By Rich Bowden Feb 28, 2007, 15:16 GMT
In a strategic move by the Opposition, former Australian TV personality Maxine McKew announced last weekend she would be challenging the Australian Prime Minister John Howard in his seat of Bennelong in the general election due to be called later this year. McKew will stand as the Australian Labor Party (ALP) candidate.
Calling herself the obvious “underdog” in the battle for Bennelong, the former ABC TV presenter and journalist told reporters she was aware her opponent was highly respected in the electorate but sensed people wanted change.
“I sense that Australians are hungry for a different kind of political leadership,” she said.
“It’s a style of leadership that understands Australia’s future challenges require long-term solutions, not short-term political fixes. It’s a style of political leadership that is focused on the future, not the past.”
McKew recently joined the ALP after a celebrated thirty-year career in both television and magazine journalism and her high-profile candidacy for Bennelong has caught the attention of the national media.
Though many pundits have said wresting the seat from the politically savvy Prime Minister is considered a difficult task, a fact admitted to by the Labor candidate, a recent poll of 400 Bennelong voters gives her hope. The poll taken early this month shows Labor holding an approximate 55 per cent of the two-party preferred vote meaning Labor would have won the seat if an election had been held.
The surprise findings have even prompted some within Howard’s own party to predict the Prime Minister’s downfall. Former Liberal party national president John Valder spoke of the desire for change in the electorate.
“From my knowledge of that electorate I think that people are looking for a change and with a candidate like Maxine McKew, there's a smell of blood around,” he said to ABC radio.
“That will accelerate and personally I do think that if an election was held today that Maxine McKew would win. Howard is in a very vulnerable position,” he said.
Antony Green, one of the nation’s leading election analysts, has described the seat as a “litmus test” in the upcoming election and agreed the Prime Minister “should be worried.”
Saying the seat had changed considerably since Howard first won it for the Liberal party in 1974, Green said if the Prime Minister were to lose Bennelong, he believed the government would change hands.
“I can't really see the situation where John Howard is defeated and the government is re-elected,” he said to Southern Cross radio.
The government’s unpopular pro-war policies in Iraq, draconian industrial relations laws and its refusal to bring Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks home for trial have been instrumental behind its collapse in support amongst voters.
Not only has Howard seen his governing Liberal/National coalition lose its lead in opinion polls, but he has also had to surrender his previously unassailable lead as preferred Prime Minister since the installing of the popular Kevin Rudd as Leader of the Opposition last December. However, despite encouraging polls, two important historical facts appear to work against McKew’s chances in the seat on Sydney’s Lower North Shore. Firstly, Bennelong has had only two members since its creation in 1949, both from the Liberal party and secondly, only one Australian Prime Minister has ever lost his seat at an election, the Nationalist Stanley Bruce in 1929.
The ALP though, believe they stand a good chance of turning history on its head with a popular, high-profile candidate and a recent redistribution which will add predominantly working class suburbs to the well- to-do seat. Despite the fact that Howard’s current margin is a clear, yet vulnerable four per cent, Labor strategists believe this redistribution will reduce the Prime Minister’s margin to within range.
Howard has refused to comment on the McKew candidacy except to say the news will make him work harder to retain the seat of Bennelong.
“…when I get news like this it only steels my resolve to work even harder for the people I have had the privilege of representing for the last 30 years,” Howard said to the national Nine TV network.
To win the right to govern, the ALP must win 16 seats from the government in the federal election. Admitting the task to be “a really tough ask,” Labor’s Treasury spokesman Wayne Swan said the Prime Minister appeared to be rattled by the announcement of McKew’s candidacy and said candidates of her calibre would be replicated throughout the country.
Should Howard win in Bennelong, experts have suggested Howard will retire from politics shortly into the next term of Parliament to allow his successor time to take control of the party before the 2010 election.
Some commentators have speculated McKew’s candidacy may be a Labor party ploy to position McKew for the expected by-election for the seat should the Prime Minister stand down.
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