When all's said and done, after all the millions of words spoken and written by the candidates and commentators in advance of the Australian general election on Saturday, it's crunch time.

As far as I'm concerned, some bloke named Tom Bellgard from Cooma has most succinctly summed up the situation in his letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald five days ahead of the vote: "Governments are like socks and underwear - they should be changed frequently or they begin to smell."

And judging by the results of pre-election polls and the opinions of most professional pundits, enough of Bellgard's fellow-citizens agree that it's time for a change of Down-Underwear.

In fact quite a lot of us have found the Howard government pretty much on the nose for the whole 11 years or more that it has been in office.

To paint a picture of the situation for Malaysiakini readers, many of whom I assume know or care as little about Australian political situation as most Australians do about the state of affairs in Malaysia, Prime Minister John Howard heads a coalition of the Liberal and National parties.

The National Party, formerly known as the Country Party, principally represents, as its old name suggests, the interests of farmers and graziers. And as farmers and graziers in Australia are as politically conservative, as they are pretty well everywhere else, the National Party is extremely right-wing.

The Liberal Party, by far the larger and more powerful component of the coalition, is also, in stark contrast to its name, concertedly conservative. In other words, the Liberal Party is anything but what many Australians refer to as "small-l" liberal. And its long-time leader, Howard, has raised this inbuilt contradiction to the level of an art form with his talent for double-speak, dissembling and outright deception.

For example, like George W Bush and Tony Blair, with whom he allied himself in the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing', he has doggedly characterised the ill-advised, illegal and ill-fated attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the 'war on terror' and flatly denied the glaring fact that these misadventures have only served to generate more terror.

He has also cunningly used the terror threat to terrorise the more timorous voters to keep returning him to office, shamelessly co-opting the Bali bombings as an outrage committed largely if not exclusively against Australians; permitting the Bush regime to keep Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib for years in Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial; and enacting 'anti-terror' legislation that infringes unnecessarily on Australian civil liberties.

Grubby record

As opportunistically, not to say cynically strict as the Howard government has been on terrorism and its victims, however, it's been liberality itself when it's come to Big Business.

Despite clearly credible accusations of malfeasance and perjury against executives of the Australian Wheat Board in a scandal involving $300 million in bribes to the Saddam Hussein regime, the government has persistently denied all knowledge of the affair and nobody has ever been charged with any offence.

The coalition has also been extremely liberal to its capitalist power-base with union-busting 'Work Choices' legislation that has deprived millions of Australian employees of their hard-won rights to protection against unfair dismissal.

This so-called "reform" of the labour laws in favour of the filthy rich is, I believe, what has finally put the Howard government in such a bad odour with the majority of voters that, on Saturday, they'll decide that it's high time for a change.

Another item of dirty linen that has Labour sniffing victory is the government's grubby record on the environment in general and climate change in particular. Australia's one of the few nations on earth still refusing to sign the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming, and despite lots of talk about 'clean coal', is the world's biggest exporter of the dirty variety.

And, however lacking in genuine care for the environment they may be, most Australians are starting to realise, now that they can't wash their cars, water their lawns or irrigate their thirsty crops, that the weather's changing for the worse and the supply of water is fast running out.

Consequently the Greens, led by the redoubtable Bob Brown, stand to gain a good-sized minority vote, which could make them a power to be reckoned with in the Senate.

And the polls suggest that, whatever the political issues, significant numbers of younger voters see the relatively youthful and cosmopolitan Labour leader Kevin Rudd as a prime-ministerial breath of fresh air after too many years of the duplicitous and dreary Howard.

So all in all, it seems to me, despite its desperate scare campaign claiming that Labour can't be trusted to manage the economy he's forever droning on about - while plundering it to fund his outrageous pre-election pork-barreling - Howard's Liberal-National coalition government is all washed-up, and come this Saturday it's going to be hung out to dry.

It's a prospect that has me wishing I could foresee the same fate for Malaysia's Barisan Nasional regime.

If the current Australian government is a bit on the stale and rancid side after only a decade or so in office, it's no wonder that after five decades of rule riddled with corruption, cronyism, nepotism, despotism, racism and religionism, BN stinks to high heaven. And however hard it tries to hide or staunch the stench by sanitising the media, the smell only gets more unbearable.

Not that BN government demonstrates the slightest willingness to change or to clean up its act any time soon. Nor have Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's efforts to dress it up as cleaner and more transparent fooled anybody who's familiar with the fable of the emperor's new clothes.

But surely the longer it takes to change or render itself bersih, the closer the incumbent Malaysian government gets to the day when the people will finally be forced to throw it out like so much dirty laundry.