It wasn’t long ago that the upcoming federal election in Australia seemed to be Tony Abbott’s to lose. With Julia Gillard as damaged goods, the Opposition leader appeared poised to win one of the biggest electoral landslides in political history. Think Clement Atlee and Labour’s demolition of Winston Churchill’s Tories in 1945.
But recent polls have seen the lead of Australia’s conservative coalition parties narrow dramatically, raising the spectre of another hung parliament, if not a narrow Labor victory on 7 September.
What happened? What accounts for Labor’s resurgence in just a few weeks?
Well, simply put, Kevin Rudd is not Julia Gillard. Three years of broken promises and embarrassing missteps had fatally undermined the Lady Macbeth of Australian politics. Feminists and Labor partisans blamed an alleged culture of misogyny for her downfall.
The reality, however, was that she had grossly misjudged middle Australia, whose centre of political gravity is well to the right of Gillard’s cosmopolitan Melbourne constituency.
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