor has been obsessed with multilateral regional architecture since the 1980s and Rudd sounded positively Hawke-like when he intoned “we need to have a vision for an Asia-Pacific community, a vision that embraces a regional institution, which spans the entire Asia-Pacific region — including the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region.”

As if, on cue, Greg Sheridan — who, for those who find him drearily right wing these days, was a dogged supporter of Keating’s foreign policy agenda — popped up in The Australian to make the link with the previous Labor Government.

The Coalition, too, responded as if reading from the same scripts of years gone by, with Andrew Robb emphasising bilateral relationships over this multilateral nonsense.

A more plausible goal for Rudd would be to try to transform APEC from a giant talkfest that is far too large to play any effective role, into a body with some capacity for achieving outcomes in realistic areas, like regulatory harmonisation, rather than the big-picture stuff suggested by invoking the European Union. But that would probably mean getting rid of APEC and starting again with a smaller, more coherent grouping. Now THAT would be visionary.