Sun, Aug 22, 2010 page1

• Australia faces hung parliament

  GREEN KINGMAKER The election came down to the wire, with neither Labor nor the Liberal/Nationals gaining a clear majority, but the Green Party took a record count

  • AFP
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  Australia looked set for its first hung parliament in 70 years yesterday, following a furious voter backlash against the ruling party after it ousted an elected prime minister.

  Australia’s first woman leader, Julia Gillard, who came to power in a party coup just two months ago, was lagging behind the conservative opposition at 69 seats to 71, public broadcaster ABC said as counting continued into the night.

  Senior party officials tipped a rare hung parliament — the first since 1940 — with neither Gillard’s Labor party or Tony Abbott’s Liberal/National coalition set to gain an outright majority of 76 seats.

  

  A voter walks past election posters at a polling station yesterday in central Melbourne, Australia.

  PHOTO: REUTERS

  “I think a hung parliament is looking more and more likely,” Liberal Senator Nick Minchin told ABC, a sentiment shared by Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.

  A hung parliament would represent a stunning reverse for Labor, which came to power less than three years ago in a decisive election victory under former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.

  However, Gillard replaced Rudd in a spectacular party coup just eight weeks ago, and ran a chaotic campaign that failed to capitalize on Labor’s big achievement of helping Australia avoid a recession during the financial crisis.

  Voters were incensed after Labor’s decision to shelve an emissions trading scheme, the centerpiece of its anti-climate change drive and Gillard was plagued by a series of Cabinet-level leaks.

  “We shouldn’t be on a knife-edge tonight and we shouldn’t be losing colleagues all over the country,” said Labor’s Maxine McKew, who lost Sydney’s bellwether seat of Bennelong.

  Two separate television exit polls earlier predicted Gillard’s party would win by 51 or 52 percent of the vote to the coalition’s 48 or 49, but indicated big swings against Labor in key marginal seats, which could cost it power.

  And results showed voters ­turning on Labor in the battleground states of Queensland and New South Wales, but stronger support for the Greens, which favors the ruling party under Australia’s complex preferences system.

  Around 14 million electors took part in a mandatory vote for the lower house and half the 76-seat Senate, with experts and opinion polls all predicting the elections would go down to the wire.

  Gillard, 48, a red-headed former lawyer who was born in Wales, has pledged better education and healthcare and played up Labor’s economic record, as well as its planned national broadband scheme.

  Abbott, a 52-year-old religious conservative who has doubts about mankind’s role in climate change, has targeted fears over illegal immigration and questioned Labor’s spending record, as well as Gillard’s unseating of Rudd.

  “This is a big day for our country,” Abbott said as he cast his vote in Sydney. “It’s a day when we can vote out a bad government.”

  Senator Mark Arbib, a Labor powerbroker credited with orchestrating Gillard’s sudden rise to power, said the party may form an alliance with the Greens, which claimed one seat in Melbourne.

  “This is a bad night for the Labor Party,” he told the Nine Network. “We’re now looking like we have to talk to the Greens.”

  The environmentally minded party took a record 11.46 percent of the ballot, with 75 percent of the vote counted, figures from the Australian Electoral Commission showed.

  “The green vote is on the rise — green values are now mainstream values,” Adam Bandt, the Green candidate claiming the inner city seat of Melbourne from Labor, told national broadcaster ABC.

  The election is a record result for the party, which won 7.8 percent of the vote in the last election — its highest result until now.

  Bandt, who would be the first Green candidate to win a seat in Canberra’s lower house in a ­national election, said the result was a “resounding verdict” on the climate policies touted by the major parties.

  “The government has chosen to delay action on climate change and the coalition is in denial about it,” Bandt said. “We’ve run a campaign that we need to take urgent action.”
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