KEY POINTS:
Finally, with time fast running out and a nation of increasingly impatient voters keen to get on with the summer ahead, John Winston Howard has put his neck on the block.
On November 24 Australia will go to the polls to decide whether Howard will be reprieved with a fifth successive term and allowed a graceful farewell into history, or whether the guillotine will fall.
The omens are not looking good for the Prime Minister of 11 years and the Government he has led since 1996: worse even than the run of grim polls since Kevin Rudd became Opposition Leader last December is the news that the nation's punters are putting their money on a Labor victory.
Not that any of this guarantees Rudd will lead Australia into the second decade of the 21st century. There are still a large number of uncommitted voters who, at the last moment, could lose the taste for change and decide instead to stick with a bloke running on a record of national affluence.
Signs have emerged that this may be starting, with a narrowing of the polls during the first week of campaigning. Although still showing a commanding 54 per cent to 46 per cent lead for Labor, an AC Nielsen poll in Fairfax newspapers yesterday showed a fall of 2 per cent in the opposition vote, and a larger 5 per cent slump in Rudd's standing as preferred prime minister.
A new Galaxy poll also showed a smaller - 53 per cent to 47 per cent - lead for Labor in the two-party preferred vote that decides Australian elections.
There are two massive political machines, geared and ready to go for months, now squaring off for what will be an intense campaign. Pared to the absolute bone and hammering from opposing sides, these will offer Australia the choice between the experience and record of a proven leader, and the vigour, zest and vision of a new generation.
In effect it will be a presidential style of campaigning, as Australian elections have increasingly become. While separate, detailed and specific campaigns will target individual marginal seats, the national focus will fall on Howard and Rudd.
Major, multibillion-dollar promises and policies have already been flagged by both sides. A day after calling the election, Howard promised A$34 billion ($40 billion) in tax cuts, and with an unexpected additional budget revenue surplus over the next four years, the Government and Labor are gearing up for more, massively expensive, commitments.
Key targets are likely to be health, education, roads and other fundamentals of life - all concerns highlighted in polls and confirmed in interviews with voters by the Herald over the past week in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.
Campaigning styles have also emerged: vitriolic, personal attacks on Rudd and his competence from senior Coalition ministers; Labor portrayals of Howard and his team as tired and lacking the ambition, ideas or energy to grasp the future.
The election will also be fought across a continent that has changed greatly since Howard beat Labor's Paul Keating. Old certainties have been shaken by swings in population within major cities and along the coastline, redrawing electoral boundaries and shaking the political landscapes within them.
Howard himself, and his multi-millionaire Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are prominent victims of this. Howard's Sydney seat of Bennelong, held by the Liberals since its creation in 1949, is now among the country's most marginal. With a majority of only 4.1 per cent and a high-profile candidate in former high-flying ABC journalist Maxine McKew, polls suggest that Howard is at serious risk of becoming the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat.
For Turnbull, the position is even worse. After more than a century as a blue-chip Liberal citadel, redistribution has weakened the conservative backbone of some of Australia's wealthiest suburbs by adding the Labor-leaning inner suburbs of Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.
Turnbull made powerful enemies through his ugly preselection defeat of the popular sitting member, Peter King, and faces a determined campaign to unseat him by local opponents of the Government's approval of a controversial pulp mill in Tasmania, and the animosity of a large gay community angered by Howard's refusal to allow same-sex marriages.
Across Australia, Liberal MPs in 35 marginal seats face similar nail-biting contests. Labor has 11 marginals at risk and - while nothing is ever certain - polls and betting patterns suggest the war at the margins will go its way. On a national scale, polls predict a landslide to Rudd.
Other former Howard certainties have been shaken. Australia is involved in an unpopular war, with no end in sight, an absolute commitment to stand by the United States, and a belief among Australians that they are at greater risk of terrorist attack as a result. Rudd has promised to bring the troops home.
And the economy is proving to be a double-edged sword. While Howard is counting heavily on economic credentials and more than a decade of booming growth that has pushed unemployment to its lowest level in 33 years, the suburbs are hurting.
At the last election Howard pledged to keep interest rates low.
