Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard won the support of a key independent lawmaker yesterday, leaving her just two seats from regaining power and within reach of ending a crippling political crisis.
Former Iraq war whistle-blower Andrew Wilkie said Gillard’s center-left Labor party was best placed to deliver “stable” and “competent” government after the Aug. 21 election returned the first hung parliament in 70 years.
“I have judged that it is the Australian Labor Party that best meets my criteria that the next government must be stable, must be competent and must be ethical,” Wilkie told journalists in Canberra.
Wilkie’s vote gives Gillard 74 seats in the 150-member lower house, just shy of an absolute majority of 76. However, Tony Abbott’s opposition coalition remains in the hunt with 73 seats, with three independents still undecided.
Wilkie urged the three remaining “kingmakers” to make their move soon, after nearly two weeks of political paralysis following the cliffhanger poll.
“I hope that this sends a signal to the other three independents and they move as soon as they can to make their decisions, and to decide to support a party or parties in a way that will bring stability to the parliament,” he said.
The final three independents — rural lawmakers Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, and maverick Queenslander Bob Katter — have pledged to begin formal negotiations today.
Momentum is now firmly behind Gillard, Australia’s first woman prime minister, after she confirmed the support of parliament’s lone Greens lawmaker on Wednesday.
Gillard also received a boost when the opposition was accused of a policy blow-out of up to US$10 billion, prompting the remaining independents to question Abbott’s trustworthiness.
“Essentially what we’re after ... is a judgment on two different teams that want to be the government for the next period of three years,” Windsor said. “One of those things that we have to establish is trust in what they’re actually saying.”
New figures show that the opposition overstated savings from their election promises by up to A$10.6 billion (US$10 billion).
Abbot said yesterday that his coalition has the best economic credentials to govern, despite the figures released late on Wednesday by independent lawmakers.
Senior Liberal lawmakers have stuck by the accuracy of their own figures and explained that the discrepancies with official calculations by government ministries were “a difference of opinion” on methodology and underlying assumptions such as future interest rates.
“There are a whole lot of issues in play here and an, at times, arcane argument about costings is by no means the most important,” Abbott told reporters at Parliament House. “The bottom line is that there are two competing economic records here.”
He said that when Labor was elected in 2007, it had inherited A$60 billion in assets, which it turned into a A$90 billion debt through economic stimulus spending.
The three independents had requested briefings from Treasury and Finance ministry bureaucrats on confidential estimates of competing election pledges.
They said the questions of which party had the best economic blueprint, and which might have misled voters, were key factors in deciding whether to back a Liberal Party-led coalition or Labor Party government.
The trio released Treasury documents that contradicted Abbott’s claim that Australia’s bottom line would be A$11.5 billion better under his conservative coalition in three years, when both sides of politics have promised to return the budget to surplus.
Treasury found that the improvement could be as little as A$900 million.
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