Word: labors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last time Labor partied quite this hard was in 1972, when Gough Whitlam swept it back to power after 23 years in the federal sin bin. On Saturday night the Labor faithful were again in raptures as they cheered the party's new savior, Kevin Rudd, and the end of John Howard's long run as Prime Minister. Best keep the ecstasy to a minimum, Rudd jokingly advised a crowd of several hundred campaign workers in Brisbane: just "have a strong cup of tea." But the beer cans went on opening. "Eleven and a half yearsh," people kept saying, happily...
...excitement, Labor's triumph seemed somehow old news, a foregone conclusion. Thanks to opinion polls, Australians had expected a Rudd victory for almost a year - and bet more than $7 million on the hunch. Since last December, when a demoralized Labor Party elected the former diplomat and bureaucrat as its sixth leader in a decade, not a single national opinion poll - and by election day there'd been more than 100 - had put Howard's conservatives in the lead. "Throughout the year I have had a fairly gloomy view of our prospects," conceded former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer...
...ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and pull troops from Iraq - are largely symbolic. Though Australia is outside the Kyoto regime, the country has met its emissions targets. And on the question of a successor treaty to Kyoto, Rudd in mid-campaign abruptly took the Howard position: a Labor government would not ratify Kyoto II unless it required China and India to limit their emissions. On Iraq, Rudd has moderated Labor's earlier "pull-out-now" policy. He says he will bring home the 1,400 Australian troops in Iraq and the Gulf gradually, in a "negotiated, staged withdrawal...
Australia under Labor will remain a "rock solid" friend of the U.S., Rudd has said, but reserve the right to act "independently." Rudd, who spent eight years as a diplomat in Beijing, has criticized China's human-rights record but appears more sympathetic to the People's Republic than Howard. Rudd rejected the Howard government support of a potential alliance between the U.S., Australia, Japan and India, saying China would feel encircled...
...exultant Labor voters - "Eleven and a half years is just too long," many said of Howard's long run - cheered Rudd's victory speech, some observers wondered whether he'll maintain his Howard-like demeanor or whether, as left-wing commentator Robert Manne said during the campaign, "When he gets into government, then we'll begin to see the differences again." Australians who voted Labor only when Rudd moved toward the center may be hoping those differences are not too startling...