Bush administration ally loses election in Australia

SYDNEY, Australia – The Bush administration lost one of its staunchest political allies Saturday, when Australians chose a Mandarin-speaking former farm boy to become their new prime minister.

Labor Party candidate Kevin Rudd swept to power in a landslide victory to defeat Liberal incumbent John Howard, the second-longest-serving prime minister in Australian history.

Unlike Howard, Rudd has pledged to pull combat troops from Iraq and to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a move that would leave the U.S. as the only major industrialized country to shun the global warming initiative. But the new leader is not expected to jeopardize the strong ties Howard has built with Washington over the years after a campaign fought mainly on domestic issues.

Rudd, a former diplomat who served in Sweden and China, won despite his relative inexperience and a strong economy. Many voters were fed up with a host of domestic issues that had dogged the incumbent: interest rate hikes that Howard promised to rein in, workplace reforms that have proved disastrous, and Howard’s promise to retire mid-term, and then hand over the office to his deputy who would not have had to face voters directly.

Rudd’s victory, analysts say, was also due in no small part to the fact that the country was ready for a fresh start after more than a decade of Howard’s conservative rule.

“This is about a generational change,” said Alan Dupont, director of the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. Howard’s government, he said, was “seen as competent on economic issues. But after 11 years it’s very hard for one party to win for five terms.”

At 50, the blond and boyish Rudd is 18 years Howard’s junior, and he quickly warmed to the country’s 13 million voters. Polls showed him leading the incumbent for months before election day, but the results exceeded expectations.

The Labor Party needed to win 76 seats in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament to wrest control of the government. Initial results indicated that the party had won at least 86.

For Howard, the four-term incumbent who critics say did himself in by hanging on for too long, the end of the era might have come with a slap in the face: In addition to losing the prime minister post, he was likely to lose his own seat in Parliament, and would become only the second sitting prime minister since 1929 to be kicked out of his own Parliament seat in his home district.

His legacy includes forging a strong bond with the United States. Howard was in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the defense and security treaty between the U.S. and Australia. He was one of the first Western leaders to back President Bush’s original “coalition of the willing” to battle terrorism and has been in lock step with the American on most foreign policy issues ever since.