There were some noticeable swings in the Tasmanian election, and there will be some changes in the Assembly, but overall the result seems to have produced a Parliament with a similar balance of power. That’s not great news for the government, because the outgoing Assembly had just voted no confidence in that very government.
By my reckoning right now, it looks like the Liberals have won 14 seats (losing one in Franklin and gaining one in Braddon), Labor has won 10, the Greens have won five, and incumbent independents Johnston, Garland and O’Byrne have been re-elected. That’s 32 seats that are basically the same as in the last parliament. Peter George has won a seat as well, and the last two seats look like they will either go to the Liberal Party or the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.
While there is a shift between the electorates, overall this means that there has been somewhat of a like-with-like replacement. The three ex-JLN MPs have all vanished. Two of them had voted confidence in the government, and they will either be replaced by Liberals or the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers – an untested group but one that could probably work with a Liberal govenrment. The third had voted no confidence and his spot is effectively taken by Peter George, who is most definitely not a friend of the government.
(Casey Briggs has pointed out that George has said he would not have voted ‘no confidence’, but he is no friend of the government and has said he won’t make any confidence deals.)
The government potentially gaining two seats is good news, but it doesn’t really change the mid-point of the Assembly and it doesn’t produce an Assembly that seemingly has confidence in the government. This chart splits up the blocs in the Assembly (pre and post election) based on how they did or would have likely voted on confidence, and the numbers for each bloc before and after the election.
So yes, this was a status quo result. And that isn’t good news for a government that went into this election one seat short of a working majority.
There is one seat that could flip those numbers – if the Liberal Party was to increase their support and win that seat, at the expense of any of their opponents, then that would mean they could have an 18-seat majority without winning over any of those who voted no confidence, or Peter George.
Of course it’s also possible the government can sway the votes of some of those who voted no confidence. I’ll come back to that at the end. But that hasn’t happened yet.
There was a shift in the vote. At a statewide level, I see two stories worth talking about. Firstly, Labor lost support to the Liberal Party. Secondly, the Jacqui Lambie Network vote vanished, producing a boost in the size of the Greens, independent and Shooters vote, and with a small part of that vote going to the Nationals.
The overall size of the major party vote, the Greens vote and the ‘others’ vote was about steady. But that was the lowest major party vote on record, so that is still notable. The new normal is still here.
I’ll leave it to others to properly assess the polls, but they did understate the Liberal vote. Most of the recent polls actually got the Labor vote fairly spot-on, with the last two EMRS polls putting Labor on 26%, but the last YouGov poll had the major parties neck-and-neck at 31% and 30% and that was off. If you ignored that last poll you wouldn’t have been too surprised about Labor doing worse than Liberal, but the gap was wider than the polls. Every poll appears to have overstated the independent vote and the Greens vote.
There is a history in Tasmanian politics, particularly in the aftermath of hung parliaments, of a bloc of voters flocking to whichever major party has the best prospect of forming a majority, and them winning a clear majority. This instinct can be seen in the Mercury specifically editorialising in favour of a majority government. There are voters who care more about a majority government than the particular flavour of that government.
It is possible we did see a last-minute surge of those voters to the Liberals, but the size of that bloc is either too small, or the parties are too far away for it to be enough to win a majority. Things have changed.
The other story that stuck out for me last night was the significant divergence between the election in the three northernmost electorates and the two southern electorates.
This chart shows the vote share between these two areas.
The vote in the south for independents is abolutely enormous, and the Liberal lead over Labor isn’t huge.
The Labor vote is roughly steady between north and south, but the size of the vote for other progressive groups is very different.
If the whole state looked like the north, I’d expect the Liberals to have won a clear majority. While they’d have no chance of governing if the election looked like the South.
This is also interesting when you examine the swings in these two areas.
The Lambie Network was almost entirely a northern phenomenon. Their disappearance has created room for a boom in the Liberal vote, but also a boom for nearly everyone else. Even the Greens vote surged in the north by 2%. Yet Labor’s swing against them was consistent everywhere.
Meanwhile the independent swing in the south seems to have impacted everyone. The Greens were particularly hit by Peter George’s campaign in Franklin.
So what comes next?
In theory, there are the numbers there for some kind of non-Liberal government to be stitched together. Labor are extremely reluctant to give ministries to others in some kind of coalition government, but there would be practical problems for a Labor minority government. The party only holds ten lower house seats and a handful of upper house seats.
A minority Labor government would also leave a lot of talent on the backbenches: six Greens MPs, four lower house independents and a number of progressive upper house independents.
Part of the motivation for expanding the Assembly from 25 seats to 35 seats was to give governments greater bench depth and larger talent pools, but that wouldn’t work if major parties insist on governing alone when they hold barely a quarter of the seats.
It’s possible that the Liberal government is able to win over some of the independents who voted no confidence, possibly with policy or personnel concessions. If the Liberal Party manages to get to 16 seats they’d also have a case that for practicality reasons they are best-placed to govern.
And of course it’s possible Labor could be in a position where they could theoretically form government, but their expectations about the difficulty of such an arrangement could lead them to decline to attempt to form a government. Effectively this is what happened in 2024. And what it would mean is that, regardless of the formal arrangements, the Liberal government’s survival would be reliant on Labor’s refusal to force an election or to force a change of government. That hardly feels like stable government.
Surely this now means that a non-Liberal government is possible but a Liberal government is not? To me it looks like the JLN has gone to the Libs and SFF, and the ALP has gone to the Greens and Peter George. As Eric Abetz asked last night if the majority voted for the stadium Libs ALP and the minority voted agaisnt, AND the minority dtermines the governmenet, what next?
i said this was gonna happen weeks ago but you al said i was craazy and trumpet blowing for the libs labor got nowhere and wentbackwards and te libs actually increased their vote share depsite coming off a belting at the federal level. Dean Winter thought he could steal government and it has backfired massively.
Think the North/South swing charts are neglecting the massive swings to the Liberal Party in the southern booths in Lyons. Some of which are exceeding the vote the Liberal party gained in their 2014 high point.
Anecdotally the baseball bats were out for Labor in the outer-suburban, working class booths. There is some further evidence of this in the Northern Clark booths.
And further evidnce the federal election was an aberration due to a poor campaign by the Fed libs labor will be shitting themselves come 2028. They could lose all 4 seats