As Australians cast their ballots in a tight election on Saturday afternoon, Australian Senator Nick Xenophon worked up a sweat while preparing kebabs at a Greek restaurant in his hometown.
“Nick, if you no get across the line tonight, I give you a job,” owner Yianni Tsagariolis shouted in a thick Greek accent, drawing laughter from Xenophon supporters who had gathered at the restaurant.
However, with early results showing the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) party winning between three and five Australian Senate seats, it became clear the restaurant’s charcoal grill was the only reason for Australia’s next political kingmaker to break into a sweat.
Photo: AFP
Australians went to sleep without knowing who will be prime minister, but the eventual election winner — whether the ruling conservative Liberal-National coalition or the opposition Labor Party — will likely need to negotiate with NXT senators to pass key legislation.
With almost 10 million votes counted on Saturday, the parties were in a near deadlock. It is expected to take several days to determine a winner.
Far-right politician Pauline Hanson also looks set to win a position in the upper house.
NXT candidate Rebekha Sharkie, who won the party’s only lower house seat, might even have a say over who becomes prime minister should the election lead to a hung parliament.
Xenophon, a former suburban lawyer who has served in the senate since 2008, built his position by exploiting widespread political fury sparked by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott’s 2014 decision to buy a A$50 billion (US$37.58 billion at the current exchange rate) fleet of 12 submarines from Japan.
That decision shattered a promise Abbott had made to build the vessels in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, and Xenophon relentlessly pushed the government to open up the process and hold a tender.
Speaking on election night, Xenophon said his party would be a voice for millions of centrist Australians who felt left out by the two major parties.
“We’ve broken the duopoly,” he said to cheers from supporters at a campaign event in Adelaide. “There’s only been one of me in 226 seats; there’ll be at least four of us and that’ll be huge. That will be a base for us to build on... That’s why the majors are running scared.”
In the previous election cycle, mining magnate Clive Palmer briefly played a similar role before infighting led to an implosion in the Palmer United Party. Two of its senators resigned from the party.
NXT also lacks a unifying ideal beyond his personal brand, said Peter Chen, a politics and media lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“Xenophon himself is obviously an experienced and disciplined campaigner and parliamentarian, but he has to be able to keep his troops in order and he’s never been called on to do that before,” Chen said.
However, a political source close to Xenophon, who asked to remain anonymous, because he was not authorized to speak with the media, dismissed such concerns.
“It’s a good result from a team management perspective,” the source told reporters. “In some sense, if we’d won everything we could have done, it would have been a management nightmare. All of them understand the importance of unity.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS