Bush loses a friend

last updated 8 January 2015

What happened

Australia’s outgoing prime minister, John Howard, began clearing out his office on Monday after his center-right coalition was trounced by the Labor Party in weekend parliamentary elections. (Melbourne, Australia, Herald Sun) Howard had been a staunch ally of President Bush, and his replacement, Kevin Rudd, is expected to change his country’s policies by pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the withdrawal of Australia’s 550 troops in Iraq. (The New York Times, free registration)

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The change in Australia “holds lessons for Democrats” in the U.S., said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post (free registration). Rudd, 50, won a mandate for change—even though the 58-year-old Howard “presided over record prosperity”—by casting the election as a chance to “move beyond the tired “ideological categories of the past” and “end a long conservative era. Sound familiar?”

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