Rudd gets down to business

2007-11-26 11:42

Sydney - Australia's prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd got down to work on Monday on plans to sign the Kyoto Protocol and reverse unpopular labour laws that led to conservative leader John Howard's stunning ouster.

The centre-left leader is reshaping foreign and domestic policy following his landslide victory on Saturday that ended Howard's 11-year reign and left US President George W Bush isolated over climate change and the Iraq war.

A day after Rudd announced he was preparing to attend a major conference on global warming in Bali next month, his deputy Julia Gillard said their Labour Party would immediately honour a campaign promise to ratify Kyoto.

"Kevin will be making that decision but you can expect it to be very soon. We need to ratify Kyoto as part of our commitments to dealing with climate change," she told Australian television.

"Ratifying Kyoto we can do without the parliament sitting," she said, outlining plans to implement election pledges that also included withdrawing Australian combat troops from the Iraq war.

Rudd revealed he had already received advice from officials on when Australia could ratify the protocol.

"We have just received that advice as I was driving out here and I'm yet to read it," he told reporters a day after meeting senior bureaucrats of the prime minister's office to set out his agenda for the Bali meeting.

Global warming a top priority

Howard's defeat stripped Bush of a key ally on the eve of the Bali conference. Australia and the United States are the only two major industrial nations not to have ratified Kyoto.

Rudd, an economic conservative, has named global warming as his government's top priority, and he discussed the issue on Sunday by telephone with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Howard and Bush refused to ratify the UN treaty aimed at cutting carbon emissions blamed for causing global warming, saying that doing so when China and India had not would damage their economies.

The political veteran also introduced new labour laws that reduced worker protections and boosted the flexibility of employers, which proved very unpopular on election day.

Voters rejected him in a comprehensive defeat that almost certainly also cost him his own electoral seat of 33 years, despite poll findings that most Australians believed his government was better equipped to manage the economy.

Labour has so far snapped up a huge parliamentary majority with at least 83 seats won compared with the outgoing government's 58, a six percent swing, leaving Howard's Liberal Party in tatters as its shattered leaders quit politics.

'As soon as is humanly possible'

Counting was still under way in key marginal seats, notably Howard's Bennelong constituency, where former television newscaster Maxine McKew held a narrow lead.

If he is defeated in Bennelong, Howard would be only the second Australian prime minister in history to suffer the indignity of being stripped of his own seat by voters.

With nearly 80% of the votes counted, Labour's McKew led Howard by 51.7% to 48.3%, prompting her to say: "This is now a Labour seat for the very first time in the history of Bennelong."

Ironically, Stanley Bruce also lost power and his electorate in 1929 over an unpopular industrial relations policy.

Gillard, who is expected to become industrial relations minister and deputy prime minister when Rudd unveils his cabinet on Thursday or Friday, said work was beginning on rolling back Howard's workplace laws.

"Our big job is to get our industrial relations legislation together," Gillard said, adding that Labour would introduce legislation to abolish the laws "as soon as is humanly possible".

- AFP