Tas Liberal Senate Turnover As Duniam And Askew To Go

I had a piece in drafts almost ready to release for weeks about this, but perhaps just as well I didn't since further developments have rendered the draft somewhat out of date.   The last few weeks have seen major news in the leadup to the expected 2028 half-Senate election with the Tasmanian Liberal ticket to lose both its incumbents.  Incumbent since 2019 Wendy Askew was to retire at the end of the term but will now resign in coming weeks while incumbent since 2016 Jonno Duniam will quit by the end of this year.  Askew's successor will get something like 20 months and Duniam's successor about 17 in the Senate in the lead-up to the next election, assuming it is on schedule and not early. 

The preselection currently underway is for the next election but I would expect that the top two candidates will inherit the seats of Askew and Duniam unless there are twists regarding availability.  

While it may seem disastrous for the Liberals to be go in with no incumbents, in some ways it is an advantage to them compared to if just one incumbent departed now.  The party now has more flexibility in planning a 2028 ticket from scratch without, for instance, feeling pressured to choose a female candidate as the sole winner of the vacancy race as might have been the case had only Askew departed.  

Duniam has cited family (once a cliche, these days with younger politicians not so much) and also burnout (especially over the Liberals' recent leadership spill) as factors leading to his departure.  Duniam, as outgoing Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, was viewed as a pretty major player in the Coalition Senate team especially on national security.  It's quite common to see politicians quit parliament citing lack of family contact then turn up in a new demanding job, as was the case with Gavin Pearce's comically brief retirement from politics, but in some such cases what they are really quitting is Canberra - being a FIFO politician from the Apple Isle would take a toll on families.  We will see where Duniam, who is only 43, turns up next.  Askew has a much lower profile but has served as Chief Opposition Whip and Chair of the committee on Senators Interests, and is well regarded as among her party's more knowledgeable people on the Senate's operations. So between them they are leaving quite a gap to fill.

What are the stakes?

At the last Senate election the Liberals retained the seats of Claire Chandler and Richard Colbeck, but Colbeck's seat was in doubt for some time with a final winning margin of 3.06% over Labor after One Nation preferences.  (It is not true that One Nation's Lee Hanson was close to winning this seat; Hanson jnr in fact finished eighth).  The Liberals' second seat was at risk because of a strong Labor performance in a case where Jacqui Lambie took the fifth seat. Lambie intends to retire in 2031, and it is not expected that there will be a Lambie Network ticket at the 2028 election.  

However a new threat is apparent in current polling, which is that One Nation are polling so well nationwide that in an election "held now" they could win two seats to the Coalition's one in various states, with Tasmania being potentially one of these.  The underlying strength of One Nation in the state  has long been masked by the competing Lambie Network vote, and the Liberal vote in the state is weak.  Had JLN not contested, One Nation would have polled around 6.8% in Tasmania in 2025 (slightly lower than Queensland and higher than every other mainland state - though partly because of a smaller field of parties), though they would not have won a seat in 2025 because of the high Labor vote.  In 2022 had JLN not contested, One Nation would have won a seat.

There is also a possibility that if Labor has another strong election, Labor could win three seats in the state with the Liberals and One Nation on something like current numbers winning only one each.  This sort of four left two right result would have happened in 2025 had JLN not stood, though in that case it would have been two Liberals.  Although this seems unlikely at the moment with the government struggling to retain its primary vote in polls, the government also struggled in polling at times in the previous term, so this cannot be ruled out.

Overall at the moment the Liberals would be expected to win the top seat while the second seat is a maybe, maybe not.  The second seat firms up if One Nation support collapses though it has so far shown no real signs of doing so.

Who's (not) running or might run?

I will edit this section if/as news on candidates comes to hand.  At the moment we have one declared candidate and a fair amount of speculation but other names are not to my knowledge public.    

Brad Stansfield (declared candidate - announced June 12) is a former Liberal strategist and staffer who was a key player in the party's victories at the 2014 through 2024 state elections (but not 2025).  He was chief of staff to Will Hodgman for eight years, and before that to Eric Abetz for a few years when Abetz was a Senator.  In recent years he was also known as a partner in the Tasmanian public relations firm Font PR which had a large number of industry and political clients in the state and which hosted Fontcast.  After Font PR dissolved itself, Stansfield took over the long-running polling business EMRS which Font had previously acquired and has also been commenting on the Poll Position podcast.  He is also a part-owner of Tasmanian Country newspaper.

