Well, the votes have been counted, the agonisingly complex preferences calculated, the writs have been issued, and the result is that something has really happened in Tasmania. And it’s a doozy.
Having taken the state to an election to gain stability, Premier Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberals have gained 14 seats in the new 35-seat Parliament, which is only one more than they were elected with in the old 25-seat Parliament at the last election.
Against them are 10 Labor representatives and a whopping 11 on the crossbench: five Greens, three Jacqui Lambie Experience, and three independents: former Labor member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly (and party leader) David O’Byrne, genuine independent Kristie Johnston, both reelected, and joining them, on his sixth go, Craig Garland, the northwest-coast fisherman and boatswain.
Garland’s election in the seat of Braddon was a Hare-Clark classic, the preferences careening between him, a fourth Liberal, and the Greens, who came achingly close. Ultimately, according to the redoubtable Kevin Bonham, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party preferences gave Garland an unreachable lead.
The result has returned Rockliff to the crisis position in which he believed himself to be on election night, when he gave a “victory” speech that sounded like someone reciting Fiona Apple lyrics while cops tried to talk him down from a ledge. Then, “JRock” (“he is a, er, rock, and he, er, rocks” E.Abetz) thought Labor was going to steam ahead to form government, and JRock would become a proverbial joke for his epic miscalculation. When Labor renounced that possibility, Rockliff regained a cockiness, a tone predicated on the Liberals picking up a 15th seat, and attaining a working majority with the three members from the Jacqui Lambie Experience.
It’s a measure of how difficult the position he is in now, that relying on the Experience looked like the good times. The Liberals now need one independent to give them confidence and supply. Kristie Johnston has said she will do so, but that’s as far as it goes. Johnston, a former mayor of Glenorchy, is a trained criminologist and can be assumed to be on the statist, progressivist side of the political divide.
Rockliff is not only claiming government; he has doubled down on claiming a mandate to implement the Liberals 2030 growth manifesto. He has nothing of the sort, and he will be fighting his way, vote by vote, until in a year or so, exhaustion looms, and Eric Abetz administers the Vulcan death grip and slides into the premier’s chair.
So the line goes, especially from Dean Winter, running for nomination as new state Labor leader, from the party’s fervently anti-Green right. But it might not be the windfall Labor is hoping for. The anger at Labor, for not allowing Rebecca White to stay in place and see what possibilities arose, is widespread, amplified by the 14-10-11 result, and baiting the Libs for trying to govern with minority support looks tacky when the Libs can say they are only doing their duty, and someone has to govern the state. Not making a play for government, with 18 left or progressive seats there without the Lambies, just looks pathetic, a betrayal.
Labor is also getting a bit red-cordialled about the reliance on the Lambie Experience. Given everything about the history of Lambie’s groupings — most recently, the departure of recently elected Senator Tammy Tyrrell from the Lambie Experience, to become an independent, with a resignation letter that sounds like it was written after a failed cult deprogramming in a Launceston motel — that’s ostensibly a reasonable assumption, with three almost-randoms elevated on a policy of having no policies.
However, that hope may be a little misplaced. While the Lambie Exp— okay, the Network, has only the most vestigial existence, and will take a major effort to hold itself together even if it wants to, there are obvious reasons why its members might make a go of it if they want to remain for more than one term. They were all elected on Lambie’s name, the even distribution of the vote across the ticket in each seat (due to the rotating ballot system) suggesting none had the least skerrick of a personal following. They will not develop one in three years, or two, or five months of government before the next election.
So who are they, the political Wonka ticket holders? In Braddon, Miriam Beswick, a Christian, a family carer and a former laser tag venue owner, and it don’t get much more north Tasmania than that (she beat out James Redgrave, the detective with Doddie, the campaign van); in Bass, Rebekah Pentland, who wants to shrink the state’s revenue base by abolishing land tax while massively expanding specialist health care; in Lyons, Andrew Jenner is a former lecturer in self-defence at the police academy and a Tory mayor of Maidenhead in the UK, who believes the Rockliff government was “well past its prime” and is an enemy of wasteful bureaucracy.
So, all three JLN members can be reasonably said to be of the political right, though there is nothing resembling a programmatic statement about taxes, spending and debt, the basics of government politics. But they are also to the right of Lambie herself, who has been left-shifted, after being staffed by the Australia and Grattan Institutes.
