After 11 years in power, John Howard is bundled out as Australian voters decide it�s time for a change
from nick squires in sydney

A former diplomat and fluent Chinese speaker, Kevin Rudd, swept to victory in Australia's general election yesterday, ousting veteran conservative leader John Howard.

In a historic upset, Howard looked likely to loose his own seat, becoming the first sitting Australian prime minister since 1929 to be dumped by voters. He had represented Bennelong, a constituency in Sydney, for 33 years.

Despite the humiliation, Howard, Australia's second-longest serving prime minister, congratulated Rudd on "a very emphatic victory".

"We bequeath him a nation that is stronger, prouder and more prosperous than it was 11-and-a-half years ago," Howard said.

Rudd's left-of-centre Labour Party has pledged to withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Both moves would distance Australia from the United States, its most important ally, although Labour has stressed it is "rock solid" on the military alliance between the two countries.

In his victory speech in his home state of Queensland, Rudd promised to keep the economy strong and help farmers battling the worst drought since Australia was settled by Britain more than 200 years ago.

"Today Australia has looked to the future," he said. "Tomorrow the work begins. It's time for a new page to be written in our nation's history."

Rudd, 50, promises to hold a referendum on whether Australia should become a republic and ditch the Queen as head of state, although not in his first three-year term of office.

Labour's victory - its first since 1993 - brought to an end the 11-year rule of Howard, 68, arguably the Western world's most successful contemporary political leader.

During a bruising six-week campaign, Howard's tired and rattled appearance contrasted with the slick, almost presidential performance of Rudd, whose silvery blond hair, round face and spectacles have earned him the nicknames Harry Potter and Tintin.

A key paradox of the election result is that Howard has presided over an unprecedented economic boom, based in part on China's insatiable demand for coal and minerals gouged out of the Australian Outback.

During the election campaign he warned voters that Labour would wreck the economy because of its inexperience and its links to the union movement.

But the scare campaign failed to make its mark, with most Australians apparently willing to entrust the 17-year-long economic boom to Labour.

Rudd successfully presented himself as a safe but more palatable alternative to the prime minister.

Appealing to middle Australia, he offered a balanced blend of business-as-usual economic management and bold new change for the future.

He also played up the 18-year age difference between himself and Howard, who recently became a grandfather and was perceived by many voters as tetchy and out of touch.

Rudd paraded his credentials as a church-going family man, a committed Christian and - most crucially - an economic conservative whose wife is a self-made millionaire.

He promised to repeal the government's unpopular industrial relations reforms, which water down employees' rights and make it easier for employers to sack them.

"Kevin Rudd is basically John Howard without the nasty bits," Peter Hartcher, political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, told the Sunday Herald.

Rudd shamelessly copied many of the government's election pledges, including tax cuts of more than A$30 billion.

The similarities between the two leaders and their parties prompted a former Labour politician to describe it as a Seinfeldian "election about nothing".

But Labour's policies differed to the government in key areas. Rudd pledged to reform public hospitals, install high-speed broadband and computers in secondary schools and increase trades training to address Australia's acute skills shortage.

He also declared the fight against global warming to be one of his main priorities. The pledge struck a chord with Australians, whose minds have been concentrated on the perils of climate change by the drought and water shortages in most major cities.

It contrasted with the attitude of Howard, who was deeply skeptical about climate change until a reluctant and partial conversion to the issue this year.

Rudd has promised to personally represent Australia at a UN climate change meeting of environment ministers next month in Bali to discuss the how to tackle climate change after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. On Iraq, Labour will withdraw Australia's small but politically significant contingent of 550 combat troops.

But the drawdown will be gradual and conducted in consultation with the Americans, in a manner designed to cause President George W Bush the least embarrassment.

Another 1000 military personnel, including navy warships in the Persian Gulf and a diplomatic protection contingent in Baghdad, would remain.

The man likely to become Labour's foreign minister offered words of assurance to Washington. "Labour is not calling for a precipitous overnight withdrawal, and we are certainly not going to leave our American mates in the lurch," said Robert McClelland.

Further softening the blow for the Americans is Rudd's commitment to maintain Australia's troops in Afghanistan, and perhaps even to increase the numbers.

