Editorial: Strange allies

OPINION: After an election campaign that was desperately shallow and cynical, even by Australian standards, and a fortnight of low political horse-trading, Australia at last has a government.

The new administration may be a strange hybrid creature formed by the Greens out on the Left, the mainstream Labor Party and some odd independent mavericks representing conservative country districts, but it has for the moment saved the political skin of the Labor leader, Julia Gillard.

After engineering the defenestration of her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, and leading Labor to an electoral catastrophe against a weak opponent, Gillard would almost certainly have been unceremoniously ejected from the Labor leadership if she had not been able to return to power. As it is, since no-one in the Government she has formed has any interest in provoking a new election, the administration is likely to endure. How much it will be able to get done is another question.

Like recent elections in the United States, Britain and even New Zealand, the Australian election revealed a citizenry not wildly enthusiastic about either of the mainstream parties available and delivering a crucial say to outside, less conventional offerings. In Australia, simple analysis is complicated by the country's preferential voting system. On the primary vote the Liberal-led coalition of Tony Abbott won hands down over Labor – taking 43 per cent of the vote to Labor's 38. But when preferences were factored in Abbott beat Gillard by only the slimmest of margins – 50.01 per cent to 49.99. There are some who have argued that that small majority for the Coalition meant there was a moral obligation on the independents to follow the voters' choice and go with Abbott. In fact, the margin was so small that the argument is hardly compelling and the political reality was that the independents would use their position to finagle for as much as they could for their constituents and would jump according to what they thought was to their own best advantage.

The independents used their position to extort from Gillard a promise that $10 billion in funding already allocated to various health, education and other programmes would go to rural and regional areas of the country. This will no doubt please what Australians like to call "the bush" but is likely not to be so welcome to the vast majority of taxpayers, and Labor voters, who live in the cities. That, however, is a longer-term problem that can be dealt with another day.

How well such politically disparate spatchcocked-together elements can work to produce a legislative programme remains to be seen. Some commentators foresee gridlock and timidity. For a time this may not matter too much, particularly in the federal system Australia has. But the country faces serious questions on climate change, immigration and the economy that require major decisions. The longer they are postponed, the worse it will be.

In the meantime, Abbott, as Opposition leader, will be trying hard to make life as difficult as possible for the Government. As a seasoned negative campaigner, that will not be hard for him. But the election is hardly a full-throated endorsement of him and his party. If he is wise he will try also to formulate more substantial alternative polices than he was able to do during the latest campaign.

- © Fairfax NZ News