This was reportedly part of the bust-up with Tyrrell, who was given carte blanche to vote independently, and then outrageously proceeded to do so — opposing Lambie’s support of the teals’ two-prescriptions-for-the-price-of-one measure, which the Pharmacy Guild had fought, for example. All three members of the JLN state “members” have more business experience – i.e. some — than Lambie did when she entered the Senate. Rather than coming apart, they may form a working bloc independent of Lambie, and either push the Libs to better government or help them enforce a de facto austerity regime. Anything’s possible.
Ditto with Craig Garland, whose lead policies — remove the habitat-killing salmon pens from coastal waters, no vast windfarm on the far-northwestern Robbins Island, and more integrity and anti-corruption reform — are recognisably left-wing. But he’s also alarmed some people with anti-vax views, the company he keeps and some relatively mainstream views of gender and sex. And like many Tasmanian indie types, he talks an anti-political language of plain folks getting together and sorting it out. But like all independents, he’s going to have to vote a budget up or down.
The problem for the government, the Parliament and the state is that the vote they’ve made has utterly borked the Westminster-style politics that has been laid across it for more than a century. From World War I to the late 1980s, Hare-Clark reliably delivered a dual-party system, usually with small majorities at best and a couple of independents, usually former-party MHAs. This system put a strong emphasis on consensus and governing towards the centre. What it has now produced, in a post-class bloc political era, is something that its progenitors never really imagined happening. Tasmania has a European-style continental Parliament onto which Westminster adversarialism simply cannot be mapped.
The Tasmanian political system is desperately unwilling to accept this. Both major parties are insisting on the manly virtues of single-party government — strong, decisive, STRONG! — in a system that may never deliver majority government again. The majors’ belief that it will, as voters become exasperated with impasse, is a desperately cynical strategy that will produce the stasis and chaos it warns of, condemning the state to wasted months and years, reform left in limbo.
The Germans have a solution for this inevitable result of a multi-member proportional system. No, not dictatorship. Their parties negotiate prior to the poll, and minor groups announce what their conditions would be to support government after the vote. The majors announce what they would accept. So people know what combinations are possible as they vote.
That is obviously what should happen from now on, but for the moment the obvious solution, that will not be pursued, is also a German one: that the Liberals and Labor should form a “grand coalition”, with a shared program, the Greens forming the opposition, and the Lambies and independents the crossbench.
The advantage of this is that it reflects political realit and addresses the problem that the re-expansion to 35 seats was designed to solve: the impossibility of forming effective government. If the Liberals form a single-party government with 14 seats, they have barely got out of the ghetto of having eight or nine key members occupying the whole ministry, committee chairs, etc. They will crash again. With 24 members on the government benches, a full ministry would be possible.
The “grand alliance” would make visible the fact that the Liberals and Labor are much closer to each other, simply two variants of a simple-minded growth politics that will fail even more in the coming years. A grand alliance would allow the Greens to give the state a genuine opposition, and to elaborate an alternative vision. Eventually, it would produce the full undermining of the two-party dominant system.
Labor won’t go into a grand coalition, because it doesn’t want to admit its proximity to the Liberals. But any notion that it will go into alliance with the Greens is fond hope; Tasmanian Labor is two parties, and really, the Democratic Labour Party squats like a toad at its centre. The logic of Hare-Clark suggests it should split and run entirely separate tickets.
Thus, the most radical event has happened in what is simultaneously the most radical and backward state in the Commonwealth, and the backward dimension means there will be a period of stagnation before the contradictions of the result start to shake apart the status quo. Thirty-five years ago, the two-party system was breached by the Greens and Democrats getting to five seats. Twenty-five years ago, Jim Bacon chainsawed out the crossbenches to try and stop it. The efflorescence of the system now is a product of Bacon’s cynical act, done under the cover of a class politics.
Labor, not the Liberals, will lose more from what’s about to happen if it doesn’t admit the categorical shift in Tasmanian politics, the historical importance of what has just happened — the first Parliament to fully reflect the fragmented character of the present — and cut with the grain of it. They are in part holding out for federal reasons: Labor doesn’t want a nine-card, federal-state-territory full house, ahead of the Queensland election, and is happy for the Liberals to have Tassie, as a sort of bogan Taiwan.
