A backlash against the US-led Iraq war is damaging Australian Prime Minister John Howard's re-election chances in a ballot expected within months, with opposition Labor snaring a firm lead in a new opinion poll.
"We are in the fight of our political lives and all energy must be focused on that," Howard told a meeting of party colleagues yesterday. "The odds are very much against us."
Howard, a close US ally who sent 2,000 military personnel to the US-led invasion last March, said his government had been damaged by the negative publicity out of Iraq such as photographs of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.
But he said his conservative government's foreign policy would not be influenced by a swing in opinion polls after an ACNielsen poll showed 63 percent of Australians now believed the war in Iraq was unjustified, up from 51 percent in September last year.
"We did not enter the coalition [in Iraq] on the basis of opinion polls and we have absolutely no intention on the basis of opinion polls of altering our position," Howard told parliament.
Howard said he would reaffirm his support for the Iraq action when visiting US President George W. Bush in Washington next week.
The future of 850 Australian troops still in and around Iraq has become a political tug-of-war in Australia ahead of an election possible as early as August but tipped for October.
Howard wants the troops to remain until the "job is done," but Labor's new leader Mark Latham, who has reinvigorated the center-left party in the past six months, has vowed to bring them home by Christmas if he wins the close run election.
Howard's eight-year-old government has lost its lead in opinion polls this year since Latham stormed the political stage.
Despite a positive response to the government's big-spending budget two weeks ago, an ACNielsen poll published on yesterday found support for Howard's Liberal-National Party coalition had slipped to 39 percent from 42 percent a month ago.
In contrast, Labor was in its best electoral position in about three years, with support up one point to 43 percent and Latham was enjoying a higher personal approval rating than Howard, at 58 to 52 percent.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
RSS