CANBERRA, Australia, Aug 22, (Agencies): The leaders of Australia’s two major political parties began negotiating power deals with independent lawmakers Sunday after the nation’s closest election in decades failed to deliver a clear mandate to govern.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who remains caretaker leader, said it was clear that no party had won a majority of parliamentary seats in Saturday’s poll that delivered an extraordinary voter backlash against her center-left Labor Party after a single three-year term.

Labor hemorrhaged votes to the environment-focused Greens party as the government was punished for shelving plans to charge major polluting industries for every ton of carbon gas that they emit.
Gillard and Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal Party, said they had initiated talks with three independents in the House of Representatives as well as the Greens party in a bid to secure their votes in the House of Representatives. Neither revealed what they were prepared to offer in the confidential negotiations.

Both Labor and the Liberal-led coalition have conceded that neither is likely to hold the 76 seats needed to form a government in the 150-seat lower chamber.
“It’s my intention to negotiate in good faith an effective agreement to form government,” Gillard told reporters.

She suggested that Labor would be better able to get its legislative agenda through the Senate, where major parties rarely hold majorities. The Greens’ record support in the polls increased the party’s Senate seats from five to nine, giving them the leverage to become kingmaker in deciding which major party controls that chamber.

“So the question before all of us is this: Which party is better able to form a stable and effective government in the national interest?” Gillard said.
But Abbott, who doubts the science behind climate change and rules out ever taxing polluters for their greenhouse gas emissions, said Labor had proved unstable even with a clear majority.
Bitter recriminations within Labor over the election result have begun, with at least one lawmaker who lost her seat blaming her colleagues’ dumping of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for Gillard. Some lawmakers have blamed the result on a series of damaging media leaks against Gillard during the election campaign which are suspected to be the work of disgruntled Rudd loyalists.
“It’s certain that any Labor government emerging from yesterday will be chronically divided and dysfunctional,” Abbott said.

Independent Tony Windsor said he planned to talk with fellow independents Bob Katter and Rob Oakeshott on Sunday to decide whether to negotiate a power deal with the major parties as a group or individually.

They were the only independents in the last Parliament and are former members of the Nationals party, which is a coalition partner of the Liberals. But all have said they are open to supporting a Labor minority government.
“Whichever side it is, we need to have some stability and maintenance of stability so that the government can actually work,” Windsor told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

First
Australia’s knife-edge vote looked certain to bring a hung parliament, but it has also delivered the country its first Aboriginal and Muslim politicians in the lower house, and its youngest.
Neither the ruling Labor party or conservative opposition managed to secure enough seats to claim office in the closest race in decades, with the balance of power to fall to a handful of independent and minority MPs.
Among those elected to Australia’s first hung parliament in 70 years is Bosnian-born union worker Ed Husic who claimed a seat for the Labor party in Sydney as the country’s first Muslim MP.
Baby-faced Wyatt Roy, 20, was elected to parliament as its youngest ever member, just hours after voting for the first time.
Roy, a university student, snatched the key northern seat of Longman for the conservatives, with 52 percent of the vote.
“I don’t think I was ever the likeliest candidate and I’m very, very proud of the work that the local campaign team did here,” Roy said.
“There’s a lot of people out there in the community who put a great deal of faith and trust in me and I can’t tell you how humbling an experience that really is.”
The conservatives also looked on track to deliver Australia its first Aborigine to the lower house, with Ken Wyatt ahead of his rival in the Western Australian seat of Hasluck.
Fewer than 400 votes separated him from sitting Labor MP Sharryn Jackson on Sunday, but Wyatt, who is of Noongar, Yamatji and Wongi heritage, said he was confident “we will fall over the line.”
“I think Australians have been very generous in the way we’ve come forward over the last 30 years,” said Wyatt.

Aborigines were denied the vote for many years, and Wyatt will be only the third indigenous person elected to either house of parliament after Neville Bonner and Aden Ridgeway served in the Senate from 1971 and 1998 respectively.
Wyatt said he would use his first speech to pay tribute to former Labor leader Kevin Rudd for his historic February 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations of Aborigines removed from their families by white
settlers.

“When he delivered his address to the house that day, being a typical macho male I really didn’t think the emotions would impact me as much as they were,” Wyatt told the AAP newswire.
“I must admit I was sitting there with tears because I knew what my mother and her brothers and sisters had gone through, particularly knowing the abuse that happened to her.
“I wish my mother was alive and (could) have seen.”
The final result in Hasluck is not likely to be known for up to two weeks.
Aborigines are believed to have numbered around one million at the time of white settlement in 1788, but there are now just 470,000 out of a population of 22 million, and they are Australia’s most disadvantaged minority.