Labor buys itself an extra year in opposition

Residents of Australia’s southernmost state suffered over the weekend through Arctic winds, pelting rain, and a state election that pleased no-one and resolved nothing.

Tasmania’s election came just 15 months after the last and has produced much the same result: the Liberals went in with 14 seats out of 35 and Labor with 10, and if the final outcome differs at all, it’s unlikely to be by more than one in either direction.

Labor looks the biggest loser, having brought on the election with a no-confidence motion against Premier Jeremy Rockliff that may only have bought it an extra year in opposition.

To this one may retort that Labor could yet form government: with Labor on 10 or 11, the Greens on five, and four independents whose colourings range from green to teal, the numbers are certainly there for an anti-Liberal majority.

But as the success of the no-confidence motion showed, that was also true before the election. If it happens, what will have changed is not the numbers in parliament, but Labor’s refusal to govern with support from the Greens.

Presumably alert to the impossibility of a majority, Labor’s hope would have been that independents alone could have got them to the magic 18.

However, Labor’s relationship with the independents is fundamental to what got it into the mess of the early election in the first place.

As even politically disengaged mainlanders may be aware, the flashpoint issue of Tasmanian politics is the AFL’s insistence on a publicly bankrolled stadium as the price for the state’s manifest birthright of a home-grown team in the national competition.

When Labor went to last year’s election promising to reject the government’s surrender to the AFL’s terms, it was disappointed with the results: the Liberal vote plunged, but the dividend was yielded by independents and the Jacqui Lambie Network.

Shortly after, Labor under new leader Dean Winter abandoned its opposition, in keeping with the orthodox view that an opposition facing a tired old government need only pursue a small-target strategy to ensure its path to office.

However, this had the unforeseen effect of making a crossbench that was all but united against the stadium look like the real opposition.

So when a debt blowout in the May budget left the government raising the spectre of privatisations, Winter saw an opportunity to deal his party back into the game — and duly overplayed his hand.

Labor moved its succesful no-confidence motion in the evident anticipation that the Liberals would respond by offering Jeremy Rockliff as a sacrificial lamb — a course that was all but endorsed by Senator Jonathon Duniam, the leading conservative out of what remains of the Tasmanian Liberals’ federal retinue.

If any credit emerges from the episode, it must go to a Liberal partyroom that held its nerve and allowed Rockliff to face an election as the wronged party in a Labor power play that had dragged voters to the polls at the worst time of the year.

The Liberals’ 40% vote share on Saturday may not be the stuff electoral dreams are made of, but it compares remarkably with the 29% the party was credited with in the last poll before the crisis unfolded.

Labor on the other hand managed barely a quarter of the vote, falling more than 3% short of its already feeble showing from last year, despite the 6.7% vote of the effectively defunct Jacqui Lambie Network being up for grabs.

The independents elected in 2024 were all thumpingly reelected, and will be joined by the Climate 200-backed Peter George and, almost certainly, one or possibly two candidates from the hitherto unrepresented Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.

The size and diversity of the crossbench means that whatever government emerges will be fragile and unstable, which some will hold as an indictment of the state’s Hare-Clark system of proportional representation.

Such criticisms are misplaced, for there is a ready solution that will seem immediately obvious to observers of European politics.

Commonality between Liberal and Labor hardly ends with the stadium: it was the Liberals who went to the election promising to reestablish a state-owned insurance company, Labor who called for the forestry industry to be spared “green tape”, and the two were in perfect accord with regard to the nationally controversial salmon farming operation at Macquarie Harbour.

On health, education and much else, the parties’ election policies could readily have been swapped around without any non-expert noticing the difference.

Beyond self-interested strategic calculation and malign cultural blindness, there is nothing to stop Liberal and Labor forging a power-sharing agreement, serving out a full term with a thumping joint majority, and delivering on every point of substance that they took to the voters.

Disclosure: William Bowe conducted paid consultancy work for Climate 200, which provides support for the campaigns of teal independents.