2025 Tasmanian Postcount: Bass

BASS (2024 Result 3 Liberal 2 Labor 1 Green 1 JLN)

(At Election 3 Liberal 2 Labor 1 Green 1 IND)

SEATS WON 3 Liberal 2 Labor 1 Green

SEAT PARTY CONTEST: Multiple contenders - Labor, Liberal, SF+F appear to be best chances

SEAT WINNERS: Bridget Archer (Lib), Michael Ferguson (Lib), Rob Fairs (Lib), Janie Finlay (ALP), Cecily Rosol (GRN)

WITHIN-PARTY BATTLE: Jess Greene vs Geoff Lyons (ALP) - or both may win

WITHIN-PARTY BATTLE: Simon Wood/Julie Sladden/Chris Gatenby (Lib) - may not be for a seat

SEAT APPARENTLY LOST: Rebekah Pentland (IND)

Click here for link to tallyboard page with links to other postcounts as written

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In trying to work out what might happen at this state election, one of the hardest things to figure out was what would happen to the final seat in Bass.  There were a range of possibilities but no one seemed to have their hand up for it.  I'm delighted to inform the House that this is still the case, if anything it's messier than I imagined possible.  Perhaps after tomorrow's prepolls this will change, but we will see.

As I start this thread Bass is 59.3% counted.  Tomorrow we have the Launceston prepoll which in 2024 was worth 16.8% of enrolment; it will probably be larger this time.  

The current quota leaders in Bass in the race for the final seat are:

Shooters Fishers and Farmers 0.368 quotas

Greens 1.316 quotas

Liberals 3.314 quotas

Razay (IND) 0.268

Labor 2.210 quotas

Pentland (IND) 0.190

When the Launceston prepoll is added the Liberals should go up to approaching 3.4 quotas, and all of SF+F, Razay and Pentland should drop.  

The cutup, when it starts, will start with the election of Bridget Archer who currently has 1.46 quotas in her own right.  Michael Ferguson has 0.83 quotas and may cross on Archer's surplus.  Janie Finlay is currently on roughly a quota and will cross either on primaries or very soon after (perhaps even on leakage from Archer.)  There will then be a long series of exclusions from the bottom that after the exclusion of various minor Greens and Liberals will eventually put Rob Fairs and Cecily Rosol over quota in some order.  

It may seem from the numbers above that Labor are trailing several others in the race for the final seat but here Labor have an advantage that Geoff Lyons and Jess Greene currently have almost identical votes (1475 and 1577).  If they can maintain that split then the 1.2 quotas Labor is left with eventually becomes close to 0.6 quotas for each of two candidates. They will not move as quickly on preferences as a single candidate for a party would, but that lead might be large enough to hold off the challengers.

The other thing in Labor's favour here is that Finlay has almost exactly a quota which is perfect for them.  They have currently only .661 quotas in votes that can leak on preference throws on the way to either Lyons or Greene.  The Liberals have .858 quotas in leakable votes and most of this is in the Archer surplus.  I would expect that because of Archer's federal career and reputation for crossing the floor her votes may be leakier than the average Liberal.

In the event of the Liberals being in contention for four I suspect that Simon Wood will pull ahead of Sladden and Gatenby as an incumbent as he did last time.  

The Greens have lower exposure to leakage than either (.432 quotas currently) but they tend to have very high leakage rates and could well lose about as much to leakage as the majors.  The single-candidate contenders (the Shooters' Michael Frydrych, the independents Razay and Pentland), however, cannot leak, they can only accumulate preferences.  On that basis there's a fair chance, for instance, that Razay will pass the second Green.  

Anti-stadium preferencing, if it was a thing at all, could see some preferences pooling among the minor parties, but a cross-cutting factor is that some share of Greens preferences will always go to Labor - even if a Greens voter hates the stadium, will they really preference the Shooters over it?   Another factor is that SF+F don't usually tend to do that well on preferences.

I suspect this eventually ends up as a candidate race between the Liberals and Frydrych on the one side and the two Labor candidates on the other, and the question is whether the right-wing candidate (after preferences from the other one) can get over one Labor candidate after Labor has gained on Greens preferences.  

In theory an independent like Razay could get over Labor (if the split between its candidates becomes uneven) knocking out one of their candidates, whose preferences will then elect the other with a surplus.  But this isn't very helpful to the independent because there will be a lot of exhaust here.  For this reason I don't think the Greens, Razay and Pentland have serious chances here but will keep an eye on them.

Pentland is in the ungrouped column which will help with preference flows from indies but some of the other ungroupeds are quite Greens-friendly and there will be quite a bit of scatter, especially as Razay is in the adjacent column.

Expect we'll know far more about this one after the prepoll tomorrow.  

Sunday 20th:  Bass prepoll was actually weaker for the Liberals than expected with a below electorate average swing.  They made gains but so did the independents at the expense of Frydrych.  Now Greens 1.342 Liberals 3.336 SF+F 0.329 Razay 0.277 Pentland 0.204 Labor 2.193 - but remember that Labor's apparent last place is possibly really first!  Probably because I could not spell a word that long at 3 am I forgot to mention Labor winning would be another example of the Ginninderra Effect; the DemosAU seat sample pointed to this possibility in this seat.    A blow for the Liberals' chances to have not made a serious gain in this prepoll.