Australia's Lesson for Democrats

By E. J. Dionne

Kevin Rudd, Australia's new prime minister, combines iron discipline with a puckish sense of humor, political toughness with a reflective spiritual side, and a youthful disposition with an old pro's skill at divining where a majority lies.

The triumph of Rudd and his Australian Labor Party holds lessons for Democrats and other center-left parties. John Howard, the conservative incumbent swept from power after 11 years in office, had presided over record prosperity. For the first time in the country's history, wrote Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald, a government was tossed out in unambiguously strong economic times.

Until Saturday's vote, Labor had lost four elections in a row. One young Labor politician I spoke with during a visit to Australia this summer worried whether her party would have any future if it lost a fifth time. As it happens, Labor under Rudd won its largest share of the vote in 60 years. Howard lost his own seat in a rout that saw Labor go from 60 seats to about 86 seats (some races are still close) in the 150-member House of Representatives.

Rudd built on a strong reaction against Howard's new workplace laws curtailing the rights of workers and unions. Labor won a swath of seats in the far suburbs of the big metropolitan areas where younger two-income families flourish but also struggle with rising mortgage rates and the work-family-community time crunch.

But it is the success of the 50-year-old Rudd in drawing a generational line across the Australian electorate that could be adopted elsewhere, particularly in countries like ours where young people are frustrated with replays of old battles. He overwhelmed the 68-year-old Howard among voters under 30, beat him among those aged 30 to 50, and ran even or slightly behind among voters over 50.

Everything Rudd did cast the election as a choice between the past and the future, the old and the new, the tired and the fresh, all embodied in his core slogans, "New Leadership" and "Fresh Ideas." The issues he emphasized -- the need for action against global warming, an "education revolution" to make Australia "the best educated country in the world," and a pledge to bring broadband technology to the entire nation -- reinforced his resolutely up-to-date aura.

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