Australia has thrown out John Howard after eleven years as Prime Minister and replaced him with a relative novice, Kevin Rudd. The change in leadership forecasts other changes for Australia. Mr. Rudd has said he will withdraw 500 front line Australian troops from Afghanistan by the middle of 2008. He has also pledged to sign the Kyoto treaty on global warming and he will attend a UN sponsored climate summit in Bali in December.

Australia has enjoyed an economic boom under the conservative Howard government. Rudd, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the past, had to run on a fiscally conservative platform. If he tinkers with a successful economic formula he may find himself out of office.

Here is a comment from a Wall Street Journal article on the switch over:
 

Mr. Rudd isn't a faddish man who came to his beliefs lightly. When he was a child, his father was accidentally killed and his mother was put on the dole. Watching his family and neighbors struggle to better themselves made him a believer in "activist government," he said. In his article for the Monthly last year, Mr. Rudd argued that governments can manage markets to achieve better social outcomes, which the bureaucrats, themselves, pick and choose. Australia tried that in the 1970s under former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, with disastrous results. How long the Rudd government will last will depend on how "equitable" and "fair" the public finds his "progressive" theories, once they're put into practice.