THE LAST time Australia had a one-term government was during the Great Depression. That historical reality, combined with her party’s broadly positive record on economic management, seems likely to provide a fair wind for prime minister Julia Gillard’s prospects in the snap August election she has just called.
Just a month after the party coup that saw her, as deputy leader of the Labor Party, supplant prime minister Kevin Rudd, Gillard, the country’s first woman premier, is ahead personally in polls, and the party with Green support is now edging ahead of the conservative opposition Liberal/National coalition. Monday’s poll in the Australian gave them a 10 percentage point lead.
The flourishing economy, largely bypassed by the global crisis, is Gillard’s strongest card: Australia saw growth for a fifth straight quarter in the three months to the end of March, courtesy in part of government stimulus spending. And its dollar has over the last decade notched up the third-best performance of the worlds 16-most traded currencies, gaining about 50 per cent against the US dollar. Labor has vowed to return the budget to surplus by 2013.
But the reality is that the election is less about big issues than a rather tame contest between Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott. As one local political correspondent put it, the latter “was approaching his election campaign as a protest vote against Kevin Rudd. But he hit an early snag – Julia Gillard got there first.” In essence, two opposition candidates, with little to separate them, are vying for the one job.
Campaigning on the inane, but these days all-to familiar, slogan “moving forward”, Gillard has moved fast to defuse controversy over key Rudd policies. Most notably, a levy on mining company profits. Two weeks ago she scaled back the planned tax to 30 per cent of coal and iron ore earnings from 40 per cent on all resource profits in a package signed off on by mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. Abbott has attacked it as punitive on the nation’s most profitable industry.
He has also opposed as a burden on consumers and business Rudd plans for a carbon-trading system. These were postponed to the distress of Greens whom Gillard must woo back – she is committed to reviewing the issue in 2012 while the Greens want an energy tax in the interim. Immigration will also be a campaign issue, with Gillard seizing opposition ground by toughening Rudd’s “Big Australia” liberal policies with talk of limiting intake to those needed to meet skills shortages.