Kevin Rudd's worst comeback since his last one

 

It's a precarious business, deciding when to make your comeback from disgrace and defeat. Wait too long and nobody remembers you or cares what you did for good or ill. Check yourself out of the sin bin too quickly and the angry mob which tossed you in there are still hanging around with pitchforks and burning branches.

I fear the return of Kevin Rudd was not well timed and the event – a TED Talk on the possibility of war between the US and China – was poorly chosen.

On the matter of timing, a good comeback is best deferred until the mess you made has been cleaned up. Mr Hugh Grant the English thespian, undone by his appetites and the big mouth of a talkative prostitute, did not immediately hop from the seat of his white sports car onto the confessional couch of Mr Jay Leno's The Tonight Show. He at least took some time to have the upholstery cleaned.

Since we remain mired in the sticky mess of the Abbott era, it hardly seems fair that the man who did so much to bring us here should turn up looking so well pleased with himself. Mr Rudd appears in his TED Talk looking like a nicely steamed pork bun, white, fluffy, soft around the edges and perhaps a little heavier than you were expecting.

The topic at least promised some entertainment, if not enlightenment. This was after all the former PM who had described the Chinese government as ratf--kers while he was still in office and was presumably constrained in his sentiments by the nuclear arsenal of the People's Liberation Army. With the yoke of office removed what might he say?

Unfortunately, not much besides a couple of reheated dad jokes and the sort self aggrandising humblebrags that made me cringe so hard I collapsed into an embarrassed singularity. . We learned yet again that his Chinese teachers gave him the name 'Kevin the Conqueror' and try as he might the Conqueror could not be nearly as self deprecating as he needed to be about this because there was a large part of him that found it entirely appropriate.

Two or three minutes spent condensing China's grievances with the West into a couple of sound bites were very TED-like and even useful. But then we veered into the danger zone of the 'Thucydides Trap' and Rudd's recommendations for frameworks of "constructive realism for a common purpose" and superfans in the audience were suddenly crying out, "Do programmatic specificity, Kevern!" It might not have mattered that fully half the talk wasn't about US-China relations, but rather the Return of the Conqueror, if the Conqueror had been even a little bit chastened by the undeniable fact of the exile which occasioned his return. It seemed for one brief shining moment that he might repent, when telling his north American audience that he had a little experience back home with "how you try to bring together two peoples who frankly haven't had a whole lot in common in the past".

Was this it? Was he about to explain why he trashed two Labor governments? Was he about to seek forgiveness from the Julia Gillard and all those disappointed Labor voters?

Nope. He just rambled on and on about how he reconciled black and white Australia before coming all Deepak Chopra and asking the two hyper powers of the 21st century to examine their feelings, to follow the heart and to dream a dream for all human kind. Even returned Conquerors. John Birmingham