Australia's New Order

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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 sort of personality where people want to spend time with you outside a work issue." But he was a hard worker, and he worked as hard at popularity as on policies.

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 was no evident anger or public rage."

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, too.

Rudd's public-relations people took polls and held focus groups and told him what those things appeared to be: vision and hope for the future. Former P.M. Keating thought Rudd was too poll-driven, a captive of advisors who "won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side to get out on." But the polling helped Rudd focus, relentlessly, on offering voters what they yearned for: a government as conservative as Howard's, only with a fresher face and a more inclusive smile. A government that cared, in the financial sense, about public hospitals and schools, and the frustrations of a too-slow Internet connection. A government that would help them atone for their coal-powered prosperity by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Rudd, youthful, blond and inoffensive, understood. None of the good stuff would change, he told voters — the economy least of all. "I am an economic conservative," he said. "Always have been. Always will be." He may be the first Labor leader in Australia's history to have scolded a conservative government for engaging in a "reckless spendathon." A Rudd government would be tightfisted with taxpayers' money, Rudd seemed to say, but open-handed too. "We have a bit of compassion," he said. "We would actually like to get out there and help people while still keeping the economy strong." Rudd never out-rated Howard as better economic manager, but polls showed that nearly half of voters thought the economy would be fine no matter which party was in power.

Labor no longer talks much about its founding principles. "The struggle of the working class against the excesses, injustices and inequalities of capitalism" doesn't strike much of a chord in a country where there are more self-employed workers than union members and more than 55% of adults own shares. Rudd gave the impression that under him, Labor would be as un-Labor-like as it could be without becoming the Liberal Party. The only revolution he was about to start was an educational one, and it didn't mean overthrowing the teacher class. It meant upgrading trades training and providing senior students with computers and Internet access. "I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist," said Rudd, who had previously described himself as "an old-fashioned Christian socialist." Is Labor still a party of the left? a TV interviewer asked Rudd. "The economy is basic to everything," he replied. Is Labor a party of the left? "It's all about an education revolution," Rudd said. But is Labor a party of the left? It is, Rudd conceded, "a part of progressive politics." "I'm not interested in arid debates about left, right, center, up, down," explained the Anglican Rudd, who'd converted from Catholicism but had not yet, he said, "resigned from Rome." "As a Christian," he said, "I don't believe denomination is really that relevant."