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This is your perfect resource to find out the actual count as it occurs. Our panel below, is your direct link to the Australian Electoral Commission who will automatically update the count progressively.
Counting does not resume until Tuesday 5th July 2016 with counting anticipated to run until at least Friday 8th July 2016
ABC’s Q&A program panel is asked about the difficulties young people face in Australia, and how the political parties intend to invest in the younger generation’s future. Entrepreneur and youth advocate Holly Ransom says the older generation has left the younger one worse off and the economic systems of the country are no longer fit for purpose
UPDATE
The huge South Australian electorate of Grey is shaping up as the make-or-break contest for the coalition’s chances of forming majority government.
Sitting Liberal MP Rowan Ramsay is in a tight race with Nick Xenophon Team candidate Andrea Broadfoot as the counting of votes resumes on Tuesday.
Senator Xenophon believes Ms Broadfoot will go within a “whisker” of winning and if she does it may cost the coalition majority government.
While 77 per cent of primary votes have been counted in Grey, electoral commission officials were forced to recast the distribution of preferences after it became clear it would be a contest between the Liberal Party and NXT.
Ms Broadfoot leads Mr Ramsay by 782 votes from only five of the 124 booths considered.
With more than a million postal votes to be counted across the country between now and Friday week, the coalition believes it has 69 lower seats in the bag – six short of a majority – Labor 67, the Greens one and independents four.
Nine seats remain in doubt: Capricornia, Cowan, Forde, Herbert, Hindmarsh where Labor leads, Chisholm, Dunkley, Gilmore where the coalition is ahead, and Grey.
Senator Xenophon believes the coalition is still in the box seat to win the 76 seats needed to win majority government.
Senior Labor MP Chris Bowen says it will be some time before the result is clear.
“I expect the lead will see-saw a bit in a few seats,” he told ABC radio.
“There will be times when we’re ahead, times when the other side are ahead.”
Liberal strategists are banking on a historic postal vote bias towards coalition MPs.
They are confident about retaining Dunkley, Forde and Gilmore, hopeful about picking up Chisholm from Labor but less so about retaining Hindmarsh.
The Nationals believe they can hold the Rockhampton seat of Capricornia despite trailing by nearly 1000 votes.
Herbert and Cowan remain in the mix despite their Liberal MPs Ewen Jones and Luke Simpkins trailing by a similar margin.
While the most likely outcome is a minority coalition government – with 75 seats – that relies on one or two crossbenchers for support, some inside the coalition still believe 78 seats is not beyond their reach.
Opposition frontbencher Andrew Leigh says Labor has not given up hope of forming minority government.
Australian election: has Malcolm Turnbull’s big gamble backfired? – video
The Australian prime minister announced the election knowing what was at stake; having pinned his leadership challenge partly on his ability to win public votes, and with seats in both parliamentary houses up for grabs, has his big gamble backfired? We take a look back at what brought the Liberal leader to this point
Even if they can form government, it will be a sour little victory for the Liberal party
At the moment the Liberal party is a burnt and broken enterprise and to repair it may be quite impossible.
Tony Abbott’s baton of failure has been passed to Malcolm Turnbull. The party is stuck in a miserable warp that locks out the country’s crying unresolved issues, and there’s no one in the wings with the integrity, intellect and command to drag it out of its pitiable state.
The great issues of the day that define who we are as a country were not part of the Coalition’s play sheet, and this includes: climate change, offshore imprisonment of refugees and marriage equality. Instead, we had the mirage of an economic “plan” for jobs and growth, which on closer inspection turned out to be trickle-down economics based on a bunch of tax cuts for the better off.
Turnbull says he can form a majority government, in which event it will be a sour little victory – a victory without a mandate. The hard-right soul of the party is also in flames – just look at what happened in Tasmania where Senator Eric Abetz’s Christian regressives run the local machine. There’s no moral authority to be found there – all we might hope for is that now he sits quietly in a corner for a very long time.
The party started to take a primordial direction under John Howard, who is now paraded as a patron saint. The Liberals failed to heed the message that was delivered in 2007 when the saint was flung ignominiously by voters out of his own seat.
