Australia's Labor set for wipe-out in state election

Mar 26, 2011, 8:35 GMT

Sydney - Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Labor party looked set for a massive loss to the conservatives Saturday in elections in Australia's biggest state.

Exit polls conducted in Sydney by Sky News pointed to a 21-per-cent swing and a cut to scandal-plagued Labor from 50 to 16 seats in the 93-member New South Wales (NSW) Parliament.

'Conquered not by a courageous foe but by an unstoppable public revolt, our widely despised Labor Government will tonight be tossed on the scrapheap - its rulers put to the sword, its legacy trampled to dust, its once ruthless army cut down to a mere troupe,' the Daily Telegraph gleefully predicted.

Labor, in power in NSW for 16 years, is looking at its worst electoral performance there in more than a century.

With just 8 per cent of the vote counted, national broadcaster ABC election analyst Anthony Green declared that Labor was finished.

'There's been a change of government,' Green said.

'It's cataclysmic, I mean it's a bloodbath,' Labor campaign spokesman Luke Foley told the ABC. 'I think this is a massacre, a slaughter, the likes of which none of us has seen, sadly, for my party.'

All Australia's six states were Labor-held when the Liberal Party was turfed out in the 2007 federal parliamentary election but that tally is about to be halved.

Another loss will make governing even more difficult for Gillard, who finished in a dead-heat with the Liberals in the 2010 federal parliamentary election and has held onto office by dint of a pact with independents.

The trouncing in NSW will make it even tougher for her to deliver on her pledge to bring in a carbon tax in July next year, and win back majority government at a federal parliamentary election due by March 2013.

'Such is the backlash expected from voters (in NSW) that the party could very well be cast into electoral oblivion for an entire generation,' the Telegraph said.

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