PM Rudd calls Australia election for Sept 7
Print Edition
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called an election for September 7 and said yesterday that it will be fought over who can be trusted to manage the Australian economy as it transitions from a decade-old mining boom fed by Chinese industrial demand that is now fading.
In starting the five-week election campaign, Rudd said the economy can no longer rely on Chinese demand for iron ore and coal that made the country one of the few wealthy nations to avoid a recession during the global economic downturn.
“Who do the Australian people trust to best lead them through the new economic challenges that lie ahead?” Rudd asked at a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra.
Rudd conceded that his center-left Labor Party was the underdog, saying his advisers had told him that if the election had been held this weekend, his government would have lost.
But opinion polls also show that more voters prefer Rudd, a 55-year-old Chinese-speaking former Beijing diplomat, as prime minister than opposition leader Tony Abbott, a former Roman Catholic seminarian and journalist who is also 55.
Latest economic figures show a sharp decline in the nation’s finances, with the Treasury Department last week raising its estimated deficit for the current fiscal year to 30.1 billion Australian dollars (US$26.8 billion) due to the mining slowdown. The new forecast for the year ending on June 30, 2014, was A$12 billion worse than its last forecast in May.
The conservative Liberal Party-led opposition coalition has accused the government of wasting money on stimulus spending after the last conservative government delivered surplus budgets year after year until it lost power in 2007.
After the election was announced, Abbott promised to “get the budget back under control,” and listed scrapping the unpopular carbon tax among his top priorities if elected.
The election promises to be an extraordinary contest for Australian politics. Labor leads Australia’s first minority government since World War II, and polls suggest the opposition faces an easier task picking up seats than Labor does.
Labor holds 71 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives where parties form governments. The opposition has 72 seats, with the rest held by independent lawmakers or legislators from minor parties.
A recent poll has shown that secrets spiller Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks Party have a realistic chance of winning seats in the 78-seat Senate.
Rudd was first elected prime minister in 2007, but was ousted in 2010 by his then-deputy, Julia Gillard, in an internal leadership showdown among Labor lawmakers. He was dubbed “Recycled Rudd” by media when he reclaimed the leadership in a similar challenge on June 26 as the government faced the prospect of a loss of historic portions with Gillard at the helm.
Since then, Rudd has changed several key policy positions, and opinion polls suggest Labor is closing the opposition’s lead.
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