Rudd made the offer during a 20-minute telephone conversation conducted in Mandarin in which the new Australian leader also accepted Wen's invitation to attend next year's Olympic Games in Beijing, the Australian newspaper said.

Rudd assured Wen "he is willing to act as an intermediary between China and the developed world," the paper said quoting an unidentified government source.

The conversation marks the first time Rudd, who was sworn in Monday after winning an election landslide on November 24, has held detailed discussions with another world leader since taking power, the paper said.

Wen called the Chinese-speaking former diplomat Rudd "to congratulate him on his decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions," the Australian said.

"The Chinese Premier also sought Mr Rudd's cooperation in future talks on the issue of climate change," according to the national daily newspaper.

Rudd's first official act as prime minister was to sign an order for Australia to ratify Kyoto, a treaty which his predecessor John Howard and US president George W. Bush have refused to embrace.

The contact with Wen gives Rudd a major boost in his bid to take on a global leadership role in the battle against climate change, which is playing out at a major UN conference in Bali that Rudd will attend next week.

China, along with other developing countries, is under massive pressure from Europe to agree to binding emissions cuts at the talks aimed at setting a timetable for negotiations on a new post-Kyoto global climate change pact.

Rudd told the Sydney Morning Herald's website he intended to use Australia's new position as a member of the Kyoto club to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries on future emissions controls.

"I fully recognise the difficulty of this because the distance between those two positions at present is enormous, but this is a gap which Australia in the past could not even hope to begin to bridge because we were not at the negotiating table at all in a substantive way," Rudd said.

Rudd has said his government will not sign a new pact, which will kick in after Kyoto's current provisions expire in 2012, unless it sets emissions targets for developing nations and major polluters such as China and India.

Earlier Thursday, Rudd denied his government would support emission cuts of of between 25 and 40 percent for developing nations by 2020, despite reports that Australian officials had publicly embraced the plan in Bali on Wednesday.

The European Union has pledged to commit to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2020 if the rich world follows suit, while nations such as the United States refuse to do so.

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