Australian PM please explain? In Mandarin ...

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivers a speech at the Peking University in Beijing April 9, 2008. Rudd may have wowed China with his fluent Mandarin, but his obtuse, jargon-laced native English frequently leaves fellow countrymen scratching their heads in bewilderment.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may have wowed China with his fluent Mandarin, but his obtuse, jargon-laced native English frequently leaves fellow countrymen scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Australian newspapers this week took Rudd to task, calling the former diplomat "policy obsessed", and decrying his reliance on "diplo-babble" and acronyms.

"Sometimes, it seems he fabricates a language all of his own. As he speaks, he does unspeakable things to the English language," said Sunday Age newspaper senior columnist Tom Hyland.

Rudd won praise on Thursday for giving a speech in perfect Mandarin at an elite Chinese university, where he delivered a sometimes blunt message on human rights and Tibet.

But Australian newspapers said the message in Beijing contrasted sharply with his use of the English language.

Papers seized on a climate change comment by Rudd after a recent meeting with Britain's prime minister as an example of his "geek talk".

"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," Rudd told perplexed journalists.

The Sydney Morning Herald said: "You can take the boy out of the bureaucracy but you cannot take the bureaucrat out of the boy", citing Rudd's frequent use of acronyms like EWS (early-warning system), RTP (right to protect) and CCS (carbon capture and storage).

(Editing by David Fox and Michael Perry)