CANBERRA: Australia looked set to expand uranium mining on Sunday with conservatives poised to win elections in resource powerhouse Western Australia State and demolish the coast-to-coast grip of the centre-left.

State Labor Premier Alan Carpenter was bravely tipping a hung parliament with four of the 59 seats still in doubt, but election analysts said the two conservative opposition parties would likely form a coalition government in coming days.

“It has not been the sort of night and the sort of day that we had hoped,” said Carpenter, who called the election five months early to capitalise on disarray caused by a conservative leader, caught sniffing the chair of a female staffer.

A day before Carpenter called the poll, the pro-uranium Liberal Party dumped its troubled leader Troy Buswell, who was dogged by lurid reports of his chair-sniffing behaviour, and replaced him with veteran Colin Barnett.

“I believe that the people of Western Australia have expressed their trust in myself and my colleagues. They have given us an opportunity and if that comes to pass we will accept that opportunity,” said Barnett.

Labor was tipped to win 27 of the 59 seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly, while the conservative Liberal Party was tipped to take 25. The conservative Nationals, representing mostly farmers, were likely to win four seats and others three.

Western Australia is at the centre of Australia’s resource boom with vast iron ore and offshore oil and gas projects, but the state’s centre-left Labor government opposes uranium mining, meaning eight major deposits remain unexploited.

The state accounts for a third of the A$1 trillion national economy on the back of the international resource boom, and a third of global iron ore exports, but has only a tenth of Australia’s 21 million population.