Rudd ends opposition years

Alongside coverage of Saturdays election, the Australian media have been carrying a story of sixteen Indonesian asylum-seekers recently picked up by an Australian naval vessel from a leaking fishing boat. To members of the defeated Howard Government, the news of their delivery to immigration officials on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean on the day following the election must have seemed like a black joke; to governments enemies on the left, delicious irony. At the 2001 election, the Coalition was saved from defeat by a combination of 9/11 and the governments ruthless political exploitation of the arrival, also off Christmas Island, of the Norwegian tanker carrying asylum-seekers rescued by its captain. The Tampa affair, as it was called, initiated the myth of John Howards invincibility, the belief in his almost magical ability to draw an electoral rabbit out of a hat. When Howard saw off another Labor challenger at the 2004 election after trailing in the polls for most of the year, some commentators claimed that he was unbeatable. Labor would only return to government, they forecast, once Howard had retired from public life.