A 36-year-old play embedded in Australian political folklore was haunting legions of Labor supporters as the country appeared ready to end a dozen years in power for John Howard, the conservative Prime Minister.

After a campaign in which Kevin Rudd, the Labor leader, has been out in front, a grim night for the Left in 1969 was playing on the nerves of many party supporters last night.

The events of that night — when another Labor leader with a seemingly unassailable opportunity to end years of conservative rule slipped up at the wire — are immortalised in one of Australia’s best-known plays, Don’s Party.

With one poll showing Mr Howard closing the gap to four points on the final day of campaigning, Don’s Party, a tale of election-night euphoria turning to depraved despair, has aroused dark omens for many Laborites.

The parallels with today’s vote are so stark that the author of Don’s Party, David Williamson, a critic of Mr Howard, said: “Many of the old baby-boomers, faint memories of the idealistic dreams of the Sixties not yet erased by Alzheimer’s, are hoping fervently we won’t see a rerun of 1969.”

Mr Rudd, 50, a former diplomat and China specialist who has led Labor for less than a year, has propelled the party to what some commentators regard as an impregnable lead in the polls.

Far from exciting the nation with the promise of risky policy adventures, he has revelled in his blandness, which is aimed at denying 68-year-old Mr Howard opportunities to elevate policy differences into fear campaigns. The most exciting moments of his campaign have involved Mr Rudd’s confession that he once visited a lap-dancing club in New York — he said he was too drunk to remember what happened — and television footage of him eating his earwax in parliament.

The centrepieces of the Howard and Rudd manifestos are all but indistinguishable — tax cuts worth about $A34 billion (£14 billion). Mr Rudd sounded uncannily like Mr Howard this week when he said that he would cut Australia’s public service. He long ago adopted Mr Howard’s mantra of economic conservatism.

In Mr Rudd’s Australia there will be differences but no revolution; he will sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. He will scale back Australian forces in Iraq. There are unlikely to be back-slapping meetings with President Bush. There will be a rolling back of Mr Howard’s unpopular workplace laws and he will say sorry to Aborigines for past grave injustices — an apology Mr Howard steadfastly refused.

Some Labor supporters, however, particularly women, yearn for more character. Mr Rudd’s persona is safe, predictable, solid. Not for him the skyscraping arrogance of Gough Whitlam, who did, finally, return Labor to office in 1972 (only to be sacked by the Governor-General three years later).

Nor does he have the larrikin streak of the former union boss Bob Hawke, who won in 1983. And he is not the Flash Harry aesthete who succeeded Mr Hawke, the last Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating.

Yet, should Mr Howard lose today, the new man in The Lodge, the Prime Minister’s Canberra residence, will be more reflective of today’s prosperous, optimistic Australia. The heart will be harder, policy adventures will be tempered. Predictability will be celebrated. That is the legacy of the Howard era.

Night of loss

— Don’s Party was set in a suburban household on election night 1969

— Labor under Gough Whitlam appeared set to sweep away two decades of conservative rule

— Young Australians hailed his promises to withdraw from Vietnam, open universities to all and restore Aboriginal land rights

— The euphoria turns to despair as victory slips away from Whitlam

— He lost by five seats to the incumbent, John Gorton, who went on to rule for two more years

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