Turnbull and Scott Morrison crying foul on Saturday night about Labor party lies was a treat to behold. The “we wus robbed” line coming from the people who brought us children overboard, Islamic scares, the “intelligence” for the Iraq war and fake budget projections is an exciting new audacity. Even the party’s very name is a lie.
The campaign was laced with warnings about “hung parliaments”, “vote sharing fiascos”, “chaos”. The obverse is that MPs should be puppets and parliament a rubber stamp for the party with the majority of seats, doing what the executive commands – yet “stability” has not been a uniform feature of the long history of Westminster-style parliaments. Indeed, the Senate has ensured that in Australia hung parliaments are the norm and minority governments are not unknown.
Importantly, this state of affairs is not always unworkable. Julia Gillard’s government operated both as a minority and in a hung parliament quite effectively, even if chaotically.
With the support of crossbenchers and the Greens, the Gillard Labor government passed 561 bills through parliament, not one of which was defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives, including the National Broadband Network, the carbon tax, the resource rent tax (even though it turned out not to be very effective), the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the household assistance package, and pension increases. Despite the raucous attacks from the Coalition, by any standard it was an effective government.
The federal election of September 1940 delivered a hung parliament in wartime. Menzies lost the confidence of the House with the result that John Curtin emerged as Australia’s most important prime minister. And it’s not as though that parliament sat on its hands – it passed the Statute of Westminster, legislation that gave Australia its own sovereignty, and created a uniform income tax regime, one of the most powerful public policy instruments. The Senate was hostile to Labor 21 to 15. Political historian Rodney Cavalier argued that Australia today lives “in the shadow of the 1940 parliament more than any other”.
The election of December 1961 produced a situation most akin to today’s circumstances. The House of Representatives was then composed of 124 seats and following the election, and after provision of a speaker, the Menzies coalition clung on with a majority of one: 61-60. That was because the two Labor members for the territories were only permitted to vote on matters that affected the ACT and NT.
The wafer thin majority did not impede Menzies entering the great pantheon of do-little conservative heroes.
The mother of Westminster parliaments is also the mother of all hung parliaments where prime ministers have frequently failed to win majorities on the floor of the Commons – most notably and recently David Cameron in 2010, resulting in a Conservative Liberal-Democrat power sharing arrangement but an effective government nonetheless.
In fact, governments that control both houses invariably flop. Malcolm Fraser’s government had control of the Senate for a time and it is widely believed not to have done anything much with this unique opportunity. On the other hand, when the same advantage was delivered to the Howard government in 2004, the Senate was treated dismissively and arrogantly, the beginning of the hubris that saw voters turn the tide.
A government that has to fight for its ideas and legislation on the edge of a razor is no bad thing. The contest is more alive and substantial arguments have a better chance of winning the day.
One encouraging aspect of the 2016 election result is that the very best and worst efforts of the Murdoch press have not mattered a hill of beans in the outcome. If anything, the over-larded bias proved to be counterproductive to anyone other than the rapidly decreasing clutch of rusted on believers.
Now the smugness and swagger has been taken down a notch, or 10, from a Coalition that has assumed a god-given right to rule.
I remember two elections ago standing in the queue outside a polling station in the seat of Wentworth when a van pulled into the kerb, the door flung open to disgorge a small tribe of Turnbulls. Father and Mother Turnbull, little Daisy Turnbull and some retainers.
While Father Turnbull worked the queue, from which no one could escape, pumping hands and spreading charm, young Daisy bounced up and down advising the slack-jawed constituents that her father is “awesome”.
Alas, awesome no more.
Originally published in The Guardian 5th July 2016
Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation; Fron Jackson-Webb, The Conversation; Michael Courts, The Conversation, and Wes Mountain, The Conversation
Australians have voted, but with the result currently unclear, how are the numbers falling across the country?
The figures in the panel below are static numbers as at 11:30PM Saturday night and will not be updated in this post:
Key seats
Emil Jeyaratnam, Multimedia Editor, The Conversation; Fron Jackson-Webb, Health + Medicine Editor, The Conversation; Michael Courts, Editor, The Conversation, and Wes Mountain, Deputy Multimedia Editor, The Conversation
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
