Geek, for a brief summary on recent moves:
The Sporting Shooters Association of Australian (Effectively our NRA) published the stated polices of each party prior to the election and asked members to vote for a couple of distinctly progun members of parliament and bear in mind the party platforms when voting in the senate or other seats in the house.
A bunch of shooters 'borrowed' the Liberty & Democracy party (think Ron Paul libertarian types) to run as minor party candidates and the Australian Shooters party ran candidates for the first time in a Federal election, in coalition with a pro fishing minor party to make them more palatable.
A point to keep in mind is that Australia has compulsory preferential voting. This means if you vote for a party ticket and your man doesn't get up the votes then transfer to the next designated party on your partys preference ticket. This continues until one person has more than 50% of the vote in the house, or 15% in the senate (we have multiple senators for each state). Kind of like the Democrats Iowa Caucus.
There were a _lot_ of minor parties. Something like 15, none had a chance of getting up. There are four major parties in the senate, Labor, Liberal/National, Green & Democrat.
In the House there are two, Labor & Liberal/National.
The Greens and the Democrats are completely antigun. Websites such as this would be banned or censored under their policies. Effectively no private firearms ownership would be allowed. The danger was that their parties would hold the balance of power in the Senate and be able to make demands for gun bans in return for passing government legislation.
Normally the Greens & the Democrats rely on preference harvesting from the other left wing minor parties to get their quota of votes.
The Liberty & Democracy party and the Shooters arranged preference deals with the various minor parties so that as the votes cascaded up the chain of preferences as each minor party was eliminated the preferences went to the shooters groups first and then from them to the Labour party before the Greens or Democrats.
The end result is that the greens failed to have their senator in my home state reelected, none of the Democrats senators were reelected with the Greens taking all of their seats.
So one antigun party was completely eliminated and the other made no real gains (they had pretty much told the Democrats how to vote anyway) when they expected an additional three or more seats.
The senate is now evenly split between the left and the right so the Govt will be able to get it's legislation through being blackmailed by the greens.
