HUON (IND vs ALP 2.55%)
This is my first guide for the Tasmanian Legislative Council for this year. An assessment of Legislative Council voting patterns has been updated and a guide to Rosevears has also finally appeared.
I expect to be doing live coverage of the Legislative Council elections on this site on election night, scheduled for Saturday May 2. However, updates to this page in the lead-up will probably be less frequent than normal.
The current numbers in the Council are three Liberal, three Labor, one Green and eight independents, with the independents ranging fairly evenly across the political spectrum. Labor gives up one vote on the floor and in the committee stages because it holds the Presidency. As the major parties frequently vote together, the Government has not had an especially difficult time of it in the upper chamber lately, most notably getting the hugely controversial Macquarie Point stadium through 9 votes to 5. But that is not to say the Liberals get everything their own way, for instance having their legislation to wind up greyhound racing referred to an inquiry.
This year sees just two Legislative Council contests, being the first defence for independent Dean Harriss in Huon and likewise for Liberal Jo Palmer in Rosevears.
Seat Profile
Huon (see map) includes the Huon Valley, the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, Bruny Island, part of Blackmans Bay and Huntingfield. In recent decades occupants have usually been conservative and have often had Liberal Party connections. Past incumbents have included the Hodgman brothers Michael (Former Premier Will's father) and Peter, who won it as independents in their late 20s before going on to bigger things as Liberals. Paul Harriss, whose LegCo career was bookended by Liberal runs, held the seat as a conservative independent for three terms from 1996, in which time nobody came close to beating him. (Indeed in 2002 there was speculation Labor's Fran Bladel could unseat him at the height of the Jim Bacon years, but he was barely even taken to preferences.) When Harriss senior switched to the Lower House in 2014, Peter Hodgman tried to win his old seat back for the party, and was blown away on preferences by then Huon Valley mayor Robert Armstrong. Armstrong was a very conservative independent whose voting behaviour almost never gave the Liberal Party any cause for concern. In 2020 Armstrong in turn was heavily defeated by Bastian Seidel (Labor), the first time Labor had won the seat since the 1940s. However Seidel quit after less than two years (see background in 2022 edition) and Labor failed to retain Huon at the by-election, with Paul Harriss's son Dean Harriss winning the seat at his second attempt.
Huon is one of the greener Legislative Council electorates, but at the 2025 state and federal elections many of its voters switched from the big-G Greens to high profile anti-fish-farm tealish independent Peter George. George was easily elected as an MP for Franklin in the 2025 state election. His state election group topped the poll in its own right at traditional Greens Channel area booths of Cygnet, Woodbridge and Middleton, and the combined George group/Greens vote for the state election exceeded the vote for any other party in two thirds of the booths in Huon (the exceptions being mainly in the Huon Valley). Overall with a rough adjustment for non-booth votes I estimate 2025 state election voting in Huon at Liberal 34.9% George group 20.9% Labor 19.7% Greens 15.1% David O'Byrne 8.4%. In booth voting at the federal election, Labor only beat George 53.2-46.8 two-candidate preferred within Huon (while thumping the Liberals who have long given up on federal Franklin).
Elections in Huon often see "favourite son" voting with strong local concentrations of support for candidates near where they live (the 2014 contest had a lot of this especially).
Incumbent
Dean Harriss (Facebook) is seeking a second term after filling the four-year remainder of Seidel's term. Prior to politics Harriss was a Huonville builder and project manager and third generation A-grade cricketer. In the last two years' voting patterns reviews I've assessed Harriss's voting pattern as centre-right on a spectrum running from Cassy O'Connor and Meg Webb to the Liberals (noting that this still placed him to the left of the ALP). In the past four years he has voted with Labor 49% of the time and the Liberals 62% of the time, and most often votes with other conservative-leaning INDs such as Tania Rattray. While generally joining the major parties in supporting resources industries, he also often seems to have a lot in common with the other independents generally. Harriss is to my knowledge the only current Tasmanian state politician with Indigenous heritage.
Political disagreements aside, Harriss has not been involved in any personal controversies I am aware of in his term in the Council so far. A notable event involving Harriss was his discovery of a large typo in the Government's interim supply bill tabled prior to the calling of the 2025 election, which required the figures to be amended - this even though Harriss had no familiarity with budget-speak prior to politics.
Harriss, with Bec Thomas, was one of the two key independents whose votes the government needed at least one of to pass the stadium without complications. Here Harriss's position has been a subject of a lot of commentary. While wanting to see the AFL team which depended on the stadium go ahead, Harriss raised concerns about aspects of the approval and design process and the state of budget repair and obtained various commitments albeit not all he had asked for (his letter and the government's response were tabled and can be read here.) (See stadium section below.)
