I feel a bit disappointed by Labor’s candidates in Bass. With Cox retiring you’d think that a more high-profile or seemigly more talented bunch would have come forward. It’ll be interesting to see whether one of the new four garner a big share of primaries. I don’t know much about Wightman but he looks like the pick of them for the second spot. In one sense I’ll be embarassed if Bass voters go for Webb, but at least it would stop McClean getting in. The last thing Parliament needs is more old-labor union forest industry representation.

The Greens have got a really good ticket here, it’s a shame they don’t have a chance for more than one. Ball polled very well in the last Launceston City Council elections, as did Whish-Wilson in Windermere. Splitting the vote isn’t a problem per se, only to the extent that preferences leak out of the ticket. The risk of this might be lower than it could have been with Labor’s team being a bit weak. Three strong candidates will be good to pull in primary votes, and the Greens will need to do more of this if they want to work up to getting more than one in each electorate.

The Libs seem to have a strong set of candidates. Remarkable that 6 were pre-selected, now down to a sensible 5 with Napier not recontesting. I think Gutwein has been pretty good on Treasury and is definitely one of my more favoured Liberals in Tasmania. McGinity has been associated with the anti-pulp mill campaign. I thought this could have been a big plus for her, there’s a lot of anti-mill people who don’t like the Greens (and maybe 0.2 or more of a quota of Green preferences to be distributed if we believe the polls), but she quickly announced her support for it. Still, she’s given a signal about where she sits on the spectrum which might differentiate her from some of the others.

Ferguson is a strong candidate and will poll well, but it’s looking like the Libs will end up with quite a big Christian conservative right faction in their caucus. Ferguson here and ex-Family First Petrusma in Franklin look v likely to get in, and then Archer in Denison would add to it were she elected.

http://tasmanianpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/02/sue-napiers-replacement-announced.html

16% is a good vote – while it might split the vote a bit, I rather suspect it might pull in a bigger pool of people …and anyway, you still have Jeremy Ball there, and he’s run in other elections too (Bass federally in 2004) so it has a reasonably profiled list.