Word: rudd
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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...
...time," had been Whitlam's message; time for change. Rudd updated the sentiment. "Today Australia has looked to the future," he told air-punching supporters and TV viewers around the country. "Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward...
...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...
...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" him. Known as Pixie for his fresh...
...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...