Polls back Australian PM Gillard’s rival Rudd

SYDNEY — Kevin Rudd’s bid to lead Australia again won a boost on Saturday when opinion polls showed he remains more popular with the public than his rival in next week’s ballot, Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Rudd will face off against Gillard on Monday in a ballot taken by the 103 members of the Labor Party caucus after a divisive battle that has seen the ruling party engage in unprecedented infighting.

Gillard has said she is confident she will win the vote but Rudd has called on his party to accept the “cold, hard, stark reality” and reinstate him as leader to prevent Labor from being dumped by voters at next year’s election.

A Nielsen poll of 1,200 voters published in the Sydney Morning Herald found that Rudd was overwhelmingly the preferred party leader, garnering 58 percent of the vote compared with Gillard’s 34 percent.

The poll also found that Labor’s overall support remained below the opposition’s, with only 47 percent of votes likely to go to the government compared to 53 percent heading to the opposition if an election were held now.

It showed that 60 percent of voters disapproved of Gillard’s performance.

But they were divided on who was the preferred prime minister if asked to choose between Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott, giving them 46 and 47 percent respectively.

A Galaxy poll, published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, showed Rudd ahead of Gillard as best placed to lead the Labor party by 52 percent to 26 percent.

The survey of 1,020 voters also found that if Rudd were Labor leader, the party’s share of the vote would jump from the current 34 percent to 37 percent.

A Newspoll in The Weekend Australian also suggested that Rudd was Labor’s best hope of defeating the conservative opposition in 2013, with those questioned said they preferred him as leader over both Gillard and Abbott.

Rudd shot to power in November 2007 when he led Labor to victory after more than a decade of conservative rule under John Howard.

But by mid-2010, many of his Labor Party colleagues were deeply disgruntled with his style of leadership and he was ousted in a party room coup that installed Gillard as the nation’s first woman prime minister.

Gillard only narrowly clung to government after an August 2010 election and she has endured a year of dismal polling while Rudd, who until his resignation on Wednesday was foreign minister, appears to still enjoy public support.