Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called an election for 21 August, vowing to tackle the flashpoint issues of refugees, the economy and global warming, just weeks after taking power.
Ms Gillard said she would ask the Australian people to endorse her leadership after she deposed former prime minister Kevin Rudd in a party coup.
‘Today I seek a mandate from the Australian people to move Australia forward,’ Ms Gillard said, officially kicking off the five-week campaign.
‘This election I believe presents Australians with a very clear choice - whether we move Australia forward or go back.’
Australia's first woman prime minister said the nation had ‘come too far as a country and evolved too much as a society to risk the kind of backward looking leadership’ offered by her conservative opponent Tony Abbott.
The former industrial lawyer laid out her case for re-election on the issues of asylum seekers, economic management and climate change, painting herself as a progressive optimist who was ‘asking the Australian people for their trust.’
But - after just three weeks in office in which she insisted she had made some ‘big strides forward’ - she warned it would be a ‘very close election’ and that a ‘close, tough, hard-fought campaign’ lay ahead.
She faces an uphill battle to deliver the centre-left ruling Labor party a second three-year term in office, after a spectacular fall from the dizzying heights of popularity it enjoyed for its first two years in power.
Once regular sparring partners on commercial breakfast television, Ms Gillard said she expected Mr Abbott to prove a ‘robust’ opponent.
Mr Abbott said his Liberal-National party coalition would ‘stand up for Australia’ and for real action on the economy and boatpeople.
‘I'm going to end the waste, repay the debt, stop the new taxes and stop the boats. That's what you'll get from me,’ he said.
Ms Gillard promised to outline her climate policies during the campaign and said she was ‘a person who believes climate change is real, who believes it's caused by human activity and who has never equivocated in that belief.’
Mr Abbott, who once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’ countered that a return to Labor would mean a carbon tax, saying: ‘It will be high and it will impact on everyone's standard of living.’
The opposition would need to achieve a swing of 2.3% to return to power, less than three years after their 11 years in rule were ended by Mr Rudd's landslide election victory in November 2007.
