Australian Prime Minister John Howard defied mounting pressure to name an election date yesterday as a new opinion poll showed him heading for a landslide defeat.
The opposition Labor Party accuses Howard of delaying the vote while the government pumps millions of dollars into an advertising blitz in a last-ditch bid to turn public opinion -- a charge he denies.
Howard's conservative Liberal-National coalition trailed center-left Labor by 12 points in an ACNielsen poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald -- a margin large enough to rout the government if repeated on election day.
The poll of 1,405 voters put support for the coalition at 44 percent against 56 percent for Labor on a two-party basis, which strips out the influence of minor parties.
The result was in line with a series of polls this year since Labor was taken over by Kevin Rudd, 50, who consistently beats Howard, 68, as preferred prime minister.
In the latest poll he won 52 percent of the vote to 39 percent for Howard, with the rest undecided.
Rudd was regarded as more trustworthy and having a better vision for Australia's future, while the prime minister was seen as a better economic manager.
ACNielsen poll director John Stirton said the last opposition to poll so well was the coalition under Howard shortly before he won power in 1996.
"While this does not make Labor a certainty to win, it entitles [them] to clear favoritism going into the campaign," Stirton said.
Howard must seek a fifth term in office before mid-January next year. He has pledged that a vote will be held by early December at the latest, but has refused to name the date.
"A point must come when John Howard leaps out of the aeroplane and hopes that a miracle opens the parachute," veteran politician analyst Michelle Grattan wrote in the Age newspaper.
Howard used a weekly radio message yesterday to highlight his economic credentials, which is the one area he has maintained a steady lead over Rudd. Rudd's support has come from his promises to re-shape education, health and employment laws.
"I want Australia to become a full employment economy where anyone who wants a job and is able to work has a meaningful job that leads to a lasting career," Howard said, highlighting unemployment at 33-year lows.
But Howard's pitch has been blunted by successive central bank interest rate rises to a decade high of 6.5 percent, denting traditional conservative support in outer city mortgage belts.
"At the moment these people don't really care about the economy at they're saying they intend to vote Labor or Greens," AC Nielsen pollster John Stirton told the Sydney Morning Herald.
"The polls, it seems, are not going to provide any greater security before the jump," Grattan wrote.
A long-running drought has also lifted the importance of climate change as a major issue for eight in 10 voters, polls show.
That made Howard's backing last week for a new A$2 billion (US$1.8 billion) timber pulp mill in the divided island state of Tasmania a political gamble. Howard, unlike Rudd, has refused to ratify the Kyoto climate pact, which has angered environmentalists.
Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett said voters, jaded by months of government advertising in an as-yet undeclared campaign, were more occupied by Australia's shock weekend 12-10 loss to England in the Rugby World Cup in France.
"Given that we've had this devastating result in the football, and we're all feeling it this morning, why doesn't he just get on and call the election," Garrett said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion