Word: howard
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...terrible piece of work." But by picking left-winger Julia Gillard as his deputy, he won over the factions - and got the leadership. He started campaigning the same day. Labor's poll numbers jumped from the low 40s to the high 50s; within three months Rudd led Howard as preferred P.M. By the time the election was called, in October, Howard was staring Dr Death in the face...
...Other Labor leaders had been popular, though - and they'd always self-destructed come election day. Besides, Australians had no apparent reason to reject the Howard government, which had made stability and prosperity seem like the country's natural condition. It's now in its 16th consecutive year of economic expansion, with GDP growing at over 3% a year and exports at 10%. Unemployment and interest rates are the lowest since the 1970s. Listening to Howard's concession speech Saturday night, former Liberal Senator Michael Baume said: "This is the first defeat of a government in decades where there...
...There was, however, ennui. Many Australians were bored with Howard, uneasy at the prospect of his handover to Treasurer Peter Costello, which the P.M. had been postponing since 2001, and mistrustful of new labor laws that made wage negotiations individual rather than collective affairs. Many voters, too, bridled at the government's tendency to treat politics as a branch of economics. They wanted a sense that politics was about other things...
...captive of advisors who "won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side to get out on." But the polling helped Rudd focus, relentlessly, on offering voters what they yearned for: a government as conservative as Howard's, only with a fresher face and a more inclusive smile. A government that cared, in the financial sense, about public hospitals and schools, and the frustrations of a too-slow Internet connection. A government that would help them atone for their coal-powered prosperity by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol...
...reckless spendathon." A Rudd government would be tightfisted with taxpayers' money, Rudd seemed to say, but open-handed too. "We have a bit of compassion," he said. "We would actually like to get out there and help people while still keeping the economy strong." Rudd never out-rated Howard as better economic manager, but polls showed that nearly half of voters thought the economy would be fine no matter which party was in power...