Challengers (5)
(Note: candidates may contact me once only to request a change to the link their name goes to, or additional links which will be added, or not, at my discretion and subject to my time. I don't want to receive long emails or lobbying. I will be mostly offline during mid to late April. No other changes will be made on request except to correct clear factual errors, and I reserve the right not to correct errors caused by a candidate failing to keep their linkedin up to date. Any differences in the length of different candidate sections reflect differences in amount of available/(in my view) interesting material; candidate sections tend to be longer when candidates have past electoral form.)
Challengers are listed in order of the timing of the first readily accessible announcement I could find. All Huon candidates are believed to live in the electorate unless stated otherwise.
Clare Glade-Wright (Facebook, candidacy announcement, linkedin) is an independent candidate and the current Deputy Mayor of Kingborough. She was elected as a Kingborough Councillor in a 2021 by-election and then led on primaries in the Deputy race in 2022 with 21.4% in a field of six, winning easily after preferences. Glade-Wright ran for Franklin in the 2024 state election polling 1126 votes (1.6%). Glade-Wright is a former ecotourism operator. She is often associated with the community independents/teal movement and is endorsed by the Voices for Franklin group (not to be confused with Voices for Tasmania which was prominent in the 2024 election, though Michael Roberts who was the leader of it is her campaign agent). More significantly I suspect, she is also endorsed by Peter George.
Abby McKibben (Facebook, candidacy announcement, instgram, linkedin) is the endorsed Labor candidate. McKibben is the Manager of Communications, Engagement and Marketing at the Hobart City Council and is also co-owner and director of a pepper berry farm at Geeveston. She has previously worked in marketing at Huon Acquaculture and in IT and business in Hong Kong. McKibben's only previous political tilt known to me was a run for Huon Council in 2009 where she fairly narrowly missed out, polling 5% and finishing sixth in a race for five seats.
Michael Rowan (Facebook) is an independent candidate. He is a retired acadamic whose Doctor of Philosophy actually was in philosophy ("Hume, probability and induction" - very sound material here) and is now a frequent commentator for the Mercury, Tasmanian Times etc on education and also climate change and environmental issues. In 2024 Rowan was prominent in debate about Tasmania's dire secondary education retention rates, appearing in panels with Saul Eslake and Lisa Denny. He has an interest in the application of philosophy to environmental problems and a separate website on this subject. Rowan ran for Kingborough Council in 2022 polling 2%.
Paul Gibson (Facebook) is the endorsed Greens candidate. Gibson is a Greens councillor on Huon Valley Council, who was the third candidate elected in 2018 with 7.3% of the vote, then again third elected in 2022 with 11% (I didn't say "re-elected" because the two Greens councillors actually resigned their seats in the leadup to the 2022 election in protest over the council's handling of the extremely controversial appointment of a now-departed General Manager). Gibson also ran for Mayor in 2022 finishing second to Sally Doyle 44.3-55.7. Gibson is an architect and builder and is also the partner of Greens' Leader Rosalie Woodruff.
Tyler Petersen (Facebook, Instagram, linkedin) is an independent candidate. He is currently Operations Manager at Rotor-Lift and has worked in hospitality and pubs in Tasmania and originally the USA. He also at one stage part-owned Phat Fish Bar, a Salamanca seafood restaurant. As far as I'm aware he has no prior political form. His campaign material generally comes across to me as soft-left and services-focused and as likely to fit in with several of the other independents in the parliament; for instance he has networked with the electorally invincible Murchison MLC Ruth Forrest on Marinus Link.
Not Running
The Liberal Party has shown no interest in contesting this seat, and ultimately didn't nominate. The Liberals generally only run against incumbents who annoy them a lot and it seems they would rather leave the seat to Harriss and focus on Rosevears after a somewhat embarrassing fourth place finish in 2022. Eric Abetz in parliament recently referred to Harriss as 'the excellent local member for Huon' or similar.
Issues
Issues noted on the campaign trail will be listed here. This list is not comprehensive or in order and issues may be added over time. The presence of an item on the list does not necessarily mean it will sway votes, only that it is being talked about.
1. The Stadium: Although the contentious Macquarie Point stadium has been approved, it will continue to be talked about in particular from the perspective of inevitable cost blowouts. Harriss and Thomas obtained commitments for their votes in favour, but will the commitments be honoured in full and how can they be enforced now that the stadium is on and nobody will want to kill it off? Glade-Wright, who was at an early stage supportive of the stadium, posted in September that she'd changed her mind and now thought the stadium was "not sensible". Labor voted for the stadium and the Greens voted against it. The stadium is not a particularly big issue in Huon (part of Franklin which is overall the electorate where it gets closest to an even mix of support and opposition) but we won't get away from it on the campaign trail anyway.
