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Will Rudd bring the promised land to Australians?

. — PHOTO: AP

Through thick and thin: Newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is greeted by his wife Therese Rein and son Marcus after Labor won the national elections, in Brisbane on Saturday. At right, Prime Minister John Howard hugs his wife Janette after his concession speech in Canberra

BRISBANE: Australia’s Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd comes to power with some of the best foreign policy credentials around, including mastery of the Chinese language that stymies so many foreigners who tackle it.

But the Labor Party leader is a relative novice on other fronts, having never served in the national government. He has been an elected politician for nine years, relatively few for an Australian lawmaker.

He is a sum of contradictions — partly because he seems to have made an effort to be.

After scoring an emphatic victory over longtime Prime Minister John Howard, Mr. Rudd looked excited and slightly embarrassed by the fuss as he made his first public appearance as the nation’s leader.

A crush of rock star proportions confronted him, with 600 campaign volunteers chanted “Kevin, Kevin” as he took the stage at a convention centre in his hometown Brisbane, flanked by his wife, three children and son-in-law.

Comedians have been scoffing for months at the idea that someone with such a supposedly “nerdy” name as Kevin could be Prime Minister.

“OK guys,” were his first simple words to the Australian public as Prime Minister-elect as he gestured for quiet.

Mr. Rudd is known as extraordinarily intelligent and articulate — critics say arrogant — but he has learned during a brief political life that sometimes that should be toned down.

He is a left-wing leader from one of Australia’s most conservative states, Queensland, born to a tenant farmer who was a member of the conservative Country Party.

He pointed out that irony when he paid tribute to his father, Bernie, whose death in a car accident in 1969 left him, his mother, and two siblings homeless and reliant on the charity of relatives and neighbours — a time that he says shaped his socialist leanings.

The former diplomat, who spent 10 years as a state government bureaucrat, is a public figure whom Australia is still getting to know after a meteoric rise from obscurity.

Some observers say he is the best-qualified Prime Minister Australia has had to navigate the complex shoals of foreign policy.

“Rudd comes to the prime ministership with more expertise on foreign affairs and strategic issues than any predecessor since the Second World War and arguably ... than any predecessor ever,” said Hugh White of the Australian National University.

But his political opponents argue Mr. Rudd is the least experienced Prime Minister to ever hold the office.

Only a year ago, even his party did not consider him the right man to lead.

Unable to muster enough personal support to win a leadership ballot of his lawmaker colleagues in December last year, he struck a deal with another contender, Julia Gillard.

Ms. Gillard agreed to become Mr. Rudd’s deputy in return for her supporters backing his leadership bid. The deal paid off, and she will now become Australia’s first woman Deputy Prime Minister.

Observers say that in government Mr. Rudd will centralise control in his office — resisting the influence of labor unions, which have traditionally held sway over his party.

“He’s the sort of guy who likes to keep control of things, so it will be very much a leader-dominated government,” said Monash University political scientist Nick Economou.

“There are [Labor Party] people who are very grateful to him for bringing them into the promised land — he’ll have a great deal of authority,” Mr. Economou said.

During the campaign, Mr. Rudd differentiated himself from Mr. Howard by promising to sign the Kyoto Protocol, withdraw Australian combat troops from Iraq and create a foreign policy that is more independent of the United States, Australia’s most important ally.

But on most issues, Mr. Rudd’s policies are not all that different from Mr. Howard’s — especially those linked to Australia’s long economic boom — feeding the perception of 50-year-old Mr. Rudd as a younger version of Mr. Howard, 68.

Nicholas Stuart, a journalist and author of a recent Rudd biography, said few people even within the Labor Party know what the new Prime Minister really stands for.

Mr. Rudd has the air of an intellectual, softened by a sense of humour that made him a popular guest on daytime television early in his political career as he built a public profile.

As a senior state bureaucrat, he was loathed by some for pushing a tough public-sector reform agenda. He is regarded as extraordinarily work-focused, a trait shared by his wife, Therese Rein, a self-made multimillionaire and working mother of three who intends to continue her career as owner of a job-finding business. — AP

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Will Rudd bring the promised land to Australians?

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