What, did you say it’s not possible? Why not? You don’t know where one is? Me neither, that’s why I asked you, you Earthling! Isn’t this Australia, one of the countries beliving it’s a highly developed, well run, modern Western society? And you say there’s no leader?
In real life, Australia had federal elections on 21 August. In about a day approximately 80% of the votes were counted and with very even result between the two major parties, a battle for power began.
Two weeks later, the AEC has officially counted only 83% of votes, that roughly 0.1% every day, and at this pace it’ll take months to count them all. Then they probably will recount at least a portion of them to confirm results. So it’ll take half a year in this country to get the votes counted in the first place.
In any democracy that would inform who has won. With 1/8 votes still being unknown, the balance can be shifted dramatically in the theoretical case that the remaining ones are heavily biased in some way.
An imaginary example: you have 15 million votes for 150 parliamentary seats. With 7/8 votes (13.1 million) counted, that’s 6.3 million for each major party, and 0.5 million for the fractions. With nearly 2 million votes left, there are 12 seats up for grabs. What a swift in balance if even half of that went to a single party of block!
The example above highlights how premature it is to form the government while 1/8 of the parliament is still unknown! How on Earth can you know which party
Her Majesty, Queen of Australia and all of the British Empire
will hold the power at the end of the day?
This brings us back to the first question: take me to your leader. Most countries do have provisions in their Constitution for these situations. First of all, you have to have reasonable certainty of the election outcome – Australia does not have that even yet. Secondly, there is a head of state who has the power, and obligation, to appoint someone to form the new government – doesn’t Australia have this power vested on anyone? With much faster counting and having a leader initiating the process we would have come out clean on this situation.
The government was finally decided upon on 7 September, after 2.5 weeks of deadlock. No drama there, it can take a lot longer in many cases. What strikes me, however, is that there was no real leader forming the government.
They said the democracy has finally won but the decision was ultimately made by two independent members of the parliament. Two! You call that democracy? In a population of four that certainly would be it, but with 22 million people three is a far cry from democracy. It’s an oligarcy! This oligarcy dictated how this country should be run, got their will, and now have given “green light” to the labour party to form a minority government.
Overall, this excercise showed that Australia needs to sharpen it’s constitutional approach to elections and democracy! These situations will occur again and we want to go in a nice, democratic way about them, don’t we. The way where people power rules, the votes count, and there’s a real leader in this country.