2. Rural Health: Rural health was the keystone issue of Labor's huge win in this seat in 2020 but the question is can they do it again or was it a one-off Tassie Labor case of doctor power (see Macarthur, Robertson, Bega etc). Rural health along with childcare were highlighted by McKibben in her opening announcements. Petersen has suggested that government interventions while welcome have suffered from being top-down.
3. Fisheries: Just to have something to talk about other than salmon all the time it's worth noting here that the entire coastline of Huon is affected by the recent ban on catching sand flathead due to overfishing. (Harriss criticised the government's original announcement of a review and said it needed to be more thorough). But salmon will also be on the menu as Huon was ground zero for Peter George's federal and state election campaigns on the issue. The salmon industry's usage of the antibiotic florfenicol has recently been in the news, with the permit to use this antibiotic recently revoked. The salmon issue particularly pits Glade-Wright and Gibson (as candidates raising environmental concerns about the industry, Rowan also expressed concerns in answer to a questioner on his site) against Harriss who has also criticised the government for breaching pre-election commitments to the industry. Interestingly, McKibben has actually worked in the industry.
4. The Budget: Tasmania is in what is known technically as deep budgetary doo-dah as the state's debt continues to rise. Outside of the stadium (which is opposed in the name of budget restraint mostly but not exclusively by people who never liked it anyway) I haven't seen a lot of debate about it in the context of Huon but with the Budget coming I expect there will be plenty.
5. Cost of living: For years the staple of election campaigns everywhere (though I wouldn't expect the LegCo to have that much impact on it), this was starting to recede but there's nothing like $2.40 a litre for petrol to return it to number 1 on the doors.
More issues may be added.
Campaign
Campaign style issues and incidents may be noted here.
1. Polarised Politics? I evaluated the voting pattern at the 2025 Tasmanian state election as showing an increase in polarisation. Votes moved from Labor to the Liberals, but on the other hand the non-major vote moved more to candidates with a stronger political identity than in 2024. So it was interesting to see McKibben say that voters are actually sick of polarisation and want to hear more about services. I doubt this line will do Harriss that much damage (he does tend to support controversial industries but then again so do Labor) but what do voters tossing up between Labor and anti-fishfarm candidates make of this?
2. Corflute Reports: Over Easter I spent time in parts of Huon travelling up and down the highway through Huonville to the far south. The most corflutes were seen for, in order, Harriss, McKibben closely followed by Glade-Wright, then Gibson. Good numbers of the first three at least and plenty of Glade-Wright in areas not near Kingborough.
Prospects
Recontesting Legislative Council incumbents have an extremely high success rate. In the last two cycles recontesting incumbents have won 19 times (mostly very easily) and lost just 3. However, Huon in 2020 was the last case where a recontesting incumbent lost, Labor nearly won again in Huon 2022 (and usually does well in the south), and the support for green politics in the area is very high, so this defence is of some interest. When incumbents do lose the reasons look obvious in retrospect, but because this doesn't happen often it is really hard to see it coming in advance. (I predicted only one of these three losses, Rumney 2017).
It seems highly likely that Harriss will make the final two, and indeed if there is no Liberal candidate in a field full of at least nominally left options I would expect him to be ahead, perhaps a lot ahead, on primaries. Assuming that's the case the question then is what the gap is and is there a strong enough preference flow to anyone else. In 2022 there wasn't; Labor were unable to fully erase a 12.5% three-candidate gap to Harriss on Greens preferences with only 64% reaching their candidate - the advantage for Harriss of being an independent. I think that Harriss vs either McKibben (who seems like a stronger than average local Labor candidate) or Gibson would be the most commonly expected final two here, but we will see if that's correct. It could be that Glade-Wright would actually be a harder opponent if she makes the final two since then the independent advantage for Harriss is lost and preferences from the Greens will flow heavily to her (Labor's I am not so sure about).
There is a geographic oddness in that all of Harriss, Gibson and McKibben have their highest profile in the Huon Valley so we could see Glade-Wright poll well in the Kingborough booths, and it will be interesting to see where the massive anti-salmon vote along the Channel goes between Glade-Wright and the Greens; how much of the state George result is repeatable with a medium-profile candidate? The problem for all challenger indies is that Harriss will suck up a lot of the independent-for-an-independent's-sake vote in this electorate, and I also think he's done far more than Armstrong did to avoid the dreaded "closet Liberal" tag.
There is a fair chance the order of exclusion in this seat will not be clear on the night. I should also note that there have been cases in the past where incumbents (including Harriss snr) retained Huon easily despite perceptions they were in for a tough fight,
At least two of the challenging campaign teams are saying they are encountering very low name recognition for the incumbent on the doors and that on that basis they think that they have a chance. We shall see.
