Australia count begins after tight election race
August 21, 2010
Counting is underway in Australia in a general election that looks to be one of the tightest in the country for decades.
Early exit polls put Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, ahead of her conservative rival Tony Abbott by a slim margin.
The vote takes place two months after Ms Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd in a Labor Party leadership challenge.
Correspondents say she has been hit by a backlash over the move.
Fourteen million registered voters began casting their ballots at 0800 (2200 GMT). Voting is compulsory in Australia.
Voting has ended in most of the country, but polls remain open in the west.
‘Tough contest’
An exit poll by Channel Nine suggested a narrow victory by Ms Gillard, with an expected win of 52% compared to 48% for Mr Abbott’s coalition.
A second exit poll by Sky News indicated Ms Gillard would garner 51% of the votes to Mr Abbott’s 49%.
But the exit polls also suggested a swing against Labor in key marginal seats, which will determine the final result.
But the normal advantages of incumbency have not worked much in the present prime minister’s favour, largely because of the manner in which she got the job.
It has been an insular and parochial campaign, which has left many voters uninspired by the choice before them.
Were it not for compulsory voting, turnout might have been low.
- Bryant: The great poll paradox
“It all depends on the uniformity of the vote across the country,” David Briggs of the Galaxy polling company told AFP news agency.
Speaking on Australia’s ABC television channel, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the election would be decided by “30 or more marginal seats throughout the country”.
Earlier, Mr Abbott declared that it was “a day when we can vote out a bad government”.
“It’s a day when we can vote in favour of a competent stable government which respects the tax payer’s dollar,” he said while casting his vote in Sydney.
Ms Gillard, who voted near her modest house in suburban Melbourne, told reporters that it was a tight race.
“This is a tough, tight, close contest, but I’m exercising my own vote,” she said.
As the campaign drew to an end, one opinion poll gave Ms Gillard a narrow lead over Mr Abbott, while another had them level.
Such polls raise the possibility of the country’s first hung parliament since 1940.
Mr Abbott - who leads the Liberal Party - worked through the final night of the campaign.
Correspondents say he has tried to exploit the Labor party’s divisions after the departure of Mr Rudd, trying to portray his coalition as a stable answer to a government beset by in-fighting.
In his campaign he has pledged to tighten immigration and has hit out at government spending. He has also toned down his well-known climate change scepticism.
Ms Gillard, a former lawyer who called a snap election shortly after coming to office, is hoping to be rewarded for the government’s handling of the economy, which weathered the global recession remarkably well.
During campaigning, both candidates made several visits to marginal constituencies upon which - given the slim margin between them - the election could hang.
Most of these are in the states of Queensland and New South Wales.
All of the seats in the lower house are up for grabs, plus half of the seats in the Senate - where opinion polls show the Greens could end up holding the balance of power.
‘Change in fortunes’
That Labor is locked into such a tight election race represents a turnaround in its fortunes since the start of the year.
Missteps by Kevin Rudd on climate change and a controversial mining tax caused his support - previously high - to fall sharply.
Ms Gillard was Mr Rudd’s deputy, and when she challenged him for the leadership in June he surrendered without a fight after realising his support among government colleagues had collapsed.
But Ms Gillard’s move triggered a backlash, with support for her falling sharply in the two months since she has been in office.
She has also been hit by a series of damaging - apparently internal - leaks during the campaign, something that Tony Abbott has cited as evidence of disarray within the Labor ranks.
Source: bbc.co.uk/
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