SYDNEY -- Australians had hardly stopped cheering their Olympic champions in Athens -- the highest medal winners in the world on a national per capita basis -- before a general election was announced and the media again went wild.
Timed for Oct. 9, the unusually long and inevitably bitter campaign will decide a new House of Representatives and half the Senate -- the other half of the Senate will be voted for next year. The Senate election is reasonably easy to predict. The Liberal-National coalition government could well gain three more seats here. But the power-holding Lower House is as yet anyone's guess.
What makes this election so different from a century of earlier ones is the wide disparity between the two political leaders. Rarely before has Australia faced such a stark choice.