Australia Votes as Labor Government Struggles to Survive

By MATT SIEGEL

New York Times - IHT: September 6, 2013

SYDNEY, Australia — Australians went to the polls Saturday in a contest that pits Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party, which is hoping for a fresh mandate after a tumultuous six years in power, against a conservative Liberal-National coalition seeking to ride a wave of voter dissatisfaction into power.

Mr. Rudd faces a formidable opponent in Tony Abbott, who has dispatched two prime ministers during his four-year run as opposition leader. Mr. Rudd, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, returned to the leadership in June after a nearly two-year campaign by his supporters culminated in a party coup that ousted the country’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard.

Polls have suggested that Mr. Rudd was facing an uphill battle in convincing voters to return him to the leadership he had fought so hard to regain from Ms. Gillard. And on Friday Mr. Rudd received a setback when all but one major daily owned by Fairfax Media, the normally left-leaning publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and the nation’s second largest newspaper publisher, endorsed Mr. Abbott for prime minister. Only Fairfax’s Melbourne daily, The Age, stuck by Mr. Rudd in the contest.

The socially conservative Mr. Abbott, however, has long struggled to connect with voters and most polls had him either equal to or less popular than Mr. Rudd heading into the vote. There is a strong sense that, if he prevails in Saturday’s contest, he will be entering office without a strong personal mandate.

But Mr. Abbott appeared relaxed after casting his ballot early Saturday morning at a beachfront polling station in Sydney’s affluent northern suburbs. He even poked fun at his oft-mocked penchant for the tight swimming trunks known colloquially as “budgie smugglers” – named after the budgerigar, a small Australian parrot.

“You will be pleased to know I am in a suit — not in budgie smugglers,” Mr. Abbott told Nine Network television after casting his vote. “I wish I was out in the waves. It is a nice swell for an elderly long boarder.”

Mr. Rudd, by contrast, was at the center of a chaotic scene at St. Paul’s Church in Brisbane, where a group of protesters loudly mocked him as he arrived to vote in the early afternoon. Confusion at the polling station – reportedly as a result of the campaign having given little advance notice of his arrival – led to a crush of journalists and campaign workers inside the church.

The Labor Party, which dumped Ms. Gillard in the hopes of averting a landslide loss, has struggled to shake the impression that it is more focused on personal feuds than pressing issues like the slowing of Australia’s mining-driven economy and the record number of asylum seekers trying to reach the country in dangerous and overcrowded boats.

Whatever the outcome of the election, the end of the campaign will surely be welcomed by a weary electorate. The bitter and feisty contest, whose start was officially declared by Mr. Rudd last month, has effectively been under way since January, when Ms. Gillard announced, unusually early, that the vote would be held in September.

That sense of exhaustion was evident Saturday afternoon at a polling station in the leafy Sydney suburb of Leichhardt – a traditionally strong area for Labor. A handful of voters trickled in to cast their ballots under the high steeples of the local town hall, and none expressed excitement for their party’s leadership.

Matt Rogers, a 32-year-old mortgage broker, said that he had voted for the Liberal Party despite his misgivings about Mr. Abbott. He hopes, however, that the coalition will bring stability back to government after the leadership crises of the Labor years.

“Yeah, maybe not the most ideal of leaders for the Liberals,” he said with a laugh. “But I believe that you’re voting for a party and not just individuals.”

But Alex Chapple, 56, said that it was precisely the leadership issue that had driven him to vote for the Labor Party this time around, after having voted for The Liberal Party in the previous election. A vote for Mr. Rudd was a vote from “my heart,” he said, and no amount of media coverage saying the election was lost would convince him that was the case.

“Don’t count him out,” he said. “You never know until the last breath.”