Australia's conservative coalition, in office since 1996, has been swept from power with a 6.3% electoral swing to Labor. Under's Australia's system (Alternative Vote for the House of Representatives, STV for the Senate), it takes a few days to get complete results, but the best estimates are that Labor will come out of the 24 November poll with an 86-64 majority in the House of Reps. Outgoing prime minister John Howard has lost his own seat.

In the Senate, the best prediction is a sort of draw: Labor will have 32 seats, the Greens will have 5, and Family First (an anti-abortion group which nonetheless opposes the conservatives' anti-union laws) one; but the Liberal-National coalition will have 37, and the remaining seat will be held by anti-gambling Independent Nick Xenophon, who commits himself no further than: "The WorkChoices legislation went too far. There definitely needs to be some revisiting of it..."

The Greens' five Senate seats are an advance on their previous four. They increased their Senate vote to about 1,080,000 (9%) compared with 917,000 in 2004 [1].

The main activist-left challenge, from the Socialist Alliance, secured only its usual (low) level of votes, with some increases here and there but decreases elsewhere [2]. Maybe the SA vote was squeezed by the Green vote.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions had (unprecedentedly) suggested a no.1 vote for the Greens for the Senate, because the Greens' stand against the anti-union laws has been much stronger and more consistent than the Australian Labor Party (ALP), to which most of the unions are affiliated, and the Greens' stand on almost all other issues is closer to union policies too.

Kevin Rudd, Labor's new Blair-model leader, a repulsive and sanctimonious creeping-Jesus type, has progressively and drastically diminished Labor's commitment to repeal of the anti-union laws. All it amounts to now is:

• A slow phasing-out of Australian Workplace Agreements - the new individual contracts which the coalition hoped to have replace union collective bargaining - with them being largely replaced by new forms of individual contract, and no solid new legal backing for union collective bargaining;

• Strikes will be illegal except if they are at the time of negotiating a new agreement, and over the terms of that agreement;
• The conservatives' legal restrictions on union organisers' access to workplaces will remain;
• The ABCC - the special police force set up for the construction industry, with powers to compel construction workers to testify on pain of six months' jail if they choose to remain silent - remains until 2010, and is then to be replaced by a new ABCC-lite.

The ACTU claimed: "An exit poll of 415 voters... found:

• Industrial Relations was among the most important issues for almost eight out of ten Labor voters. Of the people who voted Labor, 45% said IR was the most important issue, and 33% said it was one of the most important issues.

• When asked whether the Liberals' advertising attacking unions made any difference to the way they voted – 76% said it made no difference, and 20% said it made a difference. Only 5% of voters said it was more likely to make them vote Liberal, while 12% said it was more likely to make them vote Labor".

Picking up on attacks by Rudd on trade unionists - Rudd had forced ETU leader Dean Mighell to resign from the ALP, and unsuccessfully pressed CFMEU leader Joe McDonald to do the same, because they had used rough language against employers - the Liberals had made a big deal of attacking Rudd's Labor as "union-dominated".

The Liberals' campaign seems to have backfired among voters - but to have "worked" in intimidating union leaders. In the run-up to the election, the union leaders' message to the rank and file had been: Yes, we know Rudd is bad, but don't say so now, or Howard could win the election. We'll criticise Rudd and make demands after the election. But the ACTU still makes no demands on the incoming government.

The Victoria Trades Hall Council, generally more combative than the ACTU, comments only mildly: "It is important now, once the justifiable celebrations are over, to focus on ensuring the lost rights at work are won back through fair and effective new Federal legislation".

The question on the workers' side now is: how soon, how energetically, and how boldly will the unions and the left mobilise to apply pressure to the Rudd Labor government to win back workers' rights?

And the question on the other side is: will Rudd, who has modelled himself partly on Tony Blair, try to use the credit from his election victory to ram through structural changes in the Australian Labor Party similar to those Blair forced on British Labour with "Partnership in Power" in 1997?