Australian PM Howard wins third term

Australian Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government today won a third term in office after a national election campaign dominated by his hard-line stance against illegal immigration.

"I have to concede defeat, we have lost this election, there is no doubt about that," Opposition leader Kim Beazley told supporters in Perth, Western Australia. He immediately resigned as Labour leader.

With 75 per cent of the vote counted, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said Mr Howard's Liberal Party had won 68 seats and its junior coalition partner, the National Party, won 12 seats in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament. The Labour Party won 64 seats.

Former Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke summed up the gloom that enveloped his party as the election results rolled in: "I am more deeply disappointed than I have ever been in any election."

Australia's 12.6 million registered voters were choosing all 150 seats in Parliament's lower house and 40 of the 76 Senate seats. Voting is compulsory and turnout usually is around 96 per cent.

Mr Howard's policy of turning away refugee boats was a central plank in his campaign, along with strong support for US-led military strikes against Afghanistan.

"It is an extraordinary difficult thing to conduct an election campaign against a background of an ongoing war and in circumstances where people feel a great sense of insecurity," Mr Beazley said.

After lagging in the polls all year, Mr Howard's dramatic revival began in late August when he vowed that 433 mostly Afghan asylum rescued from a sinking Indonesian ferry by a Norwegian freighter would never set foot on Australian soil.

Almost 2.000 boat people, coming mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan via Indonesia, have since either been turned back by the navy or shipped to detention camps built by Australia on Papua New Guinea and Nauru, two impoverished Pacific island nations which are both major recipients of Australian aid.

Opinion polls show more than 70 per cent of Australians support the policy, which Mr Beazley backed.

The issue overshadowed Mr Beazley's attempts to promote his agenda of tax reform and increased funding for education, health care and research.

Labour needed less than one per cent more votes than it won in the 1998 election to topple the government.

Of the minor parties, the big winner was the Greens Party which more than doubled its vote to almost five per cent nationally from the previous election.

Meanwhile, the key issues which have figured heavily in public debate in recent years ? such as reconciliation with Australia's indigenous Aborigines, the move to dump the British Queen as the symbolic ruler, and relations with Asia ? have received little attention, despite their being clear areas where the parties differed.

Mr Howard is a staunch monarchist, who has also refused an official policy to Aborigines, and has swung the focus of foreign policy away from Asia to Europe and particularly the United States.

Mr Beazley had said he would reopen republic debate apologize to Aborigines and rejuvenate links with Asia.