Australia expected to kick off 2-month election campaign

A two-month Australian election campaign is expected to officially start tomorrow, with climate change, climbing house prices, company tax rates and union corruption in the national building industry shaping into the key issues.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who heads the center-right Liberal Party, has said he will likely tell Governor-General Peter Cosgrove to lock down a July 2 election date this weekend and trigger the unusually long campaign.
He and Bill Shorten, leader of the center-left Labor Party, recently outlined their conflicting economic policies on how Australia should rein in mounting debt without slowing an already sluggish economy.
Neither Turnbull nor Shorten has ever led his party into an election campaign before.

A heartening historical fact for Turnbull is that no Australian federal government has lost power after a single three-year term since the tumultuous early years of the Great Depression. But Australia is now in an extraordinary era of political volatility as it grapples to diversify an economy that thrived on a mining boom that has gone bust. If Labor wins the election, it would mean Australia's fifth change of prime ministers in six years.
Turnbull replaced his unpopular predecessor, Tony Abbott, in a leadership ballot of lawmakers in the Liberal Party in September, only two years after the coalition government was elected.

The change of prime ministers immediately boosted the government's standing in opinion polls, but recent polls suggest the government is now running neck-and-neck with Labor.

The government has released its budget plans for the next fiscal year, which begins on the eve of the election, calling for stimulus measures including income tax cuts for middle- and high-income earners and a gradual reduction of the company tax rate over a decade from 30 to 25 percent.
Shorten's Labor Party opposes most of the tax cuts and would spend the money saved on hospitals and schools.
Shorten said the government's budget was crafted for "Malcolm's millionaires" and offered nothing for the poor. He accuses Turnbull, a 61-year-old self-made multimillionaire, of being out of touch with ordinary folks.