The Prime Minister, Mr John Howard vowed yesterday to maintain the crackdown on illegal immigration that gave him a third-term election victory in Saturday's Australian elections.
The win was seen as a stunning vindication of his hardline policies and a remarkable personal triumph for the leader of the Liberal-National coalition, all but written off in the aftermath of unpopular taxation reforms early this year.
Mr Howard (62) personally planned the strategy that put his government on track to victory with a swing of 1.25 per cent and that made him only the third Liberal leader ever to win a third term of government.
"It's been a great victory for the Liberal Party," a relaxed and casually dressed Mr Howard said yesterday.
"But you never want to allow yourself to indulgently interpret the results and we'll have to respond immediately to challenges." Mr Howard acknowledged his tough refugee policy was a factor in his victory and said there would be no softening of it.
"We are continuing the policy," he added. "My position on that today is as it was last week." But he rejected charges that the crackdown was a politically-motivated attempt to reverse his government's declining popularity early this year.
"That is the spin my critics would put on it," he added. "Of course I do not accept that."
As his government languished in the polls in March, Mr Howard fought back with a A$20 billion vote-buying spree and the use of twin threats of invasion by unwanted Middle-Eastern asylum seekers and terrorism.
He built an election campaign around the need for strong leadership amid international crisis, ignoring international condemnation and revelling in instant domestic support for his stand.
But he denied yesterday the boat people issue alone won the election.
"The idea that it was all due to the public response to the issue of border protection . . . ignores the series of steps the government took to respond to community concerns and to rebuild its political position," he said.
Other priorities included managing the economy in a global economic slowdown, he said.
The opposition Labor leader, Mr Kim Beazley, who had no realistic political alternative but to support the immigration controls, campaigned on domestic issues like education, health and taxation.
But Labor failed to win the seats it targeted, particularly in working class and formerly rock-solid Labor areas such as Sydney's western suburbs which swung solidly behind Mr Howard.
Another factor was the collapse of support for Ms Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration One Nation party, which only eight months ago split the conservative vote in two state elections and helped Labor to defeat the coalition.
Ms Hanson threatened the same at the federal election, but instead saw her right-wing party's vote halved from the nine per cent it won at the last election in 1998.
Half a million voters abandoned it in favour of a coalition promising tough immigration controls of the sort which Ms Hanson had demanded.
But the former independent MP failed on Saturday in her quest for a Senate seat.
After two failed attempts to lead his party to victory at the polls, Mr Beazley (52), announced late on Saturday that he will resign the leadership, making way for the former union leader, Mr Simon Crean.