Word: australia
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...Today Australia has looked to the future," said the country's newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, claiming victory for his Labor Party for the first time since 1996. Poll after opinion poll had predicted a Labor triumph in national elections, but few had forecast its scale. Labor captured at least 22 seats from the ruling Liberal-National coalition - including, it appears, the northwestern Sydney seat held for the past 33 years by Prime Minister John Howard. With 77% of votes counted in Sydney's Bennelong district, Howard trailed by several hundred votes. In an emotional speech Nov. 24 Howard...
Pundits have spent much of the past year debating what the trend to Labor said about Australia. In a country where voting is compulsory, elections turn on a dozen or so marginal seats, where small shifts in voter sentiment can make or break governments. There was reason to think swinging voters would applaud Howard: Australia is in its 16th successive year of economic growth, and unemployment and interest rates are the lowest since the '70s. "This is the first defeat of a government in decades where there was no evident anger or public rage," said former Liberal Senator Michael Baume...
Whether a Labor government would manage Australia's $1 trillion economy as adeptly as have Howard and Costello remains a voter concern, according to polls. However, Rudd has largely defused economic management as an issue. The thrust of his case is that Australia's strong economy is less the result of any judicious handling on the part of the government than of the ongoing minerals boom and watershed reforms undertaken in the 1980s by Labor governments. He's repeatedly cast himself as an economic conservative and tried to prove it by declining to match the government's extravagant spending promises...
Rudd is offering the country just enough tinkering around the edges of government policy in the areas of Iraq (a phased pull out of Australia's 1,400 troops), industrial relations (abolition of an unpopular Howard program) climate change (ratifying the Kyoto Protocol), education (more laptops in high schools) and communications (faster Internet access) to convince Australians that it's worth making a change. "After 11 years, it's now time to turn the page on this government," Rudd says. "Australia is a great country but not as great...
Seasonal sensitivities have gone global: a story out of Australia made headlines worldwide after a department-store Santa reported being told not to say "Ho, ho, ho" for fear of offending women. (Santa's employment agency insisted it was actually worried about frightening small children and recommended a gentler "Ha, ha, ha" instead...