Australian Prime Minister John Howard has called elections for late November.
A formidable politician who has destroyed his opposition in four consecutive elections, Howard, 68, and his governing coalition face an uphill battle against the Labor Party, which one newspaper poll over the weekend showed to be 18 percentage points ahead, 41 percent to 59 percent.
What ultimately matters is not the national average but the number of seats that change hands.
The Labor Party needs to win an additional 17 seats in the 150-member Parliament to wrest control from the governing coalition, which consists of Howard’s Liberal Party and the National Party.
If voters bear out the polls, the opposition will win by a comfortable margin, gaining as many as 20 seats.
That doesn’t sound too comfortable to me. Winning by as many as four seats is a little a close for comfort. Unlike America, the Australians are not piling up debt.
One benefit of the strong economy is that it has filled the coffers of the treasury to overflowing, allowing both sides to make extravagant promises to the electorate.
Between the coalition and the Labor Party, over the past few weeks politicians have promised more than $20 billion in public money for everything from roads to mental health.
The Howard government is not unpopular because of the state of the treasury. They have different problems.
The Howard government is nonetheless vulnerable on some economic fronts. One of his most important pieces of legislation was designed to encourage business by making workplace practices more flexible.
Business and industry are enthusiastic supporters of the Industrial Relations legislation, but it has played out badly with much of the work force, who believe that it has made jobs less secure.
The legislation cost Howard much of the youth vote. The weekend poll in the newspaper The Sun-Herald, which looked at voters in the country’s two most populous states, indicated that 73 percent of voters under 29 intended to vote Labor.
The respondents cited the new workplace legislation as being high on their list of concerns, but young voters were also worried about the environment.
And then there is the elephant in the room.
Howard has also been a stalwart ally in President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism. That has not helped him at the polls, and the Labor Party has said that it will push for a timetable for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq, but both the main parties competing in the election have said that the United States will remain Australia’s most important ally for the foreseeable future.
And it’s Howard’s role as Bush’s lapdog that could cause the ‘ultimate indignity’.
There are even signs that Howard, who has been prime minister for 11 years, might suffer the ultimate indignity: losing in his own suburban Sydney constituency, which would be the first time a sitting prime minister has lost his seat in an election since 1929.
Howard’s opponent is Kevin Rudd. Get used to that name. With any luck, the left will be resurgent in Australia and Rudd will be a crucial ally for a Democratic president in 2009.
If Howard’s coalition loses, and particularly if Howard loses his seat, the long tradition will continue. As Aznar, Blair, Berlusconi, and the House and Senate Republicans learned…anyone that works with Bush is ultimately destroyed.
