On November 24, the Australian Labour Party (ALP) came to power with a thumping majority under the leadership of Kevin Rudd, 50. The ALP defeated the coalition government of John Howard, winning 83 seats in the house of 150.

With this change of guard after 11 years, analysts have begun to debate what the change means for Australia and the region, including India. It is rather encouraging that Rudd has always seen India as a major country in Australia’s foreign policy calculus and has maintained that India, the second major economic engine of growth in Asia, should be harnessed constructively by Australia. He has been appreciative of India’s ‘Look East’ engagement with North East and South East Asia and supportive of its inclusion as a part of the ASEAN Plus Three Plus One.

India-Australia ties, according to him are not just about curry, the Commonwealth and a common language. They should be given more substance. He has also emphasised the need to establish within the department of foreign affairs and trade an India division, and believes that Australia has the institutional and bureaucratic capacity to harness India’s growth for Australia’s long-term economic and strategic advantage. He forcefully calls for establishing regular prime ministerial visits, to ‘inject greater political ballast into this relationship’.

If these are the promises, then challenges emerge, too. A major one is to balance Australia’s need to engage with India while not compromising on the ALP’s long-standing commitment to global non-proliferation and disarmament. Rudd’s opposition to the proposed supply of uranium to India, initiated by the previous John Howard regime, remains one of the most potent challenges to a Indo-Australian strategic partnership. Fortunately for the new Australian PM the delay in the India-US nuclear deal, due to political opposition to it in India, allows the Labour government to wait and watch the outcome of the parleys between New Delhi and Washington on the one hand and India and IAEA and India and the Nuclear Supply Group, on the other, before taking any stand on the issue. Rudd believes that since India is not a signatory to the NPT, the supply of uranium may jeopardise global disarmament efforts. For India this is hard to digest, as it not only ignores its long unblemished non-proliferation record and nuclear bonafides.

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