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Australia poll set for November 24

SINGAPORE: Long-serving Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Sunday announced he would seek a fresh mandate in a general election to be held on November 24.

Hoping for a fifth successive term at the helm, Mr. Howard, now trailing badly in opinion polls, said the general election would help Australians choose “the right leadership” to “preserve” their present “prosperity” and to “build it further.”

Hitting back, Opposition leader Kevin Rudd, already riding the crest of an 18-percentage-point lead in the opinion polls, said the choice now was about “who offers new leadership for Australia’s future.”

With the prime campaign theme becoming a choice between a “new leadership” and “the right leadership,” Mr. Howard said he had “no intention of spending even a nanosecond between now and the election day in commenting on the opinion polls.”

The timing of the general election will allow Mr. Howard to participate in the East Asia Summit in Singapore a few days before the voting. He regards foreign policy as his forte, having “expanded” Australia’s relations with China, Japan, and also India after first denouncing it over its 1998 nuclear tests.

However, by leading Australia into a hugely unpopular war in Iraq on the side of the United States, Mr. Howard is widely believed to have spoilt his copy book in the opinion polls. Mr. Rudd commented, sarcastically, that Mr. Howard “has had a lot of experience in taking Australia into a war without an exit strategy.” Mr. Howard’s defence was that Australian troops should not be pulled out of Iraq prematurely.

Seeing Mr. Howard’s poor opinion-poll numbers as a paradox at this stage of economic buoyancy in Australia, analysts identified his U.S.-friendly Iraq policy as a major negative factor.

Labour, the main Opposition party, portrayed his industrial relations policy as a fault-line in economic policy. Other debating points would span issues of education, public health, climate change, and national reconciliation in regard to the aborigines.

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