SYDNEY: Australia's prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd got down to work on Monday on plans to sign the Kyoto Protocol and reverse unpopular labour laws that led to conservative leader John Howard's stunning ouster.

The centre-left leader is reshaping foreign and domestic policy following his landslide victory Saturday that ended Howard's 11-year reign and left US President George W Bush isolated over climate change and the Iraq war.

A day after Rudd announced he was preparing to attend a major conference on global warming in Bali next month, his deputy Julia Gillard said their Labor Party would immediately honour a campaign promise to ratify Kyoto. 

"Kevin will be making that decision but you can expect it to be very soon. We need to ratify Kyoto as part of our commitments to dealing with climate change," she said.

"Ratifying Kyoto we can do without the parliament sitting," she said, outlining plans to implement election pledges that also included withdrawing Australian combat troops from the Iraq war.

Rudd revealed he had already received advice from officials on when Australia could ratify the protocol.    

"We have just received that advice as I was driving out here and I'm yet to read it," he said a day after meeting senior bureaucrats of the prime minister's office to set out his agenda for the Bali meeting.

Howard's defeat stripped Bush of a key ally on the eve of the Bali conference. Australia and the United States are the only two major industrial nations not to have ratified Kyoto.   

Rudd, an economic conservative, has named global warming as his government's top priority, and he discussed the issue Sunday by telephone with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.   

Howard and Bush refused to ratify the UN treaty aimed at cutting carbon emissions blamed for causing global warming, saying that doing so when China and India had not would damage their economies.