May as well make this the de facto Australian election thread. There’s a guy in Australia called Antony Green who occupies a weird position, kind of a Dave Wasserman guy, but his job is election analyst for the public broadcaster and has been as long as I remember. He is a household name - I would guess that around 50-60% of adults could tell you who he is. It’s not that he is the “most trusted” election analyst here. It’s that he is THE GUY, the one and only. There is nobody in Australia who can contradict anything he says about elections here.
Polls have been closed in the east for a couple hours now and Green says there is a lot of uncertainty but the most likely outcome is a hung parliament, with independents controlling the balance of power. Polling suggested a Labor win, as it did in 2019, but as we have seen with two successive Presidential elections and Brexit, it seems like there’s a chronic left-wing bias in polling happening.
Well that turned quickly. ABC now project that Labor will form government. After 3 terms of conservative government we finally got rid of them. Greens have won a bunch of seats too. 4 to 6 looks like.
Looks like it might be a minority government. Basically it’s impossible for the Coalition to form government again, but the composition of the Labor led govt is in doubt.
An interesting phenomenon this election has been the rise of so-called “teal independents”, a loose collection of independent candidates, virtually all women, who are running against Liberals (again, that is the conservative party) on a platform of climate action and the establishment by legislation of a Federal Integrity Commission, a government-monitoring anti-corruption watchdog. They are not a party in the parliamentary sense in that there is no party line on any issues other than the above two. They’re projected to go from 5 seats to 8, which is a pretty decent chunk now.
