So after all the tumult and the shouting, the Hare-Clark-Robson system roaring away, the votes flying in all directions, Tasmania is to get another Liberal government, this time buttressed by the Jacqui Lambie Experience, a group that went to the election proudly stating it had no policies.
Labor folded its tent immediately. Now former leader Rebecca White, after a placeholding speech on Saturday night that left open the possibility of seeking a coalition, announced on Sunday morning the party had knocked that on the head. She then vanished into obscurity after a decade in the thankless, joyless role of opposition leader, having foregone the chance to commit fully to a coalition and dare the caucus to pole-axe her later (they would have pole-axed her, so fast as to get bronze in one of the state’s wood chop competitions).
The Liberals’ need to turn to Lambie (leaving a few wildcards aside) does ostensibly give Lambie, and the group of elite policy professionals who staff her, a sudden leap in power, controlling two-thirds of the swing vote on the federal crossbench and balance of power in the state house (although, if the Libs stick at 14, they will still need one more stray vote for a majority). Ostensibly is the operative term.
Lambie has expressed her surprise that Labor folded so early. But had White gone the tonk on Saturday night, would she have opened negotiations? What’s that you say, irregular? Mate, Westminster-wise, it’s all shonky, with Premier Jeremy Rockliff negotiating with someone not in Parliament to secure public commitment to a backing that can’t be guaranteed, by members whose actual identity is unknown. It’s a Parfit storm.
But leaving that aside, the dismal fact is that the whole Jacqui Lambie Experience is, so far as actual populism goes, a bit of a Travelling Snake Oil Road Show. People’s vote is, in a sense, nothing other than what it is. You vote what you vote for. Nevertheless, the Lambie Project combines political support for the Liberals when it’s required (to guarantee preferences), which is to the right of her supporters, but policies well to the cultural left of her supporters, thanks to her left-wing think-tank staffing.
Well, they know their stuff. This is politics for the post- and anti-politics era. The state campaign was slick and well thought out, focused on the shining personal integrity of the candidates as endorsed by Lambie herself. It is both a perfectly legitimate way to campaign and maddening to anyone who believes that politics is about saying how you think the world works and what you’ll do to make it do so better.
Lambie is now in a tantalising position. She has a federal-state axis of balance of power, of great potential. But she is also in the same position as Clive Palmer when he elevated her to the Senate in his own rentaparty. Nothing binds whoever, by a degree of chance, ends up in the Assembly.
There are eight candidates — three each in Braddon and Lyons, and two in Bass (one Bass candidate has a lower personal vote) — from among whom will come the two or three members for the Experience. They include several military vets, an ex-Tory mayor from the UK, child protection lawyers and small business owners — and some are several of these.
They are, in other words, very different people from the insider policy and media professionals who currently staff Lambie, and they are particularly different in coming from outside knowledge class milieux and mindsets. They do not strike one as people likely to defer to abstract expertise, or possibly anything. It will be fascinating to watch.
What else was possible? That a genuine grassroots movement might have been organised, with an actual program — left economically, right culturally — for militant action on health, housing, boondoggles and the like, and actual joined-up politics? Could it have gone up against the Lambie starpower?
Probably not. But had there been, could Labor have considered a three-way coalition with the Greens and a stable third party? Could the entire crossbench have become an “Assembly group”, constituted itself as the opposition and sent Labor to the crossbench? Possibilities, possibilities, all going down the chocolate fountain drain. Well, it’s an experiment and a test. But it’s always a bloody experiment and a test. Total victory would be, occasionally, nice.
Nevertheless, Team Lambie will surely have to visibly and actually deliver concrete improvements in Tasmanian life, things it can point to that the Rockliff/Abetz/Tubby Quinn* government wouldn’t have done, to go back to the people with in four years. There is surely a limit to spectacle and personality politics. Lambie is now, to some degree, hostage to the actions of the state members working under her name. For as long as they are.
*Tubby’s not a Liberal. But the only other name sufficiently winsome to go in here is Tabatha Badger, incoming Greens member for Lyons.
