The prime minister said he remained confident the coalition could secure a majority in the new parliament.
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Peter Chen, a political analyst at the University of Sydney, said the election had exposed Turnbull as a failure.
Voters went to the polls on Saturday in the country’s first-ever double-dissolution election, where all the seats in both the lower and upper houses of parliament were contested at the same time.
“Mr Turnbull tried to capitalise on the Brexit vote and say because of what happened in England that you had to vote for him in Australia”, Mr Shorten said.
“Clearly Mr Turnbull has jeopardised the rating by delivering instability”, Mr Shorten told reporters.
Labor has called on Mr Turnbull to resign for failing to provide the stability he promised, but Coalition frontbencher Josh Frydenberg dismissed that on the ABC’s Q&A program.
“This guy is like David Cameron of the southern hemisphere”, Mr Shorten said.
“There is no doubt that there is a level of disillusionment with politics, with government and with the major parties, our own included”.
“What I’m very sure of is that whilst we don’t know who the victor was, there’s clearly one loser: Malcolm Turnbull’s agenda for Australia and his efforts to cut Medicare”, Shorten said, referring to Australia’s universal health care system.
The AUD opened lower on Monday morning, trading at 74.48 United States cents at 7 a.m. Election results are not expected to be finalised until a few weeks.
Australian last had a hung parliament from 2010-13 but the then minority Labor government only had to deal with one party in the Senate to pass legislation.
Both major parties are agonisingly short of the 76 seats needed to form a majority government in the House of Representatives, and negotiations are already underway with independents who will hold at least four seats.
Launching a stinging rebuke, Mr Shorten likened Mr Turnbull’s position to that of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union – which he effectively lost – and subsequently announced his resignation. Vote counting could still take several days, electoral officials have said.
Electoral Commission projections give the coalition 67 seats in the 150-seat lower house, against Labor’s 71 and five to independents and the Greens.
“I take full responsibility for the campaign”, he said, adding that “there are lessons to be learnt from this election”.
“We will work with the Liberals, we will work with the crossbenchers and the minor parties because this country, and this parliament, is too important to fall foul of needless partisanship”, he said.
The Labor leader, jubilant from his party’s stronger than expected showing in the election in which there is even a chance of them forming a minority government, was going in for the kill on Monday. “But we won’t compromise our principles”.
Oliver said Australia’s rating could be lost almost immediately if Labor wins seats because of the party’s strategy for larger deficits over the next four years.
After calling this election early in a bid to shore up his power, he is now reportedly facing a revolt from within his conservative party, prompting senior Liberals to call for calm.
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Mobbed by reporters outside his Sydney home on Monday morning, Turnbull ignored a question about whether he was still confident of his leadership, telling journalists simply that “the counting continues”.
