A prime minister with nine lives

摘要

Opinion pollsters, political commen-tators and Australia's conservative coalition government itself, led by John Howard, all agreed that the country's election on October 9th was likely to be close. At best, the government would scrape home with a slashed majority; at worst there would be a hung parliament, with the opposition Labor Party possibly doing a deal with the resurgent Greens. All this turned out to be wrong. Within three hours of polls closing, the Liberal-National coalition had won a comfortable fourth term, with a voting swing of more than 2% and a possible majority of 24 in the 150-seat House of Representatives.