Jacquie Lambie’s predicament, one entirely of her own making, is that the more successful she becomes at securing her own power, the more starkly she exposes the counterfeit nature of her entire political being to date. Had Jim Hendrix not died at 27, but instead gone on with Noel and Mitch to do endless tribute tours into their eighties like too many of their peers, milking the ‘ground-breaking’ Experience ‘experience’ to the point of self-parodic, retrospective negation, the longer Lambie hangs about the political scene doing f**k-all, the more obviously ersatz her pantomime ‘plain-speakin’ n’ plucky bogan shtick’ reveals itself to be. You know she senses this herself, too. Her recent ‘barely contained fury’ meeja stuff – OTT even by her contrived Jerry Springeresque production standards – smacks of rapidly-onsetting ‘shtick panic’. It’s Hendrix at 85 again, playing his 11th ‘Woodstock Nostalgia’ gig by now, by this late stage feeling the need to ramp up the guitar-burning climax with a whole jerrycan of high octane aviation fuel, just to keep proving his ‘authenticity, man’, to a Boomer audience who are now mostly dozing, deaf or fixated on trying to figure out how to turn off their iphone flash so the footage of the blaze looks better on the Tik Tok short they are also struggling to figure out how to tag into to their grand-daughter’s 2.5K following.
Lambie’s crunch choice now is to decide now whether or not she’s who she’s always claimed to be, or just another FoS politician on the make. Welcome to the Rep’s eternal dilemma, mate: to do any truly disruptive (‘independent’) good while you are there, you’ve got to genuinely jeopardise your prospects of remaining there. Alas, like most populist ‘anti-politicians’, Our Bogan Lass has very quickly discovered that happiest of happy, self-affirming coincidences (O, happy frabjous serendipity, Jacquie!) Y’know, the one that assures oneself that what is ‘best’ for ‘democracy’ and ‘decency’ and ‘egalitarian, no-nonsense Aussie-ness’…why, it just happens to be oneself continuing to most nobly and honourably occupy that $200K, all-expenses paid, highly-staffed, Australian magazine and ABC-duchessed and pampered sinecure up there in nasty old Canberra! O, happy frabjous…you get the picture. T’is truly a noble sacrifice – the horror, Senator Plain-Speakin’, the horror – to be an ‘anti-politician’ trapped in the Hell-Town of The Politician!
There is one and only one point to being an ‘independent representative’ in a democratic parliament. One and only one point of eschewing the security, stability and resource-splendour of an organised party (or sponsored-grouping, like the Teals). And that’s to burn up every shred of your (limited shelf-life anyway) personal-political capital – that is all you have – by genuinely forcing disruptive change upon the entrenched governing business-as-usual groups. Using whatever real power – floor voting/negotiating leverage – you manage to bodge up at the ballot.
That’s what people who vote for Independents are voting for, Jacquie Lambie: for you to be a democratic kamikaze pilot if you need to.
And bluntly, Senator Lambie: : for all your endless populist self-advertising, you’ve made it repeatedly and crystal clear, with your gutless voting decisions – more strictly, your gutless serial equivocations – that you’re not remotely interested in ‘changing’ anything about ‘politics’. Least of all the most agreeable upward trajectory of your own journey, since you temporarily thumbed a ride on the arch populist-cynic Palmer’s grubby ‘anti-politics’ bandwagon. For now, Senator Lambie, you’re the functioning antithesis of your own loud and relentless self-advertising. Like just about every ‘anti-politics’ politician who ever railed against ‘politics’ and ‘politicians’ – My policy, you ask? Why, I am anti-politics, of course! – it’s YOU who are the quintessential ’empty politician’, believing in nothing so much as your own continued political existence. Compared to you, an Eric Abetz – or a Pauline Hanson, or the Socialist Alliance, or even the balaclava’d goons who hoik their right arms high on the steps of Parly House – are paragons of principled, coherent, meaningful political value systems. So by all means keep rolling out your tired old Jimi Hendrix flashy-populist tricks – playing your guitar with your teeth, or behind your back, or pretending to burn up the Tassy political landscape…but strictly as staged illusion, natch, with a tiny little Zippo lighter no more bonfire of the systemic masses than torching the front door of the old Parly House was.
But no-one’s impressed by that kind of cliched made-for-telly-soundbite cr*p anymore. Use your power this time around. Or f**k off. Canberra has more than enough pretend-bogan imposters already. Good luck. Mate.
So well said!!
Wrong wrong wrong.
Bloke loves a pluralist website, Don & Cate! You are both doubtless every bit as correct as moi…
*group hug* 🙂
Looking forward to you proving the triple assertion – NB citations required, not unfounded expectoration.
Nice vat of vitriol there, Jack.
