polling places dont open for another 6 hours, but today Australia is voting.

I am honestly predicting that we will end up with a hung parliment, because both major parties have ticked off a lot of people, and the greens party (who are almost popular enough to be considered a third major party) will hold the balance of power.

So how far do you have to travel to go to these polls?

VOTE DINGO

Sounds like our last election, although one of our major parties did their pissing off back in the 80s.

yup, we pretty much seem to have a hung parliment, just gotta wait for the postal votes and such to come in.

Can someone describe the consequences of a Hung Parliament for those not familiar with Australian Politics?

I'm hung, can I be on Parliament?

My brother is a missionary in Australia right now.

That is all.

Good luck with your 'democracy'.

Don't blame me, I voted for the Queen.

I like Australia, because they don't hesitate to vote some jerk out of office. They just say "hey we think you suck... you're fired."

I like that. They actually vote.

In basics, it means that the major parties need to try and win the favor of the independants to see who will form government, and at this point, it is realy hard to see who will get their favor, mostly cause I have no idea of the policies of the independants that have won, and there are two seats that are still undecided, and both parties are tied at 72 seats each (76 are needed to form a majority government.

However, due to the fact that the last hung parliment was back in 1940, I cant tell you all the complex consequences of a hung parliment. Though, the Australian Greens (who were actualy the first Greens party in the world, and pretty much the only one that actualy has any real influence, partly due to quite often holding a balance of power) have managed to win their first senate seat in a general election (as opposed to a by-election).

Also, I currently dont know who the greens will support, due to the Australian Liberal (who are our conservative party, which has lead to the creation of the term "small l liberal to talk about people that arent conservative), being against mandatory internet censorship, which is something that the labor party seems to be insisting on, even though it is extremely unpopular, although pretty much every other policy that the Liberal party has is something that the Greens don't support.

Not that the Australian Labor (yes, they spell it the American way, as they were formed at a time when it was a hip thing to use American spellings) is much better, because in addition to mandatory ISP level censorship, they have a lot of other unpopular policies that could cost them support for a minority government (I think that the mining tax is currently one of the biggest issues).

Basicly, it seems that we won't be getting much done in the federal government over the next three years. Hopefuly the next election follows what happened in 1943 (which was the election after the one that resulted in our last hung parliment) and one of the parties gets a large victory.

No matter what happens, I think we can pretty much guarantee that the next Australian Prime Minister is going to be racist against the aboriginals.

The Australian constitution states that you must have the backing of the majority of the 150-seat House of Representatives to form a government, so over the next few weeks both of our major parties which hold 72-73 seats each will attempt to form a minority government in coalition with a bunch of independents and minor-party representatives who hold the balancing 4-5 seats. The minority government will be very unlikely to last more than a year or two before a double-dissolution election is called.

What's a double-dissolution election? As with the American system all our bills must pass through the House of Reps and the Senate before becoming law. If the Senate twice rejects a bill that's been twice successfully passed through the House of Reps then the Governor General (the governmental representative of the English monarchy in Australia - 99% of the time a purely ceremonial position) can dissolve the House of Reps and the Senate and call an election irrespective of how long has passed since the last election.

So basically we're set for a period of 18 months or so of people bickering and nothing really happening before we go through the whole process again.