Tasmania repeats

The state of Tasmania, currently the site of Australia’s only non-Labor government, will go to the polls on 23 March, a little over a year ahead of schedule. It’s almost a carbon copy of what happened last time.

Three years ago, Liberal Peter Gutwein was premier, having taken over mid-term when his predecessor, Will Hodgman, retired. The government had been elected with a one-seat majority, but the defection of one of its MPs turned this into a minority. Gutwein decided to take his chance on an early election and was returned with a majority: 13 Liberals as against nine Labor, two Greens and an independent.

Gutwein also retired mid-term, and was replaced in 2022 by his colleague Jeremy Rockliff. His one-seat majority also disappeared with the defection this time of two Liberal MPs, who left the party last year but promised to support the government on supply and issues of confidence. Rockliff also decided that this was unworkable, and yesterday the governor accepted his advice to dissolve parliament for another election.

Whether the same move will work twice is not clear. The Liberals have been in office since 2014 and are naturally starting to look a bit tired. Nor do they have a pandemic to help them this time. But Labor has had its troubles as well; its leader, Rebecca White, resigned after the 2021 defeat, but her successor only lasted three weeks before being forced out by allegations of sexual harassment (he now sits as an independent), leaving White to return to the job.

But the big change since 2021 has been the expansion of the House of Assembly from 25 to 35 seats: to be elected, as before, from five multi-member districts, now with seven seats each instead of five. This returns the system to what it was before 1998, when the two major parties colluded in the reduction in an attempt to shaft the Greens.

In the short term that move worked for them; the Greens were reduced to just one seat in the 1998 election. But by 2010 they were back to five seats and the balance of power. Since then they’ve declined to 12.4% of the vote and just two seats, but with the larger house and smaller quota, another three could be within reach.

Both parties, as usual, are promising to govern only if they win a majority and not to rely on the Greens, independents or the Jacquie Lambie Network, which has high hopes of winning a couple of seats. Those promises shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but they can have the effect of pushing voters towards whichever party seems best placed to win a majority – the Liberals seem to have benefited from that last time, just as Labor did in 2006. But if the voters can’t tell which party that is, it doesn’t help much.

If Labor can pull off a win, with or without some help from the crossbench, it will return it to the position it has held only once before (in 2007-08), of being in government federally and in every state. But if Rockliff can convince Tasmanians that the early election wasn’t really his fault, he may live to fight another day.

For much more on the election and its background, don’t miss Kevin Bonham’s guide.