Only quibble – I think you were wrong to throw Jimi under the bus; I have a feeling that if he’d made it to his 80s, he’d still be cool. Dude’s thing was ball-tearing innovation with one foot in the blues… He would’ve been doing collabs with NIN and RATM I bet. (Showing my own old fart vibes with 30yo examples of cool)
Not vitriol. Brisk discursive brio! Really didn’t pick you as a melty snowflake, Kimmo. 🙂
Hendrix had truly massive (south) paws and his timing was impeccable re: guitar technology, both of which (like his sound) has tended to over-amplify his musical legacy and influence, I think. There were much better, no less innovative and certainly more creatively interesting guitarists around in his time, especially other black guys. He mostly played a RH Strat strung upside down, which has all sorts of tonal and timbre and dynamic control implications, and he had a whole bunch of ‘dawn of the guitar age’ sonic modifiers to play with: wah-wahs, overdrives, phasing and distortion stuff. But there’s no question he really did (re)define what the guitar could do. Technically he wasn’t that great a player – extreme distortion and volume hides a multitude of sloppies and cliches, and there’s prolly at least five million contemporary 20 year olds who sat glued to YouTube tutes through Covid who are faster, more precise, more musically aware and maybe even more inventive than he ever was, too. Even I can play most of what he could, note-ish for note-ish, given enough time to tab it out. He was also a first-class physical and sexual bully, a lazy and entitled asshole, and a serial user and abuser of people of very good faith who gave him every leg-up. Certainly a classic rock pedigree of the highest order.
The point of running with the JHE metaphor was simply that the gap between reality and contrived image that, I think, obtains to the JLE too. (Also, the chance to gratuitously talk about guitars.) It’s bad enough watching Keith Richards at 125, flopping about the stage like a bizarre bag lady striking ironic ‘Keef’ poses, while his ‘guitar technician’ bloke plays his bits from under the stage. I think a Hendrix still performing at 82 would have long retro-hollowed out any claim to greatness, which, securely quarantined in another time and place by premature death, he certainly deserves to be granted.
“…
theRundle’s JHE metaphor…”‘pols.
Again, looking forward to the JLE “Lividity Haze” rip-off version of Jimi’s.
She might still surprise us both klews. Bogan hillbillies r m’natural peeps, boganese m’natural jam. Shh, no blabbing.
“Not vitriol. Brisk discursive brio!”
Potato potahto. It wasn’t a diss.
I know. Nor mine. Blimey you really are going soft, softie!
Basically correct, just a pity it’s written in the Guy Wankle school of writing style. Why use 10 words when you can prance around with a 100?
Yes, I am generous like that. As in the BV mix and the boudoir, more Jack on the page is…more.
You’re welcome, mangga. ?
In short she is a symptom of our RW MSM and ‘architecture of influence’ dumbing down policies and debate creating ‘talking points’ for ‘low info’ cohorts, then allow analysis to be avoided, platform those who shout loudest and longest, like a preacher in their pulpit.
Underpinned by deep, genuine and justified frustration with the main parties. I think it’s impossible to overstate the importance of that. Elected independents – good, bad, ugly – are always a raised amber flag warning of systemic dysfunction. When they’re as manifestly rubbish as Lambie was when Palmer bought her first sinecure, it’s a red flag.
With luck Australians will never get to suffer any parliament in which neither of the two broad ‘party-based’ governing combos have power. Government by an informal and unstable coalition of multiple micro-groups and Indies is the least-best system of democratic governance. It’s like group sex: sounds fantastic in theory but in practise everyone just gets in everyone else’s way, pushing and pulling and stabbing and thrusting the empty lusty air. With no-one allocated to order the pizzas and wash the sheets.
I blame our misinfo system of the MSM, commissioner class, oligarchs and influencers who spend much time keeping both the ALP and LNP on piste by also helping some third parties and troublemakers if they take votes from the ALP, but obviously not the Teals; the LNP seems the most fearful as the RW MSM, oligarchs and IPA is all they have got?
‘ammo’ not ‘money’.
Plausible enough. As you know I’m no less hard on the various lefty imposters waving about their ‘progressive’ credentials about cynically. At least half of those voting for Lambie would probably rather be voting for a decent local ALP candidate.
