Reborn Rudd loves the old conventions Prime ministers are rather structured creatures, on the whole. But their unguarded moments often convey the flavour of what they'd rather be doing. If prime ministers had time machines, where would they end up? John Howard, one imagines, might dial up August 1882, to enjoy Fred "The Demon" Spofforth's exhilarating demolition of the Poms at London's The Oval, in the match that gave birth to The Ashes. Julia Gillard ... it's hard to say, although there would be a temptation to repair to 1960s Nambour, armed with something blunt. But this past week has left us in no doubt where Kevin Rudd would go: Geneva, July 1951. It was in this month that the United Nations negotiated - at a special conference - the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UNHCR website records fragments of that Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons, an event that sounds about the closest thing to Kevin Heaven as you'll find on this earthly promontory. The "travaux preparatoires" (preparatory papers) alone are the sorts of documents that would have, on our PM, roughly the same effect that a sheaf of 8x10 lightly clad Christina Hendricks glossies might have on the less diplomatically minded heterosexual Aussie bloke. Despite the regrettable initial handicap of having been finalised six years before Rudd was even born, the Refugee Convention has battled along now for 62 years, more or less unmolested beyond the gradual addition of member countries, the newest of which is Nauru (2011). But in recent weeks, as the reinstalled Ruddbot has resisted the entreaties of his closest advisers to proceed directly to an election, maintaining there are one or two things he would like to tinker with first, it has become very clear that the premier international instrument guiding the movement of displaced people worldwide through countless wars and disasters is one of those things. The Prime Minister intends to engage, in a multilateral way, with refugee source countries, transit countries and asylum countries in order to revisit the assumptions underpinning, and interpretive orthodoxies surrounding, the 1951 convention, and achieve a methodical and calmly thought out resolution to the escalating incidence of unauthorised arrivals to our shores. Ideally by next week. This development provides some useful clues to the widely asked question: "Has this man changed?" It also hints at an exciting, internationally themed successor to Rudd's famed 2020 Summit - a 1951 Summit, to be staged in Canberra post-election. The 1951 Summit will be presided over by Rudd, re-elected, reinvigorated, and imbued with a special aura of confidence by the Pyongyangian invulnerability to collegiate insubordination that was one of the other things his recent tinkerings accomplished. At the 1951 Summit - staged on the banks of Canberra's "Just like Geneva's, Only Smaller and More Artificial" Lake Burley Griffin - chaps in celluloid visors and ladies will toil through the night over the preparatory memoranda, while the smoky bars will be full of gossip about the likely fate of the Rosenbergs, the ANZUS Treaty, and the fascinating new novel The Catcher In the Rye. Ridiculous? No more so than any of the other putative solutions our political system has coughed up in recent years. Plus, it might give Rudd a fighting chance of beating Menzies. Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott (who would probably also choose to time-travel back to 1882, but to spend leisure time with Howard) countered with his own diplomatic reinterpretation of what an emissions trading scheme is. "This is not a true market ... It's a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one," he instructed reporters. Abbott's colleagues, who tend towards protectiveness where their leader is concerned, have not yet told him about the derivatives market, lest it shock him too deeply. His struggles with the concept of a colourless gas being tradable at an international level are a matter of record. The Coalition's policy, of course, is far less innately foolish. It will pay large industries directly for their non-delivery of the same invisible substance. It will also pay farmers - and anyone else with an entrepreneurial spirit/sense of the ridiculous - handsome sums to bury 85 million tonnes of invisible substance in the ground every year. Which should at the very least be visually diverting; which is something. In the end, of course, neither Rudd nor Abbott is in a position to comment reliably on largely imaginary marketplaces based on regular gaseous exhanges of vast expense but little actual value in the real world. That's their day job, after all. Annabel Crabb is the host of Kitchen Cabinet, which screens at 8pm Tuesdays on ABC1. She tweets as @annabelcrabb.