The man who can influence China

Saturday night Australia elected a new Prime Minister, the Labor Party's 50-year-old Kevin Rudd. He replaced the Liberal Conservative 68-year-old John Howard who governed the nation for 11 years.

Days before the election Howard wrote on YouTube, "The government to be chosen today will set the direction of the country for years into the future."

As it stands it is not just Australia that's changing tack with the election of Rudd but also the wider global geopolitical environment.

Rudd is conversant in Mandarin, and formerly worked at the Australian embassy in Beijing. He is adept at high-level diplomatic exchanges with China and has the potential to act as a broker between the west and an emerging, increasingly powerful, often misunderstood middle kingdom.

Three years earlier the then Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham commented,

"No country in the world is better placed than Australia to work to ensure that the relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China remain fruitful, productive, creative and, above all, peaceful."

He could very well have been speaking of this day.

At present the United States is experiencing festering anti-China sentiment in regards to the toy quality debacle in the lead up to Christmas, in addition to continuing trade imbalances with China and a recent visit by the Dalai Lama.

Place this alongside growing militarization in Japan where the US still has bases, continuing American weapons sales to Taiwan, not to mention meandering nuclear North Korean tensions and the situation seems to cater for a diplomat of Rudd's caliber.

Choosing the opposite path from his predecessor and refusing to play the role of Bush's deputy sheriff, Rudd has promised to pull out Australian troops from Iraq and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Of note, one of the first calls he received after the election was from President Bush himself.

Addressing carbon emissions in Australia was incredibly risky and took guts. Australia's three leading export earners are coal, tourism and iron ore. According to Dr Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens Party, "Today we have seen Australia vote for a greener, more compassionate Australian parliament".

In the lead up to this week's election three past Labor prime ministers, Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, swallowed their egos, buried their long bitter animosities and stood up to show their support for the winds of change. They recognized the potentialities Rudd brings to Australia and the wider world.

Forty-six years ago Gough Whitlam smelled it in the air when he became the first western leader to visit Beijing preempting Kissinger and Nixon.

The next Labor leader a decade later, Bob Hawke was in tune, becoming one of the founding fathers of the Boao Forum for Asia that takes place each year in Hainan.

Hawke's replacement, Paul Keating was thrown out by the people and replaced with Howard, with one of the reasons given that he was too close with Asia.

In many respects Rudd is the prodigal son of the Australian Labor Party and represents their collective vision of the leader the nation needs for this new century.

It was a mark of maturity for the Australian electorate to recognize this too and not step away from the task at hand.