By GREG ANSLEY
CANBERRA - It is two days past the Ides of March, but for Australian Prime Minister John Howard a sense of doom still hangs across the southwestern corner of Brisbane where voters today may herald his political death.
The Ryan electorate, for 50 years a Liberal bastion, will select a new federal MP in a byelection that need not have been held, in a seat that Labour contemplated not contesting.
Polls unanimously predict Labour will coast to victory for the first time since the electorate was created in 1949.
Howard is putting on a brave face by pointing to victories that have been won by embattled Governments despite disastrous byelection losses in the runup to general elections.
There was even some small crumb of comfort yesterday when Brisbane's Courier Mail published a poll reporting an 11th-hour rise of 5 per cent in Liberal support, and a 1 per cent decline for Labour.
But this still leaves the Opposition in front, 37 per cent to 32 per cent.
Howard, pugnacious to the end, is urging Liberals not to punish the Coalition with a protest vote, and attacking Opposition Leader Kim Beazley for talking down the economy as it lumbers towards recession.
"We're in there with a really strong chance and I am appealing to people in Ryan not to reward the negativity of the Labor Party," he said yesterday.
Well may Howard tremble. Defeat today will increase the murmurs of discontent at his leadership already rumbling around the Liberal Party.
Howard's public position has always been that if the party no longer wanted him he would go, although there is virtually no chance of a leadership spill before the federal election - not with the popularity of the Coalition Government at record lows, the economy in a mess and getting worse, and the most likely successor Treasurer Peter Costello.
Even with his present pile of woes, Howard still remains the nation's preferred prime minister, albeit under growing challenge from Beazley, the invigorated Labor Party leader. But should Beazley gain the landslide that polls predict, Howard would go.
The question today is how strong is the backlash against the Government? And will a defeat in Ryan seal Howard's fate later in the year?
The Ryan byelection could not have been held at a worse time, coming in the wake of renewed anger at the GST, the soaring cost of petrol and the added impost of price-indexed increases in the fuel excise, a rapidly weakening economy and collapsing confidence.
Howard performed some spectacular policy backflips to try to claw back some support.
But in the final few days of the Ryan campaign, he has been battered by headlines screaming fears of recession, a dollar that for the first time plunged below 50USc and yesterday reached a record low of 49.02c, and rising unemployment.
Worse for his prospects in Ryan, unemployment in Queensland climbed from 8.1 per cent to 8.8 per cent - well above the national rate of 6.9 per cent and the highest of any state or territory except Tasmania.
Said Beazley of Howard: "He is frozen with fright, panic-stricken in policy making, in denial on the dollar, and now he wants to award the safest Liberal seat in Queensland to the Labor Party."
"It is an indication of a final acknowledgment on his part that he's got out of touch."
Most commentators agree that, in Ryan at least, Beazley is right.
Former sitting MP John Moore was hurried from the front bench to clear the way for a move by embattled Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith to a new life in the Defence portfolio.
Moore, elected in Ryan in Malcolm Fraser's 1975 landslide and a minister or shadow minister for the intervening years, was not a man to fade quietly to the backbench. He quit instead, forcing Howard into a byelection he should have avoided.
Howard's difficulties have been compounded by the splintering of the traditional vote, sparking the resurrection of Pauline Hanson's One Nation and a rush of independents, and fuelling the resurgence of the Greens, who will direct their preferences to Labor today, and probably in the federal election.
Australian byelection seen as omen for embattled Coalition
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