Hawke Seems on Way to Narrow Victory

Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s Labor government appeared headed today for a narrow victory two days after Saturday’s hotly contested national elections.

Although final results won’t be known until Thursday, Australian Election Commission officials said that Hawke holds a slight but probably unbeatable lead in his bid to become the Labor Party’s first four-term prime minister.

Hawke, 60, told reporters that Labor is now “odds on” to win.

“I believe Labor is going to win government,” he said.

Under Australia’s parliamentary system, the winning party needs a majority of the 148-seat lower house to rule. With five seats still officially in doubt early today, officials said Hawke’s party is likely to win a two-seat majority.

Opposition leader Andrew Peacock, 51, refused to concede defeat, but he acknowledged that his conservative Liberal-National party coalition is unlikely to overtake Labor’s lead. Analysts said that Peacock, who also lost a 1984 challenge to Hawke, probably will be forced from his leadership role in the coalition.

Independent candidates apparently captured two seats for the first time since 1946. In an upset, Dr. Helen Caldicott, a peace activist who became well-known in America’s anti-nuclear movement several years ago, was favored to win a seat held by Charles Blunt, head of the right-wing National Party.

“This is people power,” Caldicott told supporters. “The Australian electorate is very fed up with both the Labor and coalition parties.”

The cliffhanger election was an oddly exciting climax to a five-week campaign that sparked little interest from what was usually described as a “sullen electorate.”

But analysts said Labor’s apparently narrow win may cripple efforts for bold moves to reinvigorate an economy suffering record foreign debt, high interest rates and growing unemployment.

The results, Paul Kelly wrote in today’s The Australian, a national daily newspaper, “will breed timidity and instability in government.”

During the campaign, Hawke promised tax cuts, an easing of monetary policy to force interest rates down and a broad package of environmental, education and child welfare programs for Australia’s 16 million people.