Labor has a fourth attempt at trying to unite the party

Sydney Letter:After four straight federal election losses and with another election due within a year, the Australian Labor Party has put its faith in a bookish, foreign- policy specialist and intellectual.

With his glasses and straw- blond hair, Kevin Rudd (49) looks like a cross between John Denver and a grown-up Milky Bar Kid; but underneath lies a steely resolve that he - Labor's fourth leader since losing government in 1996 - has what it takes to wrest power back from the Liberal/National coalition.

Rudd's immediate task is to unite his bitterly divided party. In his first press conference as leader he said left and right factional interests within Labor would not overrule him.

"I'll be leading the show and when it comes to the outcomes I want, I intend to get them. I don't particularly care if anyone has opposing views, that's what's going to happen."

He went on to prove this by promoting Peter Garrett, former singer with rock band Midnight Oil, to the shadow cabinet. Although widely seen as one of Labor's most talented MPs, Garrett had previously failed to get a frontbench position because he is not a member of any internal party faction.

Rudd seized leadership after challenging and defeating the incumbent Kim Beazley by 49 votes to 39 in a caucus ballot. There was no major celebration however as, immediately after the vote, Beazley got a phone call telling him his mentally disabled younger brother had died.

Beazley lost the 1998 and 2001 elections; his successor, the hapless Simon Crean, did not even get to contest an election; Crean was succeeded by the firebrand Mark Latham who lost the 2004 election before resigning shortly after, following rumours of a breakdown, making way for Beazley again.

But a Labor insider told The Irish Times that this time, things were not so cut and dried. "In no way was this a black-and-white case for change. There were very strong arguments for and against.

"On the for side," he said, "Kim had been around forever and the electorate made up their mind long ago that he would never be prime minister and stopped listening. So we needed a new messenger so Labor's message would get through and Kevin was the hardest-working frontbencher with the best media profile.

"On the other hand," he added, "Kim is well known and we look like a rabble by changing leader again. We look like a circus. I was not personally in favour of the change but the majority of caucus was and I can see why it was done."

Rudd's media profile is largely due to appearing every Friday on Australia's top-rated morning TV show, Sunrise. The producers initially wanted no political content on the show, but Rudd convinced them to give him a slot and is still there, more than three years later, with an audience of 500,000.

He was raised a Catholic and now considers himself to be a non-denominational Christian. He regularly attends an Anglican church in Canberra and recently wrote a magazine article about Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was hanged in 1945 for plotting to assassinate Hitler).

Despite his rural Queensland upbringing and impoverished background - his father died when he was 11 and the family were subsequently evicted from their rented farm - Rudd speaks in refined tones, unlike Labor's new deputy leader, Julia Gillard.

She spent the first four years of her life in Wales and is a former lawyer, but Gillard speaks with a broad Australian accent often compared to the eponymous Kath from hit Australian TV series Kath and Kim.

Gillard (45) has never made a secret of her own leadership ambitions and the arrangement with Rudd is said by many to be a marriage of convenience. She has suffered unfavourable comments for being childless and not married and got almost as many column inches for her new hairstyle as her policy positions after becoming deputy leader.

Rudd's formative experience of poverty made him become a Labor Party member at age 15. After they were thrown off the rented farm (which Rudd had assumed they owned), he recalls his mother pulling off the road one night, breaking down in tears and telling the children they would have to sleep there.

Even then he thought: "No one in Australia should have to suffer that kind of insecurity."

With the latest opinion poll giving Labor a decisive lead over the coalition government, it might not be very long before he can put policies in place to try and end that insecurity.