New Australian prime minister has Catholic roots, Christian policies

Published: 2007-12-03

SYDNEY, Australia (CNS) -- Kevin Rudd, the Catholic-born leader of Australia's Labor Party, was sworn in as Australia's prime minister Dec. 3. Throughout a year of electoral campaigning, Rudd worked to familiarize the Australian people with how his view of Christian values informed his policies. The youngest of a Catholic family of four children in rural Queensland, Rudd said the death of his father, a dairy farmer, from complications arising from a car accident had the greatest transforming effect on him when he was just 11 years old. When his father died in 1969, Rudd was the only child living at home. His older brother was away in the army, his sister was a novice at a Mercy sisters' convent, and his 14-year-old brother was boarding at the Marist College Ashgrove in suburban Brisbane. With the family evicted from their farm, Rudd recalled that he and his mother spent a night in their car before being taken in by other family members. The eviction, said Rudd, aroused "my earliest flickering of a sense of justice and injustice. ... I just thought it was plain wrong that that could happen to anybody or that you didn't have anywhere to go and stay."

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