At first, Rudd stunned his assailant with a burst of trademark jibber jabber that was supposed to pass for explanation.

Then the coup de grace: "Now we must cut our cloth to make sure it fits and that applies to the totality of the budget."

Only recently did this column poke fun at Rudd's tendency to use language that either makes no sense or few people comprehend. Thursday's program - in effect a live, one-hour press conference conducted by the public - exposed to a wider audience just how brilliantly he does it.

People like Baden Eunson have been studying Rudd for a lot longer. For him, the Prime Minister is a gift.

Eunson, a writing lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, is completing a PhD in Plain English and Jargon.

"Rudd has all these multiple personas and they keep fighting with each other," he told the Herald recently.

One of Eunson's chief criticisms of the Prime Minister is his tendency to turn a verb into a noun, thus forcing him to then find another verb to drive the new noun.

For example, rather than say "we will implement the policy next month", Rudd would say "we will be finalising the implementation of the policy next month".

Rudd is hardly alone in this category. Canberra, especially the public service, is full of wafflers. At the 2020 Summit last month, as the groups were told to wrap up their sessions, this column saw one sub-group from the governance session seriously proposing as its big idea:

"To engage the Australian community in the development of an ambitious long-term national strategic plan with accompanying benchmarks and measurable outcomes."

Meaningless rubbish that Eunson said was always going to be the end product of a summit during which many participants complained about language being diluted of all meaning. Gatherings of more than 15 people were always dangerous, he said. So the summit, with its 1000 participants, was doomed.

"Often the person who has the best idea is introverted and doesn't speak," Eunson said.

One of Eunson's favourite tools is what is known as the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula, a program that purports to calculate how many years of formal education one needs to understand certain phrases, speeches or written texts.

It was developed in the US to help educators and parents judge the readability level of various books and texts.

Eunson said it is a crude but consistent program that basically operates by factoring in syllables, words and sentences. The more syllables there are, the harder the text is to remember.

After Rudd was in England last month and chaired the climate change session at the Progressive Governance Conference, Eunson tested the following prime ministerial offering:

"There has to be a greater synergy between, let's call it our policy leadership in this - which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets - and global architecture almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes."

The Flesch-Kincaid program calculated that needed 18.5 years of education - that's post-doctoral - to understand.

Another speech Rudd gave on that trip - a foreign policy speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington DC - was also pilloried at the time for its overt appeal to the pointy heads.

Eunson said elements of the speech peaked at 19 in Flesch-Kincaid but averaged 10.5 - that of an intermediate high school student.

The average reading standard in Australia ranges between that of a year 8 and a year 9 student and it is this level of readability that most politicians, communicators and, indeed, newspapers, target.

"[John] Howard was as boring as batshit but there was intelligence there," Eunson said of the former prime minster's ability to mix it with the folk.

Rudd tries to do it by sprinkling his speeches with what Eunson calls "dinky-dis" and "ockerisms".

For example, in his speech to the NSW Labor conference on May 4, Rudd repeatedly used "Chif" instead of Ben Chifley, and at one stage tried to be hip by saying: "We have been in office barely five months and we've not exactly been sitting on our dig."

An example of the competing multiple personas, the public servant versus the politician, Eunson said.

Rudd, he believes, needs to dramatically improve his communications skills.

"He sounds like the head prefect reading The Man From Snowy River.

Source: smh.com.au