Among his circle of influential Chinese and expatriate friends in Beijing, Kevin Rudd was being talked up as Australia's next prime minister well before he bounced Kim Beazley out of Labor's top job.
Rudd has been a regular visitor to the Chinese capital for many years but with increasing frequency in the past several, often squired around by the businessman now at the centre of an Opposition parliamentary fishing expedition, Ian Tang.
Tang heads up Beijing AustChina Technology, a China-based company which started out in telecommunications and is now behind a massive redevelopment of the famous Friendship Store in the centre of the Chinese capital.
Rudd gave a speech at the company's launch of the redevelopment project in Beijing in mid-2006, with Australian Embassy and Austrade officials also in attendance.
Rudd's extra-casual acknowledgment this week of Tang as "this guy" he'd known for "quite some time" and with whom he had had a quick post-election catch-up in "Brizzy" "10 or 15 minutes, cup of coffee, hello, how are you", as he put it doesn't quite capture the extent of the relationship. Tang's subsidiary company Beijing AustChina Investment and Development Pty Ltd paid for Rudd to travel to China in 2006, with a sweep through the United States, Britain and Sudan on the way. The same year, it also paid for now-Treasurer Wayne Swan to travel to China and Hong Kong and for now Agriculture Minister and formerly shadow immigration minister Tony Burke to take multiple trips. In all, Tang paid for 16 trips for Labor politicians.
Declaring the travel in the register of parliamentary interests, Swan and Burke revealed very similar itineraries. In fact, the wording declaring receipt of a gift in Hong Kong was identical.
In the register's newest chapter covering the second part of 2007 and tabled in Parliament on Monday, Rudd declares gifts which presumably derive from his meetings at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney a leather stationery box and platinum Cross pen from the United States President and a porcelain vase from the Chinese President. He also received a $690 bottle of 1986 Grange Hermitage from, yes, AustChina Technology Ltd.
The Opposition has been poking about in all of this trying to suggest something untoward in the Rudd-Tang relationship.
There is absolutely no evidence of Tang being involved in anything improper. He appears to be a successful Chinese businessman applying all the principles of successful Chinese business. And Rudd, a superb networker, applies a few of them himself. China is networking central.
So, the Coalition wants to be very careful.
But one interesting question keeps arising in relation to AustChina paying for all those trips. Why?
Perhaps it's worth looking at the sequence of events.
Rudd, who Tang was describing to everyone who would listen as the next prime minister, was in Beijing in July 2006, and not for the first time that year. Swan, a fellow Queenslander who Rudd would ultimately make his Treasurer, and Burke, an MP from New South Wales who might have been expected to be immigration minister, were there in the same September week, two months later.
On the day Burke flew out of Sydney bound for Manila, Beijing and Hong Kong for eight days at Tang's expense September 21, 2006 Beijing AustChina Technology made a $59,000 donation to the Australian Labor Party.
It made two more donations within weeks $50,000 on October 13 and $49,000 on October 23. These were not directed to the ALP national office but to the NSW branch.
NSW is, of course, the power base of Australia's Chinese community. It's also where Tang has his Australian subsidiary based, nominally, out of a house in the suburbs.
The Chinese community is so important to the NSW branch that it has a full-time staff member dedicated to maintaining relations.
In its pursuit of Rudd's connection with Tang, the Opposition has not raised much fuss about the donations. Glass houses are precarious places in which to reside.
Rudd's rejoinder to the Question Time grillings has been to point out that Tang also donated $155,000 to the National Party. The Australian Electoral Commission's register shows a donation of $99,980 to the Nationals, made on April 26 last year.
Rudd has also been waving a sheaf of letters, presumably supplied by Tang, which demonstrate the previous Coalition government's support for his company. They date back to 2001 and include one from then deputy prime minister and Nationals leader John Anderson.
Anderson wrote to Tang, then vice-president and director of PowerTong Network Technology Ltd, on March 16 of that year, thanking him for an invitation he had received to a signing ceremony relating to supply of fibre-optic cable.
Anderson accepted the invitation.
"I look forward to being able to support this venture," Anderson wrote. The following year, when then prime minister John Howard was in Beijing, Tang approached him at a business breakfast, shook his hand and said thanks.
"John Anderson helped our company," Tang said in a conversation picked up by a television microphone. "We've been given $25 million." So, multi-million dollar assistance from the Australian government to a Chinese company and then, five years later when it was in diabolical trouble on the eve of an election, it donates to the party of the man who facilitated it. Coincidence, surely.
Rudd has vowed to ban foreign donations to Australian political parties as part of his drive to clean up the rules on electoral donations. And after this week's questioning about his ties to Ian Tang, he has also hinted he may ban private sponsorship of MPs' travel, a phenomenon which is startlingly widespread, particularly among Opposition MPs, for whom there is effectively no travel budget.
It probably is time to take a look at this and at least see if a line can be drawn anywhere. Taxpayers may not be keen to fund more travel for politicians but in some cases it may be both justified and a better option than having them marching about with logos on their luggage, singing for their suppers at corporate gigs abroad.
Rightly or wrongly, when companies extend largesse to influential Australian politicians, well, you can jump to all kinds of conclusions.
Karen Middleton is chief political correspondent for SBS Television.
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