Word: labors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...predictable as the election seemed, few were prepared for the scale of the government's defeat. Labor had to capture 16 Coalition seats to win; at press time it had taken 24, with the outcome in five seats still in doubt. More shocking for the Coalition, Howard was hanging on by his fingernails to his northwestern Sydney seat of Bennelong - and appeared set to become the first Prime Minister since 1929 to be turned out of his own electorate...
...year ago, however, few but the fiercest Labor partisans thought any kind of victory was possible. The party was in shambles, limping from opinion-poll rubbishing to new leadership ballot and back again, and desperate enough to bet the house on a man who seemed to many a most unlikely Labor leader. At 49, Rudd was not only young but inexperienced: he'd been in Parliament for just eight years and shadow Foreign Minister for less than five. He was an active Christian in a resolutely secular party, and said the machinations of Labor's factional power-brokers "revolted...
...Into the spotlight Surprising as Rudd's popularity was to the Coalition, it was even more so to some of his Labor colleagues. Prissy, bookish, and married to a multimillionaire businesswoman, he wasn't exactly everyone's picture of the Aussie working-class man, though he lost few opportunities to remind people he'd grown up on a Queensland farm. "If he grew up in poverty in rural Queensland," sneered former Labor leader Latham, "where did the posh accent come from?" Advising Rudd to "take the piss" out of himself, his brother Greg reportedly said: "You're just not that...
...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...