Word: labors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rudd, youthful, blond and inoffensive, understood. None of the good stuff would change, he told voters - the economy least of all. "I am an economic conservative," he said. "Always have been. Always will be." He may be the first Labor leader in Australia's history to have scolded a conservative government for engaging in a "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...
...Labor no longer talks much about its founding principles. "The struggle of the working class against the excesses, injustices and inequalities of capitalism" doesn't strike much of a chord in a country where there are more self-employed workers than union members and more than 55% of adults own shares. Rudd gave the impression that under him, Labor would be as un-Labor-like as it could be without becoming the Liberal Party. The only revolution he was about to start was an educational one, and it didn't mean overthrowing the teacher class. It meant upgrading trades training...
...direction As a Diplomat, Rudd spent eight years in Beijing; he makes much of his ability to speak Mandarin. Perhaps coincidentally, his approach to Labor doctrine resembled an Australian version of Deng Xiaoping Theory. Whether an ideology is "surnamed capitalist or surnamed socialist" is immaterial, the late Chinese leader declared. Socialism is "whatever increases the comprehensive strength of the nation...
...Rudd embraced conservative policies with an ease that shocked Labor stalwarts. He supported the government's bill restricting marriage to one man and one woman; its intervention into dysfunctional Aboriginal communities; its sale of the final one-third of telecommunications firm Telstra; its takeover of the Murray-Darling basin; its use of antiterrorism laws to expel visiting doctor Mohamed Haneef, suspected of complicity in a British bomb plot. A scornful Bob Brown, leader of the Greens Party, continued the list. "Labor and the Coalition are exactly the same," he said, "on logging native forests, exporting more uranium, increasing coal mining...
...already met its emissions targets. And on the question of a post-2012 successor treaty to Kyoto, Rudd in mid-campaign abruptly took the Howard position: no ratification of Kyoto II unless it requires China and India to limit their carbon emissions. On Iraq, Rudd has moderated Labor's earlier "immediate pull-out" policy. He says he will begin negotiations with the U.S. and Iraq on a staged withdrawal of 500 combat troops - one-third of the total deployment there - to take place over the next seven months...