Two weeks after polling day, counting for Tasmania’s state election concluded on Saturday. It confirmed the initial view that this is a new low for the two major parties: indeed, more so than originally thought, since the Liberals were surprisingly defeated for the last seat in Braddon by serial independent Craig Garland, who started with only 5.1% of the vote but performed much better on preferences.
The Liberals therefore finished with just 14 of the 35 seats in the House of Assembly (three in each electorate except for Clark), down three from their notional 2021 total. Labor has ten (two in each electorate, down two); the Greens five (up two); Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN), which did not contest in 2021, three; and there are three independents (unchanged). (See official figures here.)
Two of the independents, Kristie Johnston and David O’Byrne, lean clearly left, while Garland is hard to classify but also at least broadly on the left. If JLN supports the Liberals, then Garland would seem to hold the balance of power between them and the left-of-centre forces. But while that may eventually become important, for now Labor has dealt itself out of the race; it won’t work with the Greens, and Johnston and O’Byrne, for want of any alternative, have indicated that they will help prop up a minority Liberal government.
Neither major party is ready to accept the fact that it needs to co-operate with others in order to govern, despite the fact that they have less than two-thirds of the vote between them. But if they won’t work with the minors, they will increasingly be forced to work with each other – as historic rivals Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were in Ireland, which uses the same electoral system. That sort of formal coalition is not in prospect in Tasmania, but there’s little doubt that a Liberal government will often rely on Labor to get its way on legislation.
Apart from that, no-one really knows how the new parliament is going to work. Calling an early election has done nothing to promote the cause of stable government; as Kevin Bonham summed up the day after the election, “The major parties tried at this election to scare voters away from chaos, but both were themselves chaos that faked that its name was stability.”
With 13.9% of the vote the Greens have improved by 1.5% but are a long way short of their 2010 peak, when they topped 20%. With the expanded parliament, however, they have not only returned to their old level of five seats, but for the first time they won two seats in a single electorate (Clark), an essential step towards being taken seriously as a major player. Next month brings them another opportunity, as former leader Cassy O’Connor attempts to win their first seat in the Legislative Council.
Rather than any of the parties, the big winner is the Tasmanian electoral system, which has once again shown itself to be the fairest in the country. Here are the totals of votes and seats,* with the percentage of seats won and, in the final column, the seats that would have been won on a Sainte-Laguë system treating the whole state as one electorate.
Labor and the Shooters were a bit unlucky and JLN a bit lucky, but otherwise they’re basically spot on. A Gallagher index, the standard measure of electoral distortion, on those figures gives me a score of 5.7, which is very good – compare the last federal election, which was 15.5 (higher is worse, up to a theoretical maximum of 100).
So Tasmanians have got the parliament that they voted for. The major parties might not like it, but they’ve got to live with it.
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* I’m using the ABC’s table of vote totals because the electoral commission doesn’t produce a summary table.
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PS (Wednesday morning): Kevin Bonham now has an excellent post-mortem on the result. He has a table like mine, from which he also concludes that “Tasmanians have a parliament that is, in proportion to primary vote support at least, what they voted for.” He notes the fact that Green preferences have little impact, and then remarks that “instead of Greens preferences causing Labor to win seats from behind as elsewhere in the country, Green votes helped Labor and the Greens to win one more seat than the Liberals. However, Labor chose not to do anything with that.”
He also makes the interesting point that although the non-major-party vote is a record for Tasmanian state elections, it hasn’t even caught up to how Tasmania votes in federal elections: in 2022, 39.8% of Tasmanians voted for minor parties or independents. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s “not really a remarkable level anymore,” but things do seem to be heading that way. That means, as he puts it, that “absolutist majority/minority rhetoric will continue to bite major party leaders who engage in it. It needs to be tempered with a reality that, as other states have shown (…), some minority governments are very workable and successful.”
The World is Not Enough 