On 26 March C.N. Gomersall wrote: >Any of our OZtralian colleagues want to comment on the new leader of the >Labour Party? Please ensure that your observations are intelligible to the >average pom. > A quick rather than profound response is as follows: Kim Beazley is the new leader of the parliamentary Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition. He was elected unopposed to the position after Paul Keating stepped down following the election loss on 2 March. It is a measure of the scale of the loss suffered that Kim Beazley was himself in limbo for two weeks until final counting in his own seeat in Western Australia confirmed he had actually been re-elected to parliament. Beazley was previously Deputy Prime Minister and has been a leading heir apparent amongst several contenders for some time. His ascent to the leadership therefore does not mark any major upheaval or change in power structures within the ALP. The position of leader was/is not one that was highly desired; the ALP has been reduced to a rump in parliament and it make take them more than one election to rebuild to a position where they can take power again. Other contenders for the leadership are happy enough to wait until the possibility of achieving government is closer. There was a brief contest for the Deputy leader's position between Simon Crean, the aloof and sometimes incomprehensible former President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and former minister, and Gareth Evans, former Minister for Foreign Affairs, who can be most simply described as being in the "arrogant intellectual" model of Paul Keating. Beazley, Crean and Evans are all from the right-wing faction of the ALP which remains dominant, although there has been a new centre grouping formed. Beazley is large/overweight, and has a gregarious, knockabout image which some say may help the ALP rebuild links with the working class heartland which deserted it in the election. The popular argument is that in pursuing long term visions of a republic and integration with Asia, the ALP did not do enough to retain the loyalty of its core constituency in terms of wages and living standards. That, and the fact that the conservative Liberal/National party coalition lied about their true agenda and promised that no Australian would be worse off under a change of government. Right now, the Coalition government has appointed a committee of leading right-wing business leaders to rewrite industrial relations legislation. In summary, the Australian Labor Party in federal parliament will not be doing much more than licking its wounds for some time, so don't expect to hear much from Kim Beazley. Peter Colley Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union Sydney, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED]
