Australia’s first woman prime minister Julia Gillard will fight for her political life in a nail-biting election Saturday which could doom her as one of the country’s shortest-serving leaders.
Gillard, 48, who came to power in a hail of controversy after knifing elected leader Kevin Rudd, has shrunk to a wafer-thin lead in the opinion polls over conservative Tony Abbott, the pugnacious opposition leader.
Defeat of the Welsh-born Gillard, whose parents emigrated in 1966, would make her Labor Party the first single-term government since Second World War, and return the Liberal/National Coalition to power after less than three years.
It would also cap a dramatic period of upheaval in Australian politics, starting with the once enormously popular Rudd’s slide down the approval ratings and highlighted by his spectacular ousting in June.
‘When I became prime minister I said to the Australian people I would very quickly call an election so people could have their say,’ Gillard said Wednesday. ‘Everybody gets their say on Saturday.’
The latest Newspoll gives the former industrial lawyer a 52-48 per cent advantage over Abbott, but with some 40 marginal seats in the 150-seat lower house, the race is viewed as too close to call.
Haydon Manning, head of politics at Adelaide’s Flinders University, said the election — a compulsory vote by about 14 million electors, spread across the vast and varied continent — could be the tightest in decades.
‘Voters are looking at two of the least exposed leaders since World War II,’ he said. ‘To a lot of average voters, Gillard and Abbott are not names they know well. They wouldn’t know very much about them at all.
‘At this stage there’s a lot of undecided voters and anything could change their minds.’
During the bitter campaign, Gillard has struggled to dispel memories of June 24, when as deputy prime minister she suddenly turned on her boss, Rudd, and deposed him in a party ballot backed by shadowy factional chiefs.
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