Australian election too close to call

Canberra: Australia's federal election tomorrow is poised on a knife-edge, with most opinion polls indicating the result will be the closest in almost 50 years.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who heads the Australian Labor Party, said yesterday that the result would be a cliff-hanger.

"This will be a knife-edge election result,'' she said during an address to the National Press Club in Canberra.

"It will be a long, late night on Saturday and every vote counts, absolutely every vote.

"So it's very tough. It's very, very tight.''

Most opinion polls have the ruling ALP just one percentage point ahead of the opposition Liberal-National Coalition.

Gillard is the country's first woman prime minister and has been in the top job for just over two months, since deposing former prime minister Kevin Rudd in a leadership coup in June.

Her challenger, Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party, is hoping to buck an established trend in Australian politics where a first-term government has not been voted out of office in more than 80 years.

The six-week-long election campaign that has received saturated coverage across all media platforms, from television to Twitter, has surprisingly failed to capture the public's imagination.

In an online opinion poll conducted by national broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 92 per cent of respondents said the election campaign had made no difference to the way they would vote tomorrow.

The campaigning has been variously described by media commentators and the public alike as "boring", "dull" and "uninspiring".

Opposition

Opposition Leader Abbott, meanwhile, is set for a sleepless couple of nights till the election — literally. Abbott is a superfit athlete who has even completed the gruelling Ironman triathlon challenge.

He told reporters accompanying him on the campaign trail yesterday that he would campaign non-stop till the election, day and night.

"Why sleep at a time like this, if there are voters to be seen, if there are cases to be made, if there's an argument to be put across to the public," he said.

"If it is a good night [Saturday], I will be back to work on Sunday morning, because we aren't going to waste time," he said.

Many commentators have bemoaned the lack of a focus on important issues during the campaign. The economy remains the single biggest issue, with the ALP Government claiming credit for guiding Australia through the Global Financial Crisis with a $A42 billion (Dh138 billion) economic stimulus package.

The Liberal-National Coalition claims that the former Howard government's decade-long economic management created the conditions for Australia to emerge from the GFC in better shape than any other developed economy.

Climate change, a hot-button issue among voters which contributed to the ouster of former PM Rudd, has been relegated to the back-burner with neither party willing to put a price on carbon because of the potential impact on Australia's big polluting companies.

The arrival of asylum-seekers is another issue. Health care is also a major issue, with long waiting lists for "elective" surgery and lack of enough hospital beds in public hospitals in the densely-populated major cities.

Foreign policy has been notably absent in the campaining, and there has been virtually no mention of Australia's relationships with its regional neighbours and major trading partners China and Japan.