Coalition prepare for tight battle against Rudd in Sydney, Melbourne
Date
June 26, 2013 - 8:30PM
The coalition will divert election resources from the vacant seats of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott and increase focus on winning marginal seats in Sydney and Melbourne to fight a much "tighter" election against Kevin Rudd.
A senior coalition source said the leadership change would restore part of the Labor base - many of who will greet his resurrection as "righting the wrong" when he was knifed three years ago.
Tony Abbott's forces will remind the electorate of descriptions of Mr Rudd by his own colleagues, including "a psychopath with a giant ego" but concede he will be a more formidable opponent.
Liberal Party strategists concede Mr Rudd is hugely popular in ethnically-diverse seats, particularly among Chinese and Arab voters, as evidenced by his hero's welcome recently in the southern and south western Sydney Labor seats of Reid, Barton and and McMahon.
All three seats, on margins of 2.7%, 6.9% and 7.8% respectively were in danger of being lost under a Gillard-led Labor but would likely be held under Mr Rudd, polling suggests.
Fairfax Media research of all Nielsen polls since February, showed Labor under Julia Gillard was on course to lose 14 seats in NSW and at least three in Victoria.
Once safe Labor seats right up to the Blacktown-based electorate of Chifley, held by Ed Husic with a margin of 12.3 per cent, was under threat.
"Rudd will go better with ethnically-diverse groups and those groups tend to be in marginal seats so the complexion changes considerably," a coalition source familiar with election planning said.
The party is now confident that Tony Windsor's seat will fall to Barnaby Joyce and Mr Oakeshott's Lyne electorate will be captured by his fellow National Party member, David Gillespie. Resources will be diverted from those but no decisions will be made before seats are polled under the new leadership landscape.
Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane said recently that the party was "ready for any contingency" and would not be caught on the hop by a late change.
Comments by senior ministers like Treasurer Wayne Swan and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy about Mr Rudd being a Labor saboteur will be used against the ALP during the election campaign.
Mr Swan savaged Mr Rudd in February 2012 before his first failed challenge.
"The Party has given Kevin Rudd all the opportunities in the world and he wasted them with his dysfunctional decision making and his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people including our caucus colleagues," he said.
"He was the Party's biggest beneficiary then its biggest critic; but never a loyal or selfless example of its values and objectives."
Environment Minister Tony Burke said on the same day: "'The stories that were around of the chaos, of the temperament, of the inability to have decisions made – they are not stories."
The coalition has already released a satirical cartoon of "headless" chickens that actually have faces, including Mr Rudd's.
Mr Abbott said on Wednesday before the spill that it did not matter who was in charge of Labor.
“It seems that the Labor party caucus has not just lost faith in the Prime Minister but is losing faith with the Labor party itself," he said.
“The Labor party may well change its leader, but it doesn't matter who leads the Labor party, it will still be much the same government with much the same policies.”
Mr Rudd said his reason for challenging Ms Gillard was that the party was on course a "catastrophic defeat".
"The truth is that many, many MPs have requested me for a long, long time to contest the leadership of the party, because of the parlous circumstances we now face," he said.
"What literally thousands of Australians have said to me over the last year or so is that they are genuinely fearful of what Mr Abbott could do to them if he's elected. Let alone elected with a massive majority, including a majority in the Senate which he is currently on track to do."
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/coalition-prepare-for-tight-battle-against-rudd-in-sydney-melbourne-20130626-2oxit.html#ixzz2XJlJyDEG