Confident that he won the election, Turnbull addressed the reporters in Sydney on Sunday to claim victory.
Advertisement
IT IS now 100% clear that the Coalition has won enough seats to form a majority government in the House of Representatives.
The latest results, with about 80 per cent of the votes counted, have raised questions about Mr Turnbull’s leadership and left him without a strong mandate for much-needed economic and fiscal reforms.
Labor, which now has 66 seats under its belt and is expected to win three more, conceded defeat.
Three out of the five elected had agreed to back the coalition when it came to supply and confidence matters, a move that effectively ended talk of Shorten leading a minority government or Australians being forced back to the polls.
ADELAIDE’S western suburbs seat of Hindmarsh is one of only two across the country still considered to be in doubt, as the Coalition locks in a Lower House majority.
Sydney/Melbourne: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared victory at the federal election as he addressed the media following opposition leader Bill Shorten’s concession of defeat. Mr Georganas said he was feeling optimistic but knew that a single “bad batch” of postal votes could slash his lead.
“I think a plebiscite offers us a great future, like it did in Ireland, of comprehensively putting this issue to bed in a way where the community completely owns the result and politicians just have to toe the line”.
After the signing of this agreement, which is occurring today, the Prime Minister will visit Governor General Peter Cosgrove to be sworn in again as Prime Minister.
Despite the election loss it is believed that Shorten has the support of the Labor to continue as leader of the party due to the Labor winning as many as 69 seats compared to 55 in the 2013 election.
Turnbull thanked Australian people for voting him in.
“I understand we need to make this parliament function and we’ll be up for that”, Mr Shorten said. The Nationals are expected to be in a better bargaining position for cabinet positions after they secured a higher than expected percentage of seats in the lower house at the election.
Moody’s said such a scenario would be “credit negative”, echoing S&P’s decision last week to cut Australia’s credit rating outlook to negative from stable, threatening a downgrade of its coveted triple A status.
The chaos follows one of the closest elections in Australian history, which failed to deliver an immediate victor.
Labor is also looking at a frontbench switch up, with a source telling Fairfax that all positions bar Chris Bowen’s as shadow treasurer are under consideration.
Advertisement
Restoring the building industry watchdog, imposing tougher penalties for union corruption and a bill to “stop the union takeover of the CFA in Victoria” will all be resisted by Labor and the Greens in the Senate. He had used the Senate’s blocking of the Bills to trigger a double-dissolution election, but could now face an even more hostile upper house.
