Australia gets its 1st female PM

[Cowke]

 

Australia gets its 1st female PM as Rudd ousted

 

By ROD McGUIRK (AP)

 

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia's ruling party ousted its leader Thursday in a sudden revolt that also delivered the country its first female leader and stunned the public.

 

Kevin Rudd's deputy, Julia Gillard, was elected leader in an uncontested vote about 12 hours after she surprised many colleagues by challenging a prime minister who until recently was one of the most popular in modern Australian history.

 

The removal of Rudd — best known as one of the West's few Chinese-speaking leaders and for helping to broker the Copenhagen climate change agreement — showed his party had lost faith that he could win a second term at national elections due within months.

 

The leadership change immediately eased hostilities between the government and big mining companies over a proposed tax on so-called super profits from burgeoning mineral and energy sales to China and India.

 

Gillard on Thursday immediately ended an advertising campaign that is promoting the tax, keeping a Labor promise that Rudd broke to never use taxpayers' money for political advertising.

 

The world's biggest miner BHP-Billiton responded by suspending counter-advertising that claims the new tax would cost jobs and harm investment in the mineral sector, which is driving Australia's economic growth.

 

Gillard said her government is willing to negotiate with the miners on the proposed tax. Opinion polls show the tax debate is doing increasing harm to the government's re-election chances.

 

"I have said to the mining companies of this nation publicly that the government is opening its door and we are asking them to open their minds," Gillard told Parliament.

 

Rudd had ridden high in opinion polls until he made major policy backflips, including a decision in April to shelve plans to make Australia's worst polluters pay for their carbon gas emissions.

 

An airplane towed a banner over Parliament House on Thursday which made an apparent reference to the backflip: "Julia aim higher on climate."

 

But Gillard has not committed to pressing ahead with the government's so-called emission trading scheme in which polluters would buy and trade permits for every ton of carbon gas they produce. The Senate has twice rejected the legislation.

 

She said that as prime minister she would seek a community consensus on how carbon pollution should be priced.

 

An emotional Rudd, flanked by his wife and three children, gave his final speech in the prime minister's court yard at Parliament House on Thursday, saying he was proud that his first act in government in 2007 had been to ratify the Kyoto protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

 

"I'm proud of the fact that we tried three times to get an emissions trading scheme through this Parliament, although we failed," Rudd told reporters.

 

"I'm less proud of the fact that I have now blubbered," he joked, as he struggled to contain his tears.

 

He said he would contest the next election and continue to serve the government "in any manner in which I can be of assistance."

 

Gillard and her new deputy, Wayne Swan, were sworn into their offices on Thursday by Australia's first woman Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, within hours of the ballot.

 

Swan retains his key financial portfolio as treasurer and will to fly to Canada on Friday for a summit of Group of 20 major economies in Rudd's place. He was also elected unopposed. Gillard has yet to announce any other ministers in her new cabinet.

 

Gillard has been instrumental in most of the government's decisions to date as part of Rudd's four-member inner circle that included Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. Tanner announced on Thursday he was quitting politics at the next election for personal reasons.

 

John Wanna, an Australian National University political scientist, blamed Rudd's style and inability to clearly communicate for his plummeting popularity.

 

"He's not been a bad prime minister, but he comes across as a smarty pants, policy wonk and when he does the human face stuff, he seems a bit disingenuous to the ordinary person," Wanna said.

 

Wanna said dumping Rudd for Gillard — widely regarded as the best communicator in Parliament — months out from an election was risky for the government.

 

"We've got rid of a successful prime minister after two and a half years, and we've never done that before in the past," Wanna said.

 

Gillard was born in Barry, Wales, in 1961, the second daughter of a family who migrated to Adelaide when she was 4 years old in search of a warmer climate for a lung condition.

 

A former successful lawyer and state government political staffer, she has been attacked by some opponents as unsuitable to lead because she is childless and therefore out of touch with most Australians.

 

Despite Australia's weathering the global downturn, recent polling puts the center-left government neck-and-neck with the conservative opposition. One poll earlier this month showed Labor trailing the opposition for the first time in more than four years.

 

Rudd is a Labor hero, having led the party to victory at 2007 elections after 11 years in opposition.

[Cowke]

 

The long, sad, long, long goodbye

 

By Annabel Crabb

 

It was a long, hard goodbye.

 

Kevin Rudd's farewell, in the stately courtyard that he no longer calls home, lasted perhaps 15 minutes, but it seemed like years.

 

And they were tough years, as the fallen PM veered between chipper ("Hi folks! How are you?") to the long troughs of silence as he struggled with the last of the ties that bind him to office.

 

In customary style, this Rudd speech was a list; of all the things that made him proud.

 

The evasion of the global recession, the elimination of Work Choices, new university places, the reform of the health system, the national organ donor registry.

 

That the Australian people had put their trust in him.

 

That the Australian Labor Party had put its trust in him.

 

That his Cabinet, which had "blessed and aided him" in his endeavours, had given him such earnest service: "I could not have had a better team".

 

At this point, the listener began to wonder if anything had in fact gone wrong at all.

 

But as the list of achievements lengthened, so did the silences between them, and Kevin Rudd's head spent more time down than up, and his wife Therese edged a bit closer to his shoulder and began to prompt him.

 

It's a brutal show, this; watching a prime minister literally run out of puff.

 

But Kevin Rudd - this strange, intense, omnipresent man - was not too far gone to register a wry commentary on his own circumstance.

 

"What I am less proud of," he offered after another protracted pause, "is that I have now blubbered."

 

If words were hard to summon for the outgoing prime minister, the incoming one experienced no such broadcast difficulties.

 

Sweeping into the Caucus room looking calm and groomed (an early demonstration, perhaps, of the wisdom of having a First Hair Technician on board), she launched smoothly into a treatise on the sort of prime minister she planned to be.

 

She would be all for helping the hard workers, not those who complain the loudest.

 

She was all for people who set their alarms for early - although I can think of one particular hardworking early riser who might take issue with her.

 

She was humbled, she said, and did not plan to move her empty fruit bowl into the Lodge just yet, preferring to remain in her Canberra flat until such time as the Australian people, in their wisdom, chose to hand her the keys to Australia's most famous public housing enclave.

 

You could almost hear the deep sigh of the parliamentary security detail, who already have to pelt about on mountain bikes protecting Tony Abbott and cannot be relishing the thought of securing La Gillardine's flat.

 

Still, these matters lie ahead.

 

Today is a day for marvels.

[FatB]

its shit how we vote for someone and the party turns around 2 years into the guys term and says this is ur new prime minister.... Fck democracy!

[Ilka-dahable]

she is from melbourne westren sububr and good friend of shiikh ciise and somali communty

[Cowke]

Fatb the election in Australia is only 3 months away and the new prime minister has made a pledge she won't sleep in the lodge(Presidential Palace) untill after the election and that's if the people vote for her.

 

So it's not big deal

[N.O.R.F]

Originally posted by FatB:

its shit how we vote for someone and the party turns around 2 years into the guys term and says this is ur new prime minister.... Fck democracy!

Democracy died a long time ago. Call it Corporationcracy.

[Ibtisam]

I liked Rudd!!!