Rudd digs poll hole with tax blunder

Kevin Rudd. Photo / Greg Bowker

Unless Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can reverse his disastrous slide in popularity before Australia goes to the polls in the next few months, his Government will be the first in almost 70 years to fail to win a second term.

New opinion polls have reported a dramatic collapse in support that is threatening to race out of control, handing power almost by default to the even more unpopular Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

The train-wreck facing Rudd is being driven by anger at a series of backflips, broken promises and blunders, and now fuelled further by widening rejection of his plan to tax the "excessive" profits of big mining firms.

Instead of embracing the concept of a Robin Hood super-tax to spread the nation's wealth more equitably, voters are worried by the possible impact on the sector that has kept that has kept Australia prosperous, and on the flow-through to their employment, savings and superannuation.

Rudd told ABC radio: "The challenge for me and the Government is to work harder into the future. I have got a lot of work to do to explain my plans as opposed to Mr Abbott's plans."

But time is fast running out for Rudd, previously one of the most popular leaders in the nation's political history but who now cannot even leverage his Government's world-acclaimed handling of the economy through the global financial crisis into electoral support.

Beginning with the effective dumping of his plans for a greenhouse emissions trading scheme, Rudd has presided over a series of disasters.

Government support has fled to the Greens and independents - a shift, until now, seen as "parking" protest votes until returning to Rudd at the election to be held before the end of the year. The latest Neilson poll, published in Fairfax newspapers yesterday, gave a sharp blow to this expectation.

The news was not good for either of the major parties, with their combined vote of 76 per cent the lowest in almost a decade and approval for both leaders falling to a level pegging of 41 per cent.

Although Rudd still has a 10-point lead on Abbott as preferred prime minister, that status has been steadily eroded.

The Greens have picked up most of Labor's 10 per cent dive in primary votes since the 2007 election, giving them a record 15 per cent, and pushing the combined vote of independents and others to 9 per cent.

In the two-party preferred vote that decides Australian elections, the Coalition leads in the Neilson poll by 53 per cent to 47 per cent - a 5.7 per cent swing that if repeated uniformly this year would take 29 seats from Labor.

The Sydney Morning Herald noted that the Government's primary vote is now so low that even if it received 100 per cent of Greens preferences, it would still lose.

The Neilsen poll, which repeats the findings of an earlier Newspoll that most commentators considered a protest spike rather than a trend, was given greater force by other polls reflecting voter rejection of the mining super-tax.

A Newspoll made for the mining industry, published in the Australian yesterday, found that 48 per cent of voters opposed the tax in nine key marginal seats in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia.

Only 28 per cent supported the tax.

The poll found that one in four Labor supporters who voted for Rudd in 2007 now said they were less likely to vote for the Government - and that even if only half of these swapped to the Opposition, Rudd would lose the 10 seats he needs to keep power.

Similar anger at the tax was repeated in yesterday's Neilsen results and in earlier polls by Newspoll and Morgan.

Rudd not only has to overcome rejection of the super-tax and his long list of earlier woes: Neilsen also found that voters are increasingly disturbed by the numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat from Indonesia, with many now supporting Abbott's intention to impose a new version of former Prime Minister John Howard's "Pacific Solution" of detaining refugees abroad.

Rudd is trying to focus attention back on to Labor's economic management and plans for the future, while attacking Abbott for his purported plans to bring back Howard's loathed WorkChoices industrial policy, and to cut health and education spending.