Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday looked set to form a majority government as vote counting from the weekend election allayed fears that his conservative coalition might have to rule in the minority following its shock victory.
The coalition was returned to power in a stunning result on Saturday, after opinion polls and odds-makers had tipped the opposition Labor Party to win. The outcome ranks as Australia’s biggest election upset since 1993, when then-Labor prime minister Paul Keating was returned to power.
With 76 seats in the House of Representatives needed for majority rule, figures from the Australian Electoral Commission showed that with about 84 percent of votes counted, the coalition was on target to win 78 seats — an increase of five after going into the election as a minority government.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The Labor Party was set to claim 67 seats, with independents and minor parties taking six.
Winning a majority of the seats would also allow Morrison’s coalition to appoint the house speaker from its own ranks, rather from among independent or minor party lawmakers.
After being elected in 2016 with 76 seats, the power base of Morrison’s coalition was diminished through a series of by-elections late in its three-year term. One such defeat was triggered by the ousting in August last year of then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in an internal party vote.
That move, which ended in Morrison becoming prime minister, caused widespread disgust among Australian voters sorely disillusioned by seeing another one of their leaders replaced without them having a say.
Morrison had become Australia’s sixth prime minister in only eight years. Four such changes had been brought about by lawmakers voting to dump their party’s leader, two each from the coalition and the center-left Labor Party. Morrison’s predecessor, Turnbull, had become prime minister in 2015 through an internal party coup that dumped Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party.
Analysts had predicted that the coalition would pay dearly for that latest leadership switch, with Morrison expected to exit after one of the shortest terms as prime minister in Australian history.
Most late surveys showed Labor leader Bill Shorten as having a small, but clear lead over Morrison as preferred prime minister, 51 percent to 49 percent.
As analysts tried to make sense of the outcome, several factors were highlighted.
One of them was the strong and effusive campaigning of Morrison himself, praised by his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, for having “crisscrossed the country with great energy, belief and conviction,” while selling “our economic plan to the Australian people, a plan that resonated with them.”
By contrast, Labor was said to have suffered by campaigning on a long and complex list of initiatives, including an ambitious plan for reducing greenhouse emissions and proposed changes to taxes on income from the stock market, which the coalition attacked as a “retirees’ tax.”
While Shorten insisted after the defeat that it had been right to argue for “what was right, not what was easy,” his deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, conceded that the party suffered from a campaign platform that was too cluttered.
“Our policy agenda was big. It was bold. And I think perhaps we didn’t have enough time to explain all of the benefits of it to the people who would benefit,” Plibersek said.
One telling result came yesterday, when high-profile independent lawmaker Kerryn Phelps conceded defeat to the Liberal Party in the Sydney electorate of Wentworth — the seat vacated by Turnbull on his resignation from Parliament last year.
While Phelps had wrested the seat from its traditional conservative base in August last year, she lost it back to the Liberals’ Dave Sharma only nine months later, suggesting a gulf in public sentiment between a by-election and a general election.
“Clearly, the country decided it wanted to return a Liberal government,” Phelps told reporters.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in