New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was dubbed Lu Kewen by
his Chinese teacher at the Australian National University (ANU)
almost three decades ago.
Now you'd be drawing a long bow to liken the erudite putonghua
speaker to Lu as in infantry, but ke and wen -- for overcome and
civilization -- may be more apt because Rudd has shattered
Australia's status quo by rolling the political edifice of John
Winston Howard both nationally and locally in the former PM's
electorate.
Yesterday Rudd, father-in-law to a Chinese Australian man, was
sworn in as Australia's 26th Prime Minister after ousting a
government that presided over uninterrupted growth for 11 years
while slashing unemployment to a 33-year low. The 50-year-old
leader turned a 16-seat deficit in Australia's 150-member lower
house into a whopping 20-seat majority for his center-left Labor
Party, leaving the country's conservative establishment convulsing
at the likely prospect of living at least six years in the
shadows.
Just like fretting ancients after a solar eclipse, the federal
Liberal-National coalition is now purging its ranks and policy
ideas after being trounced by a third-way politician with a finger
placed firmly on the pulse of the 21st century. "I am determined to
use the office of the prime minister to forge a new consensus,"
Rudd said last week after running on the slogan of "new
leadership".
"I want to put aside the battles of the past, the old battle
between business and unions, the old battle between growth and the
environment, the old and tired battle between federal and state,
between public and private." Highly educated yet sufficiently down
to earth to converse comfortably with middle Australia, Rudd's
ascent to the nation's top post just 11 months after assuming the
leadership of the Labor Party has been truly meteoric.
He only won a seat in Parliament two years into former Prime
Minister Howard's reign, in 1998, and was promoted to Labor's front
bench as foreign affairs spokesman in 2001.
Born to poor share-farmer parents in the sunshine state of
Queensland in 1957, Rudd's politics were forged early in life when,
at age 11, he lost his father. Afterwards the youngest of four
children looked on hopelessly as the family, unable to meet the
rent, was forced off the land.
Despite the setback Rudd excelled at a public high school where
he was a champion debater and dux - valid Victorian to Americans -
after joining the youth wing of the Labor Party. Later, he attended
the prestigious Australian National University (not far from the
country's Parliament House) and completed an honors degree in
Chinese politics and modern social movements, and mastered the
language too.
His studies led him to Australia's foreign office and postings
in Stockholm and Beijing, where according to one Australian
academic he perfected "foreigner's Mandarin".
A devout Christian who draws inspiration from German theologian
and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer's rebellion against Nazism, Rudd
captured Australians' imagination with a progressive policy
platform that, despite economic similarities, differentiated Labor
from the conservative government led by 68-year-old John
Howard.
The media-savvy Rudd, who is married to highly successful
businesswoman Therese Rein, underlined his attunement to issues
central to the Facebook and Myspace generation, such as climate
change and information technology, by courting them in their own
domain.
Previously, weekly appearances on a TV morning chat show, in
which he wielded a repertoire of light-hearted barbs during jousts
with a government minister, had made him a household name. The
natural rapport he built up with the electorate through the morning
TV spot over five years helped him get through two pre-election
crises relatively unblemished.
Rudd's happy-go-lucky public persona was questioned for the
first time without taking a serious blow when a Sunday newspaper
reported that the then opposition leader was planning with a TV
network to host a false ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps)
dawn service in Vietnam to coincide with commemorations in
Australia. The country is three hours behind Vietnam where
Australian soldiers fought alongside Americans.
A few months later, as the deadline loomed for Australia's
triennial election, the same newspaper ran a story on Rudd's visit
to a New York strip club while he was in the US as shadow foreign
minister three years ago.
Ironically, approval ratings for the eyeglass-wearing breakfast
guest, often described as "bookish", rose after that incident,
perhaps as the hurly burly of Labor voters came online.
Championing environmental protection, reconciling with
indigenous Australians, complete with a prime ministerial apology,
and tinkering with an industrial relations regime favoring business
all mark a radical departure from conservative stewardship Down
Under.
Although these issues will assuage the electorate's yearning for
a fairer, more responsible Australia, they also have the potential
to polarize the country and squander Rudd's newly won mandate. If
economic fortunes take a turn for the worse and newly selected
ministers reprise the coalition's mistake of drifting too far from
the ideological center, Rudd will be left without a leg to stand
on.
But the well-rounded and moderate Rudd has already stamped
himself as a strong leader, disregarding his party's factions to
select his cabinet. And his imprimatur on a federal government
comes years after he earned the less than flattering sobriquet of
"Doctor Death" while slashing public service jobs as a top state
bureaucrat.
Rudd's pledge to perpetuate economic conservatism by refraining
from reckless spending saw his campaign labeled as "me tooism" by
pundits more titillated by polar extremes come election time. But
this commentary, like the government he deposed, failed to
comprehend the change of direction sought by voters worried about
Australia's future after Howard largely fulfilled his economic
promise of shaping a "more relaxed and comfortable" nation.
Rudd's plan to fund a comprehensive national high-speed
broadband capability by prematurely raiding a future fund set up by
the Howard government to, ironically, pay for future infrastructure
is a case in point. The policy resonated among Internet-savvy
Australians who, unlike conservatives, realized the intrinsic value
of lightning-quick broadband to future prosperity.
Rudd also struck a chord with families with reasoned opposition
to industrial relations reform rammed through the Australian Senate
after Howard gained control of the upper house in 2004. Widespread
dissatisfaction at the loss of penalty rates and employee
protection, under the cynically named Work Choices legislation,
insulated Rudd from government claims that growth would shudder to
a halt if and when he rebalanced the employer-employee scales.
Rudd tempered his overtures to disgruntled labor interests by
appeasing business with a commitment to budgetary surpluses. He
cleverly reinforced his economic claims by refusing to match an
11th-hour A$9-billion splurge on families by Howard and his
anointed success, Treasurer Peter Costello, both of whom were
already on the political nose after campaigning in 2004 to keep
interest rates low only to preside over six consecutive rises.
Rudd also broke with conservative orthodoxy with the promise to
withdraw frontline troops from Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol on
limiting greenhouse gas emissions, both an affront to Howard's
intensification of Australia's post-September 11 US alliance.
Winning the election just months after he stole the show at the
Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation forum by speaking with President
Hu Jintao in fluent Putonghua, Rudd is now expected naturally to
cultivate stronger ties with Asia.
Campaigning also to affect an education revolution focusing
heavily on Asian languages, he sounded his intention to increase
Australia's burgeoning economic integration with the emerging East
Asian region and adhered to a growing desire, particularly among
younger generations, to extend prosperity beyond account books to
the social fabric.
"You speak fluently in Chinese and you know Chinese inside out,"
Hu complimented Rudd at APEC before inviting him and his family to
attend the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. "You show much interest in
the development of Australia's relations with China and I really
appreciate that."
By virtue of his academic and diplomatic background, Rudd now
occupies a unique position to play a go-between role between East
and West. "If I win the election I look forward to taking the
relationship between China and Australia to a whole new level," Lu
Kewen promised before doing so resoundingly.
(China Daily December 4, 2007)
