IN Kevin Grove, Caboolture, they're not happy, Prime Minister.
Take Alan Abbott. The 52-year-old ute-driving handyman enjoys his beer and cigarettes and is deeply unimpressed the cost of both have gone up since he changed his vote in 2007 and helped elect the Rudd government.
The list doesn't end there. Mr Abbott and his wife, Sandra, who works in a petrol station, are uneasy about Labor's handling of border protection. They think Australia is already big enough and yesterday's 0.25 percentage point interest rate hike added to their concern about being priced out of Queensland's southeast.
Next time round, they will both be voting for the Liberals and their namesake, Tony Abbott.
"You know, before the last election I thought Rudd was a fair dinkum sort of bloke," Alan Abbott said yesterday. "But there's something about him now that I don't really trust."
The couple are part of a growing army of the disillusioned and discontented with Mr Rudd, brought out in yesterday's horror Newspoll in The Australian for the Prime Minister and his government.
Concerns are also growing in the government, with worried Labor MPs planning to ask Mr Rudd to embrace a carbon tax as Labor's climate change policy, to fill the vacuum left by his contentious shelving of the emissions trading scheme.
After being bombarded by outraged younger voters in their electorates, five Labor MPs have told The Australian the government's current position on climate change is untenable and unsellable to the electorate.
The Abbotts' home in Kevin Grove is in the key electorate of Longman, north of Brisbane, which shifted to Labor in 2007 and will be in the Opposition Leader's sights when Mr Rudd calls the election later this year.
Mr Rudd was campaigning only a street away on Monday, as he hit the hustings to sell the Henry tax review.
Alan Abbott enjoys a beer and a smoke - "you've got to have some vices, haven't you" - and the cost of both has gone up under the Rudd government.
"I'm paying about $25 a week more for my cigarettes now than before," he said.
Mr Abbott doubts whether he will be around to vote again in Longman.
"We're moving back to the Kerang district in Victoria and we can buy a house there with no debt," Mr Abbott said.
"And one of the reasons we're doing that is we don't want to get caught up again with a mortgage when it looks as though interest rates are going to keep going up and up.
"And with this Henry report, I don't mind the mining companies paying more tax - most of them are overseas-owned - but what about the other multinationals?
"If you looked at all the other people who don't pay all their tax - the lawyers, the company directors - he was going to to do something about that as well, and that's another area where nothing happened."
But he also feels that Rudd wasn't upfront enough with his views on immigration and population, and that Australia is getting too many people.
Both the Abbotts are swinging voters who have no qualms about changing their vote between elections.
"I didn't mind a lot of what John Howard did, but Work Choices was a big reason why I voted against him last time. Nothing happened to me, but I heard so many stories from people I knew about it."
In a deadly assessment, he feels that Howard had a core competence, while the current government doesn't.
He said that around Caboolture and Morayfield, there was early talk that the Rudd government's roofing insulation scheme was a rort, while the BER scheme to assist schools also seems to have been rorted.