Relations with Britain are likely to remain largely unchanged, although Rudd, a republican, has promised a referendum on whether Australia should cut its constitutional ties with the United Kingdom.

"Britain figures less and less in Australian policy, frankly," said Dr John Hart, a political scientist at the Australian National University. "There possibly might be some dilution of the relationship."

Not so with China - Rudd's time as a diplomat in Beijing, his fluency in Mandarin and the billions of pounds' worth of trade between the two nations will ensure even closer ties.

"He's the first leader of a Western democracy who can talk to the Chinese leadership in their own language," said Hart. "The US might see him as someone who could help them in China. It could provide a new aspect to the Australia-US alliance."

When he became the leader of the Labour Party nearly a year ago, Rudd was hamstrung by a reputation as a bit of a nerd. That changed with the surprise revelation, in August, that four years ago he was enticed into a New York lap-dancing club after a night on the tiles in the Big Apple.

He said he expected to take a "belting" in the polls after the story was leaked by the government, but instead his ratings went up, in a country that esteems blokey conduct.

A Labour Party colleague, Queensland premier Peter Beattie, said the episode showed that the opposition leader had "blood in his veins".

Last month came the revelation that Rudd also has wax in his ears. An old piece of parliamentary footage emerged in which he was caught absent-mindedly rummaging around his ear and then surreptitiously slipping his finger into his mouth with the contents of his excavations.

As Australians responded with a collective "yuck", and the clip became a YouTube sensation, critics suggested the oddly compelling vision could harm his election chances.

But, as with the strip club encounter, the wax-eating episode only seemed to bolster his new-found image as an endearingly flawed egghead, a bloke that ordinary Aussies could identify with. Both episodes lent him a much-needed touch of humanity.

Howard, who has been prime minister since 1996, was fatally harmed by his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, his contentious WorkChoices reforms and a rash pledge to keep interest rates low - a promise that was shattered by six consecutive rate rises since 2004.

There was also a perception that he misled the public on a number of issues, including the reasons for backing Britain and the US over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He was damaged, too, by promising that if re-elected he would hand over power to his unpopular treasurer, Peter Costello, nicknamed "Captain Smirk".

Rudd attacked the arrangement, saying that - like Gordon Brown after Tony Blair's departure - Costello could become prime minister "without ever having to face the Australian people".

Underlying the dissatisfaction with specific policies was a growing sense of boredom with Howard after his four terms in office. Many Australians had simply grown weary of seeing him on their television screens every evening.

"Johnny has been great but I just think it's time for a change," said Jim O'Donovan, 47, a Sydney fitness trainer, summing up the national mood.

It was a childhood tragedy that propelled Rudd into public life. He was 11 when his father, a tenant farmer, died from injuries sustained in a car accident near their home in southern Queensland.

He was shunted between schools as his mother tried to make ends meet and care for her four children.

"My mother, like thousands of others, was left to rely on the bleak charity of the time to raise a family," Rudd said in his first speech to parliament in 1998. "It made me think that a decent social security system designed to protect the weak was no bad thing."

A star pupil despite his disrupted schooling, he managed to get into the Australian National University in Canberra. The opening up of China had convinced him that he should learn Chinese and study Asian politics.

Graduating with first class honours, he was recruited by the Australian foreign service and sent to Beijing.

After realising that he would rather craft public policy than implement it, he resigned and in 1988 became a senior bureaucrat in the state Labour government of Queensland.

He was elected to the federal parliament as a Labour MP in 1998 and went on to become the shadow foreign affairs spokesman.

Both Rudd and Howard turned their rather humdrum personas into political strengths; so much so that the election was described by one Australian newspaper as a "dead heat in the nerd stakes".

Dame Edna Everage, aka comedian Barry Humphries, asked in a recent stage show whether Australia was ready for a prime minister called Kevin who looks like a dentist.

Kevin Rudd does have the rather dull demeanour of a suburban dentist. But dentists are dependable, meticulous, skilful professionals entrusted with great responsibility.

As they enjoy the fruits of an unprecedented economic boom, that is exactly what Australians want.