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.
Mr. Rudd, who ended his campaign with a get-out-the-vote swing through the heavily populated eastern states, has pushed back hard against his underdog status. But just 24 hours before the polls opened, he conceded that he was still several percentage points shy of where he needed to be.
“Our job in the next 24 hours, right across Australia, is working with those three to four hundred thousand Australians” who remain undecided, he told reporters on a campaign stop in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales.
Mr. Abbott, for his part, said in an interview Friday with Melbourne radio station 3AW, that he was"conscious of being on a great threshold” of leadership.
“If it happens, I will be extraordinarily conscious of the heavy burden of responsibility, of the duties, the extraordinary duties, that will have descended upon my shoulder,” he said.
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, its end will surely be welcomed by a weary electorate. The acrimonious 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.
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.
Mr. Rudd, who ended his campaign with a get-out-the-vote swing through the heavily populated eastern states, has pushed back hard against his underdog status. But just 24 hours before the polls opened, he conceded that he was still several percentage points shy of where he needed to be.
“Our job in the next 24 hours, right across Australia, is working with those three to four hundred thousand Australians” who remain undecided, he told reporters on a campaign stop in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales.
Mr. Abbott, for his part, said in an interview Friday with Melbourne radio station 3AW, that he was"conscious of being on a great threshold” of leadership.
“If it happens, I will be extraordinarily conscious of the heavy burden of responsibility, of the duties, the extraordinary duties, that will have descended upon my shoulder,” he said.
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, its end will surely be welcomed by a weary electorate. The acrimonious 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.