So who did you vote for?

[TomB]

You must be more savvy and divining the senate make up from provision quota than me. How do you know the balance of power in the senate?

I think the other independents will trump Brown.

[Ned Kelly]

Who are they, and why would they?

[J.W. Frogen]

Labor House, Sex Party Senate.

I like the Sex Party; it is a real libertarian party with some very radical ideas promoting individual liberty. This political philosophy has been long under represented in Australia.

Labor ran an atrocious campaign but our local candidate was spectacular for our region as a state minister. She says she lost largely because Labor had no coherent message and ran from their own proposals like the mining tax.

Indeed I think part of the reason the Green vote was so high is they picked up a lot of disaffected Labor far Left. Labor made a mess of the ETS, retreating from it under Rudd and then Gillard being non-committal with the idiotic idea of a "citizen's assembly". This certainly lost votes to the Greens, then Labor at the last minute adopted a tougher approach on people smuggling by boat, one much closer to the Liberal policy they foolishly scrapped but even this was incompetent, such as the fiasco of the East Timor proposal. This too would have lost those who want an easier, more accepting policy to the Greens.

And then there were the disastrous Rudd leaks, what a fucking snake this guy is. If the leaks were not directly from him then they were from his former staff, all he had to do is come out immediately and denounce them or claim them to be untrue but he sat and let the damage be done for a time simply because his damaged ego was more important than the party. If Labor does not form a minority government they need to punish Rudd with exile on the back bench forever more. Ironically if they do, they will probably have to give him a foreign policy related job and try to keep him on the plane, out of the country.

Abbot ran a masterful campaign, especially given were he started from. He shored up his base with a clear, consistent, simple message, he stayed on that message and so did his party.

It is interesting, a Labor pundit admitted on channel 7's coverage they expected Abbot to act like a wild card and stray off message inflicting damage to the Liberals but he did not, he was extremely disciplined.

As John Howard stated, he brought the Liberals back from the dead. (Turnbull had divided the party and angered its base with an ETS the party really did not want. Even many who voted for him against Abbot latter stated they did not want an ETS but felt they should not dump the leader.)

As for the Greens, the are the powerful independent block in the Senate because they are of course one party unified, but they only have power if the party that forms government tries to pass legislation the opposition will not have, and good minority governments do not try to do this, instead they work on issues that the opposing also wants. So for instance on people smuggling if the Liberals are in government they can say to Labor, you wanted a regional solution, we do to, let's compromise, and the Greens then become irrelevant.

Abbot has control of his party even if he can not form a government, (unless he has a personal meltdown) if Gillard can not form a government I do not know how long she can hold onto the reigns. She would need to hope the government falls within a year or I reckon she will be challenged, in particular as she blew an election that was really hers to win.