Australians may go to an election in early 2010 as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd struggles to pass his agenda through a hostile Senate, but going to the ballot box may not solve Rudd's political frustrations. Rudd is dominating opinion polls and would easily win a second term with a bigger majority. But he may not win control of the upper-house Senate, where independents and Greens hold the swing votes, leaving his legislative agenda still in question. By going to the polls mid-way through his first term, Rudd might avoid the political fallout of rising unemployment expected in late 2010 from the global financial crisis and electorally damaging criticism he can't manage the economy. And by using his embattled emissions trading scheme legislation as a trigger for a rare double-dissolution election of both houses of parliament, he would ensure his key climate policy was passed in a post-election joint sitting of parliament. The Australian parliament is currently in its six-week winter recess and Rudd will be weighing up his election options before a scheduled delayed vote on his carbon trading plans in August. “I reckon he would like to go to an early election, and I think there will be one,” analyst Nick Economou from Melbourne's Monash University told Reuters. No Australian government has lost power after just one term since the Great Depression. The next election is due in late 2010 or early 2011, but an early election would allow Rudd to cash in on his extended honeymoon and divisions within the opposition. “I think he's keeping the option open. It's fairly flexible in terms of tactics. There would be advantages to go early if he could come up with a plausible enough excuse,” said Rick Kuhn, from the Australian National University. Rudd can call a double-dissolution if the Senate rejects his laws twice. Under a double-dissolution, all 76 Senators are up for re-election rather than only half of the Senate in a normal election. That favors the Greens, independents and minor parties, as they would need only about 8 percent of the vote in their state to win a seat, instead of about 17 percent of the state-wide vote in a normal election. Economou said a double dissolution election would result in more Greens and independents in the Senate at the expense of the opposition, possibly compounding Rudd's upper-house frustrations. Current polls suggest Rudd would cruise to victory in the lower house, where governments are formed, thanks to a drop in support for opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who bungled an attack on Rudd's credibility, based on a fake email. The low poll standing for the opposition has put pressure on Turnbull to shift his stance on carbon trading and to start negotiating changes to help the laws pass through parliament, to stop Rudd from using the laws as an election trigger. Rudd's plan to introduce a carbon emissions trading system (ETS) from July 2011, a central plank of his agenda, is key to his political dominance. Environment groups, big business organisations, and the opposition Liberal and National Parties are all divided over the plan, while polls show 65 percent of voters back Rudd's ETS. That all increases the pressures on Turnbull, who is desperate to avoid an early election, to give ground and change his policy of trying to stall a vote on the ETS until 2010. That could give Rudd his goal of having the ETS locked in before global climate talks in Copenhagen, which will start negotiations on a new framework to curb global emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012. But Rudd has already made major changes to his pay-to-pollute plan, and it remains unclear if the government will budge any further and relieve the political pressures on Turnbull. “The thing we don't know is how committed the government is to its own ETS, or how much they are willing to compromise,” Economou said. “My feeling is they are playing politics with it.” If Rudd does want an early election, he would resist more changes to his ETS, blame the opposition for stalling his plan, and would then fight an election on the need to take action on carbon emissions. The opposition, however, wants to fight an election later in 2010, giving Turnbull time to recover support and allowing him to fight the election on the economy rather than fight an early election on climate change. Turnbull believes he can make up ground with voters by criticising Rudd's economic management and high stimulus spending, which has locked in a decade of debt in a country more used to budget surpluses and government savings funds. The government has forecast unemployment will keep rising until mid-2010 and the ANU's Kuhn said the economy was the biggest risk to Rudd winning a second term. “If the Australian economy takes a bit of a dive, even if the global economy is starting to recover, then that could change the atmosphere a lot, and very quickly,” Kuhn said.