Stansfield has made a large number of commentary remarks about the state of the party for those looking for his positions on things.  In particular he strongly opposes imitating or forming strategic alliances with One Nation, and has also criticised a wide range of state and federal MPs who have quit the parties they were elected under.  He supported the Voice to Parliament (while criticising the woeful official Yes campaign) but I would not describe him as a typical Liberal moderate on that account; in a recent podcast with someone you might recognise he described his politics as libertarian-leaning.  He would be a rather different Senator - not an obvious "retail politician" (though that hardly matters in the Senate where name recognition among the general public is often low) but someone with a large amount of campaigning and public opinion experience.  

By the way as the podcast notes I have known this candidate intermittently for about 35 years through chess as well as politics - among other things he was joint Tasmanian Champion in 1993, at the time the youngest ever Champion though that record has since been surpassed.  

Sarah Courtney (reported for some time by some sources as "understood" to be running - now reported by The Mercury to be running) is a former state MHA for Bass, and also a financial analyst and viticulturalist and Chair of the Tasmanian Forest Products Association. Courtney was elected at the 2014 election and became Minister for Primary Industries and Water and Minister for Racing in 2018, later serving in a very wide range of other portfolios including Health Minister during the pandemic, Resources, Building and Construction, Women, Education, Skills, Training and Workforce Growth, Children and Youth,  Hospitality and Events and Disability Services.   Courtney, generally considered a moderate, was a popular MP and at times considered a future leader but resigned from Parliament in somewhat controversial circumstances in 2022.  

Jacki Martin (declared candidate - announced June 19) is a Latrobe Councillor and current advisor to Askew, and is or recently was State Treasurer of the party.  She was previously a long-term Commonwealth Bank branch manager at Ulverstone.  Martin has been on Latrobe council since the 2022 election, at which she was the sixth of nine candidates elected, winning at the first attempt.  Martin ran on the Liberal Senate ticket in 2025 in the generally uncompetitive number three position, polling 1289 below the line votes. 

Chris Gatenby (reported by The Mercury as running) is currently a Senior Advisor to Premier Rockliff, and has been an advisor or chief of staff to numerous state and federal Liberal MPs over the past decade.  He was a state candidate in Bass in 2024 and 2025, polling 1504 and 1227 votes respectively (the drop in 2025 being doubtless caused by Bridget Archer running).  The latter run means that he is a potential future state MP in the event of any casual vacancies in this term.  Gatenby also has a background in health, government relations and in campaigning in the UK.  He is a past State President of the Liberal Party.  Gatenby is considered a moderate.  

Former Deputy Premier and now backbencher Michael Ferguson was being reported as not ruling out interest but has now announced he isn't running.  

Overall Tas Senate Turnover

A potential result of these changes is that Tasmania could see a completely different lineup of Senators elected in 2028 to the start of the slate in 2022.  Peter Whish-Wilson (Greens) is about to depart, Anne Urquhart (Labor) has already been replaced by Josh Dolega after resigning to run for the Reps, Helen Polley (Labor) will be 71 in 2028 and might retire before the heat death of the universe and Tammy Tyrrell (JLN) is now effectively the third Labor Senator after quitting the JLN, briefly forming her own party then now joining Labor.  However it's possible in theory that Polley could continue for at least part of the term or that Tyrrell could be preselected for a winnable position on the Labor ticket.    

I am doubtful - but haven't checked - if any state has ever seen a complete turnover from the start of one six-year term to the start of the subsequent term since the abolition of slate voting in the mid-20th century.  There was the curious case of Queensland 2019 where none of the six elected Senators had served a three year term since the 2016 DD (four were new, and two had been disqualified during the term, though one of those was recontesting as an incumbent.)

Essential Report Microblogging Disclaimers

Frequently I post federal polling results and calculations to the microblogging sites Twitter (X) and Bluesky (links to my accounts in sidebar); here is an example I posted today:

The standard items I include are the primary votes for all parties, any two-party preferred or Labor vs One Nation "shadow 2PP" issued by the pollster, and what I call "my conversion".  "My conversion" is a 2PP figure I get by applying my own estimate of 2025 election preference flows to the primary votes released by the pollster, and is the figure I use in my Labor vs Coalition 2PP aggregate and my Labor vs One Nation 2PP estimate, both of which can be seen on the sidebar together with a link to the methods page for them.   I have been including primary vote changes recently because of interest in whether One Nation is going up or down, but probably won't keep doing so for long.  (In fact the one shown has a typo in it, the Greens are down 1 not up 1).  

