Legislative Council Voting Patterns 2021-25

A strange thing happened in the LegCo on the 20th of November last year.  In debate about the Expungement of Historical Offences Amendment Bill 2024 the major parties differed in their approach to setting compensation for victims of Tasmania's infamous former anti-gay laws (which were repealed in 1997).  The Greens had successfully moved an amendment regarding compensation levels to the Government's Bill in the Assembly and the Goverment wanted to move a different amendment on that subject in the Council.  Ruth Forrest moved that the issue be referred to the Gender and Equity Committee but Labor disagreed, arguing that the Council should be able to deal with the issue itself.  In the end the referral motion passed 8-5 with Government support but three independents joining Labor.  

What is unusual about that?  Well, in the last year it was one of only two cases I could find where the ALP, the official "Opposition", had voted against the Rockliff Liberal Government on the floor of the Council. the other being an attempt by the government to adjourn a debate on Development Assessment Panels (nobody but the government wanted to adjourn it).  A year in which the Government and Opposition voted together on 90% of recorded divisions in the Council highlighted an increasing trend towards "Laborial" politics in Tasmania, something I also picked up on last year and that has been growing since 2020.  There are signs of a similar dynamic downstairs though I haven't yet assessed the voting patterns there.  When independent Kristie Johnston declared recently for the second time that she had no confidence in the government, the charge to attack her for supposedly undermining business confidence with stunt motions was led not by the Liberal Party but by Labor's Josh Willie.  

As usual as a curtain-raiser for the Legislative Council season I have prepared an assessment of voting patterns in the Council covering the previous four years.  Last year's elections (the first with three vacant seats on the same day since 1909) saw the Liberals retain Prosser after Jane Howlett won an Assembly seat in Lyons, the Greens' Cassy O'Connor easily win the party's first ever Council seat on the retirement of left independent Rob Valentine, and former Glenorchy Mayor Bec Thomas win the seat of Elwick from Labor on Willie's successful move to the lower house.  

The 2025 Council elections have recently been postponed by three weeks to May 24th to avoid a possible clash with the federal election.  I believe this is the first time legislation allowing the government to set any Saturday in May as the date has been used, though there are previous cases (eg 1999 for redistributions and 2020 because of COVID-19) of the date being moved by special legislation.  With the current numbers standing at Liberals 4 Labor 3 Green 1 Independent 7, the elections for Nelson, Pembroke and Montgomery are again very important both for the major party balance in the chamber (on those rare days when they actually disagree) but also for the balance between party and independent MLCs.  

The methods for this article are the same as in previous years.   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.  I count two .  While there are very rare conscience vote cases where members of a major party can be found on both sides of a vote (none this year), 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 (there were no splits on either side this year).  I exclude lone dissents (there was one this year by Cassy O'Connor over forestry, though she was joined by others on other votes in the same debate). 

Note that Labor gives up a vote on every issue because Craig Farrell is the President.  So far all the very few casting votes (three more this year) that he has had have been exercised in line with neutral chairing conventions though he has quite rightly outlined that he would not necessarily be bound by them in a house of 15 members.  This missing vote matters because it means that in the committee stage, where the President is absent, the party MLCs combined cannot pass an amendment or a vote that a clause stand part of a Bill if it is opposed by all seven independents.  Nor can the seven independents pass such things if Labor and Liberal are both opposed.  The major parties also cannot succeed where they have one independent onside but O'Connor disagrees with them.  I've said it before and I'll say it again - whatever one thinks of particular "Laborial" motions it is not democratic that one fifteenth of the population are constantly losing representation because of the absence of the President from the committee stages.

In this year's rolling sample there are 88 divisions, of which 20 are new.  New divisions included such issues as presumptive sentencing, forestry, the above-mentioned Development Assessment Panels debate and approval of the Stony Rise development.  

Agreement matrix and left-right sort

The chart below shows how often each pair of Legislative Council entities (an entity can be an independent MLC or a party) agrees with each other on the contested divisions in the sample.  For instance this year's table finds that Armitage and Labor agree with each other 62% of the time.  

There are a couple of clusters with fairly to in cases very high agreement percentages.  Firstly there's O'Connor and Webb who have nearly always voted together so far, joined to a lesser extent by Gaffney and Thomas though Gaffney and Thomas haven't often voted with each other in the small sample of Thomas voting.  Secondly there's a very high agreement rate between Rattray and Harriss and these two also fairly often vote with Armitage.  Forrest fairly often votes with some MLCs from either of these groups (Gaffney, Rattray and Harriss especially) but doesn't display very strong voting patterns with or against anybody.  The major parties don't vote particularly strongly with anybody but do hardly ever vote with O'Connor, and strikingly the Liberals and Webb have now only agreed on six percent of votes in my sample.  (No wonder they are desperate to blast her out of Nelson!)  As in last year's article Labor votes with the Liberals more often in my sample than they do with anybody else.  

The "Score" column is given by dividing each MLC's average agreement with the side they most often agree with with the side they least often agree with.  A green colour indicates they agree with the left grouping more often and a blue colour indicates the right grouping.  (Forrest very slightly more often agreed with the left grouping but I have given her a different colour as she is clearly best placed as centre.) 

"Strongly Right" in the table above doesn't mean far right; this is Tasmania where the Liberal Party is rather moderate at state level.  These things are relative.  What is very striking here is that this is the first time Labor has showed up as "Right" in my sample, with a ratio of 1.62.  I assessed Labor's voting pattern in previous editions as Left in 2012, Strongly Left in 2013 through 2020, Left in 2021 and Centre in 2022, 2023 and 2024 (they were close to making Centre-Right in the latter).  

Also of interest here is the position of the newest independent Bec Thomas.  On the campaign trail Thomas ran a generally uncontroversial centre-left indie style campaign. Some left-wing and local-government based detractors alleged she was a secret government asset (see background here) although her campaign was also supported by Webb.  So far based on her voting behaviour Thomas is actually who her campaign told us she was, and her voting in the chamber has been a lot less helpful to the government than if Labor had retained the seat.  

The score figures above place O'Connor as substantially to the left of Webb, but I think this is not to be trusted as it mainly reflects Labor's shift towards the Liberals compared with the days when Labor used to vote with Webb more often.  If I remove Labor the gap closes to 2.67 to 2.36 but O'Connor is still to the left of Webb based mainly on Webb's higher agreement percentages with Rattray and Armitage (though Armitage's position has also moved somewhat over time).  A possible left-right sort of the current Council is O'Connor, Webb, (Gaffney and Thomas in some order), Forrest, Rattray, Harriss, Labor, Armitage, Liberals.   With Labor voting with it so often the government has hardly lost a thing in the past year, though Development Assessment Panels was one case where it couldn't get its way with no support outside Labor.  Its other loss was a committee stage tie on presumptive mandatory sentencing for sexual offences towards children, where it was joined by Labor and Armitage.

For this year's elections Nelson is an obviously very big deal, the Liberals would be extremely keen to turn Meg Webb's 6% agreement with their positions into 100% by electing Marcus Vermey.  Nelson is a seat that used to always be occupied by Liberal-friendly independents and its loss to a left independent is still stinging six years later.  Pembroke has been an easy hold for Labor in the recent past while Montgomery sees a mess on the right as Government Leader Leonie Hiscutt's son Casey runs for the seat against a Liberal candidate in former Senator Stephen Parry.  The elections will be overshadowed by the federal election to a large degree, but not on here!  I will be rolling out guides to all three seats in the coming weeks and covering these elections live on the night of May 24.