Australia Vote Leads to Political Limbo

Australia's voters have proven again the wisdom of ancient dramatists who warned that regicide can be the most dangerous of political acts.

Julia Gillard, who came to power two months ago, ousting sitting Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is hanging on for the moment as prime minister. She may yet form a minority government. But in Saturday's election, her Labor Party lost its majority in Australia's House of Representatives. At best, Labor will end up three short of the 76 seats needed to form a government.

Not that Tony Abbott, who also turned out his party leader a few months before, did any better. The hopes of his Liberal-National (read conservative) coalition to take over the government also were dashed. At current counting, Abbott's coalition has won 72 seats.

Australians are used to up or down elections and have not dealt with a "hung" parliament in decades. What they confront now is a situation far more familiar to voters and politicians in Belgium and Italy, cobbling together a government of disparate forces who bargain for reasons petty and grand.

Specifically, three rural independent legislators and one from the suddenly nascent Green Party hold the balance of power.

And the Greens are looking for sweet revenge. Rudd lost his premiership amid fights over climate change and mining tax legislation. Support for cap and trade may be the Greens' price for joining Gillard in government.

Already, as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere, Labor is squabbling over whether the party would have done better or worse had Rudd not been ousted. From voters in Rudd's home state of Queensland and from some Labor politicians, there was plenty of renewed anger voiced over the weekend at his ouster.

But Labor's problems do not necessarily give Abbott an advantage. He's a climate change skeptic who deposed his Liberal Party predecessor on that issue. Winning over the Greens looks like an uphill climb. He should have a better shot at the three rural independents, but proving that all politics is local, they may be swayed by Labor's more generous promises to expand broadband access to the country's vast hinterlands.

But the issues and concerns of this election are not parochial to Australia as noted in an interesting column in the Financial Times. The writer was John McTernan, a former aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair who did a stint as "thinker in residence" to the state of Victoria (nice work if you can get it.).

As McTernnan observed, the Australian electorate is grumpy despite record prosperity. Their bounty is due in large measure to exports to China, but that dependence along with illegal immigration raises fears about maintaining their celebrated lifestyle. They worry about global warming but reject climate change legislation. In a country almost the size of the United States but with only 22 million people, there are even arguments over population growth.

Australia's preoccupations, McTernan wrote, "represent a toxic and introspective political mix...all are issues which will quickly move up the agenda in Europe and North America. Eventually, what's going on down under could turn our world upside down too."