Tasmania 2018: But What Does It All Mean?

LIBERAL 13 LABOR 9 GREEN 1 UNDECIDED 2
Undecided: Franklin - Liberal vs Green - tossup
Undecided: Bass - Labor vs Green vs Liberal - Labor slightly favoured, Liberal chance remote

After the last Tasmanian election, I saw no need to unpack possible meanings of the result, as I thought it was all obvious to anyone who had followed the state's politics through that time.  This one, however, is different, though I certainly won't claim to have all the answers.  A government that seemed to be sleepwalking to a loss of majority has rebounded to the point of suffering just a trivial swing against it.  The Labor opposition did rebound to a degree, but mostly at the cost of the Greens.

Some facts and stats

A few facts about the election first.  For the first time since the 1970s, and the first time for a conservative party since 1912-3, the Liberal Party has topped 50% of the primary vote for a second election in a row.  The charge was led by Premier Hodgman, whose 38.3% is the highest candidate vote since Robin Gray in 1986.  (Hodgman will also break Doug Lowe's 1979 record for the largest number of votes recorded by a candidate, though this record is somewhat meaningless because of population growth. Lowe's record for the highest candidate percentage, 51.2%, may very well never be beaten - and I don't think the fact it was achieved before Robson Rotation really makes much of a difference.)



Contra to Labor leader Rebecca White's claim of having pushed the Government to the edge of defeat (by which she means a hung parliament anyway) this was simply not a close result.  In what turned out unexpectedly to be the most critical seat (Denison), about a 6% swing from Liberal to Labor on the current figures would be needed for the seat to have been lost, making this the Hare-Clark equivalent of a 56-44 pasting at federal level.  Even if the Liberals are reduced to 13 seats, they were still not really close to losing on the night - nor, I suspect, at any time in the final month at least.

The election saw the highest combined major party vote since 1986, and the highest in the era in which the Greens have been a statewide force.  The Greens are currently on 10.03%, though there is a fair chance that absent and other remaining votes will lift them just above their worst-ever score of 10.18% (1998).

In the seats where the Jacqui Lambie Network ran, the swings between Labor and the Greens are very similar to each other: Lyons Labor +5.5 (Greens -5.1), Bass +3.2 (3.6), Braddon +4.1 (-3.7).  Labor gained much more than the Greens lost in only Denison (+8.6, -4.0) and Franklin (+5.9, -2.5).  These are both seats in which the Network did not contest.  Thus the overall results (including a swing of 1.7% to the Liberals in Bass) suggest that net vote transfer between the majors was virtually zero, and that what variation exists in the Liberal and Labor swings by seat was largely determined by differences in the array and performance of Others.

At candidate level, the Liberals have elected Sue Hickey as a new MP replacing their sole retirement, Matthew Groom.  They will probably lose Joan Rylah (if she holds they will instead lose Roger Jaensch) and may lose Nic Street.  Labor will gain Anita Dow, Alison Standen, a new Lyons MP to be determined, and could well gain Jennifer Houston in Bass.  They have also regained David O'Byrne. The only Labor MP in trouble is Madeleine Ogilvie who is presently trailing Ella Haddad by a significant amount.  For the Greens, leader Cassy O'Connor is back, but both Rosalie Woodruff and Andrea Dawkins are uncertain, with Woodruff a 50-50 chance and Dawkins' position more difficult.

Fourth parties have again failed to get near winning a seat, though at times the Jacqui Lambie Network was on track for a seat or two in polling.  The highest vote by a candidate outside the big three was recorded by independent fisherman Craig Garland (Braddon) who may yet break 2000 votes in a campaign that he says cost him $800.

The History

This election was very similar to 2006.  In that election, the Lennon Labor government was widely being completely written off on the basis of bad polling, and was at odds of $9 to retain its majority, but beat the Liberals by 17.5 points having been ahead by as little as three points in an EMRS poll a few months out.  This time the odds were even sillier and many informed observers helped themselves to the $15 available on Liberal majority government.  The 2006 campaign - which was nastier than this one - also featured claims about the result being "bought" by business interests campaigning for majority government.

Media coverage of the election included a few hung-parliament nostalgia pieces dealing with minority governments past, in which key players from those days trumped up their legacies and sanitised the cross-party tensions that existed.  A recap of the 2006 election would have given voters a much better idea of what to expect.

The Mystery

The one thing that is hardest to explain about this election is why Labor painted a target on itself by supporting the complete removal of poker machines from pubs and clubs.  As a strategy, it was successful in removing votes from the Greens, but it failed dismally to connect with working-class voters especially in the north of the state.  Whether the policy was even capable of being sold to such voters is dubious but in any case I think Labor had no idea how to sell it.

