Rudd sworn in as Australian Prime Minister
AUSTRALIA, Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Australia's
26th prime minister Monday, launching a new era in which he has pledged
to roll back many of his conservative predecessor's policies.
Nine days after a landslide election victory over John Howard's
11-year-old coalition government, Rudd took the oath of office before
Governor-General Michael Jeffery at Government House in Canberra.
In a sharp break with Howard's policies, the new prime minister has
promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, pull Australian
troops out of Iraq and dismantle union-busting labour laws.
Watched by his wife Therese Rein, a millionaire businesswoman, and
their three children, Rudd swore on a bible to "well and truly serve the
Commonwealth of Australia, her land and her people, in the office of
prime minister."
Rudd's deputy in the Labor Party, Julia Gillard, was sworn in as the
first woman to hold the post of deputy prime minister, along with the
rest of his cabinet. The 20 cabinet ministers, 10 other ministers and 12
parliamentary secretaries were due to hold a full ministerial meeting in
Parliament House after the swearing-in, with Rudd pledging to get to
work immediately.
"It's an important day for us because we turn a new page into the
future," he told reporters ahead of the swearing-in. "It's getting down
to work on the agenda we put to the people during the election period.
I'm really looking forward to that."
A reversal of Howard's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming was top of the agenda, said Rudd, who travels next week to a
major UN climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia.
"As I said prior to the election, our first act as the incoming
government would be to proceed with the ratification of Kyoto. "That
remains our intention and when I land in Bali we would hope that
ratification process would be underway."
But Rudd warned that the conference's task of hammering out a roadmap
for a new global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions when the
Kyoto provisions expire in 2012 would not be easy.
Sydney, Monday, AFP |
