KEY POINTS:
Rudd: Unifier with spine of political steel
Kevin Michael Rudd, a 50-year-old former diplomat and Queensland bureaucrat, has emerged as a giant-killer, a man with a backbone of political steel, astute, articulate and in control of a Labor machine that finally stopped slashing at its own intestines
to unite behind its leader against the greater enemy.
In beating John Howard, he has gained even greater authority.
Rudd has achieved what his predecessors could not, consistently outclassing his opponent, and using imagery and new technologies to thrash Howard and other Liberal late-comers among younger voters.
He has driven Labor to the centre, established economic credibility, and has outlined a plan for Australia that will follow an already broadly defined path.
His first priorities in power will be the environment, industrial relations, education and communications.
Internationally, he will ratify the Kyoto protocols on climate change and begin talks with the United States to bring Australia's combat troops home from Iraq but will otherwise maintain strong support for the US alliance, the war on terrorism and Australia's role in Afghanistan.
Rudd does not have the long political history of Howard or of previous Labor leaders, but he does have ambition and a drive to succeed hammered home by early tragedy and a hard road to the top.
Rudd's sharefarmer father died after a car accident, leading to the eviction of his mother, 11-year-old Rudd and his three siblings and their dependence on what he later described as the bleak charity of the times.
Rudd fought back, becoming dux of his high school, a first class honours graduate from the Australian National university, a diplomat, and a senior China consultant with accounting giant KPMG Australia.
After failing in his first attempt, Rudd won the inner-Brisbane seat of Griffith in 1998, became shadow foreign minister, and in December last year successfully challenged Kim Beazley for leadership of the party.
Howard: Giant who went down fighting
On Saturday night a giant of Australian politics toppled and fell.
John Winston Howard, Prime Minister for more than 11 years, the nation's second-longest in the job, and a towering parliamentary figure for 33 years, lost not only the election but probably also his Sydney seat of Bennelong.
He delivered a graceful farewell at the Wentworth Hotel, but left with the certain knowledge that his political departure would have been far kinder had he handed leadership to deputy and Treasurer Peter Costello 18 months or even a year ago.
Now, for all his achievements, he will be remembered as only the second Prime Minister to have lost his seat. The other was Stanley Bruce, in 1929.
But Howard, who reshaped Australia to his image during his four terms in office, was always a fighter. Had he won the election, he would have stepped down within two years and handed power to Costello, imitating Sir Robert Menzies, the Liberal titan who ruled Australia for 16 successive years through the 1950s and 1960s.
Menzies is the only Australian Prime Minister to have spent longer in power than Howard.
The man they called Lazarus with a triple bypass, who lost one election and two leadership battles with Andrew Peacock before again winning back the job in time for his 1996 landslide over Labor's Paul Keating, is now himself history. But he has left a potent legacy.
Howard's years in office were among the nation's most prosperous, and he has left a strong, vibrant and still-booming economy to his successor.
He is also the man who took on the gun lobby after the Port Arthur massacre and refused to stop campaigning at public rallies for new gun laws despite real risk to his life; who swept aside decades of award rights and protections to reshape industrial relations; who set up refugee detention centres in the Pacific; went to war in Iraq against popular opinion; and who has taken over the lives of Aborigines in the Northern Territory.
True to form, he went down fighting.