Party wise, the Libs are more palatable than usual, which andmittedly isn’t saying much. The Greens in Tas do seem to have hung onto more of their original environmental/small local community vibe. But their vote still suffers enormously from the urbanised ID politics claptrap that’s gazzumped their mainland overlords, in media-visible places like Sydney and the ACT. Talk about handing your ‘RW MSM’ all the ammo need. As far as I know the Nats don’t even know ‘the Apple Isle’ exists, which is the usual thudding contemporary failure of a party that claims to rep our primary industries/regional communities but is actually the political equivalent of Robert Duvall’s German-Irish mafia lawyer in The Godfather. Self co-opted into championing a neoliberal project/mob that will never truly accept them as members. My dad is spinning in his grave.
So…yeah. Who DO you back in Tas, if not your local bogan grifter… :-/
chrs drew
Exactly right..how can you have a group of nuff nuffs ( independents) holding sway.
It would be a very dangerous precedent ..alibi I will not mention Jacqui Lambie as she stands for defence personell and the damage that the cost of wars has impacted on our service personell ..I applaud her for that and all kudos to her.
Ha. Lambie’s self-aggrandising, OTT, pantomime public hystericising supposedly ‘on selfless behalf of our veterans’ is one of the main reasons I regard her as FoS. No-one I know who is actually working with veterans – I am ex Army myself, with family members who are Vets and old mates in senior military roles – regard her wearily predictable (and usually casually defamatory) assaults on our over-worked and under resourced but truly excellent VA sector as anything but risible.
If your own personal experience of Lambie’s dealings with Vets is better, that’s good, but it’s not broadly representative. She is mostly not helping.
Sounds like what we’ve got anyway. Bring it on!
I am not privy to whatever deal the JLE has done with Rockliff or why they did it (if they did). But how will they feel when Abetz sets in motion his pro-conversion policies, the liberals start cutting down old-growth forests and continue poisoning harbours and waste $47 biilion on an unnecessary stadium. Their lack of policies will come back to haunt them.
Not everything is lost. Federal Labor can learn a lot from this. They will go to the next election with no policies having merely pursued Liberal policies in Government. They will slip down the pole to be overtaken by Teals and Greens.
We can only hope, and remember how much disappointment that brings us.
Another Green fantasist. Careful what you wish for.
Read it again! I did not wish for more Greens, we’ve got them already.
Having no policies does look contrary to the supposed way political parties are meant to behave, but might it have some real merit?
Do we have any real proof that endlessly churning out more legislation is doing us any good? (In the UK, in the 20th C, the volume of legislation increased exponentially: it doubled every ten years, except during the two world wars, when very little was added.) Is there a comparison with the assumption we generally make that medical interventions nearly always do good, when the nasty truth is that iatrogenic harm (i.e. harm caused by medical intervention) is extremely common? (In Israel the doctors went on strike in the early 1980s, refusing to treat patients or issue prescriptions, and the death rate there fell, and there are similar examples.) One author satirised the 19th C Tory PM Lord Palmerston for governing on the basis that there are enough laws, the country does not need any more. Palmerston was certainly not the worst PM the UK has known. Look at how things are now, when our governments are perpetually reforming education, and health, and so on; how often do our teachers and doctors jump for joy that yet again their whole field of work is being turned upside down and given a good shake, just to show the minister is doing something? Is it possible that the public would be better served by making sure existing systems are properly administered and resourced, rather than tearing it all down and rebuilding it all the time? Perhaps a government that, as its default, left things alone would not be so bad. This quotation is falsely attributed to Petronius Arbiter, but it makes its point very well:
“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
A propos there is the remark attributed to various persons, including Mr Justice Astbury, a Chancery judge in the UK from 1913 to 1929. One day his clerk, in some excitement, informed the old judge that the government was embarking on a major programme of reform. He responded, ‘Reform? Reform?! Are things not bad enough already?’
The law is a mess / Less is more
(Ideally)
Jacqui should clear out her letterbox to make room for all the free AFL Grand Final tickets and opportunities for free AFL scarves and other merchandise that will soon see her box full.
The Ghost of Campbell Newman’s Past – a leader who’s not even in parliament.
I think Tasmania Labor is going with the quote from Napoleon: “never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake” – and Rockliff is undoubtedly making a mistake, but doesn’t have much of a choice.
You’re missing ther second step of Napoleon’s strategy, which was to exploit the enemy’s mistake by inflicting a crushing defeat. Labor, in contrast, is just walking away and leaving its opponent victorious on the field of battle.
Largely the same federally.