While the votes in the Australian election are still coming in, it looks early enough to say that conservative Tony Abbott has trounced liberal Kevin Rudd — and that Julian Assange's specially formed Wikileaks Party may not have done very well at all.

Assange himself was on the ticket for a Senate seat in Victoria. However, the results coming in so far suggest that the Wikileaks Party has little more than 1% of the vote counted so far — trailing behind the "Australian Sex Party."

As British blogger David Allen Green is pointing out on Twitter, Assange may struggle to gain one of Victoria's six seats, possibly losing out to the rather obscure special interest party the "Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party":

Of course, the votes are still coming in so there is some hope for Assange yet — and it would be unfair to not note that the freshly formed party did have something of a problem given that Assange was trapped in a renovated female bathroom in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

As the Guardian points out today, another factor was a recent party preferencing scandal, whereby Pirate Party candidates in New South Wales and Western Australia were involved in a last-minute decision to put right-wing parties (including some very right wing parties) ahead of the Greens on the WikiLeaks party's Senate group voting tickets in those two states. The move seriously hurt the party's credibility with its more left wing base, Mami Cordell writes, and a number of campaign staff resigned.