Counting is still continuing from Saturday’s Tasmanian election, but we already know enough to say that it’s a remarkable result. On Friday I quoted Kevin Bonham’s remark that if the polls were right we were headed for a “strange new world”. They were (at least to the extent that matters), and we are.
Late counting won’t change the primary votes much. The incumbent Liberals are still in the lead, but their 36.8% is a huge drop from 2021’s 48.7%. The biggest component in the difference is the Jacqui Lambie (JLN) network, which didn’t run last time but now has 6.7%. Labor and the Greens are both up slightly, by 1.0% (to 29.2%) and 1.1% (to 13.4%) respectively, while independents managed 8.2% (up 3.0%). A roster of small parties had 5.7% between them (up 0.1%).
So the non-major-party vote, at 34.0%, now represents more than one voter in three. I believe that’s the first time it has ever passed that mark, in any state or federal election – it’s certainly the first time in my lifetime. The 2022 federal result, when it hit 31.7%, no longer looks like an anomaly. Over two elections in Tasmania it’s risen by 17 points.
And the other states are going the same way. Not long ago the norm was for the minor vote to be below 20% (sometimes below 10%); now, Western Australia is the only state where that’s happened at either of the last two elections. At the last three state elections prior to this one, the minors scored 23.9% in South Australia, 28.9% in Victoria and 27.8% in New South Wales.
In the mainland states, where elections are from single-member districts, major parties can still win majorities (although they didn’t in NSW). But in Tasmania, with proportional representation, that’s now an uncommonly difficult task. Of the 35 seats, the Liberal Party will have 15, Labor ten or 11, Greens five, JLN two or three and independents two.* While the polls were wrong to suggest that the combined major party vote was headed as low as 62%, that didn’t matter in terms of seats: they’ll still be lucky to get more than 25 between them.
That looks like a wide open result. Given that both independents lean to the left (one of them is former Labor leader David O’Byrne), the Labor-Greens combination still has a chance of getting to a majority with their assistance, and failing that would seem better placed to bid for the support of JLN. But appearances are deceptive: Liberal premier Jeremy Rockliff has already claimed victory, and Labor yesterday conceded defeat.
Both parties have their heads in the sand about the new world of declining major-party support. But Labor’s dereliction is more serious. After its last term in government, when it formed a coalition with the Greens following the 2010 election, it amended its rules to prohibit any Labor government offering ministerial positions to another party. Now it is making an explicit statement that it would rather be in opposition than concede any role to the Greens, regardless of what the voters might want.
I don’t suggest that political parties should pursue power at any price; sometimes going into opposition is the better strategy. But to rule out coalition-building is to pursue a fantasy: there is no sign that the world of major-party dominance is coming back. And unlike in 2010, Labor is the party making gains, albeit modest ones. In that respect it is more like last year in NSW, 2015 in Queensland or 2001 in South Australia – with Labor in each case taking government with the help of independents.
So Rockliff will be back at least for the time being, presumably with some sort of arrangement with JLN. But at some point the question will have to be revisited; JLN is unlikely to be a steady partner, and if it misses out on its third seat then it will not be enough for a majority anyway. Sooner or later Labor may have to step up, after it has, in Guy Rundle’s words, “been given a degree of legitimacy by Liberal failure.”
We’ll look at this again next week when results are more definite.
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* These are Bonham’s estimates; his site is the best place to follow the late counting. Two or three of the other results are not yet certain.
The World is Not Enough 
To my way of thinking, it’s relevant to point out that we don’t know what the voters want.
I think, on balance, that the problems with presidential systems of government are bigger than the problems of parliamentary systems of government, but one of the advantages of presidential systems is that you can have an election where voters are, as nearly as possible, asked explicitly ‘What government do you want?’ It’s reasonable to interpret the votes, afterwards, as representing an answer to that question.
