Polls point to Howard victory
By CNN's Grant Holloway
 |  John Howard, left, and Mark Latham: Soon to know their fate. |
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|  VIDEO |
 CNN's Mike Chinoy looks at the two candidates running for Australian Prime Minister
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SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Australians vote in less than 24 hours to choose a new government with most key pointers suggesting the incumbent conservative coalition of Prime Minister John Howard will be returned.
Everything from the latest public polls, newspaper opinion columns and stockmarket investors to ever-keen gamblers placing bets on the outcome are predicting a fourth consecutive victory for Howard's forces.
But such are the vagaries of the Australian political system that a win for the Liberal-National coalition is anything but assured.
It is entirely possible, as the Australian Labor Party found in 1998, for a party to win a convincing majority of the total votes cast and still not claim government.
The keys to victory lie in 20 or more marginal electorates which regularly change hands and deliver power.
Just how well either of the main parties is travelling in these electorates is difficult to measure.
Both Labor and the Coalition conduct their own continual extensive polling in the marginal seats, but they tend not to publicly share the results of those surveys.
The best indication of how things may pan out comes from a Newspoll survey of the 12 seats which the Coalition holds by slim majorities and which Labor needs to win to enforce a change of government.
Newspoll results published in The Australian national newspaper on Thursday suggest the Coalition is maintaining its lead in these seats by about 3 percent.
Given the margin of error inherent in most polls and with 4 percent undecided or refusing to answer, this suggests the fate of the government lies in the hands of a small number of swinging voters in the suburbs of Sydney and Brisbane and in rural Queensland.
This does not augur well for the Labor challenger Mark Latham.
Australians tend to be conservative about changing governments, having thrown out the incumbents only four times in the past 50 years.
But the political commentators and the pollsters have also got it wrong in the past, most notably in 1993 where the weight of opinion firmly suggested the government of Labor leader Paul Keating would be rejected. That did not happen, with Keating winning a comfortable victory.
Underlining the importance of the marginal seats, both Latham and Howard were concentrating their final campaign appearances Friday in Sydney's sprawling western suburbs.
Howard was sticking to his party's major election theme by urging undecided voters not to take a risk by voting for the Labor party.
Latham, in contrast, was telling swinging voters it was time for a change and that he and his party were "ready to lead."
After a bruising six-week campaign, just who has prevailed will most likely be determined by about 10 p.m. (Australian Eastern time) Saturday (noon GMT).
If Howard wins he is expected to hand over the prime ministership to his long-serving Treasurer Peter Costello some time before the next election.
For Latham, a loss will not likely be the end of his political career.
At just 43 and having led Labor for less than a year, it is expected he would remain as opposition leader, readying to do it all again in 2007.