They, and the state, will suffer for it. But for the moment it is all on the Lambies, who will get a ribbon round their necks, or go to the slaughter.
Guy got it right in one of his previous columns. Rebecca White should have stood up on election night and conceded that while Labor was short of a majority, the majority of Tasmanian voters were clearly to the Left of Jeremy Rockcliff, and Labor would seek to work towards a broad-based centre-left coalition to reflect that outcome. Sadly, there may be some in the Tasmanian ALP (and elsewhere), who would rather see Liberals in government than to define Labor as a Left party.
Labor voters everywhere desiring anything left of centre beyond empty words need to WTFU and stop chasing that mirage.
Agreed. Labor everywhere and particularly at the federal level is almost embarrassed by any idea it is a leftist party, which in part explains their fear and loathing of the Greens. It’s almost like having become left in name only they realise what other conservative parties have known forever and that is the Greens are the enemy of all right minded endless economic growth disciples. It’s the “economy stupid” variety of politics that has provided cover for the gradual purge of any revolutionary ideas from the ALP’s manifesto and replaced it with wishy washy feebleness that sees the current mob floundering around trying to appease the Libs in order to get “consensus”.
An active German Social Democratic Party member once told me that their worst enemy was the Greens, because they were competing for (some of) the same voters. On the other hand, the German SPD arguably lost a great deal of political ground when they became the junior partners of the centre-right Christian Democrats and didn’t seem to stand for a genuine alternative to the centre-right.
This is why a “Grand Alliance” of left and Right wouldn’t work.
What “left”? You cannot mean “Labor”.
Yes I do. They are said to be of the Left. They market themselves to their members that they are Left. The fact that they disappoint in this regard should not exclude them from this nomenclature.
Some people claim to be Napoleon which is more credible than for “Labor” to “..market themselves..” as left despite all it has done to “..exclude them from this nomenclature“.
Yes. In your mind
However, these days a Grand Alliance of Labor and Coalition, that is of Centre Right and further Right, is entirely feasible. It’s probably harder from a policy perspective to make the Liberals and Nationals work together than Labor and Liberals.
No. Only in the mind of left-wing purists. Such an alliance would fall apart at the first hurdle. The Tassie Liberals abolished funding to abortion clinics while Labor under RW fought to retain it. Can’t imagine such an alliance on so crucial a policy would last past morning tea. And budget time? Left and Right political coalitions don’t work and have never worked. Look at Germany. Left and Right have never been in coalition in Australia ever. They would disagree on minor things like accommodation and the decor of the room. It’s a nonsense suggestion. The Liberals would use to entrap Labor who just aren’t smart at this stuff.
What are you on about? Did you try to read what I wrote? It was only two sentences, it should not have been too difficult. A coalition of Labor and the Coalition is nothing like a coalition of Left and Right.
Yes it is. It may work on the local government level like in my LGA of Hawkesbury but State wide and plus, it wouldn’t last. Stop dreaming. You’re saying that Labor is Centre Right, right? That would be news to them. They certainly wouldn’t appreciate being labelled that. They see themselves as Centre-Left and you have simply tacked on your personal values to suit an argument and support this absurd proposition that Labor and Liberals can form a Grand Alliance. Something you must have swallowed reading a history book. This Socialist Alternative make believe land.
It wouldn’t last? So what, no government lasts when there are elections and more than one party. It would last as long as the skill and will of the governing MPs allowed, that’s no reason not to try.
And who cares what delusions Labor has about its position of the political spectrum? Nemo judex in causa sua. By their fruits you shall know them.
Yes. No government lasts but a government that will struggle to get through one day. Just so you and others here can feel satisfied that the “Left” and Labor side of politics is rooting for you?! And there is a miniscule possibility of warding off a conservative coalition government which make fall on its arse soon and big time?! I don’t buy it. That is petulant and unwise and poor strategy. And as for: “It would last as long as the skill and will of the governing MPs allowed, that’s no reason not to try.” That is a reason not to try. The skill and will of MPs is, let me say here and now, is a sometime thing. I think that is asking way too much of anyone but Tasmanian politicians?!
I’m not sure in Tasmania anyone really considers the ALP to be left and the Liberals to be right – both are considered essentially the same – whoever is in opposition opposes whoever is in power – but whenever they swap places…they swap political positions as well – so nothing changes – the money and power behind the scenes continues to call the shots. It’s local council ‘politics’ pretending to be a state government. It’s why both parties are frequently referred to in Tasmania as ‘the laborials’.
