The Labor Party enters the final week of Australia’s federal election campaign buoyed by opinion polls showing a rebound in support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her government. With Labor’s official campaign launch set for Monday and all political advertising to cease from midnight on Wednesday, has the party timed its late run to perfection?
The verdict from the analysts is mixed, but the consensus appears to be that Labor’s status as the incumbent and Australia’s political history of rarely throwing out governments after only one term likely will return Gillard to power.
On Saturday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott again declared himself the ‘underdog’ (generally seen as an asset in Australian politics, as few politicians like being considered the favourite) after the latest Newspoll survey gave Labor an election-winning lead in key seats.
The poll of 17 marginal seats in eastern Australia found that Labor would win enough seats from the Coalition in Gillard’s home state of Victoria to offset losses in New South Wales and Queensland, where the Labor ‘brand’ has been tainted by unpopular state governments.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s home state of Queensland has been viewed since the campaign started as Labor’s sore spot, and the reported swing against the government was biggest in the northern-most eastern state at 3.4 percent – enough to see five seats switch to the Coalition.
In New South Wales, the country’s most populous state and home to a deeply unpopular but more longstanding Labor government, Newspoll found a swing of 1.3 percent to the Coalition, with four seats set to fall. But the situation was more promising for Labor in Victoria, where the poll showed a swing of 6.2 percent to Gillard’s party and a three seat gain for the government.
Supporting the more promising trend for Labor was the latest Herald/Nielsen poll, which reportedly has called the result correctly in the last four federal elections. The poll showed Labor leading the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis by 53 percent to 47 percent – enough to deliver the government an extra two seats and increase its margin in the lower house. The poll also found Labor’s primary vote was up to 40 percent – one percentage point behind the Coalition’s – while the Greens slipped one point to 12 percent.
Gillard also increased her lead as preferred prime minister over Abbott to 52 percent versus 38 percent, in a poll that restored Labor and its leader to their pre-campaign position. Abbott, meanwhile, saw his approval rating slump to become a ‘net negative’ for the first time in a month.
A majority 59 percent said they expected Labor to win the election, with only 27 percent tipping the Coalition. But Gillard was having none of her new-found frontrunner status. Speaking to the media in Ballina, New South Wales, where she was promoting a $46 million carbon credit scheme to farmers in the northern rural electorate, Gillard said she anticipated a ‘photo finish.’
‘I think it’s going to be a nail biter on Saturday night. I think this is going to be one of the closest races the nation has ever seen,’ she told ABC TV.
Abbott was campaigning on Saturday in Perth, where he announced a $400 million boost for mining exploration and clean coal technologies.
Responding to questions over the latest poll readings, Abbott gave his standard response.
‘I’ve said all along that I will be the underdog,’ he was quoted saying by the Australian. ‘We've been running against the full might of an incumbent government, we're running against five incumbent state Labor governments, we're running against the union movement which is a $1 billion a year support operation for the Labor Party.’
Western Australia is also the state most affected by asylum-seekers (the so-called ‘boat people’) and Abbott took the opportunity to push his policy to ‘stop the boats’ by unveiling a truck-mounted placard on the reported number of such arrivals under the Rudd/Gillard government.
‘One hundred and fifty-two boats. One hundred and fifty-two reasons to change the government,’ Abbott said.
On the campaign trail for Labor in Melbourne, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke described Abbott as ‘mad as a cut snake’ and said there was no way to ‘stop the boats’ as promised by the Liberal Party leader.
‘We’re all bloody boat people,’ Hawke was quoted saying by AAP.‘That’s how we found the place…These people have got initiative, guts and courage and Australia needs people like that.’
Political antics aside, the pollsters were still seeing a tight race with the potential for a hung Parliament for the first time since 1940.
According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, a more reliable average of state results in the past three polls showed the government could still lose up to 14 seats in New South Wales and Queensland, producing a tied finish.
Griffith University’s Paul Williams, an expert in Australian politics and public policy, says that the race is still too close to call.
‘You would have to give Labor the narrowest of leads because of their incumbency and slightly better campaigning. It’s just slightly more likely that Labor will be able to form a government with a razor-thin majority,’ he says.
Should the major parties finish level in the lower house, Gillard would have first option to form a government, yet the three current independents are conservative-leaning and would likely be more amenable to a Coalition government, Williams says.
However, Williams says Australian media watchers should be prepared for some fireworks ahead of the blackout on political advertising. Along with the advertising by the major political parties, industry groups from the mining, healthcare and other industries have also entered the fray in the current campaign with their attacks on the government, while Labor has been supported by its traditional trade union allies.
‘It’s bad for democracy, but if you were a party strategist you’d want to ramp up that negativity. Because it’s so evenly matched, you’ve really got to try and score a knockout blow,’ he says. ‘It’s like a boxing match that’s been going on for 14 rounds – in the 15th round you’re both fatigued on your feet, and you’ve really got to strike that knockout blow to bring them to their knees.’
‘Labor has tried it on economic credibility, saying that Tony Abbott is some sort of economic illiterate. The Coalition is trying to say that the Rudd/Gillard governments have been failures. They’re the only single narratives that we can really put our finger on, if any. So what they need to do is drive that home with a knockout blow or a single powerful ad or something, which we might yet see from the Labor launch coming on Monday.’
According to Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher, Abbott’s official campaign launch marked the beginning of the slide in voter support for the Coalition and back towards Labor.
‘Just when the Liberals needed their launch to give a burst of energy to their campaign, Abbott offered a return to Howardism, without the spending,’ he wrote in an August 14 article. ‘Abbott is positioning as an ascetic monk in a hair shirt, offering the voter a hair shirt of her own.’
Gillard, by contrast, was offering voters major projects including the national broadband network, infrastructure and school spending, ‘a lush set of offerings more becoming a temptress than an ascetic.’
Abbott defended his campaign strategy when questioned Saturday, saying, ‘I’m pleased and proud to be leading a team which wants a better style of politics in Australia and certainly we'll keep running the kind of campaign you've seen over the past few weeks.’
Do nice guys finish last? Abbott may well rue his decision not to ramp up the attack ads. But there’s still time for a final attempt at a knockout blow.