There’s just over a week to go until the Australian election and it’s very hard to see John Howard winning it from here. Though there has been a slight narrowing over the course of the campaign, all polls are still showing Labor with a landslide winning percentage of the vote, 54-55%. Thanks to favourable electoral boundaries Howard’s Liberals could probably lose the popular vote by as much as 2% and still win, but they needed to be a lot closer by now.
Unfortunately everything seems to be going wrong. Last week the Reserve Bank raised interest rates for the sixth time since Howard was re-elected in 2004 with the slogan ‘Keeping Interest Rates Low’. Despite the bank’s explicit warning that government spending was fuelling inflation and that it would take a dim view of any increases in the same, Howard went ahead on Monday with a campaign launch which included $9.5bn
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