In the past year they have been rising, placing severe pressure on household budgets and adding further to soaring prices that has put home ownership out of reach of many Australians.
This week the latest Commonwealth Bank-Housing Industry Association survey reported that housing affordability has hit a 23-year low.
ACNeilsen polling further suggests voters used to a long golden run now have a more pragmatic view of governments and the economy. While 40 per cent believed Howard to be the better economic manager, 43 per cent said it did not really matter which party was in power.
Howard has another problem. While political greenskin Rudd can articulate a vision for the future, everyone knows the Prime Minister, what he stands for, and what his priorities are.
Howard has attacked Rudd as "not man enough" to run the country, a tactic of personal abuse that does not sit well with many voters. And during the campaign he will contrast his experience and record against Rudd's inexperience.
"The coming election boils down to a single question: which side of politics has what it takes to keep Australia strong, prosperous and secure into the future," Howard says in a "vision statement" released ahead of his election announcement.
This could be a trap, looking back rather than forward, resonating with conservative voters but turning away others who want a new future. Howard's major reforms have been in taxation and industrial law, missing the wider social, environmental and moral paths and wasting opportunities in such key areas as water and the environment.
Howard has lately been playing catch-up. Faced with a range of serious deficiencies in such crucial areas as health - especially the decay of the public hospital system - Howard has blamed Labor-led states and promised federal solutions.
THE Labor bogeyman will become an even greater player during Howard's campaign. He is playing on the number of former union officials in Rudd's team, and on fears that a return to Labor will mean a new union dictatorship.
Ignoring his own control over both Houses of Parliament - removing the Senate's traditional role of review and checks and balances - Howard warns that a Rudd govermment will patch the last hole in a red carpet laid across the continent by Labor state governments.
And as concern soared about climate change, Howard became a convert. Although still refusing, with the US, to ratify the Kyoto protocols, he has become a born-again greenhouse preacher, even taking credit for New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark's initiative to place climate change on the agenda of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' summit.
After decades of neglect and abuse by successive governments, Howard also recently turned his attention to water supplies and the alarming decline of the great Murray-Darling river system that underpins the survival of Australia's east coast.
And, finally, he is taking concerted action on the moral, social and economic plight of indigenous Australia. Reversing his previous position on reconciliation, Howard now promises a referendum on a statement in the Constitution recognising the special place of Aborigines in the nation - although still refusing to say sorry for past injustices.
Howard's massive intervention in the Northern Territory to address the crisis of child abuse, poverty, crime, violence and drug abuse also continues. While controversial and opposed by many indigenous and other groups, it has been welcomed by many Australians.
His abroad approach to the election campaign was encapsulated in five goals for his fifth-term policies, laid out in his 33-page vision statement - to keep the nation strong, secure and united, "engaged in the world and at ease with itself"; to build a new era of growth, prosperity and opportunity; to embrace a sense of aspirational nationalism to guide various levels of government; to ensure a rising tide of prosperity lifts all boats, with every child getting a solid start; and to get the balance right on the big challenges in climate change, energy and water security.
Rudd has no problem with these goals, and has supported Howard policy where he believes it will benefit the nation. He does not intend to be drawn into knee-jerk brawls, or into fighting on territory defined by Howard.
"Above all, Australians want new leadership that brings fresh thinking to the challenges of the future," he said in a speech outlining his vision for the nation.
Promising conservative and stable economic management, Rudd intends an education "revolution" to boost the nation's skills, including a A$3 billion programme for pre-schoolers and secondary school trade training centres, and the halving of university fees for mathematics and science students.
He says he will work with the states to implement a A$2 billion plan to reform the health and hospital system. Labor will also ratify the Kyoto protocols, legislate a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 against 2000 levels, and increase the nation's mandatory renewable energy target.
And Rudd will create a A$500 million national housing affordability fund to help families into homes, matched by a A$600 million package of tax incentives and financial support for developers building rental housing for low and middle income earners. The plan is to build 50,000 new, affordable, rental properties across Australia.
More, lavish, promises will be rolled out by both sides as the campaign develops.
And even with the polls favouring Labor, it will be fought down to the line.
