Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, has announced a general election will be held on 14 September, surprising the electorate and ending speculation about when she would take her minority government back to the polls. The announcement by Gillard kicks off what some commentators have described as the longest election campaign in history. The poll will mark the end of a divisive hung parliament in which the Labour government has survived on the support of independent and Green party members of parliament. "I do so not to start the nation's longest election campaign, quite the opposite," Gillard told the National Press Club in Canberra. "It gives shape and order to the year, and enables it to be one not of fevered campaigning, but of cool and reasoned deliberation," she added.