Don’t blame them, for they know not what they do. Australians are waking today and wondering what bizarre experiment they have been involved in. Or they may simply not care.

Unemployment is at a record 30-year low. Economic growth is running at 4%. And housing interest rates are still lower than a decade ago. Many Australians have never had it better, or so John Howard, their prime minister, had been telling them. And by any measure he was correct – right up until the point they turfed him out of office and from his own parliamentary seat.

It was a collective decision that in the cold light of day is deeply puzzling, so much so that political pundits are offering an assortment of explanations as to why Australians have sacked one of their most popular leaders after more than 11 years. Enlightened rationalisations range from Labor’s climate change policy of signing up to the Kyoto treaty, its pledge to pull troops from Iraq to simple boredom.

But why have voters so unceremoniously dumped a prime minister from his own seat after 33 years of service, one who has brought them untold prosperity, and replaced him with a female television journalist?

The world beyond its borders must be thinking the Antipodes has been too long in the sun.

Even Howard, the nation’s second longest serving conservative coalition leader, conceded in his valedictory speech that it was an “emphatic victory” for new prime minister Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor party. He looked visibly distressed at events. A handful of cabinet ministers had fallen in electoral battle as well.

Just how emphatic his loss was can be measured by a simple fact. Only once before in Australian history has a leader lost both his seat and the national vote.

Some see it as delicious irony that the first prime minister to do the double was another conservative leader, Stanley Bruce, who had also attempted to rewrite laws governing working conditions more than 50 years ago. This, say Labor, was the reason behind the party’s historic election last night. Howard had indeed introduced a radical industrial relations policy in his last term of office, one which he had no mandate for.

But domestic policies alone cannot explain why Australians have abandoned their once most popular leader who, at the height of his game, had an approval rating of almost 70%.

The coalition, combining the dominant Liberal party and their rural cousins the Nationals, ruled by a 30-seat majority in a 150-seat parliament with the help of two conservative Independents. The magnitude of the task ahead of Labor was daunting. That it achieved a 6% swing, which delivered it not only the 16 seats required to take power but, on initial counting, a further 10 seats to govern with a comfortable majority, is extraordinary.

It wasn’t just a win, it was a landslide, or as they are calling it Down Under, a Ruddslide.

As mysterious as it all may seem, however, it is not without precedent, well perhaps not in Australia, but right here in the UK at least. The Labor party’s general secretary in the dominant state of NSW, Mark Arbib, freely admits that Rudd is unashamedly “new Labour”.

Just as Tony Blair had once come to Australia to study the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s electoral successes in the early 90s, the last time the party was in power, Rudd’s team was taking its cue from the 1997 election in Britain.

Labor in Australia has undergone a transition from a union-dominated membership base to a party of free thinking market reformers – or so Arbib would have us believe.

Proof of this, he says, was evident in the strength of cheering to the theme of fiscal conservatism at the party’s campaign launch. Old fashioned Labor supporters wondered whether they had turned up to the wrong launch.

Australian Labor even used Blair’s education theme to string its campaign together, promising an education revolution and plans to modernise. On the economy, Labor managed to neutralise the argument that it posed a danger by being the fortunate recipient of another unprecedented event – an interest rate rise in the middle of the campaign.

It then simply declared its support for the independence of the Reserve Bank – yet another 1997 Blair moment – and that was that. Rudd had made it safe to vote Labor again as did Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997.

And with that achieved, it came down to a question of longevity and whether Australians believed that under Howard, the country’s sense of a “fair go” had been eroded. Social equity, after all, has been a hallmark of Australia’s cultural identity.

Had Howard simply been in government too long? And had he taken Australia just a little too far to the right?

Arbib is young for a party boss at 37. Rudd is just 50. They are a young team. Howard on the other hand is 68. And his team has been around since 1996 with few changes to the top echelons of his cabinet during that time.

Did voters believe the hype that there was a mood for change? Probably. Was there a case for change? The majority obviously thought so.

When a generation of voters have never known tough economic times, as has been the case in Australia for 15 years, there is no inoculation against a mood for change.

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