Tasmania wraps up (sort of)

At last we have a result in Tasmania – at least in the sense that we know the composition of parliament; working out a government will take longer (more about that shortly). Independent George Razay won the final seat in Bass, for a total of five independents against 14 Liberals, ten Labor, five Greens and one from Shooters, Fishers & Farmers.

Distribution of preferences in Bass took five days, finishing on Saturday. In other states (and federally) this process has been computerised, but Tasmania still counts by hand; in my view the additional time taken is easily justified by the gain in transparency. And this was an especially interesting count, so it’s worth having a look at just how it unfolded.

The final count of primary votes looked like this:

Party	Votes	%	Quotas
Liberal	28,193	41.8%	3.34
ALP	18,564	27.5%	2.20
Greens	11,136	16.5%	1.32
Shooters	2,754	4.1%	0.33
Razay (ind.)	2,347	3.5%	0.28
Pentland (ex-JLN)	1,705	2.5%	0.20
Nationals	1,367	2.0%	0.16
Others	1,384	2.1%	0.16

With seven seats to be filled, the quota for election is one-eighth of the vote, or 12.5%. On that basis it was obvious that the Liberals would get three seats, Labor two and the Greens one, with the final seat up for grabs. I suggested early on that maybe the Liberals and the Shooters were best placed for it, but it was impossible to pick with any confidence.

By lunchtime last Friday, after two Liberals, one Labor and a Green had been elected and most of the rest eliminated, the totals (in quotas) looked like this, with three still to be elected:

Liberals 1.29
ALP 1.23
Shooters 0.42
Razay 0.39
Pentland 0.34
Greens 0.32

From there you might expect that the third Liberal and second Labor candidate would be elected and the remaining major party votes distributed as surplus, perhaps keeping the Shooters and Greens ahead of the independents. But that’s not how Hare-Clark works; it’s a contest among candidates, not parties, and those Liberal and Labor votes were divided at that point among (respectively) two and three different candidates, all of them still well below quota.

So instead it was the remaining Green candidate who was eliminated, followed by Pentland and then one of the Labor candidates. At close of business on Friday evening, after distributing their votes, the numbers were as follows:

Fairs (Lib) 0.86
Greene (ALP) 0.70
Lyons (ALP) 0.65
Razay (Ind) 0.56
Frydrych (SFF) 0.52
Wood (Lib) 0.49

Wood was then eliminated; his preferences elected Fairs, and after distributing Fairs’s surplus Razay was still ahead of Frydrych, 0.61 quotas to 0.55. So Frydrych was eliminated, leaving just Razay and the two remaining Labor candidates. Frydrych’s votes flowed strongly to Razay, making Lyons the one to miss out; final numbers were Razay 0.83, Greene 0.78 and Lyons 0.75.

That means that although Labor finished with just 2.52 quotas as against Razay’s 0.83, it almost beat him to win a third seat. (Kevin Bonham calls this the “Ginninderra Effect”.) Whether that’s a defect or a virtue of the system is an unanswerable question: it depends how you look at it.

Four of the five independents (all bar Labor defector David O’Byrne) are broadly left-leaning, making a Liberal government difficult to sustain; even with O’Byrne and the sole Shooter they are still two votes short of a majority. Labor, needing the Greens plus three independents, is better placed, but it would be a perilous undertaking – which no doubt is why it has refused to make the attempt on the last two occasions it was offered.

Liberal premier Jeremy Rockliff evidently intends to stay in office until the new parliament meets, as he is fully entitled to do. But he may well face an immediate vote of no-confidence, in which case Labor’s Dean Winter will be asked if he can form a government. Having already caused one unnecessary election, he can hardly say “No” again.

To understand the underlying problem, Bonham’s postmortem is essential reading. I was particularly struck by this passage, relating to the rise of the independents: “In comparison to previous Green surges there is now more support than ever for candidates with broadly Greens-like perspectives, but that support is split between Greens and independents now instead of being focused in the Greens.”

In other words, to the extent that Greens’ support is plateauing, that doesn’t reflect a lack of support for their policies. The party brand itself may be tarnished, or at least less attractive than it once was, but other candidates are doing well in the same policy space. And this, it seems to me, is equally true on the mainland, as demonstrated by the rise of the Teals – but that will be a story for another day.