Australia’s first woman prime minister announces Aug. 21 general elections

Australian PM announces Aug. 21 elections

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has led the country for three weeks, on Saturday called a general election on Aug. 21 and urged voters to show trust in her by returning her party for a second three-year term.

Critics accuse her of rushing to an election to capitalize on a surge in her Labor Party’s popularity in opinion polls that analysts say typically occurs in the first weeks after a party chooses a new leader.

Gillard said she was honoring a pledge she made after she grabbed power in a surprise Labor coup to quickly allow voters to choose the prime minister and government that they want.

“Today, I seek a mandate from the Australian people to move Australia forward,” she told reporters at Parliament House.

“I’ll be asking Australians for their trust so that we can move forward together … with plans to build a sustainable Australia,” she added.

Opinion polls point to Labor winning a second three-year term, but analysts expect a tight contest against a resurgent conservative opposition led by Tony Abbott.

Gillard was former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s deputy. Rudd became a Labor Party hero when he led it to a crushing election victory in November 2007 after 11 years in opposition.

He remained one of the most popular prime ministers in modern Australian history until he made a series of unpopular political moves earlier this year, including shelving a key pledge to make major industries pay for the carbon gas that they emit.

Abbott has led an attack on the government over its 52 billion Australian dollars ($45 billion) economic stimulus spending that helped Australia scrape through the global economic recession with a single quarter of mild economic contraction in late 2008.

Abbott told a conservative party meeting in Queensland, a key state to the outcome of the next election, the government has wasted money and the leadership change from Rudd to Gillard was a “seamless transition from incompetence to incompetence.”

The government under Rudd this year abandoned a AU$2.4 billion free home ceiling insulation program after four workmen died and scores of house fires were blamed on sloppy installation. A AU$16 billion program to build a new hall in every school has produced scores of examples of inflated construction contracts.

“The people of Queensland won’t be conned by a prime minister who is now running to the polls before she has established her credentials to lead our nation,” Abbott said.

Gillard has promised to return Australia to a surplus budget in three years.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects date from Aug. 24 to Aug. 21 in first paragraph.)