By Phillip Coorey
You can take the boy out of the bureaucracy but you cannot take the bureaucrat out of the boy. This was confirmed in Britain at the weekend. While Australia slept, Kevin Rudd was rubbing shoulders with more than a dozen like-minded political leaders at the Grove Hotel, in Hertfordshire, outside London.
The Grove, which is annexed to a magnificent, yet on this occasion sadly unused, golf course, was the host venue for the two-day Progressive Governance Conference.
The conference is an organisation of centre-left political leaders established in 1999 by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and is similar to the conservative International Democratic Union, of which John Howard is currently the chairman.
Clinton was at the Grove on the weekend. Blair was not, although Rudd does plan to see him before leaving Britain for China on Tuesday.
Also present at the eclectic gathering were the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and New Zealand's Helen Clark, plus the leaders of Chile, Norway, South Africa, Liberia, Ghana, Austria, Italy and Slovakia. Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation, was another participant.
Rudd was in heaven as he and the others swapped ideas and solutions on climate change, global free trade, soaring world food prices and the global economic crisis and ways to prevent it happening again.
So much so that he subconsciously embarked on such a bout of diplo-babble that it made others sit up and notice.
Ever since Washington, where Rudd cooly dropped the acronym CSBM (confidence- and security-building measures) during an address to foreign policy wonks at the Brookings Institution, collecting examples of what Rudd calls "geek talk" has become a trip favourite.
At the NATO summit in Bucharest, where Rudd spoke of war in terms of establishing and measuring performance benchmarks, the ABC's Louise Yaxley asked him whether the leaders had streamlined the rules of engagement that apply to the NATO soldiers.
"You mean RoEs," said Rudd.
"Yes, I mean rules of engagement," said Yaxley.
At the Grove, Rudd's acronym use hit near-fatal levels as he rattled off - always without explanation - EWS (early-warning system), RTP (right to protect), CCS (carbon capture and storage), and IFIs (pronounced iffeys, international financial institutions).
The ripper came when he chaired the session on climate change, reminding each speaker to keep their contribution to three minutes. When the first speaker easily exceeded three minutes, Rudd tried to crack a joke as he warned Jens Stoltenberg of Norway, who was up next: "Jens, if you go beyond three minutes, your ODA goes up 0.1 per cent."
No one laughed or said anything, either because it was possibly the unfunniest joke ever told or it took a good while for everyone to work out what ODA meant (overseas development aid).
In the media tent, where the journos where watching the action unfold on giant screens, passions began to stir.
"Jerry Seinfeld has got a whole riff on ODAs," droned one bloke from the BBC (that's British Broadcasting Corporation).
At one stage, Rudd let this fly: "The parallel ideological synergies, vis-a-vis the development opportunity momentum in our own constituencies … that's where the low-hanging fruit lies."
And this: "Let's proceed on parallel tracks between an open chicken market and an open carbon market."
James Kirkup, who writes a blog for Britain's The Daily Telegraph, was already in a bad mood after having to get out of bed on a Saturday and drive to the freezing cold venue to keep an eye on Gordon Brown.
Kirkup thought his bloke was boring until he saw Rudd and Clark, both of whom appeared alongside Brown in a plenary session on Friday.
"The jamboree actually began last night, though sadly I missed the orgy of charisma that was the joint appearance between GB, Kevin Rudd of Australia and Helen Clark of New Zealand," he wrote.
"One witness suggests the antipodeans were chosen because their coma-inducing lack of presence made our Prime Minister look positively Clintonesque in comparison."
To her credit, Clark provided a rare highlight by pointing out that about half of her country's greenhouse gas emissions were "pastural emissions" (flatulent livestock, not vicars).
It takes a special skill to stand out as boring at a show where others' statements, such as "crisis is fertile ground for multilateral renewal" and "multilateralism works best when we don't notice it - think of air-traffic control", cause people to nod their heads in admiration and understanding.
In his defence, Rudd was never elected because he was exciting. More because he was regarded as a safe pair of hands, unspectacular even.
And to him, that's as easy as ABC.