SYDNEY: Australia’s conservative coalition government has defied the pundits and pollsters by winning Saturday’s election. However, it’s not clear whether Prime Minister Scott Morrison will secure an outright parliamentary majority.
“I have always believed in miracles … and tonight we've been delivered another one,” a jubilant Morrison told supporters late Saturday after rival Bill Shorten called to congratulate him.
“How good is Australia? How good are Australians? This is the best country in the world.”
Mr Morrison said the victory was not about him, or even the Liberal Party, but “every single Australian who depends on their government to put them first”.
Most opinion polls prior to polling day had Shorten’s centre-left opposition Labor party ahead, and exit polls on Saturday also gave the party an edge.
But as the pace of counting picked up in the evening, the Liberal-National coalition was on track to win at least 74 seats and Labor at least 65 in the 151-seat House of Representatives, where parties need a simple majority to form a government. Other parties had six seats in total, leaving just six seats undecided.
Shorten conceded defeat and called on Labor supporters to respect the election result, saying he would step down as leader of the party.
“I know that you’re all hurting. And I am too,” he told supporters in Melbourne just after 11.30pm.
“I wish Scott Morrison good fortune and good courage in the service of our great nation. Now that the contest is over, all of us have a responsibility to respect the result, respect the wishes of the Australian people and to bring our nation together.”
The Liberal-National coalition has some recent experience with minority government. After it dumped Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister for Morrison in an internal power struggle last August, it lost two seats and its single-seat majority in the bloodletting that followed.
Pre-election opinion polls had suggested that the coalition would lose its bid for a third three-year term, and that Morrison would have had one of the shortest tenures as prime minister in the 118-year history of the Australian federation.
There was so much public confidence in a Labor victory that the Australian online bookmaker Sportsbet paid out A$1.3 million (US$900,000) to bettors who backed Labor two days before the election. Sportsbet said 70% of wagers had been placed on Labor at odds of $1.16.
Shorten, who campaigned heavily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said on Saturday morning that he was confident that Labor would win, but Morrison would not be drawn on a prediction.
Morrison, 51, is the conservatives’ third prime minister since they were first elected in 2013. He replaced Turnbull in a leadership ballot among government colleagues in August.
Tony Abbott, who became the first of the three conservative prime ministers in the 2013 election, conceded defeat in the Sydney seat he has held since 1994.
“The good news is that there is every chance that the Liberal-National coalition has won this election,” Abbott said.
Polling suggests climate change was a major issue in the Sydney seat for voters, who elected an independent candidate, Zali Steggall. As prime minister in 2014, Abbott repealed a carbon tax introduced by a Labor government. Abbott was replaced by Turnbull the next year because of poor opinion polling, but he remained a government lawmaker.
Senior Labor lawmaker Chris Bowen said his party may have suffered from what he conceded was an unusual strategy of pushing a detailed policy agenda through the election campaign.
“This is very close. … There are seats which we haven’t won which I was hoping to,” Bowen said.
Morrison began the day Saturday by campaigning in the island state of Tasmania, where the Liberals appeared to have gained two Labor-held seats. He then flew 900 kilometres home to Sydney to vote and to campaign in Sydney seats.
Shorten campaigned hard on more ambitious targets to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The government has committed Australia to reduce its emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. Labor has promised a 45% reduction in the same time frame.
Shorten, a 52-year-old former union leader, also promised a range of reforms, including the government paying all of a patients’ costs for cancer treatment and a reduction of tax breaks for landlords.
Morrison, a former tourism marketer, has ben promising lower taxes and better economic management than Labor.
Both major parties promised that whoever wins the election would remain prime minister until he next faces the voters’ judgement. The parties have changed their rules to make the process of lawmakers replacing a prime minister more difficult.
During Labor’s last six years in office, the party replaced Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with his deputy Julia Gillard, then dumped her for Rudd.