Christopher Pyne, the government leader in the House of Representatives, said his conservative Liberal Party-led coalition would form a majority government following the weekend election or a minority government with the support of independents.
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The Coalition now has 73 seats, leaving it three short of the number it needs to gain an absolute majority.
Labor Leader Bill Shorten on Friday also said he believed Mr Turnbull was set to be returned to the Prime Minister’s office but he hit out at the Liberal leader as a man without substance.
Mr Turnbull is contacting cross-bench politicians who may be persuaded to support his government.
“We will form a majority government in our own right but I am talking to the crossbenchers as I would do regardless of what our own numbers in the House amounted to”. “And that was because we wanted to run a positive, optimistic campaign”, she said earlier this week.
“We really want to see them start achieving some of their forecasts”, S&P associate director of sovereign and worldwide public finance Anthony Walker told a briefing, noting that the cost of refinancing Australia’s debt is up to three times more than it earns in foreign currency.
The latest ABC projections give the government 73 seats and Labor 66, with independents and minor parties winning five and six seats still in the balance almost a week after Saturday’s polls.
Counting continued on Wednesday in electorates where the result has been too close to call. The Coalition now has 73 seats with Labor on 66, and 5 seats held by the Greens or independents.
Can Malcolm Turnbull form a government?
“You need 77 (seats) because you have got to provide a speaker but 76 is the figure we are working on”, he told ABC radio on Thursday.
The Australia dollar fell half a USA cent after S&P’s announcement, which cited concerns the coalition government would be hampered in its plans to return to budget surplus as it struggles to form a majority government. The government and the opposition Labor Party are now each short of the 76 seats needed to govern, and with the vote count ongoing, there is the prospect of a hung parliament.
Since Saturday’s poll, the coalition has attributed blame for its losses to a scare campaign mounted by the opposition Labor Party, which claimed the coalition lacked commitment to the country’s national healthcare system, Medicare.
But Turnbull, who became prime minister in September after ousting his colleague Tony Abbott in a party room vote, said he remained confident of forming a majority government.
“Australia (is) not for sale – nor am I”, he said on Sunday.
The opposition center-left Labor Party held an upbeat meeting of lawmakers at Parliament House, with opposition leader Bill Shorten acknowledging the Liberals had likely won a second three-year term, but saying its narrow margin of victory meant it faced many problems trying to govern.
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Mr Shorten, who welcomed newly elected Labor MPs into the federal caucus on Friday, said he didn’t expect the new parliament to last long.
