TASMANIA 2025: LIB 14 (=) ALP 10 (=) GRN 5 (=) IND 5 (+2) SF+F 1 (+1)
(Changes from 2024 result. JLN (3 seats 2024) did not run, their former MPs running as two Nationals and one independent, all defeated)
(Changes from 2024 result. JLN (3 seats 2024) did not run, their former MPs running as two Nationals and one independent, all defeated)
Counting is over for an election that finished up in much the same place as last year's ... but not quite, and this will be a rather different parliament despite the big three all coming out with what they went in with. At present, Premier Jeremy Rockliff is intending to be recommissioned to meet the Parliament (see pathways to government article), but the storm clouds have been gathering since election night as to whether he has any prospect of surviving another no-confidence motion when Parliament resumes, let alone whether he can govern with any stability. It didn't get any easier for him yesterday with Craig Garland ruling out supporting his party and expressing willingness to vote no-confidence again, and Peter George expressing serious reservations (while also making comments that might not make life easy for Labor either). The writs will be returned on Tuesday, kickstarting the week in which the Governor must appoint somebody, presumably Rockliff, to meet the House, preferably sooner rather than later.
The past four minority governments elected as such in Tasmania lost the next election outright, some of them heavily. This is the first to stop that rot since the Reece Government was re-elected with a majority in 1964, and that government had spent over two years in majority during its term after picking up a seat on a recount. The government not only avoided net seat losses but had a 3.2% swing to it. And for those saying that the days of majority government are gone forever, beware, they did not actually miss one by very much. The Liberals finishing eighth in three divisions has enabled me to determine that on swings of 0.94%, 1.82% and 2.30% from the winners, they would have won the final seats in Franklin, Clark and Lyons respectively - the first two of which would have given them the numbers for a potential government with Carlo Di Falco and David O'Byrne (assuming those two were agreeable). In Bass, the Liberals' elimination in tenth place makes it hard to be sure what swing would have won them the seventh seat, especially as keeping the Liberals in the final seat race requires eliminating someone who didn't actually get excluded. But I think that about a 3% higher primary vote would have been enough, meaning the Liberals could have won a majority off about 43%. Wherever it goes from here, this was a close election.
The major party primary vote gap of 14% is the highest it has ever been without the leading side winning a majority. The previous record there was 12.2% in 1989, an election which this could end up having much in common with depending on where things go from here.
My estimate is that based on the votes actually cast, of those voters expressing a choice, the Liberal Party won the two-party preferred, in terms of how many voters ranked a Liberal candidate ahead of any Labor candidate or vice versa. I estimate this at 52.2-47.8, a swing of about 2.7% to the Government. This estimate includes detailed 2PP scrutineering samples from various sources including some of my own for the major independents and the Greens. (It may seem this swing is surprisingly large given the votes for crossbenchers were more left-wing than in past years, but optional preferencing systems tend to magnify the primary vote leader's lead).
Although this sounds good for the Government, Hare-Clark is not a 2PP system and whether a voter's preference beyond their party is effective depends on how they voted. At this election, for instance, 50544 voters voted 1 Greens, and of these 31383 voted 1 for a ticket leader or co-leader. Five of the ticket leaders/co-leaders were elected without getting a quota on primaries, and the sixth was never excluded, so none of those Greens votes had any impact beyond helping the person voted 1 for get elected. If the voters for those candidates knew that was going to happen and still wished to vote that way, they had no reason to express a preference beyond the ticket.
Various apparently polling-based claims were made on election night that Labor had been preferred in 2PP polling where voters were asked to choose between a Liberal and Labor government, but none of the public polling that canvassed 2PP was accurate on primary votes. My view for this election is that had voters been forced to pick one of the two they may have very narrowly picked Labor (I got an estimate of 50.8% here) but in any case all these measures are inconclusive and it all comes down to who if anyone can corral 18 seats. If the Liberals fail to do so despite winning the primary vote by 14 points then that will be because the "left" forces combined got more votes and more seats than them (and whoever if anyone wants to work with them.) But it will be a very hard sell for Labor to the public.
Another proportional parliament
And on that score, this is another very proportional representation of what the voters voted for (see last year's review to see how this is two in a row). Hare-Clark is not necessarily a primary vote related PR system but in this case the results have very much come out that way - with a little help from preference flows in Bass! Labor has one more seat than they are proportionally entitled to and everybody else has got the nearest whole number. One doesn't expect independents to necessarily do so since not all independents are the same, but this time they did.
Had we still used the 25-seat system, I estimate seat results at 11 Liberal 7 Labor 4 Green 3 Independent. Both major parties would have been slightly (not seriously) over-represented but the problem here is Labor couldn't really govern with seven.