In a parliamentary system, it’s never going to be clear in the same way, unless the party system of a particular country makes it possible (if just two parties receive,between them, the overwhelming majority of votes). In this Tasmanian election, for example, it’s reasonable to suppose that if you asked all the people who voted for Liberals ‘What government do you want?’ then they’d answer ‘A majority Liberal government’ (or virtually all of them would). But if you asked them ‘If you can’t have that, because there aren’t enough votes for it, what would be your second choice?’ Would some of them prefer a Liberal-JLN coalition, some a Liberal-Greens coalition, and some (perhaps) a Labor government? I don’t know. There’s no way of telling. There’s the same problem figuring out the likely preferences of people who voted for Labor, or for the Greens, or for JLN–and if the situation is complicated, it’s not just a matter of second choices but potentially of third, fourth, or subsequent choices. What if the second preference of most Liberal voters is a Liberal-JLN coalition, but the second preference of most JLN voters is a Labor-JLN coalition, and the second preference of most Labor voters a Labor-Greens coalition? If you knew this, you’d have to know how voters ranked many of the multiple theoretical options before you could say anything sensible about which kind of government the voters (or a majority of them) wanted.
If Labor says ‘If we can’t form a majority government, we’re going into Opposition’, for all we know they might be accurately reflecting the preferences of most of the people who voted for them, or most of the State’s voters across the board, or both–or neither. But how can we tell?
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You’re right, of course, in one sense: we can’t be sure what voters want as between different options that they haven’t explicitly been asked about. But in most circumstances I think it’s reasonable to assume that voters prefer their party being in government to not being in government, and among different ways that it might be in government, they prefer the way in which it will be in a position to implement more of its policies.
There’s certainly evidence that most voters don’t like minority government, to the extent that some (say) Labor voters may prefer a majority Liberal govt to a minority Labor govt. But if majority govt is off the table, I think they’d still prefer a minority Labor govt.
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There is a difference between a minority Labor government which is able to continue in office because it has made stipulated concessions to cross-bench members and a minority Labor government which cross-bench members allow to remain in office without preconditions. It’s extremely likely that all or nearly all Labor voters would favour an unconstrained minority Labor government as their next preference to a majority Labor government: it is less clear how they would feel about a minority Labor government constrained by binding commitments to the cross-bench and it is plausible to suppose that it would depend on what those commitments were. If Labor said ‘We know the kind of things the cross-bench would demand of a minority Labor government, and demands of that kind are unacceptable’, it is at least possible that they would be accurately reflecting the feelings of many of their own voters. I don’t know how we can tell.
All of this, of course, applies in the same kind of way to the Liberal Party and their voters–differences there being, first, that the Liberals won more seats (and more votes) than Labor and, second, that they’re already in office.
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Thanks J-D – Yes, no doubt that minor parties might sometimes make demands that a major party would (at least arguably) be better off not agreeing to, even if that means going into opposition. But that doesn’t seem to be the situation here: the Greens & independents haven’t made any demands, and Labor has forestalled any inquiry as to what their terms might be. It seems that the powers that be in the ALP simply refuse to countenance giving the Greens a share of power on any terms. And while not impossible, I think it’s very implausible that the majority of their voters would agree with that.
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Most ALP *voters* do despise the Greens because like voters in general they are in the broad centre.
Our *activists* are a different question. Like our *leaders*, I wouldn’t allow a political/social movement whose policies are a hybrid of a neo-Luddite cult and reheated leftovers from the old communist movement anywhere near power, either.
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Well, you’re fully entitled to your view, but there’s not much evidence that it’s shared by the mass of Labor voters. Labor preferences continue to strongly favor the Greens over the Liberals, and lots of survey data shows Labor voters much closer to the Greens’ policies than to the Liberals’ – indeed, some of it shows them closer to the Greens’ policies than to those of their own party.
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As I mentioned before, I’m a member of VIC state Labor and I vividly and painfully remember the results of what happened the last time we allowed the Greens into government in both Federal and TAS – 90+ seats in the Reps for freaking Tony Abbott and a massive state defeat and the coming to power in Tasmania of a party that is the real-world analogue of the offspring of a three way between Frank Spencer (Some Mother’s Do Have ‘Em), Maxwell Smart (Get Smart) and Marmalade Atkins (Educating Marmalade).
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