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.
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