Australia's election may have produced the second hung Parliament in 6 years

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull casts his vote

(Image credit: Rob Griffith/Associated Press)

published 2 July 2016

Australia's national election on Saturday saw polls close with no party clearly possessed of the 76-seat parliamentary majority necessary to form a government. The ruling Liberal-National Coalition is in the running to hit that goal, while the Labor Party, though improving significantly over its performance in the 2013 election, will not make the cut.

"I don't think (anyone) thought it would be quite like this, but it's reminiscent of a series of Australian state elections we've had in recent times," said Nick Economou, Monash University senior lecturer in Australian Politics, "so perhaps this is the new norm where everyone is on a knife edge and you get a number of small party MPs."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.