Australians go to the polls tonight in what is predicted to be one of the closest battles in decades and offering a stark choice between two very different leaders.
Governming Labour party leader Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister by seizing control of her party from her former boss less than two months ago and called elections weeks later - hoping to save the left-leaning government from rising voter dissatisfaction with fresh, straight-talking leadership.
But a campaign by conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott - once considered too much of a loose cannon to lead, even by his own colleagues - has rallied considerable support.
Welsh-born Ms Gillard faces a backlash at the ballot box over a range of voter gripes including lingering anger over her unprecedented party power grab and her policy direction on climate change.
But most analysts still expect her centre-left Labour Party to hang on to power for a second three-year term, albeit with a slim majority.
Then deputy prime minister Ms Gillard stunned Australians - including many within her government - when she launched a sudden challenge to prime minister Kevin Rudd’s leadership on June 24th.
He surrendered without a fight after his support among government colleagues had collapsed along with the party’s popularity in opinion polls.
Ms Gillard soon called an election with a campaign slogan “moving forward”, explaining that she wanted the voters’ mandate for her leadership.
But moving forward from the leadership coup has proved problematic for her party. Ms Gillard’s five-week campaign has been repeatedly distracted by damaging media leaks, apparently from well-placed anonymous government sources, which have been blamed on Mr Rudd or Rudd loyalists.
Mr Rudd has denied any part in the leaks, which has been cited by Mr Abbott as evidence of a bitterly divided and dysfunctional government.
And Mr Rudd’s political ghost continued to cast a shadow over Ms Gillard’s campaign this week when his 26-year-old daughter Jessica launched her debut novel about a fictional Australian prime minister who is overthrown by his female deputy.
The author says she finished the book in December last year and its similarity to reality was purely coincidental.
Nick Economou, a Monash University political scientist, said continuing media attention on Mr Rudd’s demise reminds voters of their anger that the leader they had chosen had been taken from them.
“The big strategic weakness in the Labour campaign has been the failure to satisfactorily explain the change of leader and I think that’s certainly going to hurt Labour and Gillard in Queensland,” Mr Rudd’s home state, Australian National University political scientist Norman Abjorensen said.
Climate-change sceptic Mr Abbott is a stark contrast to Ms Gillard. While he was long considered too far right-wing to appeal to the Australian political middle ground, Ms Gillard has wrestled her reputation for being too far to the left.
Mr Abbott is his Liberal Party’s third leader since it lost power and the first to threaten the government in opinion polls.
The athletic 52-year-old is often pictured cycling in Lycra or swimming off Sydney beaches and is widely regarded as a man’s man who struggles to attract female voters.
He once studied to become a Roman Catholic priest but is now married with three daughters. A social conservative, he regrets that divorce has become easily available under Australian law.
Ms Gillard, 48, is a Welsh-born former Baptist turned atheist and became the first prime minister in the 109-year history of the Australian parliament to take an affirmation of office instead of swearing on the Bible.
And she will become the first prime minister to move into the official residence in the national capital with a common-law spouse if she wins the election.
She has repeatedly denied suspicions that she was a communist in her 20s and has refused to answer media questions about whether a former relationship she had with a Labour colleague Craig Emerson, now a minister in her cabinet, began before or after he had separated from his wife and children.
AP