AUCKLAND (Reuters) – The ruling center-right National Party returned to power in a crushing win in New Zealand’s general election on Saturday and secured the backing of minor parties to ensure a majority for asset sales and welfare reforms.

National, led by former foreign exchange dealer John Key, was sitting on 48 percent share of the vote on election night. That would give the party 60 seats in the 121-seat parliament from its current 58.

Key was guaranteed a second three-year term with the return of current coalition partners, free-market ACT and centrist United Future, each with one member.

“New Zealand has voted for a brighter future, and there will be a brighter future,” Key, draped in blue and white streamers, told ecstatic supporters.

National campaigned on promises to build on policies of the past three years with an emphasis on sparking economic growth by cutting debt, curbing spending, selling state assets and returning to a budget surplus by 2014/15.

“The government will be focused on building a more competitive economy, with less debt, more jobs, and higher incomes,” added Key, 52, flanked by his wife and son.

The opposition Labour Party’s share of the vote was around 27 percent, which would give it 34 seats, a loss of nine.

AUCKLAND (Reuters) – Voting closed in New Zealand’s general election on Saturday, with polls suggesting the center-right National Party, led by John Key, will sweep back into power with an increased majority.

Key has promised to build on policies of the past three years with an emphasis on sparking economic growth by cutting debt, curbing spending, selling state assets and returning to a budget surplus by 2014/15.

“The most important thing is getting the economy right,” said salesman Kelly Weaver, 25, after voting. He said he did not want to leave New Zealand to look for work in neighboring Australia, as around 34,000 New Zealanders have done in the past year.

Election officials reported a strong turnout in many areas as fine weather brought out voters. More than 320,000 votes were cast in advance, up around 20 percent on the 2008 election.

Key voted at a school near his Auckland home and said he was taking nothing for granted despite the party’s commanding poll lead.

“You feel a combination of excitement and a little bit of nervousness and anticipation,” Key, casually dressed in a blue open-collar shirt, jeans and white trainers, told reporters.

He visited party workers and then returned home, where he will watch results come in before going to the National party’s rally in the ballroom of Auckland’s casino.

MELBOURNE/SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian tribunal ordered Qantas Airways on Monday to put its planes back into the air, intervening in the nation’s most dramatic labor dispute in a decade after the national carrier grounded its entire global fleet.

Qantas had taken the drastic step at the weekend to ground all flights, disrupting nearly 70,000 passengers and bringing to a head a bitter battle with trade unions over pay, working conditions and its plan to base more operations in Asia.

Qantas’s action succeeded in forcing the government to step in and to demand the tribunal make an urgent ruling on the dispute, which had been bleeding a business that carries about a fifth of Australia’s international passengers.

Qantas said flights could resume as early as Monday afternoon, on a limited schedule and subject to regulatory clearance. The airline hoped to return to normal in 24 hours.

“We are pleased that after 24 hours of turmoil that common sense will be restored to the aviation and tourism sectors of Australia,” Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten said after the independent labor tribunal, Fair Work Australia, ordered the end to hostilities in the early hours of Monday morning.

The tribunal ordered Qantas and its unions to end all industrial action and resolve the dispute within 21 days or face a binding arbitration decision.

Qantas shares jumped nearly 6 percent as investors welcomed the tribunal’s ban on further industrial action, though the stock has lost more than a third of its value this year.

MELBOURNE/SYDNEY, Oct 31 (Reuters) – An Australian tribunal ordered Qantas Airways on Monday to put its planes back into the air, intervening in the nation’s most dramatic labour dispute in a decade after the national carrier grounded its entire global fleet.

Qantas had taken the drastic step at the weekend to ground all flights, disrupting nearly 70,000 passengers and bringing to a head a bitter battle with trade unions over pay, working conditions and its plan to base more operations in Asia.

Qantas’s action succeeded in forcing the government to step in and to demand the tribunal make an urgent ruling on the dispute, which had been bleeding a business that carries about a fifth of Australia’s international passengers.

Qantas said flights could resume as early as Monday afternoon, on a limited schedule and subject to regulatory clearance. The airline hoped to return to normal in 24 hours.

“We are pleased that after 24 hours of turmoil that common sense will be restored to the aviation and tourism sectors of Australia,” Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten said after the independent labour tribunal, Fair Work Australia, ordered the end to hostilities in the early hours of Monday morning.

The tribunal ordered Qantas and its unions to end all industrial action and resolve the dispute within 21 days or face a binding arbitration decision.

Qantas shares jumped nearly 6 percent as investors welcomed the tribunal’s ban on further industrial action, though the stock has lost more than a third of its value this year.

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Qantas CEO Alan Joyce is no stranger to clashing with unions. But his extraordinary move to ground the airline’s global fleet over labor unrest is his biggest gamble yet and has angered unions, passengers and the Australian government.

The increasingly bitter dispute, which has dragged on since September, covers the sensitive issue of jobs in Australia being outsourced to Asia and even the very survival of the iconic 90-year-old national carrier nicknamed “The Flying Kangaroo.”

Saturday’s grounding of the fleet, causing chaos for nearly 70,000 travelers using Qantas worldwide, appeared a calculated move by Joyce to snuff out a costly dispute undermining his vision of the airline’s future.

“The outcome of the gambit will decide whether Joyce is a good or bad manager,” said David Liu, head of research at ATI Asset Management, which owns Qantas shares.

“I would call it a move enacted to try and get a resolution to an issue that has been going on for the best part of this year,” he added.

Qantas shares have fallen almost 40 percent this year, underperforming an 8 percent dip in the benchmark index.

Joyce, who looks younger than his 45 years, took over at Qantas in 2008, having helped launch its low-cost offshoot Jetstar in 2003 after spells at now defunct Ansett Australia and at Aer Lingus in his native Ireland.

SYDNEY, Sept 6 (Reuters) – Australian banks will need to meet new global capital rules ahead of the internationally agreed timetable under proposals made on Tuesday, although the move is unlikely to force any of them to raise any new equity immediately.

The new Basel III rules, aimed at preventing another global banking crisis, require lenders to hold more capital aside in the form of equity, reserves and retained earnings in case of a sharp economic downturn.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) said in a discussion paper that banks should meet the Basel minimum capital requirements by January 2013, two years ahead of the 2015 deadline set by global regulators.

Australian banks should then have a capital buffer in place by January 2016, three years ahead of the Basel timeline.

Basel rules call for a minimum core, or Tier 1, capital ratio of 4.5 percent, with a 2.5 percent capital buffer on top of that.

“ADI (Authorised deposit taking institutions) in Australia are well placed to meet the new minimum capital requirements and APRA is therefore proposing to accelerate aspects of the Basel Committee’s timetable,” APRA said in a statement.

Australia’s top four banks — National Australia Bank , Commonwealth Bank of Australia , Westpac and Australia and New Zealand Banking group – have a core tier I capital ratio of just under 7 percent now.

CANBERRA/SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia and the European Union have agreed to start talks to link carbon-emissions trading schemes, as global efforts to combat climate change struggle to make headway.

The Australian government unveiled plans two months ago to impose a tax on carbon emissions from July 2012, before moving to a carbon trading system from mid-2015.

“Australia’s decision to put a price on carbon emissions is, in our view, an important step, both environmentally and economically,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said on Monday after talks with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Canberra.

“It is in our view and the European experience, the most cost-efficient way to reduce emissions and also create green business opportunities. We will now continue our joint work for a global climate regime and also on a bilateral basis we will see what we can do together,” Barroso said.

Europe’s emissions trading scheme, by far the world’s largest carbon market, was launched in 2005 and caps the emissions of the bloc’s heavy industry, forcing factories and utilities to buy carbon permits to cover their emission output.

Gillard’s minority government is fighting to win public support for its carbon-reduction scheme, with opinion polls showing it would be booted from power if elections were held now. The next election is due in late 2013.

Barroso, however, praised Gillard’s controversial plans and said it was important to enlarge the EU carbon market, warning that in the current difficult economic climate there was not enough attention on greenhouse gas emissions.

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s highest court on Wednesday scuttled government plans for a refugee swap with Malaysia in a major policy setback for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, already trailing badly in opinion polls and facing defeat at the next election.

Australia and Malaysia signed a deal in July under which 800 asylum seekers would be sent to Malaysia for processing. In return, Australia would accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia whose claims for resettlement had been accepted.

“It’s a slap in the face for the Gillard government, it’s a huge setback for the Malaysian solution,” said Marianne Dickie, an expert on migration law at Australian National University.

“It effectively hobbles it (the policy), if not ending it.”

Gillard’s minority Labour government, which will have to fight an election by late 2013, has been struggling to push through a series of controversial policies including a tax on carbon and mining profits.

Gillard signed the Malaysian deal to deter people smugglers and to fight perceptions her government was soft on asylum seekers.

But lawyers for two asylum seekers asked the High Court to declare the people swap illegal, because Malaysia had no legal guarantees to protect the rights of asylum seekers.

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Chevron signed a liquefied natural gas supply deal with Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), giving Japan, the world’s biggest LNG importer, a supply boost as it seeks more LNG after a huge earthquake in March crippled parts of its nuclear energy sector.

Chevron (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) agreed to supply TEPCO (9501.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) with 3.1 million tonnes of LNG per year for up to 20 years from its $25 billion Wheatstone project in Australia and also offered equity stakes in parts of the project, it said in a statement on Wednesday.

TEPCO, Japan’s biggest power utility, operates two nuclear plants at Fukushima that were damaged by the devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

“The TEPCO agreements and other LNG agreements we are finalizing give Wheatstone great momentum,” said Roy Krzywosinski, managing director, Chevron Australia.

Chevron added TEPCO was in talks to purchase an equity share in the titles covering the Wheatstone fields and a percentage of Chevron’s share of the Wheatstone downstream processing facilities, Chevron said in a statement.

It added it remained on track to make a final investment decision on Wheatstone in 2011 after completing the front-end engineering and design phase.

Apache Corporation (APA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KUFPEC), and Royal Dutch Shell RSDa.L are equity participants in Wheatstone, and hold 13 percent, 7 percent, and 6.4 percent equity, respectively while Chevron holds the rest.

By Ed Davies

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) – Soaring food and energy prices, the global financial crisis, Greece’s debt woes. One-off events? Not according to environmental business consultant Paul Gilding, who believes these are mere ripples before a major crisis hits the world.

Gilding, author of a new book “The Great Disruption,” has a simple message: We have left it too late to avoid serious impact from climate change and ecological damage after trying to drive global economic growth far beyond system and resource capacity.

As a consequence, we risk an environmental crash, triggering a sudden collapse in the global economy, and need to be ready to respond to the ensuing “social and economic hurricane,” he says.

“If you thought the financial situation in 2008 was a crisis, and if you thought climate change was a cultural, economic and political challenge, then hold on for the ride,” writes Gilding, a former head of Greenpeace International.

“We are about to witness humanity deal with its biggest crisis ever, something that will shake it to the core — the end of economic growth,” added the 52-year-old Australian, who as an activist was arrested five times during protests.

After frustration over how the mainstream environmental movement was struggling to get its message heard, Gilding founded his own consultancy that went on to advise businesses from BHP Billiton to DuPont on sustainability