Asia-Pacific News

Independents help Australia's Gillard hang on (2nd Roundup)

Sep 7, 2010, 11:18 GMT

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaks during a press conference in Canberra, Australia, on 07 September 2010. Gillard has won the support of independent MPs rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor to form a minority government. EPA/ALAN PORRITT

Sydney - Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Tuesday won the support of just enough independents to stay in office, breaking a 17-day logjam that built up behind the inconclusive August 21 parliamentary elections.

Two independents backed Labor, giving it the 76 seats needed to command a majority in the 150-member assembly and claim a second term.

After 17 days of bargaining, they decided the goodies Labor promised for their electorates were better than those on offer from Tony Abbott's conservatives.

'Labor is prepared to deliver stable, effective and secure government for the next three years,' Gillard said.

The independents are former Nationals, the junior party in Abbott's Liberal-led conservative coalition, and represent rural electorates that usually vote conservative.

That made the victory all the sweeter for Gillard but a bitter disappointment for Abbott, whose coalition won more seats and a greater share of the popular vote than Labor.

'I certainly felt optimistic and pessimistic; I felt exhilarated and deflated in turns in the course of the last fortnight,' the former trainee priest admitted. 'My challenge now is to ensure I'm not the best opposition leader never to have become prime minister.'

It was an election in which there was effectively no incumbent because Gillard deposed former prime minister Kevin Rudd just three weeks before the vote. Abbott, 52, himself was only nine months into his job, the fourth coalition leader since the 2007 Rudd-slide ended John Howard's 11-year conservative golden age.

Gillard, 48, has been weakened both by the slimness of her majority in Parliament and the pact with the Greens she was forced into to secure their support.

Dean Jaensch, professor of politics at Adelaide's Flinders University, said only the Greens' preference votes won Labor the government.

'What's going to be interesting is what sort of pressure and what sort of demands the Greens put on the government,' he said.

Another threat comes from Rudd himself, promised a senior cabinet post by Gillard to deter him from undermining her. He is likely to get foreign affairs.

There was likely to be recriminations on the conservative side too. Nationals leader Warren Truss shares the rage of other rural-based coalition parliamentarians that former Nationals deprived them of government.

'There was a real chance to get a fair go and a new deal for people living outside capital cities, and that opportunity has now been lost,' he said.

Colin Barnett, the Liberal premier of Western Australia, said he was 'shocked and disappointed that two country independents with basically conservative rural electorates should support a left-wing Labor-Greens alliance.'