WITH his sights on the G20 leaders’ summit in Russia early next month, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister, faced a conflict. Mr Rudd takes credit for boosting Australia’s role in the G20, and is happy on the world stage. So after he toppled Julia Gillard as Labor Party leader and prime minister in June, Mr Rudd had hoped to put back Australia’s expected date for a general election in order to glad-hand world leaders first. Yet party barons warned him not to try his luck. Famous for once ignoring advice, this time Mr Rudd listened. Dropping his travel plans, he has called an election for September 7th, the day after the summit ends.

Mr Rudd casts himself as underdog in a five-week campaign he says will be “pretty rough”. When they reinstalled Mr Rudd as leader, Labor power-brokers aimed to escape the electoral drubbing that opinion polls showed the government faced when Ms Gillard was prime minister. Mr Rudd led Labor to power in 2007, ending 11 years of conservative government, only to be unseated as leader by Ms Gillard three years later. He took his revenge on June 26th to make a comeback as prime minister. In spite of Labor’s turmoils, Mr Rudd’s return has changed the party’s game.

It has turned the election into a competitive race against the conservative Liberal-National coalition and Tony Abbott, its leader. An opinion poll on August 5th, the day after Mr Rudd announced the election, showed Labor trailing the opposition by just four points, once second-preference votes were counted; the last poll under Ms Gillard had Labor 14 points behind. Other polls since Mr Rudd’s return suggests that the parties are neck-and-neck.

Yet turning improvements in the polls into electoral victory will be hard. In the 150-seat House of Representatives, where government is decided, Labor holds 71 seats to 72 for the opposition parties. Two independents in New South Wales who supported Ms Gillard’s minority government have stepped down, and the opposition seems likely to win both seats. Mr Rudd’s salvation might lie in Mr Rudd’s home state of Queensland. Voters there turned against Ms Gillard for her knifing of Mr Rudd. Peter Beattie, a former Queensland Labor state premier, reckons they will reward their favourite son’s return with enough seats to offset losses elsewhere, delivering victory to Mr Rudd. Mr Beattie himself is coming out of retirement to contest an opposition-held seat. The political terrain is altered by the rise of small parties, such as the WikiLeaks Party, aiming to rob both Labor and the coalition of control of the Senate, the upper house. WikiLeaks’s seven candidates include Julian Assange, standing for the Senate from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he is holed up fighting extradition to Sweden.

Labor’s campaign also faces an enemy in the two-thirds of Australia’s big-city newspapers that are controlled by News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Mr Murdoch made his stand plain in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, his most influential tabloid. Its first edition of the campaign covered the front page with the prime minister’s picture and a call to readers to “Kick This Mob Out”. Some say this fits Mr Murdoch’s pattern of backing the candidate he thinks will win (the Telegraph supported Mr Rudd before his victory in 2007). The prime minister himself says the mogul’s strategy is commercial. He told journalists in Brisbane that Mr Murdoch wanted “his mate, Mr Abbott, in” because a high-speed broadband network the government is building around Australia could “challenge” Foxtel, a cable-television company that News Corporation half-owns with Telstra, a telecoms giant.

But if Mr Rudd has clawed back voters’ support, it is partly by racing Mr Abbott to the bottom on issues that resonate in the tabloids’ heartlands, notably getting tough with asylum-seekers arriving in Australia by boat. Mr Rudd’s plan to resettle them in Papua New Guinea, Australia’s nearest northern neighbour, seems to have gone down well in Sydney’s sprawling, multi-ethnic western suburbs, where Labor faces losses. Nationally, voters like Mr Rudd more than Mr Abbott: an early campaign poll gave him a 14-point lead as preferred prime minister.

The leaders are likely to slug out most of the campaign over which of them can do a better job on the economy. On August 2nd the Treasury revised its outlook for growth in 2013-14 to 2.5%, slightly lower than its forecast three months ago. It projected a A$33 billion ($29 billion) drop in forecast tax revenues over the next four years, partly because of falling commodity prices and a slowdown in China, Australia’s biggest trading partner. That leaves little room for big spending promises. The election could boil down to a contest between “trust”, as Mr Rudd puts it, or “who is more fair dinkum”, in Mr Abbott’s spin.