Another One's Gone: Rene Hidding Resignation And Replacement

Just another post to cover off on another Hare-Clark recount coming up for the Tasmanian House Of Assembly.

Former Opposition Leader Rene Hidding has resigned from parliament in dramatic circumstances. This comes days after Matthew Denholm in The Australian published reports that an unnamed woman had made historic sexual abuse claims and various related claims against an unnamed man (who could be identified by elimination, based on the details provided, as being Hidding).  Hidding has very strongly denied the accusations and has counter-claimed that his accuser has fabricated the claims in order to cause him damage as part of a family dispute.  He also says he intends to seek redress against The Australian, though the article did report that he had denied all aspects of the allegations.

Whatever the truth of these matters (a subject on which I have no information) Rene Hidding is entitled to be presumed innocent.  Having to fight these accusations is obviously a major distraction, and he was expected to retire from politics at the end of this term if not before anyway.  The claims also have a political dimension because Denholm reported the accuser as having claimed to have reported the matter to police in 2014, but Denholm also said the police had no record of this.  For much of 2014, the Police Minister was Rene Hidding - so had he remained in parliament it is likely the Opposition would have hammered the government about this aspect of the claims, and conspiracy theories would have flourished. [Update: The woman involved now says she first contacted police in 2013, when Labor's David O'Byrne was Police Minister.]

2018 Tasmanian State Election Guide: Lyons

I've left the most interesting one for last for alphabetical reasons.  This is my Lyons electorate guide for the 2018 Tasmanian State Election.  (Link to main 2018 election preview page, including links to other electorates.)

Lyons (Currently 3 Liberal 2 Labor). 
Most of the state
Rural and outer-suburban including many forestry towns

Declared Candidates

Note to candidates: As the number of candidates is large, continually changing link and bio details could consume a lot of my time.  It's up to you to get your act together and have your candidacy advertised on a good website that I can find easily well ahead of the election.  On emailed request I may make one free website link change per candidate at my discretion; fees will be charged beyond that.  Bio descriptions and other text will not be changed on request except to remove any material that is indisputably false.

I am not listing full portfolios for each MP, only the most notable positions.  Candidates are listed incumbent-first and then alphabetically, except if stated otherwise.

The order of parties across the ballot paper is JLN, Liberal, Labor, Greens, SF+F, Ungrouped.

Not-A-Poll Results: Best And Worst Tasmanian Ministers

For amusement and interest, in the last couple of months I have been running two reader Not-A-Polls in the sidebar concerning Tasmania's current Liberal ministry.  As the usual disclaimer goes, these not-a-polls are completely unscientific and represent only the opinions of those site readers (or random ring-ins) who may have chosen to participate.  Polldaddy has more advanced protections against multiple voting than the native polls on the Blogger site that I used to use, but I suspect they could be routed around if anyone was truly determined.  Also, this kind of exercise is especially prone to a word-of-mouth stack, where someone tells a bunch of their friends who would not normally read this site to vote on it.

Indeed there seemed to be something of that sort going on in the final week when there were sudden large gains for both Will Hodgman as best and Guy Barnett as worst.

Anyway, the following are the results for the Best Minister poll (in order), the Worst Minister poll (in reverse order) and a final ranking based on net scores (best minus worst) with position difference (best minus worst, 9 points for best on each scale to 1 for worst) used as a tiebreaker.  Had I used position difference to rank the results with net scores as the tiebreaker, the final order would have been the same.