You cannot help a fool

Alexander Downer was Minister for Foreign Affairs in Australia from 1996 to 2007.

Alexander Downer calls the head of the Nobel Committee, Torbjørn Jagland, a fool and says it is no surprise that Jagland was the man who decided that Barack Obama should get the 2009 Peace Prize.

SELECTING President Barack Obama for the Peace Prize was a political decision of gross stupidity.

.....So who exactly is on this committee which selects the Nobel Prize for Peace?

There are five Norwegian MPs on the committee, three from the left and two from the right. There is a woman called Sissel Ronbeck, who is a Labour MP. In her earlier years she was the chairman of the Norwegian Workers Youth League. Then there is Ms Agot Valle, of the Socialist Left Party. There is a Conservative and a member of the libertarian Progress Party. And then there's the chairman, the most important of all the members of the committee. He is a man called Thorbjorn Jagland.

Mr Jagland was once prime minister of Norway and became the foreign minister. He is a member of the Norwegian Labour Party.

In 2001, you will recall there was a standoff between the Australian Government and a Norwegian ship, the Tampa. The Tampa had picked up several people who were trying to get to Australia from Indonesia. The Government told the Tampa it had to take the people to Indonesia, that is, back to where they came from. The ship's captain, on instructions from Norway's then government, said it would not. They had to land in Australia.

One cold Canberra night I was snug in bed when my phone rang at 2am. It was foreign minister Jagland. I politely told him it was a little late for me although, no doubt, a pleasant early evening in Oslo. He started shouting. He hardly needed a phone from Norway. He "ordered" me to accept the ship into an Australian port. I politely explained our policy about stopping people smugglers and said the asylum seekers would be safe in Indonesia where they would be processed by the UNHCR. Not good enough, he yelled. The Tampa was going to land them in Australia. I told him it was not. It did not.

This Thorbjorn Jagland was a real party-political player. He was Labour, we were Liberal. He good, we bad. What a surprise; the same man has made the worst decision in Nobel Peace Prize history as he hated George W. Bush and Barack Obama is an African-American. He has done real damage to the institution. You cannot help a fool.

Read more here: Obama should give back Nobel Prize

PS: Most Norwegians agree with Alexander Downer.

Do not take the Nobel Committee too seriously

Think about it: The Nobel Committee consists of five Norwegians, selected by the Norwegian parliament. In his will, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish dynamite tycoon who thought up this whole thing, specifically wanted Norwegians to choose the winner, apparently because Norwegians, being outside the European mainstream, would be less likely to be politically corrupt. The trouble is that Norwegians, being outside the European mainstream, are also more likely to be eccentric. Norway is a wonderful country and Norwegians have some of the highest living standards in the world -- thanks to their low population numbers and their large deposits of oil and gas – but the last time I was there, I got in an argument with someone over which country was more evil, the United States or North Korea. This being a few years ago, at the height of the Bush Terror, you can guess which side the Norwegian was on.

Perhaps as a result of their eccentricity, the five Norwegians who choose the Nobel Peace Prize winner have made quite a few odd decisions over the years. Look at the most recent American winners. In what sense did Al Gore, whatever you think about his movie on global warming, fulfill the wishes of Alfred Nobel, who wanted his money to go to "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”? Jimmy Carter won it in 2002, presumably for his skill in being an ex-president; I’m not sure where he created much peace or reduced any standing armies in the decades after he left the White House, either. The Nobel Peace Prize, like all prizes, is a roll of the dice, and thus it does sometimes go to apparently deserving people – Martin Luther King Jr. won it, as did the 14th Dalai Lama – but a lot of times it doesn’t. Mahatma Gandhi never won it, but Yasser Arafat did. Need I say more?

Read more here: Why Should We Care About the Nobel?