Surprise move by formerly loyal deputy delivers Australia’s first female prime minister

Australia gets its 1st female PM

SYDNEY — Julia Gillard had long been tipped as Australia’s first woman prime minister, but the way it finally happened has shocked almost everyone.

Only last month she said she was more likely to become a football star than replace her boss. But in a brutally efficient move driven by bad opinion polls and the approach of a general election, the Labor party dumped Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for his 48-year-old deputy. On Thursday Gillard was sworn in.

At a news conference that capped one of the most abrupt transitions in Australia’s often-bruising political history, Gillard said she accepted the job “with the greatest humility, resolve and enthusiasm.”

She immediately sought to refocus attention on the popular decisions of the government in which she served for the past 2½ years, while distancing herself from mistakes attributed to Rudd.

She vowed to continue stimulus policies credited with shielding Australia from the global recession, and said she would revisit the plans Rudd shelved for a greenhouse gas emissions trading system. She sought to defuse a bitter dispute with mining companies over a proposed tax on profits.

Gillard is unlikely to change foreign and defense policies, including Australia’s 1,500-strong military contribution to the war in Afghanistan. The biggest change is likely to be in style.

With a schoolteacher’s manner and an Australian twang that betrays nothing of her Welsh origins, Gillard is considered more personable than the wonkish Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former bureaucrat with an autocratic style who led Labor to a landslide victory in the 2007 election.

Typical of Gillard’s style was her tart reply just last month when asked if she would replace Rudd. She said she was more likely to be picked to play for the Western Bulldogs, an Australian Rules football team.

Elected to Parliament in 1998, Gillard built a reputation as a formidable and quick-thinking debater in “the bear pit,” the daily question time in Parliament.

“She’s a good communicator and there’s a warmth about Gillard that Rudd never had,” said Norman Adjorensen, a political scientist at the Australian National University.

A key member of Rudd’s Cabinet, she had long been viewed as a possible future prime minister, and Rudd had repeatedly praised his deputy as a worthy successor, but always with the caveat — “later.”

Born in Wales in 1961, Gillard came to Australia at age 4 with her parents, who wanted her to grow up in a warmer climate to recover from a lung infection.

She became involved in left-wing politics while studying law at university, and built a political career in the Labor Party starting in the 1980s.

Gillard is unmarried and has no children — unusual for a politician in Australia where being part of a nuclear family has long been seen as vital for mainstream appeal. She is in a long-term partnership with hairdresser Tim Mathieson.

She has said she admires women who juggle a career and family and professes to see nothing significant about being Australia’s first female prime minister, saying: “First woman, maybe first redhead — I’ll allow you to contemplate which was more unlikely in the modern age.”

Rudd’s 2007 election victory ended almost a dozen years of conservative rule. He was a hero of the center-left, and scored record poll ratings for two years after ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and apologizing in Australia’s name to its indigenous Aborigines for past wrongs.

But this year missteps sent his credibility plunging — the climbdown on greenhouse gas emissions, then a badly handled PR campaign for taxing the profits of big mining companies, whose boom helped shelter the economy from the global downturn.

With elections less than a year away, Labor party members with misgivings about Rudd saw a final chance to call a vote by the party’s lawmakers before the winter recess. The vote was set for Wednesday and Rudd, seeing no chance of winning, withdrew. Uncontested, Gillard became leader and said the election would take place before year’s end.

As for Rudd, he made a farewell speech expressing pride in his government’s successes, with long pauses as he fought back tears. But he ended on a joking note: “I’m less proud of the fact that I have now blubbered.”

Associated Press Writer Rod McGuirk contributed to this report from Canberra, Australia.