The International Monetary Fund (IMF) must give China a greater say if it wants to accurately reflect global economic reality in the 21st century, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in Melbourne on Sunday.

Rudd said he would raise the issue at the next month's G20 meeting in London and at his first meeting with US President Barack Obama this week in Washington.

He said that if China was expected to play a major part in IMF efforts to revive the global economy, it deserved a vote that reflected its economic status.

"Everyone is expecting China to put its money on the table, that's fine," Rudd told Channel Nine television.

"But you know in the IMF, China's voting rights are currently the same as those of Belgium and the Netherlands.

"Now let's just get up with the realities of the 21st century."

Rudd said Australia would take a raft of proposals to the G20 meeting aimed at increasing the organization's funding and making it more flexible.

He said a reformed IMF would have greater scope to prevent "second wave" crises arising from the global recession.

"It could occur if you've got a huge implosion in the economy say in Central and Eastern Europe or elsewhere in the developing world, which then washes back into the world's major banks again, and that affects all of us, quite apart from those countries themselves," he said.

"So what do you do about it? The International Monetary Fund ... needs to have more resources than it's currently got, more flexibility than it's currently got, to intervene early with those emerging crises."

The IMF was formed in 1944 to oversee the international monetary system and provide temporary financing to struggling countries.

By People’s Daily Online