Australians head to polls with a new face in mind
SYDNEY, Australia - He’s been called President Bush’s puppet, and his country has been likened to an additional state of America.
And now Australian Prime Minister John Howard might be in the fight of his political life.
When Australians go to the polls today to elect a leader, there is a perception that he’s been in office too long, and a fresher face is ready to take his place.
His name is Kevin Rudd, the new head of the Australian Labor Party, a bookish former diplomat who speaks fluent Chinese and is married to a self-made multimillionaire.
While Howard was a suburban lawyer who spent some 30 years in politics, Rudd, 50, is a policy wonk who grew up on a farm and worked in embassies in Stockholm and Beijing.
Rudd has forged such a decisive lead in the polls that many believe victory is assured.
“People have been wanting for a while to find a reason to vote Howard out,” said Brian Costar, a political scientist at the Swinburne University in Melbourne. “They generally couldn’t do it because of a lackluster Labor leadership. Along comes Rudd who looks like a safe bet, and they’ve flocked to him.”
For Rudd to take the government, his party must grab at least 16 more seats in the 150-member parliament. Polls show losses by Howard’s coalition government could deliver Labor a comfortable margin, with the added embarrassment that the sitting prime minister could lose in his own seat in suburban Sydney - something that has happened only once in Australian history back in 1929.
What’s ironic is that Howard, 68, might be on his way out despite a booming economy and a relatively high approval rating of about 47 percent.
“It’s basically government fatigue,” said Michael Fullilove, program director for global issues at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, a Sydney think tank. “They’ve been in there nearly 12 years. It’s not really common for governments to last so long these days.”
The government is also perceived as being out of touch on issues such as global warming, which a recent poll showed was considered by Australians to be the country’s No. 1 external threat. Until about a year ago, Howard questioned the link between carbon emission and climate change. When Al Gore visited Australia last year to promote the film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Howard’s industrial minister dismissed it as “entertainment.”
While Howard has refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the only country other than the United States not to do so, Rudd has promised to do it as soon as he is elected.
And while Howard has been an unwavering supporter of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Rudd was against the 2003 invasion and has said he wants to withdraw Australia ’s combat troops.
But these differences are more symbolic than substantive, some observers warn, especially when it comes to foreign policy and relation with the United States.
“We are not going from a John Howard to a Jacques Chirac,” said Gerard Henderson, a former Howard staffer and executive director of the Sydney Institute, referring to France’s former president. “Kevin Rudd is very pro-American.”
If anything, observers say relations with the U.S. might improve under Rudd especially if Americans put a Democrat in the White House next year.