Kevin Rudd has described Donald Trump’s cuts to support for green industries as “unfortunate”, warning that Australians would conclude the clean transition was “bullshit” if it did not offer tangible benefits to their lives.

But – in some of his first comments since finishing his term as Australia’s ambassador to the US – the former prime minister said climate policies would have staying power if they delivered affordable prices, a reliable energy supply and new job opportunities.

“Policy continuity will be supported if we continue not just good messaging about this, but actually deliver price outcomes, security of supply, electricity supply outcomes, new industries and new jobs, which people touch, see, feel, hear and have in their daily experience.

“Otherwise, they conclude it’s all bullshit and therefore it doesn’t work,” he said, addressing the Melbourne launch of Power, Prosperity and Planet, a book by the former diplomat and Smart Energy Council international fellow Thom Woodroofe.

Now leading the New York-based Asia Society thinktank, Rudd said Australia should “seize the opportunity presented by what is now unfolding in Iran and the strait of Hormuz – and frankly the shock which working people across the world are now experiencing in terms of continued hydrocarbon dependency”.

“They are experiencing the physical terror of becoming insecure in their supply of what they need to drive to work if they’re still using a gasoline-based car,” Rudd said.

“If you’ve got an EV at the moment, or frankly, if you’ve got a hybrid, you are much less dependent on what comes out of the geopolitics of the Gulf at present.”

He said Australia had an “enormous comparative advantage” in green iron, steel and renewable energy due to its “vast slabs of real estate, vast amounts of sunshine” and proximity to export markets in south-east Asia.

Speaking at the same event, the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said “we’re in a position now where we can say to the people, you can have cheaper power, affordable power, reliable power with renewables. And that’s why nobody is building new coal power stations in Australia”.

The former Liberal leader described the Liberal party’s decision to preference One Nation in the Farrer byelection as “a retrograde move”, describing One Nation as “right out there in the climate change denial business”.

Rudd said the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was an example of trying to “thread the needle” between building the green industries of the future, delivering green energy to American working families and creating new green jobs.

For Biden and his team, “this was about driving the message home into the red states, into working families and creating new green jobs – so that when inevitably, political change occurred in Washington, it will be harder to pull it back”.

“Unfortunately, much of this has been pulled back. But if you go to the various states of the United States, including those in the south, there is enormous attachment still to the investments which came about under the [Inflation Reduction Act].

“It hasn’t been a complete flipback under President Trump, because the states have fought back.”

The message for Australian governments, he said, was to ensure policies delivered for “the good folks in communities right across Australia” in “their head, in their hearts and in their pocketbook”.

Rudd was a vocal critic of Trump prior to his appointment as US ambassador, describing him as the “most destructive president in history” in a 2020 social media post.