New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has vowed to sign a
global pact on climate change and to negotiate to withdraw
frontline troops from Iraq after an emphatic national election win
on the weekend.
The Labor leader ascended to the nation's top post after his
party secured a majority of 24 in the country's 150-seat lower
house to oust long-serving conservative leader John Howard, a
staunch ally of U.S. President George W. Bush, in Saturday's
Federal ballot.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao sent a message of congratulations to
Rudd Sunday.
A national swing of about 5.5 percent delivered the formidable
majority to Rudd's center-left party after the Liberal-National
coalition led by Howard, 68, had held a 16-seat advantage ahead of
the poll.
"Today, Australia has looked to the future," Rudd, Australia's
26th prime minister, said during his acceptance speech in his home
city of Brisbane in the northern state of Queensland Saturday
night.
"Today, the Australian people have decided we as a nation will
move forward, to plan for the future, to embrace the future and,
together as Australians, to unite and write a new page in our
nation's history.
"I say to all those who have voted for us today, I say to each
and every one of them that I will be a prime minister for all
Australians."
Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on limiting carbon emissions -
which the United States has also refused to sign - withdrawing
Australia's frontline troops from Iraq and scrapping the Howard
government's controversial industrial relations legislation were
high on Rudd's list of priorities at his first press conference as
national leader Sunday.
Earlier, the honors graduate in Putonghua and devout Christian
attended mass with his family.
Rudd, who served as first secretary at the Australian embassy in
Beijing in the 1980s, first struck a chord with voters earlier in
the year by proposing to upgrade Australia's substandard broadband
Internet capability.
This contrasted his "new-leadership" election pitch with the
status quo outlook of Howard's government, which only attacked
Rudd's plans to fund the popular project.
Rudd, 50, followed up the broadband initiative during the
six-week election campaign with a promise to focus on information
technology and foreign languages, especially Asian, to
revolutionize the country's education system.
In a further blow to Howard, voters appear to have endorsed a
former journalist over the grandfather to make him just the second
Australian prime minister to lose his seat. Howard had represented
the Sydney electorate of Bennelong for the past 34 years.
"I accept full responsibility for the coalition's defeat in this
campaign," Howard said during his concession speech at the same
Sydney hotel where he had celebrated four previous triumphs.
Defending his reign, the second longest in Australia's history,
the former Sydney lawyer noted he and his deputy, Treasurer Peter
Costello, had turned the deficit left by previous Labor governments
into a surplus, presided over consistent economic growth and
reduced unemployment to at a 33-year low.
"I leave the office of prime minister with our country prouder,
stronger and more prosperous than ever," Howard said shortly before
Costello informed him that he, too, would exit politics.
Besides his failure to match Rudd's progressive plans on
information technology and commitment to ratifying Kyoto, Howard's
chief undoing lay in the issue he had championed his entire career:
Industrial relations.
After winning control of the upper house of parliament in the
2004 poll, his government reformed Australia's labor market to
empower employers at the expense of workers' benefits such as
protection against unfair dismissal and penalty rates.
This policy saw members of parliament, especially those in
marginal seats, inundated with letters from disgruntled
constituents and generated a desire for a shift back to the
economic center.
Rudd staved off coalition efforts to portray him as subordinate
to once-powerful labor unions and sugestions Australia's 16 years
of uninterrupted growth would shudder to a halt if he tore up
Howard's much maligned "Work choices" legislation.
After appointing his Cabinet ministers later this week, which is
tipped to include a foreign minister who has pledged to foster
closer sporting and cultural links between Australia and China,
Rudd will get straight to work implementing his campaign promises
including leading a delegation to a UN climate change conference in
Indonesia next month.
Among his campaign commitments was the promise to withdraw
Australian troops from frontline duty in Iraq, no doubt a thorny
issue when Bush phoned to congratulate him Sunday.
"I emphasized to President Bush the centrality of the U.S.
alliance in our approach to foreign policy," Rudd said without
setting a date for withdrawal.
(China Daily via agencies November 26, 2007)
