Amid a booming economy and buoyed by a comfortable lead in the polls, Australia’s Labor leader gambled yesterday that austerity would help him to end John Howard’s decade in power.

Kevin Rudd got his campaign under way with spending plans of $2.3 billion (£1 billion), only a quarter of the amount offered by his conservative opponent this week. In adopting a comparatively miserly approach, Mr Rudd castigated as politically desperate and reckless the plans with which Mr Howard is trying to win a fifth term.

“Unlike Mr Howard, I don’t stand before you with a bag full of irresponsible promises,” he told a rapturous audience of Labor Party faithful in his home town of Brisbane. “Today I am saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop.” Mr Rudd was keen to present himself as a challenger from the Left, criticising the right-wing incumbent for fiscal recklessness. But on policy terms, there is very little between them.

If Mr Rudd, the polished former diplomat who has led the Labor Party for less than a year, brings to an end the Howard era on November 24, it will be because he succeeds in making himself more in the image of the man he defeats, not less. Boyish, mop-headed, urban and youthful, Mr Rudd could, in appearance, be hardly less like the gaunt, hard-of-hearing, bushy granddad he wishes to topple, and whom the polls have long said that he will.

But most of Mr Rudd’s policies are a virtual mirror image of Mr Howard’s. Both are offering about $30 billion in tax cuts and an almost matching postKyoto agreement on climate change.

Mr Rudd has slapped down his front-benchers who have dared to propose policies that Mr Howard could use against the Labor Party. He humiliated Robert McClelland, his party’s well-regarded foreign affairs spokesman, for proposing a campaign to end the death penalty in Asian countries. He did the same when his environment spokesman said that it was no “deal-breaker” if China and India refused to sign up to Kyoto emissions targets. Mr Rudd said they had to, just as Mr Howard has long maintained.

Mr Rudd’s policies have galled some Labor supporters and led to accusations, including from his opponent, that he is timid and too afraid to put meaningful differences between himself and the Prime Minister. But Mr Rudd knows that he cannot afford to give any opportunity for Mr Howard to use his undoubted populist skills to portray the Labor Party as ill-prepared for government – tactics that allowed him to crush the party in the elections of 2001 and 2004.

The great gift of the campaign – though Mr Rudd cannot admit it – is last week’s decision by the central Reserve Bank to increase interest rates to dampen inflation, undermining Mr Howard’s promises in the last election that only he could keep interest rates at record lows. They have, instead, risen six times since.

It is now an unfamiliar, ragged Mr Howard that Australians are seeing. At his campaign launch in Brisbane on Monday – with a “Go for Growth” banner as his backdrop – he publicised another $9.5 billion in campaign promises – most of them reworked versions of policies already put forward by Mr Rudd to reimburse parents for school fees and childcare costs.

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