In the case of one particular pollster, Essential Report, I have to add a lot of disclaimers because of the unusual properties of that poll.  And I'm tired of typing them out so often so I have decided to put them in article form to link to in the future to save the time of doing so.  If this has the effect of causing or coinciding with some changes in some of the less credible aspects of Essential's polling, I will take that too.

So here we go:

1. Different Scale: Every other significant pollster publishes primary votes with undecided respondents in some way removed or reallocated.  However, Essential does the following: if a voter picks "Don't know" on the first voting intention question they are asked which party they are leaning towards.  If they again pick "Don't know" they are left in, creating an undecided figure that is usually 5% or 6%, so the primary votes attributed to parties and independent/other total 94-95 instead of c. 100.  

In theory this should mean that the parties all get slightly lower primary votes from Essential than on average from other pollsters.  In practice this doesn't happen because of:

2. Very Low Independent/Other readings:  Essential measures the independent/Other vote via a voting option of "Independent or other party" which appears near the bottom of the voting options list.  For whatever reason this attracts way lower numbers than other pollsters' independent/other options - numbers too low to be believable.  The average for the first half of 2026 has been 5.7% (6.0% after reallocating undecided) compared to 10.9% from all other pollsters.  This category polled 15.1% at the 2025 federal election, although it is very likely that other pollsters are right in finding a substantial slice of that has since moved to One Nation.  (I would not rule out some other pollsters having Ind/other a bit low too.  I think about half of the 5.5% minor right vote would have gone over; I am not sure how much of the independent or left minor vote has.)

3. Unusual 2PP Method:  Essential calls its Labor vs Coalition method "2PP+".  Instead of presenting a two-party figure that sums to 100 such as 51-49, Essential leaves undecided voters as undecided in the 2PP so the figure might instead be 48-46 with 6 undecided.  Essential started doing this after the 2019 election polling failure, arguing that in a close election it was necessary to stress that a slim lead was not conclusive and undecided voters could yet cause the trailing party to win.  As I pointed out at the time this reasoning placed too much weight on the apparently spurious excuse that undecided voters caused polls to be wrong in 2019.  The 2019 failure was more likely caused by bad sampling, overly simplistic weighting practices and herding or a herding-like phenomenon.

4. Aberrant Respondent Flows: Essential's 2PP+ is largely based on asking voters who support minor parties which of Labor and Coalition they would preference highest; if the respondent then says they don't know then the last-election preference split for that party is used.  This is basically a respondent preferences method but for whatever reason it produces flows to the Coalition that are stronger than the respondent flows from other pollsters (how much stronger varies) and much stronger than last-election preferences.  On average the Coalition in the 2025-8 term is doing around two points better on Essential's "2PP+" (with undecided removed) than it is on my last-election estimates.  At the same time, Morgan's respondent preferences on average have the Coalition doing one point worse than last-election preferences - something that there might actually be a reason for if One Nation are taking voting intention from the right-wing end of the Others pool.  These preference flows in Essential are so odd that they should have a careful look at their operations (in particular spreadsheet calculations and whether their panel adequately controls speeding respondents) to see if they are doing anything wrong.

5. House Effect: Even after using last-election flows for Essential to negate the impact of its weird respondent flows, Essential still has better numbers for the Coalition overall than other regular pollsters - it tends to get the Coalition's primary on the high side and the Greens on the low side compared with the average.  This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong about these primaries but is worth keeping in mind when I post conversion figures for it that are lower for Labor than those for other regular pollsters.  For the term so far, Essential is running 1.3 points better for the Coalition on my 2PP conversions than my aggregate at the time of its releases.  Some less regular pollsters (Freshwater, Spectre and Fox&Hedgehog) may have similar properties but have only released a few polls each.  

The combined effect of aspects 4 and 5 is that Essential had the Coalition ahead in four of its five 2PP+ readings in the first half of 2026.  But only one other pollster (Fox&Hedgehog in late May) has had the Coalition ahead on a pollster-released 2PP at all (51-49), and that was also the only poll by anyone that converted to a Coalition lead even to one decimal (50.3-49.7) on my conversions.  Every other poll that released a 2PP had Labor ahead at least 51-49, and for polls without a pollster-released 2PP all converted to ALP leads, though one of these (late May DemosAU) would have rounded to 50-50 to the nearest whole number.  

I also note that Essential doesn't have a good accuracy record in recent years.  It was at the bottom of my final-poll accuracy tables for federal 2019, federal 2022 and the Voice 2023 and 8th out of 10 (ahead only of Freshwater and the once-off Ipsos) for federal 2025, which is not to say it cannot perform well in the future or should be entirely ignored.