Preferencing impacts and the Razay snowball
Usually in a Hare-Clark election preferences play a relatively minor role in deciding seats with nearly all the party-level seats won by the parties leading on quota total. This was no different with 34 of the 35 seats going to the quota leaders. The 35th was the amazing race in Bass, the likes of which we've never seen before. It has some similarities to Victoria Senate 2022, another multi-way contest where nobody had much and somebody had to win (just a shame about the winner in that case). In Bass 2025, independent George Razay was fourth on spare primary quota totals (Liberals 3.344 SFF 0.327 Greens 1.320 Razay 0.278). However, Razay immediately overtook the Liberals' margin over three quotas following leakage from Bridget Archer's surplus alone, and with leakage rates around the 17% range from the early Greens minor candidates it didn't take long for him to pass them as well. Where Razay had to win on pure preferences was against the Shooters Fishers and Farmers' Michal Frydrych, who he started 407 behind and ended up beating by 448, a gain of 855 votes. Here Razay basically hung around in the count making very slow gains and looking at risk of potentially being excluded until accelerating with a 408 gain from Rebekah Pentland and a 127 vote gain from the Greens combined enough to get him well past Frydrych, though other parcels including from independents Tim Walker and Jack Davenport and a big leak from fellow retired medico and adjacent councillor Julie Sladden (Liberal) also helped.
While Razay was beating the major parties on primary vote totals from very early he was still very nearly beaten by the Ginninderra Effect, in which a party that is trailing can win by keeping both its candidates ahead individually of the lone candidate who seems to be "in front". Labor in Bass executed this to near perfection, with the almost exact split between Jess Greene and Geoff Lyons keeping them in the hunt at four exclusions where they were otherwise in last place. But in the end the preference flow into their ticket was just too weak and even a perfect split would not have been enough. After allowing for leakage effects (which saw 1289 votes go out of the Labor ticket with 262 going to Razay), Razay gained a further 4006 votes while the entire Labor ticket (2-6 candidates at various points of the count) gained only 4359.
These flows are a fair bit stronger than usually seen, and the anti-stadium vote in Bass is a big factor here, but also there was a strong anti-majors mood in preference flows in general. A striking illustration was Franklin, where David O'Byrne started 18 votes behind Dean Winter but beat him in the race for fourth elected despite Winter being his party's leader and having access to 1607 ticketmate votes (albeit splitting four ways). Here a big factor was flows from the Peter George ticket - from voters supporting anti-stadium candidates to O'Byrne who is strongly pro-stadium! More on the stadium later.
Razay won from the lowest primary vote ever for an independent or ticket, his 3.5% beating Craig Garland's 5.1% from last year - itself breaking a record that had stood for 90 years!
There were two trailing wins in within party contests. These are a pretty common feature with 18 of them between the 1980 advent of Robson Rotation and last year. Normally they involve close margins (two-thirds have been 200 votes or less) and this was very much the case with Jess Greene beating Geoff Lyons from 83 votes behind in Bass. (For quite a while it looked like both might win.) Greene gained 400 on Lyons within-ticket preferences with a 700 vote gain from Mellissa Anderson more than cancelling out a big gain to Lyons off Luke Moore; out of ticket preferences had very little net impact on the contest.
The more unusual win was Madeleine Ogilvie beating Simon Behrakis for the second Liberal seat in Clark from 670 votes behind. This is the fourth largest margin overturned since 1980. The three larger overturns, noted in the Ogilvie Chases History section on the Clark page, were two cases of an incumbent's huge surplus favouring another incumbent and one where Andrew Lohrey's distinctive view on the Gordon below Franklin dam saw him win on Democrats preferences. In the Ogilvie/Behrakis case the main driver seems to have been gender preferencing, with Ogilvie making a net gain of 560 off a predominantly female preference pool as one woman competing against two men. Ogilvie then made a further gain of 290 on non-Liberal preferences, mostly also coming from female candidates, but I'd expect her more moderate reputation also made a difference here. Or perhaps it was just the AI.
MP turnover
Although this looks like a no-change election, seven MPs still lost their seats. Ex-JLNers Andrew Jenner and Miriam Beswick disappeared without trace running (and the fact that they were on it together was silly enough) on the feeble Tasmanian Nationals attempt. Rebekah Pentland's independent run came a lot closer; she was 517 (0.77%) behind Razay at her exclusion, and had she outlasted Razay she may have won. Liberal Nic Street was the victim of eight into seven doesn't go after Peter George jumped in the Franklin party. Labor's Casey Farrell and Liberal Simon Wood were swamped by recent federal incumbents Brian Mitchell and Bridget Archer, Farrell for now ending the shortest stay in parliament since Neville Oliver in 2002. Finally, the People's Republic Of Clark in typically on-brand behaviour saw an election caused by a budget crisis and threw out the only economist in parliament - Marcus Vermey replaces Simon Behrakis. A third recent federal MP stormed in with Gavin Pearce winning in Braddon, but the Liberals made a gain there so they got that one for free.
