Just when will it be Ass Loong Son's turn and also Najib's?:p
http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...-ousted-by-deputy-as-poll-ratings-tumble.html
Australia’s Rudd May Be Ousted by Deputy as Poll Ratings Tumble
June 23, 2010, 2:42 PM EDT
More From Businessweek
By Gemma Daley and Marion Rae
June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose support slumped after he abandoned a carbon-trading plan and proposed taxing the mining industry, faces a leadership challenge today from deputy Julia Gillard that may cost him his job.
Rudd needs a majority of Labor lawmakers when the party meets at 9 a.m. in Canberra. Gillard, who requested the ballot yesterday after Rudd began losing support, confirmed she would seek to oust Rudd, without further comment.
While Rudd said he was “quite capable” of beating back Gillard’s challenge, one analyst, Andrew Hughes, said the prime minister was likely to lose.
“He is a goner,” said Hughes, a political analyst at Canberra-based Australian National University, in a phone interview. “It’s the most significant political downfall in Australian political history.”
Three Labor Party lawmakers, including one minister and another who heads the party’s largest faction, also predicted Rudd’s defeat. They declined to be identified because of their party affiliation.
The Australian Workers Union, which represents over 135,000 people in such industries as agriculture, construction and hospitality and favors the mining tax, endorsed Gillard yesterday.
Rudd began to slide in polls in April after he shelved his carbon-trading proposal, a key campaign pledge when he won office in November 2007. Then he proposed a 40 percent tax on the “super profits” of resource projects in Australia, the world’s biggest shipper of coal and iron ore, and refused to back down even after members of his own party objected.
Record Dissatisfaction
Dissatisfaction with Rudd, 52, hit a record 55 percent, according to a telephone survey of 1,147 people between June 18 and June 20 published in the Australian newspaper this week. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. Rudd was previously the nation’s second most-popular leader, after Bob Hawke in the 1980s, according to a Nielsen poll published in March 2009.
“I believe I am quite capable of winning this ballot based on the counting we have done,” Rudd told reporters yesterday. “Politics is a tough business.”
The mining tax was opposed by such companies as BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest mining company, and Rio Tinto Plc. Shares of Melbourne-based BHP and London-based Rio Tinto rose after the leadership vote was announced. BHP climbed 1.8 percent to $69.38 as of 1:38 p.m. in New York yesterday, while Rio Tinto rallied 2.2 percent to $50.98.
Dollar Trade
Australia’s dollar was little changed at 87.23 per U.S. cents at 1:36 p.m. in New York from 87.16 cents yesterday, after touching 86.88, the lowest since June 18.
Were Gillard to topple Rudd, she would become Australia’s first female prime minister. Elections are required within 10 months.
Wales-born Gillard, 48, has been Rudd’s deputy since December 2006 and helped Labor win power after almost 12 years in opposition. She is minister for education, employment and social inclusion and has supported the mining tax.
Awarded the so-called “super portfolio” of education and employment in 2008, Gillard was responsible for dismantling former Prime Minister John Howard’s Work Choices labor laws that decreased the power of unions. Voter opposition to the laws was seen as the pivotal issue in the 2007 election victory.
She studied at the University of Adelaide and Melbourne University, where she graduated in 1986 with degrees in arts and law and joined law firm Slater & Gordon in Werribee, Victoria in 1990, practicing industrial law. The firm now has a meeting room named after her in its Melbourne office.
Welfare Spending
She was elected to the national parliament in 1998, where she is a member of the so-called Left faction of the party, which favors greater spending on social issues, including welfare.
Rudd won in 2007 with promises to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq and ratify the Kyoto treaty on climate change. While the troops were out by July 2009, his efforts to pass a carbon trading plan similar to systems used in Europe were scuttled by the opposition coalition in the Senate.
“I was elected in to do a job,” Rudd said in Canberra last night at a press conference that started at 10.10 p.m. “I intend to continue doing that job.”
Some 78 percent of voters surveyed in nine parliamentary districts in Western Australia and Queensland said the tax should be scrapped or changed, according to a Newspoll survey commissioned by the mining industry and published in the Australian newspaper on June 7. The survey of 1,800 people taken between May 31 and June 3 didn’t provide a margin of error.
‘Psychological Hold’
“There is a psychological hold that mining has on the country,” Malcolm Mackerras, visiting fellow in political science at the University of New South Wales, said from Canberra.
The son of a tenant farmer in northern Queensland, Rudd graduated with a first-class honors degree in Asian studies from Australian National University before becoming a diplomat in Stockholm and Beijing between 1981 and 1988. He worked for the Queensland Labor Party before entering parliament in 1998. He was elected leader of the party in December 2006.
The winner of today’s ballot will face an opposition led by Tony Abbott, a former amateur boxer who studied for the priesthood. Abbott has promised not to adopt the resource profits tax and has offered a more generous plan for parents to take leave from the workforce after they have a baby.
“This is a party that knew it was going to lose an election” and thus is turning to Gillard, Hughes said. Rudd “used to be a fashion item and now he’s going to be put in the used clothes bin.”
