If history is anything to go by, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should have the edge over Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in the first leaders' debate of the election campaign.
Voters have rated Labor leaders higher than Liberal leaders in most of the televised debates held over the past three decades.
However, an international expert in political debates says it's time to overhaul Australia's format to increase voter engagement and stem the decline in viewer numbers.
Nick Rowley, a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, who advised former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on a formal debates commission, has been researching the situation in Australia.
He says debates can shift votes by between one and 1.5 percentage points.
"It sounds like nothing, but in a close election it's significant," Mr Rowley told AAP on Friday.
The way debates are managed here is "laughably superficial", Mr Rowley says.
As evidence, he points to 2010 when the timing of a debate was scheduled around the MasterChef program.
Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott are due to go head-to-head on Sunday night at the National Press Club in Canberra and the event will be broadcast by all the networks.
The moderator will be David Speers of Sky News.
Mr Rowley doesn't place much stock in this first debate.
"One hour of commercial TV with ad breaks, arranged in under a week at the National Press Club, with a single journalist in a suit asking questions of two blokes in a suit at a lectern with a whole lot of very prescriptive rules is going to be as dull as dishwater," he said.
But he says holding it so early in the countdown to September 7 could minimise any political fallout from one leader "king hitting" the other.
Under the UK system, the debates commission organises a series of debates months ahead of a poll.
It's helped improve the quality of the debates and increased voter participation.
The 2010 UK election debate questions were derived from voter emails, with journalists choosing the best.
Former prime minister Julia Gillard and Mr Abbott had backed a local debates commission but it's still to become a reality in Australia.
Mr Rudd in the first week of the campaign challenging Mr Abbott many times to a weekly series of debates, but so far Labor and the Liberal parties have only settled on Sunday's event.
The Liberals have proposed two "town hall"-style events, similar to those held during the 2010 poll - the first of which favoured Mr Abbott over Ms Gillard.
The 2010 Australian leaders debate attracted more than 3.4 million viewers across four networks.