As well as the new independents George and Razay, the other new crossbencher is Carlo Di Falco, a serial Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate who had got one deposit back in seven prior attempts. While partly testament to the Tasmanian party's success in moving beyond conventional right-wing politics into, for instance, rural health and service issues, this win is more of the same anti-big-three voting in Lyons that has seen high Lambie and One Nation votes at various elections. It's all the more intriguing as the Shooters were caught on the hop by the snap election like everyone else and only ran a scaled-back campaign with three single candidates.
The People's Republic of Franklin!
While far too many independents cluttered up the ballot this time (and something must be done!) the four most prominent (Kristie Johnston, Peter George, David O'Byrne and Craig Garland) bolted in, and Razay must have done something right since he won. Johnston and Peter George topped their polls, the first non-proto-Green INDs to do so in a seat since Reg Turnbull in Bass in 1959, and the first case of two non-Green INDs doing so in the same year. (The Greens topped two in 1989 and 2010). Non-major party MPs (Johnston and Vica Bayley) were elected 1 and 2 in Clark; this has never happened before. In Franklin, three non-major MPs (George, O'Byrne and Rosalie Woodruff) were in the top four elected; this is also unprecedented. Franklin overall displayed some very Clark behaviour at this one, returning an even lower major party vote (57.15 vs 57.65). Franklin has had its hand up for being a second People's Republic for a while now, including voting Yes at the Voice (albeit narrowly), being a non-classic seat at the federal election (although without the independent winning) and now this. Maybe some of this will pass if David O'Byrne is ever reintegrated into the ALP, and also Peter George's support seems to be very non-transferrable after his ticket of low-profile supporters displayed student politics level leakage. But Labor was outpolled by the Greens and George ticket combined by 0.62 quotas in Franklin and by the Greens and Johnston combined by 0.8 quotas in Clark, and they just won't get near a majority again while anything like that's happening.
In comparison to previous Green surges there is now more support than ever for candidates with broadly Greens-like perspectives, but that support is split between Greens and independents now instead of being focused in the Greens.
Informal voting and exhaust
It was some relief to see informal voting fall from 6.31% to 5.84%; I had feared worse, especially after the federal election where the Senate voting rule was 1 to 6. It's still too high and I believe Tasmania should adopt savings provisions at least for those voters who have attempted to number seven boxes but mistakenly omitted or doubled in the process. Informal voting was down in all divisions but especially the north. It's unlikely any winners would have been different with a lower informal rate.
The statewide exhaust rate was 5.0% (down 0.5%) with Bass again highest at 8.0%. The structure of the preference distributions can have a large effect on exhaust rates, since major party voters often vote for their own party then stop, and contests that end up between candidates from the same party often see a lot of voters not numbering that column. (Exhaust in Braddon was low at 4.0% because neither major party left the count; this was also true of Franklin 3.1%). It's important to bear in mind that 5.0% of vote values exhausting does not mean 5.0% of voters' votes left the count entirely - exhaust includes votes coming from surpluses where part of a voter's vote value had helped elect somebody but part of it had later left the count.
Das Stadion
The proposed Macquarie Point stadium has been seen as a bit of a fizzer in this election since despite all the noise about it in the campaign there wasn't much swing. Here it's important to bear in mind that the stadium was an even more major issue in 2024, so its unpopularity was already baked into the baseline for this election.
At this election the Liberal Party moved to a more pro-stadium position than 2024 by dropping its previous public funding cap promise. Labor also moved to a clearly pro-stadium position after trying to run away from the issue last year. Despite this the net swing on the major party vote was +0.06%. But I don't think this should be read as anger over the stadium wearing off, since the swing to major parties was partly because the Jacqui Lambie Network collapsed and did not run. Had minor parties had more time to get organised and registered for this election, the combined major party vote would have gone down.
I think at this election there was more salient anti-stadium sentiment in both Hobart City and Launceston than 2024 (that is, more voters cared enough to base their vote around it) this can be seen in the high combined swing to Johnston and the Greens in Clark and the strong preference flows against the majors in Bass. (A Leon Compton streetwalk where almost every voter interviewed was attacking the stadium was another sign that dislike of the stadium had reached boiling point). But for all that elections aren't about one thing, and pro-stadium forces won 25 out of 35 seats and 68% of the vote. This isn't evidence that voters want the stadium, just that only a moderate proportion see it as a dealbreaker at the ballot box. Whoever governs will say they have that mandate for it, but the mandate concept becomes a problem n minority when it relies on the losing party to keep to its election position, something that in 2024 Labor said they were not obliged to do. In any case, the Legislative Council has its own mandate.
