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Embattled Aussie PM pledges the 'real Julia'
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Embattled Aussie PM pledges the 'real Julia'
AFP - 1 hour 17 minutes ago
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Embattled Aussie PM pledges the 'real Julia'
SYDNEY (AFP) - – Struggling Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard vowed Monday to shed her campaign's strict stage management and be herself, as a new poll showed this month's election teetering on a knife edge.
Gillard, who has come under fire for her highly-controlled and scripted performances ahead of the August 21 election, said she would throw out the campaign rule book, reveal "the real Julia" and take control of her campaign.
The shift towards a personality-driven campaign against her conservative rival Tony Abbott came as new opinion poll showed Gillard's Labor Party losing ground against the opposition, putting the election on a 50-50 knife edge.
"Its time for me to make sure the real Julia is well and truly on display, so I'm going to step up and take personal control of what we do in the campaign from this point," the country's first woman leader told the Daily Telegraph.
"I think the campaign we've been running has been a traditional campaign -- that is you get very stage-managed events," she told reporters five weeks after she seized power from predecessor Kevin Rudd in a shock party coup.
"You've been seeing glimpses of me but I'm going to make sure you see a whole lot more of me," she said, vowing to throw away the campaign rule book and "play my own game" for the remaining three weeks of the campaign.
In recent weeks, Gillard's popularity has imploded following a series of damaging high-level leaks about her from within her party.
She has also tripped on her unpopular plans to form a citizens' committee to tackle climate change and her decision to outsource the processing of boat people away from Australia to the tiny Pacific nation of East Timor.
Australia's first woman prime minister, who is unmarried and lives with her boyfriend, took a swipe at devoutly Catholic Abbott, known for his off-the-cuff style which has led to a string of verbal gaffes.
"The Liberal party doesn't want the real Tony Abbott coming out. They're trying to hide that Tony Abbott," she said of the politician who famously dismissed climate change as "crap" and openly opposes abortion.
But Abbott took time off the campaign trail to target Gillard's new personal style and questioned whether she was in control of her party, suggesting Labor's notorious factions run the show from behind the scenes.
"Would the real Julia please stand up," he said. "What have we been seeing over the last five weeks if it hasn't been the real Julia?"
He warned voters that re-electing Labor to a second term would mean that "it is the faceless (factional) men who will be running the country. If you vote for Tony Abbott, you'll get Tony Abbott."
The bitter sparring followed the release of a Newspoll survey showing Labor has lost its commanding lead over the Liberals and that the election could go down to the wire, with each party garnering 50 percent of the vote.
Labor's vote has fallen from a 52-48 percent lead just one week ago, before the leaks began undermining Gillard's public image.
The Newspoll survey, published in the Australian newspaper, gave Gillard a 50 percent to 35 lead over Abbott as preferred prime minister.
But that was the only good news for Gillard in the poll that came two days after a separate Nielsen survey showed her headed for a rare first-term defeat with 48 percent of the vote to the opposition's 52.
"Look, it is genuinely, genuinely tough," Gillard conceded on commercial radio, casting the ruling party as the underdog in the campaign while just weeks ago it was seen as a shoo-in for re-election.
"Ive said all along its going to be a photo finish. Its going to be tough, its going to be close and theres a real chance that... Mr Abbott will be prime minister."
Rudd led Labor to a landslide election victory in 2007 after 11 years of Liberal rule, but he tumbled from his record opinion poll highs after delaying action on implementing a carbon emissions trading scheme.
Labor's factions then brutally forced him from office and replaced him with Gillard, who has come under heavy criticism over the way in which she came to power.
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