Frequently this sort of thing happens when a party's stated reasons for holding a policy aren't their real reasons.  Whatever the reasons, Labor's desire to vastly restrict the pokies industry made the party a sitting duck when it came to the argument that Labor didn't care about working-class jobs, really had not changed from the party that governed with the Greens in the parliament before, and would probably do so again.   The policy seems to have also generated perceptions of class contempt (middle-class for lower-class) and (in my view valid) concerns that Labor and Green ideologies in the state don't take personal freedom seriously.  (The same charge can be levelled against the Liberals, but at least they seem to understand the concept, even when they selectively ignore it.)

It is possible Labor was looking at internal poll numbers that suggested the EMRS polls of late last year were wrong and that the Liberals had a large voting lead locked in, so that attacking the Greens may have made sense.  However unless Labor knew they were already losing, it is difficult to see why this high-risk gamble was taken. As well as the money thrown at the issue by pro-pokies forces, media focus on the issue created an impression that the election was all about banning pokies, preventing Labor from making health their central message (though I am not sure they would have owned that issue, or education, anyway.) I suspect there is a lot more to come to light about this in the future.

It is interesting to see ALP Right sources blaming the fact that none of their candidates have had straightforward wins on the pokies issue.  The charge is that the policy scared off conservative voters.  In fact candidate factors (in the case of Ogilvie), campaign factors (Butler) and being up against a higher-profile candidate who also had a union background (Midson) probably contributed to the Right's difficulties, but even if the pokies policy was the problem, why then were Ogilvie and Butler early movers on the issue?

This was not the only cause of Labor's defeat.  The legacy of the 2014 election left them with a shortage of incumbents and the campaign generally appeared lethargic and lackadaisical, especially when it came to refuting government claims in the media and advertising.  As a result the government was able to get away even with brazen lies like their one about Labor having always done deals with the Greens in the past.  Person-to-person communication as a campaign strategy is all very well, but the same goes for it as goes for billboards: the voter has to be receptive to what you are selling.

The result is also an object lesson in the value of securing your position while you have the power.  The previous Labor-Greens government did not make a serious effort at reforming donation laws.  Had they done so, they could have been much better placed to take on the pokies issue in a way that at least forced transparency from their opponents.

It is not enough to attribute the result solely to the Liberals' resourcing advantages.  The Liberals displayed impressive unity in office with internal tensions virtually never on public display.  The Liberal campaign was well co-ordinated and responsive to almost every issue that was raised.  There was the last-minute issue of the secretive approach to gun policies, but this had little impact, in part because the changes being proposed are mostly minor anyway.  (In fact, while the media mostly saw this as a massive story, voters may have seen it as a beat-up.)



The Polling

This was one of the more sparsely polled Tasmanian elections, with only a ReachTEL and an EMRS by way of public polls in the last few months, and the fieldwork for those was nine days and 5-7 days prior to the poll respectively.

On current statewide numbers (Liberal 50.5 Labor 32.8 Green 10.0 JLN 3.2 Others 3.6) the Mercury ReachTEL (Lib 48 ALP 32.2 Green 12.5 JLN 5.3 Other 2.1) had no errors greater than 2.5 points, which is a strong performance by the standards of polling in this state.  Also, the JLN vote becomes more accurate (4.1%) if adjusted for them not running in all seats.  The EMRS poll (46-34-12-4-3) had the Liberals 4.5 points too low.  It is possible that there were actually shifts in the Liberals' favour during the final week.

Both polls, and also all internal polls I have seen, overestimated the Greens vote, but only by a couple of points rather than the 4+ points sometimes seen in the past.  Unlike in recent previous elections, these polls got the Labor vote right, while it's possible that EMRS polling tends to underestimate incumbent governments rather than the Liberals specifically.

Polling was extensively and adroitly used by the Liberals during the lead-up to the election to convince the public that only they could win majority government.  This then helped generate the same bandwagon effect seen in poll tracking in 2005-6 (though in that case the evidence that the Lennon government was in trouble was actually much spottier than people remember it as being).  Although the company involved (MediaReach) was virtually unknown, Labor totally failed to counter this polling narrative - probably because they couldn't.  The youngest published MediaReach data (5 and 8 Feb with average results of 46.5-30-12-5-6.5) were close enough to suggest the MediaReach polls were broadly accurate at the time they were taken.  That said, there could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy component in this.

Questions might be raised about EMRS' tracking performance.  When the government appeared to be faltering in the EMRS polls late in 2017, was its standing actually that bad?

Hung Parliament Club

In Tasmania there are still too many commentators and politics junkies who are clearly in the tank for hung parliaments.  This mindset involves not only arguing that minority government is the ideal situation for Tasmania but also overestimating how likely it is to occur.  Hung parliament club no longer dominates the commentariat in the way that it did circa the mid-2000s, but it is still far too prevalent.  The fact is that while hung parliaments in the Tasmanian context may be more open compared to majority parliaments, and often deliver reforming outcomes, they are also unstable.  The instability arises from the Greens' desire to deliver for their supporters in cases where the majors are in lock step - the only way Greens can get outcomes in those cases is through the implied threat to bring down the government.  Meanwhile while major parties sometimes want to govern with Greens support, they also realise that the electorate dislikes it, and this can cause internal instability.

