The ahistorical nature of most Australian commentary means there is a vast ignorance about how globalist and how strategically shrewd so many of our prime ministers have been.

Alfred Deakin was a brilliant foreign policy innovator who convinced an uninterested nation to build a navy and who secured the first de facto security guarantees for Australia from US president Teddy Roosevelt.

Billy Hughes was a powerful and extremely assertive force at the Versailles peace negotiations after World War I. Indeed, towards the end of that war Australia was probably more globally important, in that its troops were players in the central battle in the central strategic conflict, than before or since.

John Curtin understood perfectly the strategic imperatives that needed to drive Australia closer to the US.

Harold Holt pioneered a new activism in Southeast Asia.

Gough Whitlam was promiscuously cosmopolitan and for a time served simultaneously as PM and foreign minister.

Bob Hawke was every inch a globalist, profoundly concerned with the Middle East, Africa and India.

Paul Keating (with a little help from Bill Clinton) created the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation heads of government meetings.

Howard played a central role in the global politics of the Iraq war and of climate change, and personally drove the US-Australia alliance to new levels of intimacy.

So, assertiveness in a prime minister is no aberration in Australia. However, Rudd has been influenced by one trend that makes him a bit different.

Throughout the Western world, all manner of government decisions, and certainly all foreign policy, are increasingly centralised in the office of the head of government. In Tony Blair's Britain, his advisers were notoriously more influential than cabinet ministers. Obama is in several critical areas bypassing the State Department and the Pentagon, and setting up personal envoys, such as Dennis Ross for Iran, George Mitchell for the Middle East and Richard Holbrooke for Pakistan and Afghanistan, who report directly to the White House. This is a trend Rudd relishes and has taken further than almost any Western leader.

Here, though, is a paradox of Rudd. He is the first professional diplomat to become an Australian prime minister and no PM has done more to denude and margninalise the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The government's midyear economic forecast disclosed a further $105 million cut in DFAT funds through the next four years. This follows a slash in the first Rudd budget that was somewhat reversed in the second.

It also follows a decade of savage under-resourcing of the department by the Howard government. DFAT today has a little more than 500 Australians in embassies and missions overseas. In 1986 the figure was 944. Australia has 91 overseas missions; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average is 150. The only OECD nations with fewer missions than Australia are Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovakia and New Zealand.

Rudd used to campaign against Howard's financial neglect of DFAT when he was in opposition. But in government he has found that he doesn't really need DFAT in its traditional guise. Its focus is more heavily on consular cases, travel arrangements for MPs and routine briefings. The heavy policy work has shifted to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the international sections of which have expanded while DFAT has withered.

In foreign policy, Rudd likes special envoys and old associates. This doesn't seem to be sentimental, but he feels confidence in people whose abilities he knows first hand.

DFAT has perhaps never stood lower in its influence on foreign policy, although help may be on the way. Rudd has appointed Dennis Richardson as its new head. This is very much a Rudd appointment, rather than one by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. If anyone can revive DFAT it is Richardson, as tough and shrewd and energetic a bureaucratic leader as any in Canberra.

Rudd is happy to overrule Smith, as he did when he vetoed the appointment of Hugh Borrowman as ambassador to Germany. And Smith has conspicuously failed to win any extra resources for DFAT. Nonetheless, Rudd and Smith have a good working relationship. They have never been close friends and were on different sides of most leadership battles in the Labor Party. But Smith understands that his effectiveness as Foreign Minister depends on his closeness to the PM.

Nonetheless, all the big initiatives come from Rudd.

For instance, he met Pope Benedict XVI and talked intensely about freedom of religion for Catholics in China. Rudd then made the bold decision to appoint a permanent ambassador to the Vatican. He chose Tim Fischer for the job.

Similarly, it was entirely Rudd's initiative to appoint Brendan Nelson ambassador to the European Union, although it was Smith's idea to appoint Kim Beazley to Washington, DC.

Rudd takes advantage of Australia's time zone to spend much of the evening phoning and texting his legion of contacts in the US, Europe and Asia. He doesn't always tell his ambassadors what he's doing. There is a lot of bureaucratic unhappiness about Rudd's ways. Paper moves slowly, decisions get held up, appointments are slow.

But these are all "inside the beltway" sorts of concerns, of almost no interest to the public. The much bigger question is whether Rudd makes the right decisions and gets the right results. On the evidence of the G20, he gets more right than wrong.