It’s a muggy 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Bali, Indonesia, this week, but one suspects that the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference will be feeling a little colder than usual — they’ve lost their cover.

Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has been ably assisted in its elaborate climate change obfuscation campaign by the conservative government of John Howard in Australia. However, as climate change has increasingly captured the popular imagination, both governments’ positions on the subject have become increasingly unacceptable. In response to this shift in public opinion, the two leaders have aligned their obfuscation strategies, moving from denial and skepticism to a more nuanced blend of blame-shifting and PR finessing. Singing from the same hymn sheet, Bush and Howard have demonized Kyoto for its absence of binding targets for developing country pollutant emitters like China, shunned binding targets for themselves and sought to sideline the U.N. process by convening largely ineffectual forums such as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. While any serious extra-U.N. international efforts to reduce emissions should be welcomed (in fact, they will be crucial), the consensus among engaged stakeholders is that these particular forums are largely window-dressing and will have minimal impact on the core problem. Nonetheless, Australia’s strong support has lent the Bush administration a modicum of international legitimacy on this issue.

Last week, all that changed. In the federal election of Saturday, Nov. 24, the Labor opposition, led by centrist but progressive candidate Kevin Rudd, was swept into office on a platform of “new leadership for Australia’s future.” One of Rudd’s core election campaign platforms was to ratify Kyoto and to tackle climate change head-on. However, a host of commentators in Australia have attacked Rudd’s climate policy from a range of perspectives: Skeptics and naysayers have dismissed it as mere populist electioneering; the opposition warns that committing to emissions reduction targets will harm the Australian economy and consumers, echoing the economic fear campaign that Howard took to the election, while informed observers criticize Rudd for not going far enough, noting that the act of ratifying the virtually defunct Kyoto Protocol will make little difference to the problem of climate change in practice. However, the skeptics are wrong, the opposition obviously hasn’t learned anything from the election and the informed observers are correct but have cause to be optimistic.

There is no doubt that the majority of the Australian public wants progressive action on climate change — in this sense, there were always votes to be gained by appearing progressive on this issue. By focusing on the symbolic potency of Kyoto, Rudd found the electoral hook on which to hang his climate change credentials without leaving himself vulnerable to Howard’s economic fear campaign (as Kyoto actually allows Australia to increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent above 1990 levels). Rudd painted himself as the candidate of the future while Howard, the Kyoto laggard, looked like the yesterday’s man that he is. This was a brilliant, albeit populist strategy. But good politics and good policy are not mutually exclusive. I believe that Rudd is genuinely committed to making climate change a domestic and international priority and that he will embrace aggressive (though not radical) emissions reductions targets that the experts and informed observers hope for, along with the policies to meet them, notwithstanding the economic fear campaign that the opposition will unleash.

Within the first 10 days of being elected, Rudd has taken a number of steps that signal the seriousness with which he intends to push the climate change agenda. Rudd has appointed a high-caliber individual, Australian Labor Party politician Penny Wong, as minister for climate change and water — a new cabinet-level portfolio — with specific responsibilities for international climate change negotiations and domestic emissions mitigation policies. He also has committed to an aspirational target of a 60 percent reduction in emissions by 2050. Rudd’s first act as prime minister was to sign the documents necessary to authorize Australia’s ratification of Kyoto.

Australia’s change of course will arguably have a number of important ramifications for the international community’s efforts to address global warming. While it will not likely change the Bush administration’s approach to Kyoto or to climate change in general, it will make Bush’s position even less tenable than it was before. Whereas the United States could previously look to Australia for both symbolic and practical support in its obfuscation tactics, it now stands alone among developed nations in refusing to embrace a leadership role in addressing climate change. Moreover, without underestimating the enormity of the challenges that climate negotiators face in reaching a post-Kyoto consensus over the next few years, the efforts to meet those challenges will be significantly enhanced with Australia playing a constructive leadership role as opposed to stalling on the sidelines.

Whilst Australia’s overall contribution to climate change and its global economic weight are relatively modest, Australia has historically punched well above its weight in regards to progressive multilateralism. Through its active leadership on international issues ranging from arms control and nuclear non-proliferation to the formation of APEC, Australia has widely come to be seen as an important force for global good. While this trend of historical progressivism has been in abeyance under the conservative rule of the Howard government, all the indications so far suggest that it will be revived under the leadership of Rudd. While this may make things more difficult for the Bush administration’s climate obfuscation campaign managers, the rest of the world can now breathe a sigh of relief: When it comes to the international discussion on Global Warming, after 11 and a half years out in the cold, Australia is finally back.

Fergus Green is a fourth year student of international relations and law at the University of Melbourne, Australia and a former editor of the Melbourne Journal of International Law. He is currently studying in the School of Foreign Service on exchange.