Tasmanian State Election Late Night Wrap

LIB 51.4 ALP 27.4 GREEN 13.5 PUP 5.0 OTHER 2.7
LIBERAL 14 (1 of these very likely but not quite confirmed)
LABOR 6
GREEN 3 (1 of these very likely but not quite confirmed)
UNCLEAR 2 (1 ALP vs GREEN, 1 very probably LIB vs ALP)

Post-count links for individual seats:

Bass
Braddon
Denison
Franklin
Lyons

The Liberal Party has, as expected, won a decisive majority victory in the Tasmanian state election with over half the vote.  In the process Labor has probably been reduced to its worst primary vote since the advent of the Hare-Clark system in the state in 1909, but can manage a sigh of relief that the onslaught wasn't quite as bad as the polls were predicting.  The Greens have again performed poorly relative to their polling (even more so than my attempts to compensate for this tendency suggested) and the Palmer United Party has probably failed to win a single seat. You can replay the live blog (and see a picture from the last time I got around to re-dying my hair) over here.  Apart from an intermission when I had to scramble down to Wrest Point because of a lack of booth data, it went well.



An interesting theme of the election is the strong performance of political veterans, with Rene Hidding topping the poll in Lyons and Labor's David Llewellyn and Julian Amos both fighting for seats and with reasonable chances.

Labor has very likely lost Brian Wightman and David O'Byrne, with Brenton Best in doubt.  It will have a new member in Denison whose identity will not be known until the week after next, with Madeleine Ogilvie and Julian Amos the main contenders.  It also may have successfully recycled David Llewellyn.  The Greens have lost Paul O'Halloran with Tim Morris going to the wire against Llewellyn.  The Liberals have retained their ten incumbents, who will be joined by Guy Barnett, Sarah Courtney or Barry Jarvis, very likely Paul Harriss, and at least one of Roger Jaensch and Joan Rylah (possibly both).

After at some stages looking like winning a seat or maybe two, Palmer United appear to have bombed amid the constant chaos, gaffes and ludicrously silly advertising from their team.  A more disciplined effort would have won them seats at this election but there is a limit to how many sharks you can jump in one campaign.  I had been projecting them to win a seat until the release of the final Newspoll, at which point I removed it.

Candidates other than the four major parties recorded no success to speak of with some recording risibly low vote tallies.  (It says it all for the Tasmanian Nationals that the candidate lambasted by the party for supporting legal marijuana, same-sex marriage and euthanasia was their highest vote-getter.)  Only Paul Belcher really troubled the scorers with over a thousand votes in Lyons.

Here is where the electorates stand tonight, with out of electorate votes and more postal votes to be added tomorrow:

Bass
Re-elected: Gutwein (Lib), Ferguson (Lib), O'Byrne (ALP)
Very probably re-elected: Booth (GRN)
Very probably defeated: Wightman (ALP)
Unclear: Jarvis (Lib) v Courtney (Lib)

The Liberals have 3.44 quotas, Labor 1.40, the Greens 0.75, PUP 0.31.  It sounds like Kim Booth has a whopping lead here, especially since the Liberals will lose .1 of a quota or so on leakage from the surpluses of Gutwein and Ferguson.  But the important thing to notice here is the split in Labor's vote especially.  Brian Wightman is not that far behind Michelle O'Byrne, meaning that if Labor's votes from their minor candidates were all to hold and were to split evenly, Wightman would be on 0.63 quotas and O'Byrne 0.77.  Preferences from PUP, Australian Christians and the fourth Liberal (if Wightman stays ahead of them) will be unfriendly to the Greens and, as unlikely as it looks on paper, Wightman might still close down the notional gap to Booth.  It's a pretty remote scenario though and it's very likely this is 3-1-1.

Braddon
Re-elected:  Brooks (Lib), Rockliff (Lib), Green (ALP)
Defeated: O'Halloran (Green)
Unclear: Jaensch (Lib) v Rylah (Lib) v Best (ALP) - two to win