This campaign provided a fine example of the instability of Tasmanian hung parliaments when the Greens threatened to move a no confidence motion against the government because it had not declared its campaign funding sources.  Weeks earlier Cassy O'Connor had been saying that minority government was government for grownups and that the Greens wanted to work for stability.  There is a long history of the Greens claiming to support co-operative stability but only actually supporting it until the major parties trip one of their wires.  Logging quotas, the size of parliament, the performance of the Accord era education minister Peter Patmore, and now pokies donations - these are all examples of issues that have caused the Greens to lose interest in working together over the past few decades, and there will always be more.

I think the one-eyed barracking for hung parliaments by some academics and locked-in Greens supporters simply alienates other voters.  (That's not to say the barracking for majority government is any less one-eyed or any more credible.) At least, if trying to convince voters that hung parliaments work, be honest about their limitations and look for ways that those can be addressed.  Ideally though, I think those who like hung parliaments will most increase their chances of occurring if they just shut up about it, permanently.  The first rule of hung parliament club is that you do not talk about hung parliaments.

The Greens

The Greens have suffered a 3.8% swing against them, following a 7.7% swing against them in the 2014 election, and as a result have now lost more than half their record 2010 vote in two elections.  In this election the party lost more than half its already diminished 2014 vote in Braddon, and close to half of it in Lyons.  Fraser Brindley's weakness as a lead candidate was illustrated by him securing just 43.5% of his party's vote so far, the lowest for a Greens candidate ever.  (The previous record low was 53.3%, and Scott Jordan in Braddon is bobbing around that level.)  But stupid candidate preselections in two electorates are far from the only problem.

The Greens were always facing serious challenges at this election.  Having two out of three MPs elected mid-term is not ideal for them in terms of profile-building, but primarily the party does not do well at elections where there is policy daylight between the major parties.  Their best elections have been 1989 (where the Gray government was a beacon for environmental opposition), 2002 (where the Liberal Opposition was utterly hopeless) and 2010 (where both major parties were boring and there was a feeling of nothing at stake.)  At this election, some Greens voters switched back to Labor (in cases for the first time in decades) because they were impressed with Labor's position on poker machines.  Other Green voters would have switched to reward the party for taking a chance by choosing White as leader.  It shows once again that the Greens voters wander off at the slightest distraction and perhaps a feeling that voting Green is some kind of stern moral duty, not something fresh and exciting, has something to do with this.

The Greens are complaining about the pro-pokies campaign "buying" votes away from them, but this is nonsense - those who were still voting Green at least in 2014 are very unlikely to be susceptible to claims made by the gambling lobby.  Also, the evidence is that Greens voters switched to the other anti-pokies party (Labor), not the Liberals.

Another strange excuse came from several Greens, including Bob Brown for whom no Greens result is ever bad (unless it is recorded by the Rhiannon faction of course.)  This is that there were no major  environmental issues, which the authors of this excuse are delusionally blaming on the major parties for not releasing any destructive environmental policies. This is basically either an admission that over the past four years a Liberal majority government has managed Tasmania's environment very well or an admission that to the extent it hasn't, the Greens are unable to communicate this effectively to voters.  In a time where, for instance, the endangered and remarkable Maugean skate is considered by experts to be probably doomed because of mismanagement of Macquarie Harbour, it's a bit hard to argue it's entirely the former.

There's a widespread perception that the Greens' campaign was more or less invisible, but I think that it was also bad in other ways.  For instance, I saw one massive billboard declaring that the party "CAN'T BE BOUGHT. WILL NEVER SELL OUT", but plenty of previously diehard Greens saw their 2010 deal with Labor as exactly that.

It's clear that the demographic factors that propel the Greens vote ever higher in inner city Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane don't operate to anything like the same extent in Tasmania.  Thus while environmental battles made this their birthplace, they don't have a natural vote floor here, and their vote could in theory sink even lower.  I expect that they'll be back, but if they are reduced to a single seat (that of their leader, who will be widely blamed for this result) then the path back will be more painful than it was in 1998.

The Elephant On The Red Couches

It's worth remembering that this government has had a lot of trouble getting legislation through the Legislative Council, where it had to run the gauntlet of an increasing number of Labor and/or indepedent left-wing MLCs. Currently there are four of each giving the left 8 of 15 seats, and moreover one of the non-left MLCs, Jim Wilkinson, is the President and doesn't normally vote.

This situation isn't very likely to improve for the government any time soon unless there is an unplanned resignation.  Conservative independent Greg Hall retires this year with a vacancy in the new seat of Prosser, so the best hope there is to break even, and one would expect Rob Valentine to be re-elected in Hobart (or if he doesn't recontest, probably someone of similar views.)  Wilkinson is expected to retire in 2019 which will spark a big fight for his seat. The government has already reached out to indicate it will try harder to work with the upper house, but I expect that its more controversial bills will continue to strike trouble.