By James Grubel

SYDNEY, April 27 (Reuters) - Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd said on Friday that Australia was in the mood for a change of government as he put climate change at the centre of his push to defeat conservative Prime Minister John Howard.

Addressing his first national Labor Party conference since taking over the leadership of the opposition party in December, Rudd, 49, also attacked Australia's involvement in the Iraq war and said the older Howard, 68 in July, was stuck in the past. "And that is what this election in just a few months will be about -- the future versus the past," Rudd said in his opening address to the conference, which is set to modernise the party's policy platform.

With an election due in the second half of this year, Labor has opened up a sustained 17-point lead in the polls and Rudd holds a 10-point lead over Howard as preferred prime minister.

Labor last won a national election in 1993 and lost power to Howard in 1996. But Labor insiders believe Rudd has given the party its best chance of returning to government at the polls, which are likely to be called for October or November.

Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, used his speech to the 400 party and union delegates to promote a new Labor image.

Standing behind the motto "Fresh Thinking", he promised to modernise workplace laws and Labor's relationship with the union movement, and said climate change was the great moral, economic and environmental challenge of the time.

Australians are already feeling the impact of global warming, with a severe drought crippling the nation's farmlands.

Under Howard, Australia has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for global warming.

Rudd has promised to sign Kyoto, and committed Labor to cutting greenhouse emissions by 60 percent of 2000 levels by the year 2050, and supports a national carbon-trading scheme.

"NEW LABOR"

Rudd has also promised to withdraw about 500 of Australia's frontline troops from Iraq, which he said was the greatest foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War.

Howard, a close ally of U.S. President George W. Bush, has boosted Australia's international profile, sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq and taking an interventionist stance over troubles in East Timor and the South Pacific.

Rudd received a standing ovation for his speech, as Labor's specially commissioned new campaign election song "A Change in the Weather" rang through the auditorium.

Political analyst Nick Economou said the Labor Party conference would be carefully stage-managed to showcase Rudd as a leader and to update Labor's image in a way similar to that of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and his New Labour.

Economou said Rudd was likely to win weekend debates over new workplace laws, and to end Labor's opposition to new uranium mines in Australia.

"The party has to accept what the leader wants to do ahead of the election. To undermine him at the conference would be to throw away the election," Economou told Reuters.

But Economou said it was too early to say whether Rudd was favourite to win the next election, saying the government was likely to focus on its strength of economic management over the coming months. Howard, now in his fourth term, has steered Australia through 10 years of sustained economic growth.

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