That’s a good response and analysis. In my commentary I just don’t see how a Right-Left coalition would work. 3 Independents, 3 Jacqui Lambies and 5 Greens. They don’t constitute a majority so would need one of the majors to form a majority on the floor of the lower house. I just can’t see the energy being expended fantasising how this will come about. I saw let the cards fall and see where they land. Love the, it’s local council politics pretending to be State politics. Can look that way I guess.
These days the Liberals sit where PHON was, Labor sits where the Liberals were, Greens sit where Labor was. And I doubt any of them have a clue where the centre is.
Does that correlate with an ageing electorate and with boomer ‘bomb’, dominated by above median age voters, not in the ‘real’ economy and have become or been nudged to be more conservative via wedge issues?
Is that any different from the past?
In the bush many ageing ALP voters are very socially conservative, no longer in real economy i.e. retired and along with large numbers of above median age voters, have been targeted by RW MSM; see anything refugee/immigration related; renewables, EVs & solar; The Voice No campaign and broad RW MSM domination as ABC steps back and local newspapers have closed.
No one is well informed except on personalities, sport and entertainment, nor is there a diversity of opinion, simply who shouts loudest and longest from a platform or a pulpit.
Dream on. With just 10 seats out of 35?! You are kidding. That would be seen as a naked power grab and a petulant job application. Rebecca White should have got up on election night, conceded then that she is no good, way short of a majority regardless of how the numbers fall (does anyone think Labor would negotiate if in a majority?) and resign as leader and offer to help rebuild the party under a new leader. Labor plus the Greens equals 15 seats. 2 Independent of dubious political allegiance and still short of a majority. Is there anyone here that can understand maths let alone politics?
Is that a joke on yourself? If at least 18 MPs in the TAS parliament decide to support one of their number as Premier, then that is the will of the Tasmanian people as expressed by their elected representatives, and that’s all there is to it. It makes no difference whatsoever how many, or how few, of those 18 or more MPs are Labor. Bleating piteously about Labor having only 10 MPs completely misses the point and ignores entirely how proportional representation and parliaments work. With 10 of its own MPs, Labor would need another 8 to reach 18. Could that be done? It certainly does not look impossible with the 11 cross bench MPs that were elected. But we will never know, thanks to Labor’s rank cowardice and irresponsibility.
Oh boy you are simple ain’t you. “If at least 18 MPs in the TAS parliament decide to support one of their number as Premier, then that is the will of the Tasmanian people as expressed by their elected representatives, and that’s all there is to it.” This is wishful thinking. If (I love that word. It represents the triumph of hope over experience). If (again) 18 MPS decide. 18 MPs from 3 distinct political voting blocs – Labor (who clawed 2 back out of 10 increased numbers), Greens (who got 3 up from previous 2 and did well) and 3 Independents who are a strange amalgam of folk heroes and Daniel Boone types can agree on what to eat for lunch I’ll eat my hat!!
I’m sick of this baby talk. 18 Tasmanians equals 54 heads and God knows how many fingers. It may be the will of the people as expressed in a State election but realistic government and stable government lead by the Left it isn’t.
And this, “…It makes no difference whatsoever how many, or how few, of those 18 or more MPs are Labor.” Oh yes it does. Labor have done well to ensure its future by not wanting to form a government. 10 out of 35 is a minor party. White should never have had the job and is really in her career, a victim of circumstance. She is the classic accidental leader like many Labor women and quite a few Labor men. Nathan Reece anybody?! Kim Beasley. Poor Simon Crean and the forgettable Mark Latham but one you can’t forget. Like the guy that chundered at your dinner party. From 10 to 18 is a classic Bridge too Far (sorry for the military metaphor but it really is).
I really think, and this is no joke, that the southern part of Tasmania should secede from the North. There should be 2 Tasmanias. The North are your classic inbreds. Your Tennesseans or Kentuckians. The South your transplanted yuppies, your Portlandian weirdos. The 2 won’t see eye to eye. Probably because they all have 4 eyes each minus the glasses but there you have it. The culturally backward and socially conservative and more politically conservative North are dictating to the progressive more left wing culturally diverse and artistic South with the help of the shrinking shy Centre as represented in Lyons. This just doesn’t happen in other States.
