“G’day, my name’s Kevin. I’m from Australia. I’m here to help.” With just three sentences of trademark hokeyness, Kevin Rudd swept aside the unpleasant matter of the Australian Labor party’s recent history, taking us all back to the time before the backflips, the acrimony, the white-anting, the spills, and the sweary YouTube videos. It was like he’d never left.

Suddenly, we were once more in a time when John Howard was on the wane and the odds of Tony Abbott becoming PM were still comfortably remote. A time when Rudd and Joe Hockey were the nation’s cool TV uncles. A time when Australian politics may not have been able to sustain hope, exactly, but was at least conducive to a minimal degree of optimism.

On Thursday, Rudd was helping Ted, and by implication the world, with suggestions as to how China and the US could peacefully co-exist throughout the coming century. It seems like a big topic for a 20-minute talk, but only to those of us who lack the requisite ambition and self-esteem.

For Rudd, it was a new stage on which to play the old China hand. He performed live calligraphy. He offered asides in Mandarin. (Remember when he showed Howard up at Apec? Those were the days.) We heard, once more, about how his Chinese teacher had given him a new name that translated to “conquerer of the classics”: it was classic Kè Wén. “People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interested in learning Chinese?” Before you had time to wonder once again whether that had ever really happened, he was off, and the years were melting away.

Kevin Rudd’s TED Talk, ‘Are China and US doomed to conflict?’

On the way to clueing us in on how to manage the inevitable conflicts between rising and declining powers, he pulled out every trick in his rhetorical book. There was Kevin Asking The Question That Only Kevin Can Answer (“Guess what? The economic historians tell us…”) There were hayseed tales of his back-country childhood. (“Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with…”) There were daddish, self-effacing anecdotes that made everything awkward. (“In fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm…”)

But what really completes a Rudd speech are the convolutions and missteps. At Ted, he gave us the full routine. With “I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to bring together two peoples” we got the meander with half-pike. In “The really serious pooh-bahs”, we saw the backward somersaulting anachronism. And “before pride, there always comes a fall” was a perfect execution of a Rudd specialty, the reverse platitude.

Just when seasoned Rudd-watchers were getting ready to award full marks, Rudd exceeded himself. It was Ted! He had slides! They looked like a lot they had been designed on the default Powerpoint template from Windows 98, but perhaps he was trying to avoid distraction.

Many of them contained the wisdom of sages other than Rudd. “You see that bloke? He’s French. His name is Napoleon” was how we were introduced to another politician whose luck ran out. “This guy up here? He’s not Chinese and he’s not American. He’s Greek. His name’s Thucydides”. A man who, like Rudd in his own estimation, was a “very good student of history”. The permutations of national origin were inexhaustible. “This guy here? He’s not American and he’s not Greek. He’s Chinese…”

Then he came to the point, and it was refreshingly un-Ted-like. This is the province of the counterintuitive: the clever geek with a new take on the numbers, the surprisingly simple solution to [problem] that no one had ever thought of, the exposé of the hidden evidence that things are much better than we thought. These are the conventions, and frequently they provide a cover for mere glibness.

But Rudd’s remedy was solid, sensible and unspectacular. He laid out the reasons for the mutual hostility of two great nations, and said that they should solve it by talking to each other more. As nations, they should engage in a spirit of “constructive realism”, and work on establishing frameworks of cooperation. And citizens could work towards the same goal in quieter, and no less significant ways: “next time you meet someone from China, sit down and have a conversation”. Australia, he said, would “buy the drinks”.

The example he gave to show that humane engagement works was the proudest piece of his legacy: the apology to Indigenous Australians. For a moment, you wondered whether the analogy was an appropriate one. The relationship between settlers and a colonised people in the same nation is surely different to that between two nuclear-armed superpowers?

But there was an underlying wisdom there, related to the redress of humiliation and brutality for one side, and the repentance of arrogance on the other. A change of heart – in other words, a change in the structure of our political passions and affections – can shift seemingly intractable political problems. To talk properly to China, the west needs to lose some of its pride, and see itself for a moment through Chinese eyes.

Ted’s motto is “ideas worth spreading”. Whether or not you think “constructive realism” is spreadable, it’s surely an idea. Perhaps that’s where the rush of nostalgia came from. Whether or not he was always able to live up to his ideas, Rudd was never short of them. How many have you heard lately, from either side of politics?

Can we afford to let such ideas go to waste? Can we find a place for them? It’s worth remembering that when in office, the late Malcolm Fraser did far worse things to the country, its constitution and its politics than Rudd ever managed. Despite all that, he died a beloved figure of the liberal left.

With Rudd, we still tend to look for his angle, and to wonder which job he’s auditioning for now. But we should see that his relative youth, his platform and his skills equip him to do some good in the world, and he’s not going to stop trying to insert himself into weighty matters.

Is it still too soon? Or can we put aside the awkwardness, the ego, the self-defeating disloyalty, the hopes and opportunities he squandered, and chalk Ted 2015 up as the first, halting step towards Kevin Rudd’s redemption?