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CANBERRA – Australia's main opposition Labor Party elected the party's foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd as its new leader today.
Rudd won a party ballot with 49 votes to 39 for Beazley, a Labor Party spokesman said. The party's health spokeswoman Julia Gillard will be his deputy.
Labor has lost four elections in a row to Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, and needs to secure 16 seats from the government to win office. The next elections are due in the second half of 2007.
Party spokesman Anthony Byrne said Beazley, 57, urged the party to unite behind Rudd, 49, so Labor could win back power.
"He believes we can win the next election, and wants to see Kevin Rudd become the next prime minister of this country," Byrne quoted Beazley as telling the meeting.
The leadership change comes as a new poll shows the centre-left Labor Party has a strong chance of victory at next year's election.
An ACNielsen poll in Fairfax newspapers said Labor had an election-winning 12-point lead over the government with 56 per cent support to 44 per cent for Howard's conservative coalition.
But after a decade in power, Howard, 67, continues to command a strong personal rating in polls and he has promised to stay in politics to contest the next election.
Rudd was first elected to parliament in 1998 after working as a bureaucrat, political adviser and a diplomat, serving postings in Stockholm and Beijing.
Rudd has promised to continue with Labor's policy to withdraw Australian forces from Iraq, sign the Kyoto protocol on climate change and scrap unpopular workplace laws.
Michael Lee, a former Labor lawmaker and minister in Paul Keating's government in the 1990s, said the strong victory for Rudd would help the party put aside leadership tensions ahead of the next election.
"The fact it is a clear-cut decision works in Kevin's favour," Lee told Sky television.
Rudd has said he would ask Beazley, who lost elections to Howard in 1998 and again in 2001, to remain in parliament and to serve on his frontbench.
ABL State Chamber
Shortly after the election, leading NSW business lobby group ABL State Chamber has urged new federal Opposition Leader Rudd to dump Labor's existing industrial relations policies.
Mr Rudd said on Friday that he would stick to the party's current industrial relations platform.
But ABL State Chamber chief executive Kevin MacDonald today said Mr Rudd's first action as Labor leader should be to scrap the platform, which includes the abolition of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs).
"Mr Beazley's policies ensured that he was never seen as the heir of the Hawke and Keating legacies," Mr MacDonald said in a statement.
"The fact is Mr Beazley hitched his wagon to the trade union movement who account for less than 18 per cent of Australian workers.
"More than anything else, it has been federal Labor's workplace relations policies that have made it look uninspiring and backward looking."
- REUTERS / AAP
