Victory, Ltd.

"Our slogan," cried Prime Minister Robert Menzies in his booming campaign voice, "is Australia Unlimited, and we pronounce it with confidence." But for all their leader's enthusiasm, it was with something short of unlimited confidence that the members of Australia's Liberal-Country coalition government approached last week's elections to the Senate and the House. In the nine years since he was swept into office on an anti-Socialist wave, the Prime Minister has given his country prosperity, has whipped rising inflation, boosted pensions, introduced a national health service, proved a stout friend of the U.S. and Britain. But stolid, unimaginative Bob Menzies himself has never been personally popular. His chronic testiness ("He must be drunk or paid to come here as a pest," he angrily shouted at a heckler) has not helped him much. When his car was spattered with eggs in Sydney, even the usually progovernment Melbourne Herald blandly refused to remonstrate. "At election time," it said, "it is permissible to be cynical. Indeed it is almost obligatory."

If Menzies faced a difficult time, the Laborites had their troubles too. Right-wing Laborites (mostly Roman Catholic) have long criticized Party Leader Herbert Evatt, 64, for his easygoing attitude toward Communists in unions. They formed their own splinter group, the Democratic Labor Party.

Last week, as 5,400,000 voters trooped to the polls to cast their compulsory ballots (penalty for not voting: -L-2), Sydney's Sun-Herald sourly editorialized: "The electors have a poor choice." Labor's divided condition helped give Menzies a majority in the House, and a gain of from two to four seats in the Senate.

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