The wooing begins after Australia votes come in
Source: Agencies |
August 23, 2010, Monday
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Print Edition
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THE leaders of Australia's two major political parties began negotiating power deals with independent politicians yesterday after the nation's closest election in decades failed to deliver a clear mandate to govern.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who remains caretaker leader, said it was clear no party won a majority of parliamentary seats in Saturday's poll that delivered a voter backlash against her center-left Labor Party after a single three-year term.
Market analysts predicted the uncertainty would push the Australian dollar and stock market lower when trading resumed today.
Labor hemorrhaged votes to the environment-focused Greens party as the government was punished for shelving plans to charge major polluting industries for every ton of carbon gas they emit.
Gillard and Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal Party, said they had initiated talks with three independents in the House of Representatives as well as the Greens party in a bid to secure their votes in the House of Representatives.
Neither revealed what they were prepared to offer.
Both Labor and the Liberal-led coalition have conceded that neither is likely to hold the 76 seats needed to form a government in the 150-seat lower chamber.
"It's my intention to negotiate in good faith an effective agreement to form government," Gillard told reporters.
She suggested that Labor would be better able to get its legislative agenda through the Senate, where major parties rarely hold majorities. The Greens' record support in the polls increased the party's Senate seats from five to nine, giving them the opportunity to become kingmaker in deciding which major party controls that chamber.
"So the question before all of us is this: Which party is better able to form a stable and effective government in the national interest?" she said.
But Abbott, who doubts the science behind climate change and rules out ever taxing polluters for their greenhouse gas emissions, said Labor had proved unstable even with a clear majority.
Bitter recriminations within Labor over the election result have begun, with at least one politician who lost her seat blaming her colleagues' dumping of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
No Australian government has had to rely on the support of independents to rule since 1943. The election results were expected to be the closest since 1961, when a Liberal government retained power with a single seat, and might not be known for a week.
With more than 78 percent of the vote counted, the Australian Electoral Commission said Labor had won 70 seats and the Liberal coalition 72.
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