Mark Davis takes us through the three possible outcomes of this election:
Two or three of Oakeshott, Windsor and Katter agree to support a Labor government. Julia Gillard goes straight to the Governor General to be sworn in as the Prime Minister of Australia.
All three independents support a Coalition government. Gillard can then choose to ask the Governor General to swear Tony Abbot in as PM immediately, or wait until the next meeting of parliament. She’ll certainly face a no-confidence motion, lose, and be forced to advise the GG to swear Abbot in as PM.
One independent supports the Coalition and two support a Labor government. Each party has 75 votes in parliament, and refuses to give one up an MP to act as speaker of the house. Without a speaker parliament cannot function, so Australia goes back to the polls.
Published: Monday, 6th September 2010 at 6:12 PM
By day, he works for ABC TV as a web developer. By night, he plays bass guitar in Look Who's Toxic. He also runs a little Unix Timestamp conversion site. There are plenty of other things he should be doing, but most of the time he's dreaming of what he'll do when he grows up while watching bad Star Trek spin-offs.
