CANBERRA – Australia faces days of political paralysis as vote counting resumes after a weekend election that failed to produce a clear winner and raised questions over Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s future.
Both Turnbull’s Liberal-National coalition and the Bill Shorten-led Labor opposition are currently short of the 76 lower-house seats needed for a majority government. As the Australian Electoral Commission begins Tuesday to count more than one-million postal votes, talks are under way between the major parties and independent lawmakers who may hold the balance of power.
The coalition is ahead in 67 seats to Labor’s 71, according to the AEC. An Australian Broadcasting Corp. projection has Turnbull leading by 68 seats to 67, with independents and minor parties in front in 5 seats and 10 districts in doubt.
The government remains “hopeful” it will win a majority as postal votes tend to favor the incumbent, Attorney General George Brandis said on ABC radio Tuesday. Turnbull said on Sunday he was optimistic of an outcome by the end of the week.
“We will know within a matter of days whether the remaining closely fought seats have been won by the government or not,” Brandis said. As criticism of Turnbull’s performance during the eight-week election campaign mounts, Brandis said coalition colleagues should hold fire in case it weakened their “bargaining position” with independents.
'DIVIDED PARTY'
Shorten has called on the Prime Minister to resign. “This guy is like the David Cameron of the Southern Hemisphere,” he told reporters Monday. “What he did, he leads a divided party, he has had an election and he has delivered an inferior and unstable outcome.”
While the government expected a swing against it as punishment for policy inertia, the magnitude of the voter rebellion surprised pundits and lawmakers alike, with the two main parties getting their lowest primary vote since 1943. Lacking a strong mandate, whoever leads Australia could be hamstrung in efforts to revitalise the world’s 12th-largest economy and forced to negotiate with individual Senators in the upper house.
Australia’s dollar fell, halting a two-day advance, amid speculation the country’s central bank will stand pat at a policy meeting on Tuesday to assess the implications of the indecisive election and ongoing Brexit fallout before resuming interest-rate cuts. The currency declined 0.2 percent to 75.22 U. cents as of 10:23 a.m. in Sydney.
Voters are weary of political infighting and leadership coups within both main political groupings. The country has seen six prime ministers in the past eight years alone. Still, Australians need to be patient, according to the AEC.
“The figures will move, clearly, but I’m not sure I’d say they’ll move quickly,” AEC spokesman Evan Ekin-Smyth said. “Unless the postal votes that come in lean heavily one way or another, it’s not going to take a day or two to get clarity -- it’s going to take longer than that.”