Australia is poised for its most bruising election clash in a decade as Prime Minister John Howard battles the toughest opponent to emerge since he won power, analysts say.
Howard's conservative coalition and the opposition Labor Party set the tone for the upcoming campaign last week when they accused each other in parliament of smear campaigns and mud-slinging.
Experts say the temperature will only rise in coming weeks, when Howard is set to formally nominate the date for the election at which he will seek a fifth term in office.
With the vote expected to take place in late November, Howard needs to turn around a huge deficit in opinion polls, while Labor is desperate to end 11 years in the wilderness.
Economic management and the government's radical industrial relations reforms will be key election battlegrounds, according to University of Queensland politics specialist Clive Bean.
However, he said Australia's contribution to the Iraq war would not be a major issue, even though Labor has promised to end Howard's commitment, with voters more concerned about hip-pocket domestic issues.
Experts say much of Howard's campaign will focus on persuading voters his government is not tired after being in power since 1996.
Internal party research leaked last month showed Howard, 68, was seen as "old and dishonest."
Howard's biographer Wayne Errington said the prime minister's Liberal-National coalition would run a negative campaign against Rudd, 50, who has enjoyed an extended honeymoon since taking on the leadership role last December.
"The government will focus very much on trying to discredit Rudd, portraying him as shallow and weak," said Errington, a political science professor at the Australian National University.
"They have to because it's very difficult for a government that has been in power this long to fight on policy issues, the public treat every announcement they make with cynicism and immediately look for the political motivation behind it," he said.
Bean said the campaign would likely go beyond the normal rough-and-tumble of an Australian election.
"John Howard has had bad polls before but they were six months out from an election, he's never had to try to turn things around this close to polling day," he said.
The government has already questioned the business dealings of Rudd and his wife, as well as criticizing his handling of sex abuse claims at a juvenile detention center when he was a senior bureaucrat in Queensland in the 1990s.
Salacious details of a drunken trip Rudd made to a New York strip club in 2003 were also leaked to the media, although Bean said this had backfired as it made the bookish Labor leader "more human" in the eyes of voters.
Rudd has responded to accusations he is too inexperienced to manage Australia's prosperous economy by describing himself as a "fiscal conservative" and a safe alternative to Howard.
Errington said he had also frustrated the government by adopting many of its policies as his own, limiting his rivals' avenues of attack.
Labor is promoting Rudd's leadership as an opportunity for generational change, a message Errington said was getting through to voters and showing up in opinion polls, which give him 55 percent support to Howard's 45.
"When Howard makes announcements on issues like global warming or broadband, there seems to be a feeling that they're not issues he feels strongly about, that he's belatedly discovered them as the election approaches," Errington said.
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