Election deja vu
General election, Labor (sic) loses its majority, the result is a hung parliament, everyone scrabbling around trying to woo the independents, the first Green Party candidate is elected to the lower house – no one is currently governing the country. Sounds familiar? Yep, same thing has happened here. It’s looking like the right wing (‘Liberal’) coalition will be the ones able to make the numbers up, but as yet nothing confirmed. Australia holds its elections on a Saturday as it is a legal requirement to vote. We arrived back in Melbourne on election day, so went along to the polling station. There were two voting slips – one for the lower house (House of Representatives) and one for the upper house (Senate). They have PR here, and you have to number all your preferences – your vote is invalid if you only number say your first two choices, and fail to put numbers in the other boxes. However, for the constituency we were in, for the upper house seat, there were 61 candidates. Hmm, voting can take some time! Still, that was an improvement on the last election, when there were 84 candidates!