KEY POINTS:
For many island nations of the South Pacific, Labor's win in Australia is the equivalent of hitting the reset button on a frozen PC.
Bilateral ties between Australia and its Melanesian neighbours - particularly the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea - had dipped to such a low in the past two years that their leaders openly said only a change of Administration in Canberra offered any hope of turning the situation around.
At the last Pacific Forum meeting that former Prime Minister John Howard attended in Fiji in 2006, he and some of the Melanesian leaders are reported to have even avoided eye contact. He did not attend the Tonga meeting two months ago because of the looming elections.
The extent of the Pacific leaders' impatience with the Howard Administration was betrayed by their instant - almost jubilant - reaction to Labor's win.
Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister, Sir Michael Somare, put through a congratulatory call all the way from Uganda, where he was attending the Commonwealth leaders meeting.
Leaders of the atoll nations that are threatened by sea level rises have hastened to congratulate Rudd on Australia ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on the eve of its 10th anniversary.
For his part, Rudd lost no time in announcing the appointment of a Parliamentary Secretary for the Pacific Islands in Duncan Kerr, who served as Justice Minister in the last Labor Government. He was also the dean of the law faculty at the University of Papua New Guinea - therefore rich in Pacific experience.
Announcing the appointment, Rudd said: "If you notice anything about our relations with the South Pacific in recent years, they've gone through one rocky patch after another. It's not the time for an extensive policy discussion as to why that has been the case.
"I would suggest having a dedicated parliamentary secretary, and someone with such extensive experience as Duncan, charged with that responsibility will help rebuild the fabric of personal and political relationships with the Governments of the South Pacific."
So should this be the time for Pacific Island leaders to bring out the grog bowl for a celebration? Not quite. There is a range of issues between Australia and each Pacific Island country as well as collectively between groups of them and finally with the region as a whole that the new Administration will have to look into.
Here's a look at some of these issues that have affected relations between Australia and the islands in recent years and how the new Administration may deal with them:
NAURU
No other Pacific Island country's destiny is as irrevocably bound up with Australia as Nauru's.
In the 1980s, the tiny nation of 10,000 residents rubbed shoulders with the United States, Japan and Germany in terms of per capita incomes and was in the top five of the rich list. That was thanks to rich phosphate deposits formed over thousands of years by the droppings of migrating birds.
Knowing that the phosphate would run out, Nauru's leaders created investment funds in Australia to look after the future of its small population in its post-phosphate years. But successive Governments' mismanagement reduced the country to near bankruptcy by the turn of the century.
The Howard Administration bailed Nauru out by getting it to agree to host its offshore refugee processing centre as part of its "Pacific Solution" strategy - a facility in which Nauru would babysit refugees that landed on Australian shores.
Since 2001, Nauru has depended largely on the handouts it received from Australia for running this processing centre. It has received over $100 million since then besides other aid amounting to nearly $10 million annually.
The new Labor Government is expected to the pull the plug on the Pacific Solution as part of one of its election pledges and has already begun with some early action: last week, it granted refugee status to seven Burmese men who spent a year at the Nauru detention centre.
Closure of the centre will put an end to a big chunk of Nauru's income and put hurdles in the path of the Ludwig Scotty Government's reform programme. Scotty was re-elected President a couple of months ago on the pledge of continuing with the reforms widely seen as proceeding on the right track.
SOLOMON ISLANDS
After years of widespread violence and lawlessness that brought the archipelago to its knees, the Solomon Islands welcomed the Australian-led multinational intervention force, Ramsi, in 2003.
Ramsi almost instantly put an end to the violence and over the next few years, a growing civilian component of the mission worked to rebuild its institutions and revenue system.
Four years later, surveys have shown people overwhelmingly support Ramsi and most opinion makers believe the country is not yet ready to be weaned off - a view grudgingly agreed to by former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
Relations between Canberra and Honiara began going downhill soon after Sogavare's election as Prime Minister in April 2006 following riots which reduced the capital's Chinatown quarter to cinders - and caught Ramsi forces completely unawares.
On the eve of the Apec meeting in Sydney a couple of months ago, Sogavare accused the Howard Administration of trying to recolonise the archipelago through Ramsi. This all but obliterated the thin line that distinguished the regional mission and Australia - a distinction the Australians have all along been at pains to emphasise.
Sogavare's peeve with the Howard Administration has a lot to do with his personal friend and Attorney-General Julian Moti, whom Australia wants to extradite on sex-related charges.
The Rudd Government will have to tread carefully on the Moti saga because in Australia it is a law and order issue. Its handling will have repercussions not only on the future relationship of Ramsi with the Solomon Islands but also with Australia's own relationship with PNG.
Despite four years of Ramsi, governance remains a daunting problem in much of the Solomon Islands and Rudd would have to make it the centrepiece of his Government's policy not just for the Solomons but the rest of the Pacific.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
The Howard Administration's Enhanced Co-operation Programme for PNG came a cropper when PNG's Supreme Court refused to uphold the Australians' demand for immunity for its soldiers and officials working in PNG. The initiative was soon abandoned and relations between the two countries began deteriorating.
When a PNG defence force confidential internal enquiry implicating Prime Minister Somare in aiding Moti's escape to the Solomon Islands was leaked to the media, the Australians insisted on getting an official copy to which Somare famously replied: "Ask the Australians to go to hell."
On that note, Howard refused to meet Somare at Apec in Sydney, in response to which Somare's spokesman said he regretted Australia believed the relationship between the two countries was to be determined on the one issue of Moti.
The Labor Government will indeed have to look at developing new areas of co-operation after smoothing ruffled diplomatic feathers.
FIJI
How it deals with Fiji's interim Administration may well be indicative of the tone of the Rudd Government's larger approach to the Pacific. As in the case of the rest of Melanesia, the Howard Administration's approach to Fiji was initially aggressive but the pressure seemed to peter out as the elections drew closer.
Helen Clark is the first overseas leader to have met Rudd after he took office and he said New Zealand's role in the Pacific has been outstanding under her leadership. But it is open to question if the Rudd Administration would be influenced by New Zealand's confused approach to Fiji, which seemed a clone of the Howard Government's style - in fact far more strident - in the beginning; but more recently it has sent confusing signals with an ad hoc manner of waiving its travel ban on certain Fiji citizens.
The new approach may be far more responsive with a readiness to provide both aid and expertise towards the interim Administration's stated plans for returning the country to democracy early in 2009.
KIRIBATI, TUVALU AND THE OTHERS
If Rudd's seeming hurry to ratify Kyoto drew praise from atoll nations affected by sea level rises, they may well have to wait before they really get a picture of what's in it for them.
One key factor these nations are keenly interested in is any emerging policy on absorbing and resettling what may well turn out to be the world's first ecological refugees.
The Howard Administration - in marked contrast to New Zealand's more humanitarian stand on the issue - had categorically said time and again that it did not plan to have a strategy for accommodating refugees as a result of climate change and sea level rise.
While no one expects the new Administration to make any statements to the contrary in a hurry, any policy development in that area would be keenly watched.
In any case the ratification of Kyoto has instantly symbolised a friend in Australia particularly to Kiribati and Tuvalu, which have been the focus of world attention in every forum on climate change.
It is too early to say what Labor's approach in the Pacific will ultimately be over the coming months.
Now the reset button has been pressed, Pacific Island leaders must wait patiently to see what message the rebooted PC's opening screen brings.