Braddon has produced much the same sort of mess as my aggregate predicted, except that the major parties are a little higher and the Greens and PUP a little lower.  The Liberals have a stonking 3.53 quotas, Labor 1.40, PUP 0.43, the Greens 0.40 and the Nationals 0.13.  Brooks and Rockliff are way over quota and the Liberals will suffer leakage when those surpluses are thrown, so their quota-total lead is imaginary.  But this is really a race between candidates, and most likely between Joan Rylah (assuming she doesn't pass Roger Jaensch) and Brenton Best.  Currently Best leads Rylah by 826 votes, but Rylah has access to about 4000 more ticket votes, even accounting for leakage.  The equation for Best to beat Rylah is for the percentage of non-leaking Labor preferences he gets rather than Bryan Green getting them, to be about 20 points higher than the percentage of non-leaking Liberal preferences Rylah gets rather than them going to Jaensch.  So for instance if the non-leaking votes of the minor Labor candidates flow 50% each to Green and Best, and  the non-leaking surplus votes from Rockliff and Brooks flow 70% to Jaensch and 30% to Rylah, then Best is back in business.  The other issue here is that Best may perform better than the minor Liberals on preferences from all over the place, especially PUP.  Personally I suspect the minor Labor candidate preferences will favour Green over Best and therefore that Best is in as much trouble as it looks.  But he could hold.

As for the Greens and Palmer United, their problem is that they should actually start well behind Best and Rylah because of the split in individual candidate votes between the major parties.   The Greens will not get any friendly preferences anywhere and Palmer United have trouble in that their vote is not concentrated enough with their lead candidate Kevin Morgan.  So I don't see serious hope for either on current figures.  Braddon is most likely 4-1-0 (!!) or 3-2-0.

Denison
Re-elected: Bacon (ALP), Groom (Lib), Archer (Lib), O'Connor (Grn)
Unclear: Ogilvie (ALP) v Amos (ALP) (with outside chances for Carnes (ALP) and Mulumba (ALP))

Denison is totally settled at 2-2-1.  There will be a long fight for the second Labor seat with the surprisingly well-performed (after last time) Madeleine Ogilvie and the veteran Julian Amos most likely to fight it out on Scott Bacon's surplus.  Which of these wins will not be known until at least the throw of Bacon's surplus and possibly later.

Franklin
Re-elected: Hodgman (Lib), Petrusma (Lib - not absolutely confirmed), Giddings (ALP), McKim (Green)
Very probably elected: Harriss (Lib)
Very probably defeated: D O'Byrne (ALP)

Franklin has also panned out along the lines my aggregate suggested, with the Liberal lead apparently big enough for now to absorb Will Hodgman's leakage.  The notional Liberal lead (2.99 quotas to 1.74 quotas) is currently 2284 votes which is about a thousand too many.  Unhelpfully for Labor the Greens have only an even quota and no preferences.  Labor only has any chance if the party gap closes in late counting by, say, 0.1 of a quota.  That's a big ask but maybe out-of-electorate voting will help Labor.  If this doesn't happen in a hurry it will be time to stick a fork in this one at 3-1-1 and Paul Harriss will very likely be the new minister for forestry to the gnashing, wailing and lamentations of greenies everywhere.

Lyons
Re-elected: Hidding (Lib), Shelton (Lib), White (ALP)
Elected: Barnett (Lib)
Unclear: Llewellyn (ALP) vs Morris (Green)

Perhaps the most surprising result with Labor doing substantially better than expected and the Greens significantly worse.  David Llewellyn will be going to the wire for the second election in a row, this time against Tim Morris.  It starts as a more or less dead even contest and will probably be very close.   Preferences from Paul Belcher may assist Morris but those from PUP could help Llewellyn.  Morris starts notionally 81 votes ahead and with Llewellyn more exposed to leakage (this could be worth 200 votes); the question then being whether the anti-Green run of preferences is enough to overturn Morris's lead. PUP's decision to run only three candidates in Lyons could be a big factor in Llewellyn's favour. We won't know the outcome of this one til the cutup.

The question always asked is how these results would have panned out under the old 35 seat system.  I get:

Bass, Lyons, Franklin: 4-2-1
Braddon 5-2-0 or maybe 4-2-0-1 (because of leakage from Lib ticket)
Denison 3-3-1 or 3-2-2

19-20 Lib, 10-11 ALP, 4-5 Green, 0-1 PUP

On Sunday I will set up new threads for the post-count in each of these seats.  A link will be posted on the sidebar to these post-count threads.

Oh, for those wondering, I voted 1-5 for most of the Denison independents (save Zucco who went somewhere in the middle) and then sent my preferences all over the place.  My system for preferencing was loosely to rotate between the four main columns while at the same time putting candidates from each party in a pre-decided order.  I found that I did not care about which party got my preferences first, but did care about the ordering of candidates within the parties, especially Labor.