KEY POINTS:
Most New Zealanders won't know much about last week's elections in Australia apart from the fact that Kevin Rudd's Labor Party ousted John Howard and his Government.
Predictably the National Party in our country is claiming the result was because the Liberal Party had been in power too long and people just wanted a change.
According to John Key's spin doctors, it shows we will dump Helen Clark next year for the same reason. On the other hand, our Labour Party claims that because there has been a huge swing to the left over there, this will strengthen their chances.
Of course both these interpretations are nonsense. If Howard had held on, Labour would have claimed it as a victory for incumbency and it would help them next year and our National Party would have claimed it as a loss for the left and thus indicate they would win. The truth is, there is no connection between election results in Australia and New Zealand and never has been. Everyone knew that Howard and his Government had long been on borrowed time.
The scandalous Tampa incident, where Howard lied to the Australian electorate about illegal refugees throwing their children into the sea to prevent their being caught, won him an earlier election he should have lost. Trying a similar stunt this time around by sending troops into Aboriginal communities couldn't save him.
Three main reasons for the huge swing against Howard was his active support for George W Bush's occupation of Iraq; refusal to be part of the Kyoto Protocol or in fact even recognise the planet was in trouble; and his anti-worker Workchoices legislation. None of these factors is relevant or divisive politically in New Zealand.
Apart from John Key's initial enthusiasm for sending young New Zealanders off to die in the desert with America's youth, National has fallen behind Labour's policy of staying out. With the exception of the fringe right-wing and climate change deniers there is also a political consensus on Kyoto.
National also assures us it has no intention of making any significant changes to our employment laws.
If there had been any secret plans on National's part to attack what remains of workers' rights here the Australian elections would have put an end to that idea. We won't be getting any repeat of National's Bill Birch's savage attacks on workers in the 1990s when it introduced the Employment Contracts Act. In Australia workers saw the devastation to wages and conditions here and weren't going to have a bar of it.
Australian workers and their unions mobilised their entire apparatus to defeat Howard's Government. Huge amounts of money were spent on a massive anti-Workchoices campaign showing ordinary workers talking about the effect of Howard's anti-union laws on them and their families. An ACNielsen poll reported that half of a swing of 6 per cent against the Howard Government was because of this one issue.
The irony of our Labour Government's limiting third party spending in the next election when this campaign in Australian was decisive in getting the Labor Party elected I'm sure isn't lost on our politicians.
Despite the twittering of right-wing commentators in our media it's not for tax reasons that New Zealanders are going across the Tasman to work, it's because their take-home wages are much higher than ours.
The defeat of Howard will mean Aussie workers will keep their higher wages and benefits.
I can only imagine how the incomes of New Zealand workers would be different today if the leaders of our trade union movement at the time Bill Birch took a scalpel to workers' rights fought like the Aussies. Too often we roll over when we are getting shafted. Our cousins across the ditch don't seem to have that same affliction and fight hard-ball to protect their rights.
In fact the revolt against their Government's attacks resulted in Howard actually losing his own seat. The only other Prime Minister who lost his seat was a fellow called Stanley Bruce, dumped in 1929 ironically for the same reason.
Bruce introduced anti-worker legislation along the same lines as Howard. But the similarity is richer still; both MPs were dumped from the same seat of Bennelong. How delicious.
Most of us would have predicted Howard's defeat, but not the scale and the consequences. Howard is out of Parliament. Peter Costello, his anointed successor, has bailed and a former Labour Party member now leads the Liberal Party.
Women hold the number two spots in both parties. Rudd as Prime Minster has dumped most of the old hands from the front bench and instead promoted newly elected MPs - a majority of them with trade union backgrounds.
Within months you'll have Howard's sacred cows killed off. Australian troops will be out of Iraq, the Kyoto protocol will be signed and the Workchoices legislation will be dumped. For good measure the Aboriginal people will get an apology and the Army will get out of their communities. On a global basis President Bush will lose his deputy sheriff in our region and finish his term with all his war pals dumped from office.