Downer slams Obama's Nobel gong

Former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has slammed the decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize as a "political decision of gross stupidity".

Mr Downer, who served as Foreign Minister for 11 years until the Howard Government was tipped out of office in 2007, used his regular Adelaide Advertiser newspaper column to pour scorn on the Nobel judges for bestowing the honour on Mr Obama just 8½ months into his presidency.

"This was a very bad decision and Barack Obama should have been man enough to refuse the prize. If he had, he would have helped preserve the integrity of the Nobel Peace Prize and also demonstrate a disarming degree of modesty," Mr Downer said.

"How could he have snatched the prize from such people as the great Zimbabwean humanitarian and champion of freedom, Morgan Tsvangiri, or the renowned Greg Mortenson, a former U.S. Army doctor who has set up schools for girls in tough, Taliban-dominated areas of Afghanistan.

"These people are real heroes; brave, decent, effective and modest contributors to a better world.

"Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, who mediated to end the civil war in Colombia, apparently was nominated, too. But he is not on TV every night so he cannot get it."

Mr Downer made it clear he did not blame Mr Obama himself for the situation, but said the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, made up of a small group of five Norwegian politicians, had shown an appalling degree of patronisation.

Mr Downer also raked over some old political wounds, noting that the chairman of the peace price committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, was the Norwegian foreign minister at the height of the Tampa affair, which sorely tested diplomatic relations between Australia and Norway.

"One cold Canberra night I was snug in bed when my phone rang at 2am. It was foreign minister Jagland," Mr Downer said.

"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."