Tag Archives: national

At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next?

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You’d be excused if you thought that Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s concession speech earlier today sounded more like the victory speech of a man who had just won the election.Australia Flag Icon

In a sense, Rudd did win the battle against expectations — just barely.  Even though Rudd will soon become a former prime minister and has already announced he will step down as the leader of the center-left Australian Labor Party, he can breathe a sigh of relief that Labor did not fare as poorly as some worst-case scenarios projected — either under Rudd’s return to the leadership or under former prime minister Julia Gillard.  So Rudd was probably right to gloat in his speech that he preserved Labor as a ‘viable fighting force for the future.’  What Rudd didn’t have to say was his belief that Gillard would have led Labor to an absolute collapse.

With three seats left to be determined, the center-right Coalition government led by Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott has 91 seats in Australia’s  150-member House of Representatives to just 54 seats for Labor and two independents, with Adam Bandt, the sole MP of the Australian Greens, holding onto his Melbourne seat despite a strong Labor push.  That’s a very strong victory for Abbott, who has picked up 18 seats, but it’s not a historic landslide — four of those gains come from seats formerly held by independents.

Rudd, on the other hand, can claim that his three-month leadership of the party helped avert a catastrophe, though we’ll never know whether Gillard would have done better or worse (and there are some reasons to believe that Labor should have simply stuck with Gillard through September).

You can get all of the seat-by-seat results here, and you can read the pre-election analysis of the marginal seats here.

Here’s the result of the primary vote count:

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The most striking piece is that more than one of every four voters chose as their first preference someone other than a Labor, Coalition or Green candidate, and it corroborates that the election was more a statement of disapproval of the Rudd-Gillard governments than an embrace of Tony Abbott.

So what comes next?  Within a week, Abbott will likely become Australia’s new prime minister.  What does that mean for Australian politics?  Continue reading At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next?

Rudd-erdämmerung 2013: An election-day guide to Australia’s national elections

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Polls are now open across Australia, where voters will elect all 150 members of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Australian parliament, and a little over half of the 75 members of the Senate, the upper house.Australia Flag Icon

If polling surveys prove correct, prime minister Kevin Rudd (pictured above, left) and the Australian Labor Party is facing certain defeat at the hands of Tony Abbott (pictured above, right), the leader of the Liberal Party and the center-right Coalition between the Liberals and Australia’s agrarian conservative National Party.

As we wait for results to come in later today, it’s worth taking a closer look at the voting to determine just what could happen.

Polls opened at 8 am and will close at 6 pm (for those of us on the east coast, polls close on Australia’s east coast at 7 am ET and on Australia’s west coast at 9 am ET).  Voting is mandatory in Australia, with a fine of around A$20 for citizens who don’t participate.

Australia elects House members in single-member constituencies, but with a preferential voting system that ranks candidates (much like Ireland’s preferential vote).  Each voter casts a ballot in one of 150 electoral districts throughout Australia.  But instead of just voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidate to indicate preferences from first to last.

The so-called ‘primary vote’ is the tally of the first preferences of all voters.  If, after the primary vote is counted, no candidate wins an absolute majority, the candidate with the lowest amount of support is eliminated, and the second preferences of the voters who preferred the eliminated candidate are distributed to the remaining candidates.  Candidates are eliminated, and preference are allocated, until one candidate wins more than 50% of the vote.  In reality, this typically means that all third-party candidates are eliminated, and the final count comes down to a contest between the Coalition and Labor — this is referred to as the ‘two-party preferred vote.’

So imagine a race with three candidate — Kevin, Tony and Christine.  Suppose that in the primary vote, Kevin wins 35%, Tony wins 45% and Christine wins 20%.  Christine would be eliminated, and we would look at the second preference of all of Christine’s voters.  Suppose that Christine’s voters preferred Kevin and Tony equally — when the second-preference votes are added to the existing tallies, we would see that Tony wins the election with 55% to just 45% for Kevin.

The system for determining senators is even more complex because voters elect 12 senators for each state (in a typical election, voters select just six senators for each state, but in a ‘double dissolution’ election, voters sometimes choose all 12 at once).  Senate elections are conducted with the same principles of preferred voting, but within statewide multi-member districts.  I’ll spare you the details, but if you’re interested in how the vote count becomes exponentially more complex, feel free to watch this primer.

In the previous August 2010 election, neither Labor nor the Coalition won enough seats to form an absolute majority in the House — Abbott’s Coalition actually has one more MP in the House today than Rudd’s Labor (a 72-71), which means that Abbott needs to pick up just four seats to become prime minister:

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Realistically, if polling data is correct, it’s not a question of whether Abbott and the Coalition will win — it’s a matter of how large Abbott’s majority will be.  So without further ado, here’s a look at each of Australia’s six states and two territories and where Labor and the Coalition stands in each (for even further reading, here’s a look at the policies that Abbott’s government is likely to pursue and here’s an look at whether Labor MPs should have sacked former prime minister Julia Gillard three months ago in the hopes that Rudd could deliver an improbable victory.

Continue reading Rudd-erdämmerung 2013: An election-day guide to Australia’s national elections

Why Western Australia doesn’t necessarily spell the end for Gillard

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Saturday’s state elections in Western Australia were not good news for the Labor Party or for its leader, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (pictured above).WA flag iconAustralia Flag Icon

First off, it’s important to note that no one expected Labor to win the election — premier Colin Barnett faced an electorate largely satisfied with the direction of the state’s economy and governance since he came to office in 2008.

Barnett’s center-right Liberal Party won 47.2% on Saturday to just 33.6% for the center-left Labor Party.  The leftist Green Party finished in third place with 7.9% and the conservative agrarian National Party in fourth with 6% — the National Party competes separately in Western Australia against the Liberal Party (unlike in federal elections, where it competes more or less in tandem with the Liberal Party as part of the Liberal/National Coalition).

Barnett’s victory gives him an expected 32 seats — an increase of eight — in the state’s 59-member lower house, the Legislative Assembly, which means that he’ll be governing with a majority for the first time; his previous minority government required a coalition with the Nationals.

Labor will drop from 28 seats to 20, the Nationals rise from five seats to seven.

That has resulted in yet another round of hand-wringing over Julia Gillard’s Labor government, which is seeking reelection in a vote scheduled for September 14 later this year — one former Western Australian Labor minister argues that Labor will suffer a ‘crucifixion’ at the polls if Gillard leads it through the election.

But while Gillard’s government — and her Labor leadership — remain on shaky ground, it seems doubtful that Western Australia, as such, should necessarily be the final domino to topple Gillard. Continue reading Why Western Australia doesn’t necessarily spell the end for Gillard