Australia election too close to call, vote count to continue Tuesday

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is seeking to win a second term for the conservative coalition led by his Liberal party after a grueling eight-week election campaign, one of the country's longest in recent memory.

Throughout the campaign, opinion polls predicted the coalition would return to power, but with a significant loss of the seats it took in the landslide 2013 election in which it garnered 53.5 percent of the two-party preferred vote.

However, at the suspension of counting, the result was hovering between a hung parliament with neither party winning a majority, or a very slim victory for Turnbull's Liberal-National coalition.

Until counting resumes on Tuesday morning, which will include postal votes, the result of the election remains unknown.

This election is the third consecutive federal election called by a prime minister who came to power via a mid-term party-room coup.

The most recent leadership change came in September 2015 when Turnbull spilled the party leadership and ousted the deeply unpopular Tony Abbott, who had been in the top job for less than two years.

Just six months later, Turnbull called a double-dissolution poll, Australia's seventh, using a piece of rejected legislation aimed at instituting a construction industry watchdog as an election trigger.

The eight-week election campaign, the longest voters have had to endure since the 1960s, saw the nation's economic future, debt, and job creation as the hot-button campaign topics. But with little to separate the parties, rhetoric was ultimately the winner.

Both major parties launched full-fledged scare campaigns as polling showed the likelihood of a close-run result, the government appealing to its conservative base using the perceived threat of so-called refugee "boat people," while the opposition warned of a right-wing attack on Medicare, Australia's universal health care system.

One tangible policy difference between the parties that grew in importance late in the campaign was on the issue of marriage equality.

Turnbull, who is seen to represent the softer, less socially-conservative side of the Liberals, promised to put the issue of gar marriage to a national plebiscite at the behest of the right wing of his party -- a faction that supports the former leader Abbott and remains deeply suspicious of Turnbull.

Shorten campaigned in the platform that he would pass legislation legalizing marriage between people of the same sex as his government's first order of business.

If a hung parliament is declared, both parties will be required to negotiate with minor parties and independent MPs to form government. The last time that happened, in 2010, it took 17 days until a result was known.

If neither party can form a majority in coalition with the minor parties and independents then Australia could face another election.

Source: Kyodo