Ally of Bush Is Defeated in Australia

The New York Times Reports From Sidney, Australia, Nov. 24 — Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the electorate on Saturday, as his Liberal Party-led coalition lost its majority in Parliament.

He will be replaced by Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader and a former diplomat. “Today Australia looks to the future,” Mr. Rudd told a cheering crowd in his home state, Queensland. “Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward.”

Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of José María Aznar of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political setbacks for Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister in June.

Mr. Howard conceded nearly two hours after the last polling booths closed in the west of the country.

“A few moments ago I telephoned Mr. Kevin Rudd and I congratulated him and the Australian Labor Party on a very emphatic victory,” Mr. Howard told a room of emotional supporters.

“I leave the office of prime minister with our country prouder, stronger and more prosperous than ever,” he said.

Returns for a small number of seats are yet to be compiled, but analysts estimate that over all the Labor Party gained 28 seats to win a comfortable 22-seat majority in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament, where governments are formed. Official results are expected within the next day or two.

Mr. Howard may suffer the indignity of losing his own seat, representing a district on Sydney’s north shore, which he has held for 33 years, to a former television anchor and rookie politician. He would be the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat since 1929.

It was a bruising campaign, and the Liberal Party has said it will challenge some results on the grounds that the Labor candidates had broken electoral law by failing to resign from government jobs before running for office. The Labor Party said it had broken no laws.

Mr. Rudd, 50, campaigned on a platform of new leadership to address broad concerns about the environment, health and education. He has said his first acts as prime minister would include pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and negotiating the withdrawal of Australia’s 500 troops from Iraq.

Analysts said the leadership change was unlikely to bring a radically new foreign policy, although they expected a shift in emphasis in the relationship with the United States, Australia’s closest ally. “Australia will remain a close ally of the United States, and Rudd remains committed to the alliance,” said Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. But he noted that “if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to some extent they would become closer.”

Mr. Howard has a strong personal relationship with Mr. Bush that is based on a similar socially conservative philosophy and a shared outlook on terrorism.

Australian opinion polls have shown that although Australians remain strong supporters of the so-called Anzus alliance — the security pact among Australia, New Zealand and the United States — they do not approve of Mr. Bush or the Iraq war.

The attempts by Mr. Howard’s coalition to stress its economic record apparently failed to impress voters. The Australian economy has had 17 years of continuous growth, lately driven by Chinese demand for Australian iron ore and coal. Mr. Howard had warned voters that a Labor victory would endanger the country’s prosperity.

Despite the coalition campaign, there was little distance between the parties on economic policy, and the defining characteristics came down to the personalities of the leaders. Mr. Howard was running for a fifth term, and many voters said they were ready for a change.

“Howard is out of touch,” said George Varvaressos, 52, who voted in eastern Sydney on Saturday morning. “It’s the arrogance of being in power for too long — he hasn’t been listening.”

If Australia’s strongest military and political alliance is with Washington, the fuel for its economy is coming from China. Mr. Fullilove says Mr. Rudd’s ability to manage the relationship among Canberra, Washington and Beijing will be crucial.

Mr. Rudd, 18 years younger than Mr. Howard, has a reputation as a cerebral student of policy, as opposed to the Liberal leader’s image of a hardened and aggressive political animal.

“He seems more personable, approachable. He doesn’t seem arrogant — yet — and I have respect for him,” said Marcelle Freiman, who voted for Mr. Rudd in eastern Sydney on Saturday.

Mr. Rudd’s dry image was altered by the news that he had visited a strip club during a trip to New York in 2003.

He was a diplomat in Beijing and speaks Mandarin. He impressed many with a fluent address to President Hu Jintao of China when Mr. Hu visited Australia in September.

Mr. Fullilove said Mr. Rudd’s experience regarding China was unlikely to make a significant difference to Australia’s relationship with the United States. “I would counsel against people assuming that because Kevin Rudd speaks Mandarin there would be a big rebalancing of the relationship in favor of Beijing,” he said as reported in the New York Times.
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Opposition leader says climate change is Australia’s priority.
Reported on November 21, 2007 ROD McGUIRK - Associated Press Writer - That is still during the campaign - based on Rudd’s last major address of the six-week campaign.CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australia’s opposition leader - the front-runner in this weekend’s elections - said Wednesday that climate change is his top priority and urged voters to dump the old government for a young leadership who can keep up with a fast-changing world.

Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd accused Prime Minister John Howard’s 11-year-old government of being tired, out-of-touch and ill-equipped to cope with a new generation of issues like global warming and high-speed Internet access.
«Saturday will decide whether Australia gets stuck in the world’s slow lane, letting other nations pass us by, or whether Australia decides to shift up a gear so we can properly realize our true potential as a nation,» Rudd said in a speech to the National Press Club.

Rudd said he would immediately reverse Howard’s refusal to accept Australia’s greenhouse gas emission targets set out in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. He said he would personally represent Australia at the U.N. climate change meeting next month in Bali to map out the next stage of the international fight against global warming. «That’s number one,» Rudd said during a question-and-answer session after his nationally televised address.

Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, also promised to have in place by next year a national target for renewable energy sources - such as wind and solar - providing 20 percent of Australia’s energy needs by 2020.

Howard, Australia’s second-longest serving leader, has based his campaign for a fifth term around his government’s economic management, which has capitalized on booming demand from China and India for Australia’s coal and other minerals. Australia is in an unprecedented 17th year of continuous economic growth, and unemployment is at 33-year lows. But Howard’s economic credentials have been dented among mortgage holders by six interest rate raises since the last election in 2004, and Rudd accuses him of squandering the benefits of the boom on tax cuts instead of infrastructure investments.

Howard used a speech to business leaders in Sydney on Wednesday to warn against Australia signing up to carbon reduction targets if developing countries such as China and India do not.

Rudd said Howard had failed to invest in fighting climate change and the nation’s worsening water shortage. Australia, the world’s driest continent after Antarctica, is experiencing its worst drought in a century. All major cities have drinking water shortages.

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Then There Was One: US Now Alone as Kyoto Holdout
By Richard Ingham, Agence France-Presse, Saturday 24 November 2007.

Supporters of the Kyoto Protocol were gleeful on Saturday after Australian elections left the United States in the wilderness as the only major economy to boycott the UN’s climate pact.

The ouster of Prime Minister John Howard stripped President George W. Bush of a key ally barely a week before a conference in Bali, Indonesia, on the world’s response to climate change beyond 2012, they said.

“It’s great news for the Kyoto Protocol,” Shane Rattenburg, Greenpeace’s political director, told AFP.

“It’s a very important event in the international climate debate, and for Bali. It will leave Bush and the United States more isolated.”

Industrialised countries that have signed and ratified the Protocol are required to meet targeted curbs in their greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012.

In March 2001, in one of his first acts in office, Bush declared he would not submit the deal to US Senate ratification.

He has been steadfastly supported by Howard, a fellow conservative who argued that Kyoto was a waste of time as it lacks the world’s biggest emitter and tougher commitments from China and other emerging giants.

Howard’s successor, Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd, has said that he will seek ratification of Kyoto as soon as possible and also attend the Bali gathering.

The December 3-14 conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) faces a Herculean task.

It must set down a roadmap for negotiations over the next two years that will have to deliver massive emissions cuts beyond 2012 and shore up support for poor countries facing the brunt of climate change.

A European diplomat said Howard’s departure would hamper US efforts to coax support from two other countries whose governments, eyeing the cost of meeting their Kyoto pledges, could waver at Bali.

“We’re pleased about the (election) outcome,” he told AFP. “It puts more pressure on the United States and it helps us better handle the Canadians and the Japanese.”

Rattenburg said that Australia, under Howard, had often played a “wrecking role” at the annual UNFCCC negotiations, such as demanding concessions for its forestry and striving to weaken or unpick deals.

WWF’s climate-change director, Hans Verolme, thought it unlikely that Rudd would have time to settle into office and play “a stronger, more positive role” at Bali itself. “But at least they (the Australians) won’t play a negative role anymore,” he said.

The world’s biggest polluters are the United States and China, which account for roughly half of the total. But the US snubbed Kyoto and China is a developing country, so neither have binding emissions goals.

A total of 172 countries and government entities have ratified the Protocol, which came into force on February 16, 2005. Thirty-six of them, plus the European Union (EU) as a party in its own right, are required to make targeted emissions curbs, concerning six greenhouse gases.

Despite his victory, ratification of Kyoto raises a dilemma for Rudd.

Meeting the country’s original 2012 target would entail stringent, costly and probably unpopular measures in raising energy efficiency and switching to renewable sources.

Australia had originally pledged to keep emissions growth to eight percent above 1990 levels. As of 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, it was 25.6 percent above the 1990 benchmark, according to UNFCCC figures issued last week.

The country, a voracious burner of fossil fuels, has the highest per-capita emissions in the world.