Election preview: Tasmania

Australia’s island state, Tasmania, goes to the polls tomorrow. Liberal premier Jeremy Rockliff is seeking a mandate in his own right after taking over the job in 2022 and then seeing his majority disintegrate due to defections over the last few months.

There’s not a lot to add since my post last month when the election was called. At the last election, in 2021, the Liberals were returned with 48.7% of the vote and a bare majority, 13 of the 25 seats, against nine ALP, two Greens and one independent. But since then the size of the House of Assembly has been increased to 35, so the starting point in terms of seats needs to be adjusted, and on that basis it’s not clear that the Liberals would have won a majority.

Going by Ben Raue’s calculations, the most likely outcome if the voting figures from 2021 were repeated is 17 Liberal, 12 Labor, three Greens and three independents. That already suggests something of a sea change – not since the 1950s has more than one independent been elected at a time.* But the same figures will not be repeated; for one thing, the Jacqui Lambie Network, which did not contest the 2024 election, is running this time in four of the five electorates and is likely to pick up seats.

Kevin Bonham’s assessment of the opinion polls, which makes fascinating if demanding reading, suggests they are currently pointing to a scenario of 15 Liberal, ten Labor, four Greens, three Lambie and three independents. That would be, as he puts it, a “strange new world”, in which there would be multiple routes to a majority but none that were intuitively compelling.

As I have complained before [link fixed], the problem with this sort of situation is that the major parties are in denial about its possibility, both insisting that they will govern as a majority or not at all. This lends it an air of unreality and keeps voters in the dark about the basis on which post-election negotiations might take place. But in the past it was usually just a matter of negotiating (or not) with the Greens; now other options look like being on the table.

Although voters don’t like the major parties much, they don’t seem to like minority government either. In the past, there has sometimes been a late swing back to whichever major party seems better placed to reach a majority, and that may still benefit the Liberals this time. But getting all the way to 18 seats will be a big task.

Guy Rundle, reporting earlier this week from Tasmania, suggested that a fractured parliament may tempt the major parties to collude to abolish proportional representation. But if the minor parties and independents really are getting something like 40% of the vote, that could backfire badly: single-member electorates in Tasmania would be very small, with a bit over 10,000 voters each, and it’s easy to imagine strong local candidates cleaning up.

For more on the election, check out the comprehensive guides from Antony Green and the Poll Bludger. Both will have live results and analysis on Saturday night.

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* Leaving aside the period in the 1990s when the Greens were not yet officially organised as a party and so were nominally independents.