AUSTRALIA PM GILLARD MANAGES TO CLING TO POWER
Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaks during a news conference with Treasurer Wayne Swan in Parliament House, Canberra. Gillard yesterday secured a wafer thin parliamentary majority, ending a political impasse.
CANBERRA - Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has clung to power after on Tuesday winning the support of the two remaining undecided independent MPs, and will form a minority government next week.In a day of suspense and last-minute twists, the three independents who still held the power to decide which side formed government, split up when one of them, North Queensland MP Bob Katter, appeared alone at a press conference on Tuesday morning and announced that he would support the Coalition led by Tony Abbott.
- That left the equation deadlocked at 74 seats each to Gillard's Australian Labour Party and Abbott's Liberal-National Coalition in the 150-seat House of Representatives.
- At 3pm on Tuesday, the two remaining undecided independents — Tony Windsor (Federal member for the seat of New England, in New South Wales) and Rob Oakeshott (Federal member for the seat of Lyne, also in NSW) — ended the stalemate when they announced they would support Gillard.
- Soon after, a beaming Gillard addressed a press conference in which she pledged "to work tirelessly for the Australian people".
- Labour will govern with the support of three independents and one Greens MP.
- Striking a conciliatory tone in the charged political environment, Gillard said she would try to find common ground with the Opposition in the new Parliament. "Labour is prepared to deliver stable, effective and secure government for the next three years," she said.
- Gillard confirmed she had offered Oakeshott a ministerial portfolio, but said he had yet to make up his mind whether to accept. From the outset, Windsor had repeatedly said he was not interested in a ministerial position.
- The prime minister-elect also said she would be offering a senior ministerial portfolio to former prime minister Kevin Rudd, the man she deposed in late June in a party coup. Political analysts have widely speculated that Rudd, a former diplomat who speaks fluent Mandarin, will be given the key Foreign Affairs portfolio.
- Opposition Leader Abbott, for his part, expressed his disappointment at missing out after coming so close, but vowed to hold the Government "ferociously to account".
- Late on Tuesday, Gillard met Governor-General Quentin Bryce at Government House where she conveyed her majority and presented the letters of support from the independents.
- Gillard is said to have obtained written statements from the non-Labour MPs that they would support the government for the full three-year term.
In announcing their decision to support Gillard, Oakeshott and Windsor cited broadband, regional education and climate change as the main factors in their decision.Labour vowed to push the A$43 billion (Dh144 billion) national broadband network, which aims to offer super high-speed internet to the majority of Australians.
RUDD OUTSED? AUSTRALIA GETS ITS 1ST FEMALE PM
Julia Gillard (L) watches as Governor General Quentin Bryce signs her commission as Prime Minister of Australia at Government House in Canberra on June
CANBERRA, Australia – While Australian soccer team faced elimination for the next round in world soccer tournament in South Africa, Australia's ruling party ousted its leader Thursday in a sudden revolt that also delivered the country its first female leader and stunned the public.Kevin Rudd's deputy, Julia Gillard, was elected leader in an uncontested vote about 12 hours after she surprised many colleagues by challenging a prime minister who until recently was one of the most popular in modern Australian history.
The removal of Rudd — best known as one of the West's few Chinese-speaking leaders and for helping to broker the Copenhagen climate change agreement — showed his party had lost faith that he could win a second term at national elections due within months.
The leadership change immediately eased hostilities between the government and big mining companies over a proposed tax on so-called super profits from burgeoning mineral and energy sales to China and India.- Gillard on Thursday immediately ended an advertising campaign that is promoting the tax, keeping a Labor promise that Rudd broke to never use taxpayers' money for political advertising.
- The world's biggest miner BHP-Billiton responded by suspending counter-advertising that claims the new tax would cost jobs and harm investment in the mineral sector, which is driving Australia's economic growth.
- Gillard said her government is willing to negotiate with the miners on the proposed tax. Opinion polls show the tax debate is doing increasing harm to the government's re-election chances.
- "I have said to the mining companies of this nation publicly that the government is opening its door and we are asking them to open their minds," Gillard told Parliament.
- Rudd had ridden high in opinion polls until he made major policy backflips, including a decision in April to shelve plans to make Australia's worst polluters pay for their carbon gas emissions.
- An airplane towed a banner over Parliament House on Thursday which made an apparent reference to the backflip: "Julia aim higher on climate."
- But Gillard has not committed to pressing ahead with the government's so-called emission trading scheme in which polluters would buy and trade permits for every ton of carbon gas they produce. The Senate has twice rejected the legislation.
- She said that as prime minister she would seek a community consensus on how carbon pollution should be priced.
An emotional Rudd, flanked by his wife and three children, gave his final speech in the prime minister's court yard at Parliament House on Thursday, saying he was proud that his first act in government in 2007 had been to ratify the Kyoto protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions."I'm proud of the fact that we tried three times to get an emissions trading scheme through this Parliament, although we failed," Rudd told reporters.
"I'm less proud of the fact that I have now blubbered," he joked, as he struggled to contain his tears.
- He said he would contest the next election and continue to serve the government "in any manner in which I can be of assistance."
- Gillard and her new deputy, Wayne Swan, were sworn into their offices on Thursday by Australia's first woman Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, within hours of the ballot.
- Swan retains his key financial portfolio as treasurer and will to fly to Canada on Friday for a summit of Group of 20 major economies in Rudd's place. He was also elected unopposed. Gillard has yet to announce any other ministers in her new cabinet.
- Gillard has been instrumental in most of the government's decisions to date as part of Rudd's four-member inner circle that included Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. Tanner announced on Thursday he was quitting politics at the next election for personal reasons.
- John Wanna, an Australian National University political scientist, blamed Rudd's style and inability to clearly communicate for his plummeting popularity.
- "He's not been a bad prime minister, but he comes across as a smarty pants, policy wonk and when he does the human face stuff, he seems a bit disingenuous to the ordinary person," Wanna said.
- Wanna said dumping Rudd for Gillard — widely regarded as the best communicator in Parliament — months out from an election was risky for the government.
- "We've got rid of a successful prime minister after two and a half years, and we've never done that before in the past," Wanna said.
- Gillard was born in Barry, Wales, in 1961, the second daughter of a family who migrated to Adelaide when she was 4 years old in search of a warmer climate for a lung condition.
- A former successful lawyer and state government political staffer, she has been attacked by some opponents as unsuitable to lead because she is childless and therefore out of touch with most Australians.
Despite Australia's weathering the global downturn, recent polling puts the center-left government neck-and-neck with the conservative opposition. One poll earlier this month showed Labor trailing the opposition for the first time in more than four years.Rudd is a Labor hero, having led the party to victory at 2007 elections after 11 years in opposition.
VISITORS GEOFLAGS SINCE AUGUST 26, 2009
