Hung Parliament looks possible in Australia vote

Australia’s ruling Labor party was just ahead on seats in the country’s closest vote in decades but one respected election analyst said it looked unlikely either of the main parties would be able to form a majority government.
ABC Television’s Anthony Green, one of the nation’s leading election analysts, projected Labor to win 73 seats.
That would be three short of the number Prime Minister Julia Gillard would need to keep control of the 150-seat lower house and mean a hung Parliament.
ABC’s Green projected the opposition with 72 seats, with four independents and one Green MP. At the time, just over half of the votes had been counted.

Combination picture shows Gillard (left) and Abbott casting their votes in Australia today, August 21, 2010





Official data after 62.2 per cent of the vote was counted gave Labor 59 seats against 50 for the conservative Liberal-National coalition led by Tony Abbott. To form a government, 76 seats are needed. The opposition was ahead in the national vote.

The close vote has raised concerns in markets over the possibility of a minority government unpopular with investors.

Australia’s opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said the ruling Labor party could win.

“They rolled out union money, they rolled out union workers, they did not have the community with them and yet they may well steal the election tonight,” Hockey said after winning his Sydney seat.

But Labor Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the election was extremely close.

“Everything might have to go right for us to end up with 76.” At stake was not only the political future of Prime Minister Gillard and the opposition’s Abbott, both new and untested leaders, but also Labor’s plans for a 30 per cent resource tax and a US$38 billion (RM78 billion) broadband network.

“I would say that a narrow Labor victory or a hung parliament is certainly more likely than a coalition victory,” Graham Richardson, a former Labor minister and now a strategist, said.

From surf club polling booths along Australia’s coast to dusty outback voting stations, where political banners swayed in the hot breeze, Australians had stood in line to vote.

Financial markets were unsettled yesterday by the prospect that no major party would win enough votes to form government — a scenario which would see the Australian dollar sold off and possibly result in policy gridlock and investment paralysis.

Investors are also worried about the likelihood the Greens party will win the balance of power in the upper house Senate and stifle policy and force the next government to increase spending.

The poll may be determined in marginal seats in mortgage-belt areas of Sydney and Melbourne, where there are worries over immigration, as well as in resource states of Queensland and Western Australia, where there is bitterness over the mining tax