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Video | Australia headed for a hung parliament
Counting in Australia's general election has suggested the result was “too close to call”, after the tightest race in decades. An election expert from Australia's public broadcaster ABC, Antony Green, was quoted as saying he believed a hung parliament was “now likely”.
Projections by ABC indicated that neither the ruling Labor party nor the opposition Liberal coalition would gain the 76 seats needed to win outright. The country's last hung parliament was way back in 1940.
The vote took place two months after Julia Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd in a controversial leadership challenge.
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Unofficial counts by ABC, based on two thirds of the votes counted, gave both Prime Minister Gillard's Labor party and Tony Abbott's conservative coalition 68 seats each.
Voting is compulsory in Australia, and fourteen million registered voters began casting their ballots at 0800 am Australian time (midnight CEST).
Initial counting had given Gillard's Labor party a marginal lead over Abbott, but the results also suggested a swing against Labor across the country.
Party officials insisted the prospect of a hung parliament was becoming "more and more likely".
Early results had indicated Labor suffered heavy swings against it in key states of Queensland and New South Wales.
Speaking on ABC, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith had explained the election would be decided by "30 or more marginal seats throughout the country".
Earlier, Abbott had declared that it was "a day when we can vote out a bad government".
"It's a day when we can vote in favour of a competent stable government which respects the tax payer's dollar," he said while casting his vote in Sydney.
Gillard, who voted near her modest house in suburban Melbourne, told reporters that it was a tight race. "This is a tough, tight, close contest, but I'm exercising my own vote," she said.
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If Gillard makes it I will see the result as a reward to Cynicism at it worse.
Rudd was a great PM having guided Australia through some of the toghest ever economic conditions.
His failing was that he was too a intellegent guy for a politician who did not suffer fools. He could afford it too for opposition was in tatters.
Yet the average incompetents saw an opportuity to politically 'knife' the man and go for an early election to lap the benefits of a full legislature. Hope their dastardly plan will come unstuck.
