Legislative Council Voting Patterns 2019-23

 Welcome to my traditional curtain-raiser for Tasmania's annual Legislative Council elections.  This year sees second-term independent Rosemary Armitage in Launceston, third-term independent Ruth Forrest in Murchison and first-term Labor MLC Sarah Lovell in Rumney all up for re-election.  There's a lack of buzz about this year's contests so far and in the absence of more serious challengers in the northern seats, re-election is what I am expecting to occur.  I'll be rolling out guides for these three contests very soon and I'll have live coverage on the night of May the 6th.  

Currently the Tasmanian Legislative Council contains four Liberal MLCs, four Labor and eight independents.  Labor briefly had five MLCs but Bastian Seidel resigned after less than two years and his seat of Huon reverted to its usual kind of occupant, a fairly conservative independent.  Note also that Labor's Craig Farrell is the current President and does not vote, except for casting votes (so far in line with convention) on some ties.  

Last year's Legislative Council voting patterns piece (released later than normal in the lead-up to the Pembroke by-election) was quite unusual by the standards of my past assessments.  I found that Labor and independent Ruth Forrest had ceased to be clearly on the left of the Council and moved into the centre.  Although it is only eight months since that assessment it's a radical enough change that I thought it worthwhile for this year to throw the new data into the mix and see if anything changed.  It didn't.   

The methods for this piece are the same as last year.  I look at the last four years of data on a rolling basis.  Where a given Bill or other matter has multiple votes, I include the divisions that are different to each other, up to a maximum of ten divisions per Bill.  While there are very rare conscience vote cases where members of a major party can be found on both sides of a vote, in general I treat "Labor" and "Liberal" as a single actor, and treat a party as absent for that purpose in the case of a split vote.  I exclude lone dissents (there were none in this year's sample top-up).

In this year's rolling sample there are 104 divisions, of which 18 are new.  The Climate Change (State Action) Amendment Bill 2021 was the biggest source of new divisions, accounting for seven.  The rest were a mix of issues and even included a proposal to investigate time limits for speeches! (The major parties and Armitage voted in favour of investigating the matter further, while the other six independents voted against.) 

Agreement matrix and left-right sort

The chart below shows how often each pair of Legislative Council entities (an entity can be an indie or a party) agrees with each other on the contested divisions in the sample.  For instance this year's table finds that Harriss and Webb agree with each other 28% of the time.

Once again there's a very obvious cluster involving Webb, Valentine and to a slightly lesser extent Gaffney.  Webb and Valentine almost always vote together and Gaffney votes with them about three-quarters of the time.  There's a less clearly defined cluster on the right involving the Liberals and Dean Harriss, and to a lesser extent Armitage and Tania Rattray (Rattray through often voting with Harriss and Armitage through voting with all these around two-thirds of the time).  

This leaves Labor, which doesn't vote with anyone else more than 60% of the time, and Forrest, who has a high agreement percentage with Harriss alone (which may be partly a result of a modest sample size for Harriss and partly a result of independents tending to vote together on some issues).  

I have used ratios of average agreement with the left cluster and the right cluster to find a "score" for how strongly an MLC or party aligns with one side or the other.  The high agreement percentage with Harriss actually means that Forrest has voted very slightly more often on average with the right components than the left in this sample, but Forrest and Labor are very close to the centre.  Rattray and Armitage are more or less tied (though I've put Armitage to the right of Rattray based on the third decimal place and a higher agreement percentage with the Liberals).  

As noted in last year's analysis the relationship between Liberals, Labor and the three left indies now makes the latter seem more like Greens or teal independents.  I think they have really always been this way and what's changed is the Labor Party becoming more bipartisan (the Labor-Liberal agreement percentage of 48 is another long-term high).  In this year's sample there was again a perfect "Laborial" vote with an amendment to the Environmental Management and Pollution Control Amendment Bill defeated after every independent voted for the amendment and both major parties voted against.

All in all, with the right side's ranks boosted to seven with the election of Harriss and with Labor voting more with the Liberals, the Government doesn't have too much trouble, winning fifteen of the eighteen divisions since August and losing just a few amendments.  Things may get spicier when electoral reform hits the Council later this year, or not.

I aim to release guides to all three divisions over the next few days, with nominations announced this Friday.