All that blather entirely misses the point. Any combination of 18 MPs is sufficient in Tasmania.
18 cobbled together from 3 distinct groups won’t work in Tassie. It wouldn’t work in a small shire. Labor should remove themselves and let God sort ’em out.
Labor has taken your advice, so you should be very happy with them. Why you presume there is no possibility of putting together a coalition to govern TAS is interesting. You seem to be just as blind as Labor to the reality of proportional representational politics, where success depends on recongnising the reality and necessity of building alliances and co-operating with others. If Labor, through either pride or stupidity or both, cannot grasp the inevitable consequences of Hare-Clarke it really has no business taking part in the elections there.
I am happy they have taken my advice. They should also have taken my advice and not had a bar of this Rebecca White leader from central casting. I’m overjoyed that Labor has finally done something right. They are the ones with their arse in the stern not you or these other privileged ego heads and taking heads in this forum who have nothing to lose. As for you saying has no part in elections because they can’t understand the complexities of government via the Hare-Clark system, this is just a barrel load of assumptions. Discursive and not bad in so far as it goes but ignores harsh realities. Simple maths. And a dose of realpolitik – not baby pie in the sky. We don’t do multi-party stuff well here. We did have a system of multi-party members for electorates in State legislatures years ago. For example, there would be 2 members for Rylestone or Blayney. Something like that. Pre-world war one State politics and government. If a candidate got enough votes, even though they didn’t come first, they would still get a guernsey and represent that seat. I am not 100% familiar with the exact history but I can only assure you that it did occur, before we went with the electoral device of preferential voting and single member constituencies.
I’d rather Tasmania split in 2. It really is a case of 2 countries there. Not many here on this forum grasp that. I appreciate that is another story.
Exactly. Labor’s loathing for the Greens is deep, visceral and quite mad, particularly in Tasmania. Nothing will shift it. If there were any grown-ups involved, a Grand Coalition with the Liberals would be easily arranged. If the Liberals can (usually) work with the Nationals they can certainly work just as well with Labor. But instead Labor in Tasmania is going to sit on the sidelines until the day it wins a clear majority. It’s ridiculous, this is not the conduct of serious people. Labor has obviously forgotten that in politics only the impotent are pure. Labor will be irrelevant until it grows up.
That would mean a Grand Coalition with Chancellor, er Premier Erica. And that puts Labor between a rock and a hard right place.
Labor could try telling the Liberals the deal depends on Erica staying on the back benches. It would be interesting to see how the rest of the Liberals respond to a choice between being in government or standing by Erica.
With a bit of luck, Tasmanian Labor voters will clock they’ve been abandoned, and next time return the favour.
I reckon the ‘nine card full house’ Guy talks about in the last para might be the reason (Federal) Labor doesn’t want the Tasmanian State branch to try and form a coalition with the Greens. I don’t know how ‘visceral’ the hatred is at a State level but it’s palpable federally. Rebecca White’s say – if she had no autonomy – might only have been to take that on the chin or resign.
Lots about the politicians who got elected, and their power plays etc. But nothing about what the voters of Tasmania want. Presumably it’s the voters who are changing, not so much the politicians – and this is what’s led to the problems Guy outlines.
That’s a good point and seldom mentioned in the all the political wishful thinking.
I think the Greens would be more resistant to the prospect of giving up the pristine moral sinecure that is the crossbenches and becoming the actual governing alternative than Labor would be of coalition with the Libs. I think it would be brilliant. Mostly because nothing focuses the mind on achievable climate change mitigation policy development and advocacy than the prospect you might one day get to put it into action.
But also because it would force a long overdue showdown between the environmental and material-left Greens, and the tediously precious assortment of privileged, middle-class Is-Pal, Gender, #MeToo and Critical Race Theory regressive reactionaries, who’ve lately hijacked the mainland Greens parties and made them unelectable. This gang have been the best allies the Alt Right, the new religious bigots and especially the bullying Lib-Lab neoliberal status quo could have hoped for.
Unelectable? Not around Brissbane, so I hear.
Cracking Article Guy – although is an Erica Betz Premiership really a possibility? I guess it would increase RWNJ migration. Also Bogan Taiwan, classic.
Bogan Taiwan was a ripper