Convoy of discontent set to clog Canberra

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Photo / Getty Images

Late yesterday the first of what will today become a massive convoy of road trains, trucks, cars and vans began arriving in Canberra to demand Prime Minister Julia Gillard call a new election.

Thundering the anger of voters across Australia's vast regions, the "convoy of discontent" will bring rush-hour traffic to a crawl this morning as 11 convoys converge into one, circle Parliament House, and head for special parking points before returning in buses.

The size of the protest that is bringing truckies and other anti-Labor demonstrators across the continent was last night still uncertain, but police believe anywhere between 3000 and 9000 people will converge on Capital Hill to demand a new election.

Last week 2000 other protesters rallied on the lawns outside Parliament with similar demands, cheering Opposition Leader Tony Abbott as he lashed into Gillard and insisted voters be given the right to create a new mandate.

If the nation did go to an election now polls indicate that power would be delivered to Abbott in a landslide that would slash Labor's House of Representatives seats to just a fraction of their present 72.

Gillard has never recovered from the bitterness and disillusion that followed last year's ousting of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and has failed to win voters back despite negotiating deals on a new mining tax, health reform, and plans for a new national no-fault disability insurance scheme.

Her proposed carbon tax is opposed by a majority of Australians and - with the mining tax - has infuriated voters in the big mining states of Queensland and Western Australia and further alienated rural electorates.

Nor has Gillard satisfied anyone with her cobbled-together policy on asylum seekers, now based on a controversial refugee swap with Malaysia and the re-opening of former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard's Pacific solution detention centre in Papua New Guinea.

Labor's minority Government clings to power only through the support of one Greens MP and three independents - two of whom, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott in NSW, have come under heavy fire in their conservative regional seats for their support of Gillard generally and the carbon tax in particular.

Gillard also faces the peripheral threat of NSW central coast Labor MP Craig Thomson, who is under strong and growing pressure from allegations that his union credit card had been used to hire prostitutes when he was national president of the Health Services Union.

Unless there is no option there is no way Gillard will abandon Thomson. A byelection would almost certainly cost Labor his seat.

The "convoy of discontent" is merging all these elements into the crest of a massive conservative groundswell against Gillard.

It began with plans for a relatively modest truckers' protest against the carbon tax organised by the National Road Freighters' Association, heading from Port Hedland in the north of WA across to the east coast and down to Canberra.

Since then it has become the moving embodiment of the right's wrath, picking up conservative fury at Labor and rolling into the protest over the mining tax, imports of apples from New Zealand, China and the US, the Government's handling of live exports that cost the industry tens of millions of dollars, same-sex marriage, the new high-speed National Broadband Network, foreign investment in agricultural land, restrictions on poker machines and past scandals such as the bungled subsidised home insulation scheme.

Many are also furious at the influence of the Greens through their key seat in the Lower House and the balance of power they hold in the Senate.

Canberra will feel the weight of their anger this morning as roads start to become clogged as early as 5.30am, with expectations of major delays.