The Polling: Triumph And Disaster
This election was not as much polled as 2024. There were only two outfits in the field for public polling (YouGov and DemosAU) and EMRS released plenty of its internal Liberal polling. All the final polls overestimated the independent vote (by exactly as much as in the last two elections) but EMRS was otherwise excellent. DemosAU had the overall picture broadly right despite underestimating the Liberals by five points and YouGov had a shocker! The final YouGov poll missed low on the Liberal primary by nearly 9% (worse than the sole uComms in 2021) and missed on the major party margin by 13%, one of the worst final state polls I've ever seen. And earlier in the campaign they had had Labor in the lead!
What happened here with YouGov? I'm really not sure, especially after their small seat polls of Lyons and Braddon for the federal election did well by seat poll standards. Use of 2025 federal election as a weighting has been one suspect, though this should only matter if the data were being gathered afresh, which YouGov often doesn't do (a voter annoyed by Tasmanian Labor might then be less inclined to say they voted for federal Labor, so the rusted-ons would get upweighted). Perhaps a more likely suspect is the difficulty of getting a representative purely online panel for Tasmania that isn't overly engaged, especially with YouGov being opt-in. Any further hints will be added in here.
There was also a private uComms poll taken June 10-11, the days on which the election was sought and called. This had primaries (after redistributing undecided) of 33.7-32.7-13.8-11.9-8.2, but the 8.2 included Jacqui Lambie Network who didn't actually run. If leaving it like that, it comes out slightly worse than YouGov (average difference 4.2) but if the JLN 4% is redistributed proportionally then it comes out better (3.3). Anyway, YouGov was not alone in having Labor on near-level terms, but the uComms was very early in the fray and perhaps at that time it was closer to true. It also didn't overestimate the independents!
DemosAU provided estimates for many individual candidates. The poll named nine independents on the same line as the party names, and as expected the vote for all these independents was overestimated - though crucially George Razay not by much (1.6%). The average overestimate per named independent was 2.5% and the average combined overestimate per seat was 4.4%. In Lyons where only Angela Offord was named her vote was overestimated by 4.9%.
Bearing in mind that the poll underestimated the Liberals, its estimates for named non-independent candidates were on the whole very good. The graph below is on a logarithmic scale to spread out the cluster of candidates with low vote shares. The poll predicted 91% of the variation in actual vote shares (very impressive!) It had a slight tendency to underestimate the higher-polling candidates, particularly if they were male (eg Rockliff 24.6 vs actual 31.5, Barnett, Ferguson, Broad but also Finlay). Among the many bullseyes it projected Bridget Archer to get 19.6% and she got 19.4.
I have suggested online polling with a list of candidates alongside each party name might be the way to beat the problem with overpolling independents. The problem with this is that panels themselves may be suspect so perhaps the way to do it would be to call or text random respondents and invite them to complete an online survey.
Polarisation
Although the seat results are more or less the same as 2024, the crossbench is different. The 2024 crossbench included three Jacqui Lambie Network MPs who were politically inexperienced (at least in an Australian context), had not campaigned on much, and had been elected with low profiles off the name of Jacqui Lambie. In contrast George, Di Falco and Razay arrive in parliament with shopping lists of issues they've campaigned on; all have run for parliaments before.
Putting some of the crossbench MPs in right or left-wing boxes is problematic and is crosscut by issues like the budget and the stadium. One can argue which of the major parties was really to the right or left of the other in this campaign. But overall there was a bigger vote at this election for candidates who were clearly to the left of Labor and also an increase in vote for candidates popularly placed on their right - not only because the Labor vote itself was down, but also because the vaguely centrist and lightweight JLN has disappeared.
I believe this is partly because, while clearer about what it stood for than in 2025, Labor didn't seem to be standing for enough that voters saw as different - on all the issues that drove the high combined Greens/left independent vote, Labor offered little or nothing distinctive. It's also partly because the Liberal campaign despite having a terrible position to work from again seemed more energetic, at least in the early stages.
But I also think it's because this election became about this election itself. Going to vote is no big deal, but the weeks leading up to the vote involve emotional energy and engagement with an environment full of conflict and annoying ads. The runup to the recent federal election was particularly long and draining for a lot of voters. Finally that's over, the decision's made. Tasmania has rewarded federal Labor massively, despite some reservations. Hooray, that's over now, can we all go back to sleep? Then suddenly along comes state Labor saying "Hey, can we have some of that too?"
That said I believe Dean Winter was totally sincere in believing something had to be done about the Budget, and done now, and that Labor had no alternative but to move no confidence. A problem was that despite Labor choosing to bring it on, the campaign showed they'd been underprepared in finding real solutions. Labor has been left in a situation (given the embarrassing vote share results) where they can hardly take government with a straight face, but on the other hand, if they can then they have to. And if they can't then what kind of stability is possible?
So that's all for another Tasmanian election roundup - pretty much everything except who won!
