The American satirical composer Tom Lehrer famously commented that 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.'
A similar response would be tempting when confronted with the news that Phillip Ruddock has been appointed Australia's first Special Envoy to the United Nations on Human Rights.
This, after all, is a man who was publicly asked by Amnesty International not to wear its lapel badge from that organisation, the one who fronted the Tampa debacle for the government and who pioneered the original Pacific Solution on which the current (crueler) version has been built: including denial of access to legal services for detained asylum seekers and temporary protection visas for those seeking permanent protection.
Looking beneath the surface, however, the Australian government's message is clear, if not necessarily well thought through.
The United Nations Human Rights Council is hardly a spotless institution at the moment. Chaired by Saudi Arabia, that bastion of multireligious free speech and democracy, it includes among its members a number of countries (the UAE and Viet Nam stand out) whose history of protection of human rights is, to put it politely, somewhat patchy and certainly worse than that of Australia.
Why not enter into the spirit of things by appointing someone whose record on immigration and asylum — one of Australia's most neuralgic human rights areas and one on which it is most obviously deficient — is plain for all to see?
It is hard not to agree with David Tyler in seeing Ruddock's appointment as one in the eye for all those human rights do-gooders who are the first to cast a stone but who — at least in the case of the current council — have more than enough sins of their own to expunge.
If the appointment is about demonstrating the worthlessness of current international human rights protection structures (and the consequent hollowness of their criticisms of Australia), however, it is a rather short sighted one — both for Mr Ruddock in particular, and for Australia in general.
There is no doubt that human rights has been an issue dear to the new special envoy's heart, as evidenced during his work for Amnesty International in the 1980s and 1990s, even if the areas of immigration and refugee law subsequently marked a certain blind spot for him.
Now, however, if he attempts to raise the human rights records of other countries (many of which are much grimmer than Australia's)