KEY POINTS:
CANBERRA - Australia is waking to a new reality. After three decades, John Howard has gone forever, and a man unknown to most Australians a few short years ago will now govern their country for at least three years, and quite possibly another three beyond that.
Kevin Michael Rudd, a 50-year-old former diplomat and Queensland state bureaucrat, fluent in Mandarin and with a multimillionaire wife, has become Prime Minister in the most dramatic of fashions.
His resounding victory will give him great authority and the ability to set a firm agenda. As did Howard and his predecessor, Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Rudd will change Australia.
The question Australians now face is: how great will those changes be, and what will they bring?
The first will obviously be the Cabinet that will govern the country. Rudd will be able to plough through traditional Labor factionalism to appoint a front bench of his choosing.
Howard's defeat has put new, younger talent into Labor. Among them is Greg Combet, former secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and Bill Shorten, former national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, who rose to prominence in his role as spokesman during the rescue of the trapped Beaconsfield miners.
Australia will have its first female Deputy Prime Minister in Julia Gillard, whose portfolios cover employment and industrial relations, and social inclusion. Wayne Swan, one-time educator and adviser to former Labor Leader Kim Beazley, will be Treasurer.
No other positions have been named, and some of the former shadow ministers may not make it into the Cabinet. Others may switch roles. The present spokesman on federal-state relations and international development assistance, Bob McMullan, is considered to be a potential replacement for Robert McClelland in foreign affairs.
Rudd's approach will need to take account of Labor realities. There were compromises in the build-up to the campaign and during the past six weeks that powerful blocs within Labor would not normally have tolerated. If a Rudd Government moved too far from the core beliefs and positions of these blocs, he would find himself having serious trouble in caucus.
The other reality confronting Rudd is the Senate. Until next June, when the Senators elected on Saturday will take their seats, he will face an Upper House dominated by the Coalition Opposition. This will limit his ability to rush through some of his more controversial priorities, such as his intention to scrap Howard's WorkChoices industrial laws and replace them with a new set of his own.
When the new Senate does sit, the Greens are almost certain to hold the balance of power and will extract a price for their support.
Rudd's Government will also be marked by no-nonsense pragmatism and a focus on economic justification for the measures it takes. Economic articulation will be framed in terms of the future benefits of new investment in a range of education, training and social programmes.
The management of the economy itself will not differ much. Rudd promises economic conservatism, balanced budgets, low inflation and all the other markers of Australia's economic success of the past decade.
Unions will be kept at heel, with strict curbs on industrial action, including mandatory secret ballots and bans on secondary boycotts. Nor will the planned changes to WorkChoices return the nation to pre-Howard days. Subject to negotiation with the Greens, Rudd will abolish Howard's individual workplace agreements, replacing them as they expire over two years with collective enterprise agreements and individual common law agreements.
Underpinning these agreements will be safety-net provisions including 10 basic award conditions to restore and protect such lost rights as penalty rates and overtime. New rights to dispute unfair dismissal, lost under WorkChoices, will be introduced, and a new arbitrator, FairWork Australia, will be established.
There will be international implications from some of Rudd's policy priorities, especially his intention to pull troops out of Iraq and to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change, both of which will more closely align Australia with New Zealand.
This will not be welcomed by the Bush Administration. Howard was Washington's last friend in Iraq, and the two countries were the only major players to reject Kyoto. But if the Democrats win the White House, adding to their control of Congress, Rudd's policies should meet with far greater empathy.
At home, Rudd will negotiate with coast-to-coast Labor state governments. For the first time, there is not a conservative administration anywhere in Australia, in theory easing the always difficult road to agreement between federal and state governments.
In practice, priorities and policies may clash. Among Rudd's earliest aims is the overhaul and repair of the nation's crisis-ridden hospital system, a state responsibility, albeit with heavy federal funding.
If he cannot reach agreement with the states over hospital reform within two years, Rudd intends holding a referendum aimed at hauling all public hospitals into federal control.
Rudd has said he does not intend to purge Howard's heads of department, which would ensure continuity and retain knowledge and experience.
In his first 100 days Rudd intends to ratify Kyoto, begin talks with the US on combat withdrawal from Iraq, open negotiations with the states on hospital reform, launch work on a new high-speed broadband network, call tenders for a plan to link schools to the network and give each senior secondary student a computer, and get the planned introduction of secondary school trade training centres underway.
Rudd warns that the long-running resources boom underpinning Australian affluence will inevitably end, and that the nation must now invest in human capital and 21st century infrastructure if it is to maintain its place in the world. The key is education and training, and massive spending to produce the skills the country will need in the future.
New emphasis will be placed on science and mathematics, and on the training of teachers in those fields.
Rudd will also be creating new markets for Australian innovators and technology through massive environmental, water and renewable energy programmes that will in time change the face of the nation's suburbs. First-home buyers will gain through incentives to help them save for their deposits, and housing shortages will be addressed by further incentives for developers to build low-income rental properties.
This is, Rudd promises, a blueprint for a new Australia. Today, the nation will see their new Prime Minister begin to put it into place.
