SYDNEY - Barely five months after winning reelection by a landslide, Prime Minister John Howard has seen his popularity dented by his decision to send more Australian troops to Iraq, according to opinion polls released Tuesday.
Signs that Australia's nine years of strong economic growth are coming to an end and a recent rise in interest rates also contributed to a swing of voter support in favor of the opposition Labor Party, the surveys indicated.
An ACNielsen poll published in The Sydney Morning Herald showed that Labor under it's new leader, Kim Beazley, would beat Howard's conservative coalition by 52 to 48 percent if new elections were held now.
It was the first time Labor has come in ahead of the government in an opinion poll since two months before Howard, 65, won a fourth term in office last October by a margin of 47 to 38 percent.
In the latest survey, Howard's personal approval rating fell to 54 percent, down eight points from the previous month, while just 50 percent of respondents saw the conservative politician as their preferred prime minister, down six points.
The poll showed that 55 percent of voters opposed Howard's decision last month to deploy an additional 450 troops to Iraq, doubling the number of Australian soldiers on the ground in the strife-ridden country.
Howard, one of US President George W Bush's closest overseas allies, had pledged prior to last year's election not to significantly increase Australia's troop presence in Iraq.
A second survey released Tuesday by the Newspoll group also showed voters questioning Howard's trustworthiness over both the Iraq troop decision and the government's economic management.
Howard focussed his reelection campaign largely on claims that a Labor victory would lead to higher interest rates and a slowdown in Australia's strong economic growth.
But earlier this month the central bank raised interest rates for the first time in 15 months and the same day the government's statistics agency reported that economic growth had slowed dramatically at the end of last year.
The Newspoll survey, published in The Australian newspaper, found voters saw Beazley as more trustworthy than the prime minister by a margin of 69 to 58 percent.
Analysts said the interest rate hike was a key factor in turning voters against Howard's government.
"Just as the government's interest rate scare worked for it during the campaign, Labor's line that the government is responsible for rising interest rates could be working too," polling expert Andrew Leigh told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Beazley, a former defense minister who took over the Labor Party in January, said the new polling data showed that voters believed they had been misled by Howard.
"What the public is thinking is that they've been let down, told one thing on Iraq before the election, another thing afterwards, one thing on interest rates before the election, another thing afterwards," he said.
Howard dismissed the poll as "fairly meaningless" but acknowledged that despite his coalition's strong showing in the October election, "political fortunes can change".
03/15/2005 00:11 GMT