--With reporting by Rebecca Keenan. Editors: Anne Swardson, Patrick Harrington
To contact the reporter on this story: Gemma Daley in Canberra at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne Swardson in Paris at [email protected]
http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...-ousted-by-deputy-as-poll-ratings-tumble.html
Australia’s Rudd May Be Ousted by Deputy as Poll Ratings Tumble
June 23, 2010, 2:42 PM EDT
More From Businessweek
By Gemma Daley and Marion Rae
June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose support slumped after he abandoned a carbon-trading plan and proposed taxing the mining industry, faces a leadership challenge today from deputy Julia Gillard that may cost him his job.
Rudd needs a majority of Labor lawmakers when the party meets at 9 a.m. in Canberra. Gillard, who requested the ballot yesterday after Rudd began losing support, confirmed she would seek to oust Rudd, without further comment.
While Rudd said he was “quite capable” of beating back Gillard’s challenge, one analyst, Andrew Hughes, said the prime minister was likely to lose.
“He is a goner,” said Hughes, a political analyst at Canberra-based Australian National University, in a phone interview. “It’s the most significant political downfall in Australian political history.”
Three Labor Party lawmakers, including one minister and another who heads the party’s largest faction, also predicted Rudd’s defeat. They declined to be identified because of their party affiliation.
The Australian Workers Union, which represents over 135,000 people in such industries as agriculture, construction and hospitality and favors the mining tax, endorsed Gillard yesterday.
Rudd began to slide in polls in April after he shelved his carbon-trading proposal, a key campaign pledge when he won office in November 2007. Then he proposed a 40 percent tax on the “super profits” of resource projects in Australia, the world’s biggest shipper of coal and iron ore, and refused to back down even after members of his own party objected.
Record Dissatisfaction
Dissatisfaction with Rudd, 52, hit a record 55 percent, according to a telephone survey of 1,147 people between June 18 and June 20 published in the Australian newspaper this week. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. Rudd was previously the nation’s second most-popular leader, after Bob Hawke in the 1980s, according to a Nielsen poll published in March 2009.
“I believe I am quite capable of winning this ballot based on the counting we have done,” Rudd told reporters yesterday. “Politics is a tough business.”
The mining tax was opposed by such companies as BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest mining company, and Rio Tinto Plc. Shares of Melbourne-based BHP and London-based Rio Tinto rose after the leadership vote was announced. BHP climbed 1.8 percent to $69.38 as of 1:38 p.m. in New York yesterday, while Rio Tinto rallied 2.2 percent to $50.98.
Dollar Trade
Australia’s dollar was little changed at 87.23 per U.S. cents at 1:36 p.m. in New York from 87.16 cents yesterday, after touching 86.88, the lowest since June 18.
Were Gillard to topple Rudd, she would become Australia’s first female prime minister. Elections are required within 10 months.
Wales-born Gillard, 48, has been Rudd’s deputy since December 2006 and helped Labor win power after almost 12 years in opposition. She is minister for education, employment and social inclusion and has supported the mining tax.
Awarded the so-called “super portfolio” of education and employment in 2008, Gillard was responsible for dismantling former Prime Minister John Howard’s Work Choices labor laws that decreased the power of unions. Voter opposition to the laws was seen as the pivotal issue in the 2007 election victory.
She studied at the University of Adelaide and Melbourne University, where she graduated in 1986 with degrees in arts and law and joined law firm Slater & Gordon in Werribee, Victoria in 1990, practicing industrial law. The firm now has a meeting room named after her in its Melbourne office.
Welfare Spending
She was elected to the national parliament in 1998, where she is a member of the so-called Left faction of the party, which favors greater spending on social issues, including welfare.
Rudd won in 2007 with promises to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq and ratify the Kyoto treaty on climate change. While the troops were out by July 2009, his efforts to pass a carbon trading plan similar to systems used in Europe were scuttled by the opposition coalition in the Senate.
“I was elected in to do a job,” Rudd said in Canberra last night at a press conference that started at 10.10 p.m. “I intend to continue doing that job.”
Some 78 percent of voters surveyed in nine parliamentary districts in Western Australia and Queensland said the tax should be scrapped or changed, according to a Newspoll survey commissioned by the mining industry and published in the Australian newspaper on June 7. The survey of 1,800 people taken between May 31 and June 3 didn’t provide a margin of error.
‘Psychological Hold’
“There is a psychological hold that mining has on the country,” Malcolm Mackerras, visiting fellow in political science at the University of New South Wales, said from Canberra.
The son of a tenant farmer in northern Queensland, Rudd graduated with a first-class honors degree in Asian studies from Australian National University before becoming a diplomat in Stockholm and Beijing between 1981 and 1988. He worked for the Queensland Labor Party before entering parliament in 1998. He was elected leader of the party in December 2006.
The winner of today’s ballot will face an opposition led by Tony Abbott, a former amateur boxer who studied for the priesthood. Abbott has promised not to adopt the resource profits tax and has offered a more generous plan for parents to take leave from the workforce after they have a baby.
“This is a party that knew it was going to lose an election” and thus is turning to Gillard, Hughes said. Rudd “used to be a fashion item and now he’s going to be put in the used clothes bin.”
--With reporting by Rebecca Keenan. Editors: Anne Swardson, Patrick Harrington
To contact the reporter on this story: Gemma Daley in Canberra at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne Swardson in Paris at [email protected]
