Conservative landslide in Australia: Tony Abbott will crush Kevin Rudd

Sometimes only a cliché will do, especially when the subject is the Australian Labor party. Labor is holed beneath the water line and is sinking fast. No one, not even its newly reinstated skipper, Kevin Rudd, is capable of keeping the boat afloat as the nation heads for a general election on 7 September. In a couple of weeks, barring an act of God or a military coup, the conservative Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal-National coalition, will replace the left-liberal Rudd as prime minister of Australia.

It was not meant to be like this. In June Labor’s greatest electoral handicap — its party leader and prime minister, Julia Gillard — was stabbed in the back and replaced by Rudd, who three years earlier had in turn been backstabbed and replaced by Gillard and her gang of Labor heavies. The brutal reinstatement of Rudd seemed at first to have been a stroke of genius. For a few weeks, Labor was united and the Australian people appeared to be willing to give Rudd another go. The nervous nellies in Abbott’s coalition became more than usually jumpy.

Today it’s a very different story. Abbott is preferred prime minister, Rudd’s approval rating is in free fall, and after adjustment of Australia’s preferential voting system, support for the coalition is at 54 per cent, well ahead of Labor’s 46 per cent. That compares with a 57-43 split at the end of Gillard’s reign, but it still points to an electoral landslide. No wonder Labor’s true believers are angry and alienated while the party’s urban sophisticates — rich, well-educated and congenitally liberal — are staying away from sharp objects.

Credit for all this must go to Abbott. Since he became opposition leader in late 2009, the monarchist, Rhodes scholar and devout Catholic — he was educated at the Jesuit Riverview College, the Stonyhurst of Australia — has resurrected the conservative cause, which had languished in the Antipodes since John Howard’s inglorious downfall in 2007.