Australian election dodges Yom Kippur

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Sunday called an election for September 7, avoiding fears that Jews down under would have to choose between marking Judaism’s holiest day or casting their ballots.

The previous date for elections had coincided with Yom Kippur, provoking the ire of Jewish voters. With the fall of former prime minister Julia Gillard, though, the date for elections was moved, this time sans a clash with Jewish holidays.

In January, Gillard surprised Jewish voters by announcing that national elections would be held September 14, 2013, which falls on the Day of Attonement.

Former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull posted on Twitter at the time that he was “deeply disappointed that Julia Gillard chose to hold the election on Yom Kippur — the most solemn and sacred day of the Jewish year.”

Australia, home to more than 100,000 Jews, has compulsory voting, meaning all citizens must cast their vote in national elections or face a penalty, usually a fine or community service. Since elections are always held on Saturdays, Orthodox Jews are already used to casting their votes via the mail, but there was concern that less observant members of the community may fail to follow suit and miss voting by going to synagogue.

The new election date falls one day after Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

In starting the five-week election campaign, Rudd said the economy can no longer rely on Chinese demand for iron ore and coal that made the country one of the few wealthy nations to avoid a recession during the global economic downturn.

“The boom, of course, has fuelled so much of our nation’s wealth,” he told reporters at Parliament House. “That boom is over.”

Rudd conceded that his center-left Labor Party was the underdog, saying his advisers had told him that if the election had been held this weekend, his government would have lost.

But opinion polls also show that more voters prefer Rudd, a 55-year-old Chinese-speaking former Beijing diplomat, as prime minister than opposition leader Tony Abbott, a former Roman Catholic seminarian and journalist who is also 55.

After the election was announced, Abbott promised to “get the budget back under control,” and listed scrapping the unpopular carbon tax among his top priorities if elected.

The election promises to be an extraordinary contest for Australian politics. Labor leads Australia’s first minority government since World War II, and polls suggest the opposition faces an easier task picking up seats than Labor does.

Rudd was first elected prime minister in 2007 but was ousted in 2010 by his then deputy Julia Gillard in an internal leadership showdown among Labor lawmakers.

He reclaimed the leadership in a similar challenge on June 26 as the government faced the prospect of a loss of historic portions with Gillard at the helm.

Since then, Rudd has changed several key policy positions, and opinion polls suggest Labor is closing the opposition’s lead.