Australian election result: a hung parliament?

[Zevico]

1. Neither Labor nor the Liberals have the seats to govern in their own right.
2. The party with the most seats, will need to convince the Governor General that they can stay in government. This will involve selling policies to the independents. However the independents are mostly former National party members which means they will swing right. This suggests that they will back the Liberal/National coalition, whether or not it gets the first try and trying to establish government.
3. A one-term government has not won re-election in Australia for 7 decades. The electorate is usually quite conservative. Labor is looking like it might lose government.

[C0ckney]

hung parliaments are all the rage now...

[Zevico]

Is it true girls like them better?

[onodera]

Hanged parliament

[notyoueither]

Yours looks like a bit of a mess.

How likely is Labour to force another election soon?

[Dale]

Labor can't force the election, only the Governor-General if she believes neither side can present a case for stable Govt.

At this point it looks like being (76 seats is the goal):
Labor: 72 seats
Greens: 1 seat
Independent: 1 seat (he's an ex-Labor)

vs

Coalition: 73 seats
Independents: 3 seats (ultra-conservative electorates, ex Coalition members)

If it falls that way over the next week, then Coalition will form Govt. The real question is, will the 3 ex-Coalition members side with their former party?

[notyoueither]

I'm thinking non-confidence on the first budget, or something like that. That's no kind of comfortable majority. Illness or a traffic jam could lead to the government falling.

[Frozzy]

It's a total mess. There's no real way a stable government can come out of the House of Representatives, and the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, so could just block any attempt at a Coalition-led minority government.

[notyoueither]

Does the convention that the upper house must go along with supply still hold?

[Zevico]

I believe that convention does not have constitutional force in Australia. At the very least, the Senate possesses the legal power to block supply. It is true that it does so rarely--e.g. in 1975--but it is a possibility. So perhaps it's more a tradition than a constitutional convention per se.
But it's not something I know altogether much about.
I've got to agree with Frozzy's remarks as well. No idea how the Coalition will get through the Senate on controversial issues.

[notyoueither]

The same here, but the convention is that the upper house never rejects money bills. In our recent session the government added a bunch of provisions to an omnibus budget bill. The Senate made noises about spitting the non-budget provisions off, but in the end lacked the numbers of people who show up for votes as opposed to a motivated government caucus in that chamber.

wiki says the whole Senate as well as the House should get chucked out for fresh elections for both houses if there is a serious deadlock. So, it comes back to does Labour want fresh elections soon?

[Hauldren Collider]

I feel sorry for any country that has a significant and powerful Green Party.

[CanuckSoldier]

See we in Canada have had "minority governments" all the time, and it works well here. We don't see it as a hung parliment, we see it as not giving King like power to one party. We have had a Conservative minority government for 3 years now. And all it means is that they have to through one of the opposition parties a bone on any major bills. As Conservative + one opposition party = a majorty on a bill. So when the dust settles we have very interesting question periods in parliment daily, but no party right now really wants to take the conservatives back to the polls as none of the opposition parties have a charasmatic leader that can tale out the current government. And it looks like the UK had to deal with the same thing in the last election and they chose to form a coalittion for the first time in history.

CS

[Hauldren Collider]

Unfortunately there are only two parties in the US and all third parties exist on fringes as opposed to the center. Furthermore, campaign finance laws effectively lock smaller parties out of elections.

[Zevico]

Well, I think it's partly to do with the fact that your voting system is first past the post.

To get third parties and independents as viable players, a preferential voting system works better than first past the post. Preferential voting systems destroy the incentive to vote strategically.

Also you need compulsory voting so that smartasses like KH would vote in elections instead of thinking "oh it's just one vote who cares." It's a civic duty.