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16th August, 2010
SYDNEY: Australia was Sunday heading for a knife-edge election, with no party streaking ahead in opinion polls with less than a week to go, raising the prospect of the first hung parliament in 70 years.
As Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the first woman to lead the country, battles an energised conservative opposition headed by the plain-speaking Tony Abbott, polls predict that the August 21 contest could go down to the wire.
“At the moment it looks like it could be a hung parliament,” Michele Levine, chief executive of the Roy Morgan polling group, told AFP on Sunday.
The latest Roy Morgan poll, which surveyed close to 1,000 voters across the country on Saturday, found centre-left Labor had the support of 51 percent of voters and the right-leaning Liberal/National coalition some 49 percent.
Former lawyer Gillard has conceded that she is heading into one of the tightest races in the nation’s history, after a Nielsen poll released Saturday put her ahead 53 to 47 percent and a Newspoll found she would just scrape into government.
“I’m keenly aware that as we go into the final week, if today’s polls are right, then Mr Abbott could end up prime minister by the end of the next Saturday,” 48-year-old Gillard said ahead of Monday’s campaign launch.
Polling in recent weeks has found that Labor is losing ground against Abbott, an unlikely challenger nicknamed the “Mad Monk” who only became opposition leader last year after bruising party infighting on climate change.
Levine said voters appeared uneasy about Gillard’s brutal wresting of power from her former leader Kevin Rudd in her own party coup in late June.
“That really plagued the whole of the Labor Party’s first few weeks,” Levine said. “There’s a clear indication, in both our national polling and our marginal seat polling, that there is a move to the coalition,” she added.
Although the candidates are starkly different—Welsh-born Gillard is a career woman who has never married or had children while Abbott is a conservative family man who once trained to become a Catholic priest—the campaign has been criticised as uninspiring.
Labor is leaning heavily on its performance during the global financial crisis—arguing that its massive stimulus package kept the economy out of recession and saved tens of thousands of jobs.
It is promising to develop infrastructure—including a high-speed national broadband Internet network—and improve Sydney’s congested rail links if reelected.
On climate change—a key factor in the 2007 election which saw Labor’s Rudd topple conservative prime minister John Howard, ending his 11-year-rule—Gillard has repeatedly said she believes climate change is real and wants to put a price on carbon emissions.
The outspoken and gaffe-prone Abbott, a former Rhodes scholar and minister in the Howard government, has meanwhile vowed to cut government spending to reduce national debt and “stop the boats” of asylum seekers.
Political analyst Clement Macintyre said while it was an historic vote because it was the first time Australians have a chance to vote for a party led by a woman, the campaign has been lacklustre.
“While the polling is so close both sides are conscious that one mistake could cost office and they are less bold and adventurous,” Macintyre, who is head of politics at the University of Adelaide, told AFP.
The last time Australia faced a hung parliament was in September 1940 when the United Australia Party/Country Party coalition and the combined Labor parties each won 36 seats, leaving the balance of power with two independents.
Haydon Manning, head of politics at Flinders University in South Australia, said a similar result in 2010 was unlikely, but Saturday’s election could leave the Greens holding the balance of power in the upper house.
“As a consequence … whoever forms government in the lower house, will have to go cap in hand frequently to negotiate with the Greens,” he said.
Some 14 million registered voters are expected to hit polling booths across the country on Saturday.
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