Australia’s election campaign will officially start soon with climate change policy and union corruption in the national building industry shaping into key battlegrounds for the July 2 poll.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday said that he was likely to visit Australian Governor-General Peter Cosgrove this weekend to lock down the date and officially start the election campaign.
A heartening historical fact for Turnbull is that no Australian federal government has lost power after a single three-year term since the tumultuous early years of the Great Depression. However, Australia is now in an extraordinary era of political volatility as it grapples to diversify an economy that thrived on a mining boom that has gone bust. If the opposition center-left Labor Party wins the election, it will mean Australia’s fifth change of prime minister in six years.
Turnbull replaced his unpopular predecessor, Tony Abbott, in a leadership ballot of lawmakers in the ruling center-right Liberal Party in September, only two years after the coalition government was elected.
The change of prime minister immediately boosted the government’s standing in opinion polls, but recent polls suggest the government is now running neck-and-neck with Labor.
Ostensibly Turnbull has called an early election because a hostile senate has refused to pass legislation that would allow the government to create a building industry watchdog called the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). The ABCC was disbanded in 2012 by a former Labor government, which is linked to the trade union movement.
While the plight of the ABCC seems an obscure issue to most voters, the political debate focuses attention on opposition leader Bill Shorten’s history as a union official.
Before he entered parliament in 2007, Shorten was a senior official of the Australian Workers Union, one of five unions targeted by government-commissioned inquiry into union corruption. Labor condemned the inquiry as a politically motivated witch hunt.
Shorten rejected suggestions by inquiry lawyers that he had had conflicts of interests when companies made donations to his union while he was negotiating with them over workers’ pay.
Even Labor supporters criticized him over news of the donations.
Australian National University political scientist John Wanna expects Turnbull will use the issue to focus on Shorten’s union past during the campaign.
“He’s going to turn the attack on Shorten: ‘You’re just a union thug; you’re just a union hack; you’ve blocked us from bringing in a measure that would have made unions more accountable,”’ Wanna said.
Labor is expected to exploit Turnbull’s past support for Australia adopting an emissions trading system to cut greenhouse gas pollution. Australia, on a per capita basis, is among the world’s worst polluters.
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