Howard Loses Election
Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.
Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.Rudd has named global warming as his top priority, and his signing of the Kyoto Protocol will leave the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.
BTW - I love how the AP story puts this defeat through the prism of American politics. Could it possibly be that other countries have their own politics?
Howard’s support of American policy was a huge issue in the campaign, so the AP story is pretty accurate.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 24, 2007 at 1303 hrs
Actually, Rudd made this an election about age vs. youth. Howard had been Aussie PM for 11 years, and was highly successful on the domestic front.
People in Australia were living it up under his leadership. The economy was good it has had 16 years of no recession. Even America’s never had that good a track record; no matter what party has the White House.
Australian elections have become increasingly presidential, and Labor cast this one as a two-man race: Kevin vs John, youth vs age, the future vs the past. A vote for Rudd was a vote for someone new. But not too different. Cartoonists drew Rudd as a mini-Howard. A satirical video on YouTube cast the Chinese-speaking Labor leader as Chairman Mao, with subtitles reading: “Rudd unnerve decrepit Howard with clever strategy of ’similar difference.’” Rather than attacking Howard’s strengths, Rudd appropriated them. “I am not a socialist,” Rudd insisted. “I am an economic conservative.” On issue after issue, from federal intervention in dysfunctional Aboriginal communities, to national security, to the expansion of coal and uranium mining, Rudd adopted the government’s line.
The new P.M. is likely to go Howard’s way on foreign policy, too. What he described as “fundamental differences” with Howard — his vows to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and pull troops from Iraq — are largely symbolic.
That’s from the next edition of Time magazine.
The Aussies just wanted a new front man to the band, not a change in what was happening.
Posted by Kevin Binversie on November 24, 2007 at 1734 hrs
Begin Rant:
The Republican Party needs to wake up and realize they are loosing the propaganda war on carbon dioxide. What is needed is a Project Innocent counter campaign. The pubic is not questioning the lie because the lie is not being countered by people who know the truth. The public is not being told that more CO2 does not mean more heat.
Carbon Dioxide by itself does not affect temperature. This is why a can of beer cools down in the refrigerator. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide reacts with an extremely narrow band of infrared radiation and once that spectrum of energy is absorbed, adding more CO2 does nothing. For the purposes of thermal affects, if CO2 is the gun then infrared radiation is the ammunition. Once you are out of the caliber of bullets the gun can handle, it don’t matter how many guns you have.
There is no experimental science validating the claims of dangerous man made global warming. There is only data manipulation by computer programs. The second law of thermodynamics is that energy dissipates from hot to cold and the temperature of an open system, like Earth in space, reaches a balance between heat in from the sun and heat lost to the cold of space.
The hottest Earth can conceivably reach is thus, the temperature of the sun, but the reality is that the balance will stabilize much cooler than 11 thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Before we allow authoritarian central government to destroy our economy, we should at least demand a specific number of how hot all the CO2 possible to manufacture on Earth can make the planet, remembering that CO2 by itself does not affect temperature.
End Rant.
Posted by Random10 on November 24, 2007 at 2054 hrs
Succinctly speaking, The Sun causes what Algore is lamenting.
Does that wrap it up Random?Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 0317 hrs
Oh Yea, John, Read a newspaper from outside your comfort zone once in a while. You would have learned that PM Howard’s loss had nothing to do with his backing of U.S. Policy.
In fact the exact opposite is true.
Remove your head from your third point of contact and extracate yourself from Huffinkos and you may see clearly.Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 0321 hrs
Ched- I listen, watch, and read BBC all the time, which I certainly trust a lot more on International news, particularly in the Commonwealth nations.
Kevin- I did not say it was the only reason, and while the age issue was a big campaign issue, so was Howard’s support of Bush’s policies.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 1405 hrs
Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and withdrawal from Iraq are major points in all major news coverage, not just the AP.
Speaking of reading newspapers outside your comfort zone:
Despite emphasizing the “centrality” of Australia’s ties with the U.S. in a press conference on Sunday, Mr. Rudd has promised to take several steps that are likely to test that bond, at least in the short run. These include pulling some of Australia’s troops out of Iraq and—in a reversal of Mr. Howard’s stance—ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the international accord aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Approving Kyoto would deprive the U.S. of one of its key supporters on climate change issues and put new pressure on President Bush’s administration ahead of an important meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia, where world leaders will discuss what to do when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The U.S. has refused to ratify the Kyoto plan.
—The Wall Street Journal
...climate change is now at the centre of the government agenda. After Work Choices, climate change is the reason Howard lost. His is probably the first incumbent government in the world to have been defeated in part because of denial on climate change. To be sure he made a late change of direction early in the year, and started to introduce piecemeal measures, but he has cost Australia 10 years of wasted opportunity to prepare ourselves for a very difficult future, and he has cost us a great deal of our international reputation through his recalcitrance on Kyoto.
—Sydney Morning Herald
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 1411 hrs
I travel internationally a lot and when people hear you are from the US they are dying to dump out to you how much they dislike Bush. Gotten this pretty much on five continents.
But buck up. The fact that you like Bush so much makes you VERY exceptional.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 1602 hrs
The new P.M. is likely to go Howard’s way on foreign policy, too.
Time might have been a little premature on this.
And as far as symbolism goes it is one of the few things that most of the members of the coalition provided.
And Owen;
Could it possibly be that other countries have their own politics?
Haven’t we eliminated these annoyances through “regime change” yet?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 25, 2007 at 1612 hrs
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