SYDNEY – New Australian leader Julia Gillard vowed Saturday to provide solutions not slogans on the sensitive issue of boatpeople as she works to shore up her position ahead of looming elections.Gillard secured her first policy victory Friday by sealing a compromise with the powerful mining industry on a proposed profits tax, just one week after ousting predecessor Kevin Rudd in a bloodl
Julia Gillard, Australia’s new prime minister, has caved in to the demands of the powerful mining industry and watered down the controversial resource super profits tax as she clears the decks for a national election as early as August.The Gillard government announced on Friday morning that it had made key concessions to the mining industry, ending a two-month fight that was hurting the Labor par
SYDNEY – Australians wasted no time cashing in on the shock ouster of Kevin Rudd as prime minister, businesses launching a series of cheeky adverts to run alongside stories about the party coup.Budget airline Jetstar took out a half-page newspaper ad with a picture of Rudd and the tagline, Taking a Break? Sunshine Coast from $99 , a tongue-in-cheek reference to the former leader's home to
In Jacqueline Kent's 2009 biography of her, Julia Gillard, then Australia's Deputy Prime Minister, is quoted as saying Anyone who thinks that my being PM [Prime Minister] is inevitable knows nothing whatever about politics. But, less than a year later, the subject of The Making of Julia Gillard is just that - the holder of the highest political office in the land, and the first woman to
CANBERRA – Australia appointed its first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard, who vowed on Thursday to end division over a controversial mining tax, resurrect a carbon trade scheme and call elections within months.Former prime minister Kevin Rudd made an emotional and ignominious exit, quitting just before the center-left Labor Party was to dump him in an internal ballot and less than thre
What a difference six months make.At the start of this year, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose Labor Party won a landslide election in 2007, was still regarded as the poster child for a new Australia.Like a blond superman, he flew around Australia - and the world - tirelessly working to help his nation avert the global financial crisis that had tainted other major economies; wooing fore
CANBERRA – Former lawyer Julia Gillard is likely to become Australia's first female prime minister Thursday in a party ballot that would see Kevin Rudd ousted after less than three years in power, reports said.Political statisticians from the ruling Labor Party and the opposition Liberal Party are tipping Gillard, 48, to win a shock leadership challenge that came after Rudd's catastrophic