Australians will go to the polls on 2 July after one of the longest election campaigns in the country's history.

                                                   

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has called the election several months early after the country's upper house repeatedly blocked legislation. On Sunday the prime minister asked the Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, to dissolve both the lower and upper houses of parliament.

The economy, education and health are likely to dominate the campaign. "The governor-general has accepted my advice to dissolve both houses of parliament effective tomorrow morning, and call an election for both houses, a double dissolution, on 2 July," said Mr Turnbull on Sunday afternoon.

Under Australia's political system, the governor-general is the representative of the head of state, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. In the House of Representatives all 150 seats will be contested, as well as the 76 Senate seats - the first time this has happened in an early election since 1987.

The opposition Labor Party needs to gain 21 seats in the lower house to win power, although changes to electoral boundaries mean it nominally holds three of those seats already. At 56 days, it will the longest campaign since 1969, when the race lasted for 66 days.

Mr Turnbull, who heads a Liberal-National coalition, said the country faced a choice "to stay the course, maintain the commitment to our national economic plan for growth and jobs, or go back to Labor with its higher taxing, higher spending, debt-and-deficit agenda."