Gillard Starts Australian Campaign With Poll Lead Over Abbott

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard started a five-week election campaign with a poll showing she has a winning lead that relies on support from Greens Party voters.

Gillard won 52 percent support against 48 percent for opposition Liberal-National coalition leader Tony Abbott in a head-to-head Galaxy poll published today by the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. She drew a 39 percent primary vote compared with Abbott’s 42 percent and 13 percent for the Greens, the poll showed.

Gillard, 48, called the ballot yesterday for Aug. 21, betting the Labor Party’s record of delivering growth during the global financial crisis will help ensure re-election. She begins the first full day of the campaign in Queensland, home to former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd whom she ousted last month, and where Labor aims to retain 10 seats with margins of less than 4.6 percent.

Even though the polls show Gillard is leading, the result is likely to be far closer than most people expect, said Anthony Green, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. election analyst.

“The government’s position isn’t as secure as that sounds,” Green said on the ABC’s Insiders program today.

Abbott’s coalition has 63 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives. Labor has 83 lawmakers and there are four independents, according to the parliamentary website.

Contested Seats

Queensland has 10 of the most-closely contested seats in the country and New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, has eight Labor lawmakers with majorities of less than 5 percent, the level below which seats are considered marginal.

“A lot of the leaders will be spending their time in Queensland and New South Wales because that’s where there’s the most bang for their buck in terms of seats,” Green said.

Gillard’s campaign started amid questions about the circumstances of her ouster of Rudd on June 24, after party factions and key labor unions switched their allegiance.

Some 57 percent of people thought the manner in which Rudd had been treated would undermine Labor’s chances of winning the election, today’s Galaxy poll showed. The survey was based on 800 voters on July 16 and no margin of error was given.

Treasurer Wayne Swan said concern among voters about the dumping of Rudd is “certainly a factor” in Queensland. “But the predominant factor here is the head-to-head contest between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott,” he told the Nine Network in Sydney today.

Resources Tax

The election will determine whether resources companies led by BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto Ltd. pay higher taxes, a policy championed by Rudd and diluted by Gillard to win their support. Abbott, bidding to make Labor the first one-term government in 80 years, has pledged not to adopt the tax, describing it as a punishment for the nation’s most profitable industry.

Swan today also sought to draw attention to Labor’s handling of the economy through the worst global recession since World War II. In contrast to most developed economies, Australia’s gross domestic product expanded for the past five quarters as government stimulus spending helped boost consumer demand.

Aggressive Tightening

The economic rebound has prompted the central bank to boost the benchmark rate six times to 4.5 percent since early October, from a half-century low of 3 percent, the most aggressive round of monetary policy tightening by a Group of 20 member.

Signs that the expansion will accelerate, including a 5.1 percent jobless rate that fell below Japan’s level for the first time since at least 1978 and to almost half the level of the U.S., could increase pressure on Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Glenn Stevens to resume raising borrowing costs on Aug. 3, potentially hurting voters in marginal seats.

“We are doing everything we possibly can to get the overall settings in the economy right to minimize inflationary pressures,” Swan told the Nine Network today.