In the article in question, which is paywalled, the call is made to either replace Hare-Clark with single-member preferential voting or to switch from five seats of seven to seven seats of five.
7x5, a zombie bad electoral take
Seven seats of five is an old chestnut that was roundly disposed of during the process of restoring the House from 25 to 35 members. As the concept of restoring the House to 35 seats gained traction in the 2021-4 term there was some support for doing it by going to seven five-member electorates instead of going back to five seven-member electorates. There was at the time only one Independent elected as such in the parliament, so the main motivation was to make things hard for the Greens. Anyone who is remotely familiar with that debate would be aware of the TEC's discussion paper that showed significant problems with the 7x5 model. One thing wrong with it is that it would require Tasmania to uncouple from the federal electoral boundaries and have its own state electoral boundaries process at an expense estimated at $2.5 million plus $300,000 per election. Being almost as large as the federal divisions and overlapping with them extensively the state boundaries would then cause a lot of voter enrolment confusion; the TEC also suggests it would be difficult to avoid severely splitting up communities of interest by drawing a line through Hobart City. (This said, it would get rid of the across-river divide in Franklin for state but not federal purposes, and drawing the boundaries of Clark in a completely sensible manner is getting more tricky anyway; more on this down the track).
While still very proportional compared to single-member electorates, five-member electorates are a little bit more granular than seven and, all else being equal, tend to make minor parties and independents slightly less likely to be elected. But only slightly. As my ongoing 25 vs 35 seats comparison piece shows, the percentage of crossbenchers elected off the same vote shares under a 5x5 system and elected under a 5x7 system based on the same vote shares are actually very similar. To consider current vote shares, in both 2024 and 2025 I estimate the 5x5 system would have elected 7/25 crossbenchers (28%); the actual elections elected 11/35 (31.4%). It's a trivial difference and the nature of the parliaments formed would be much the same. Whether that difference would even happen at all is debatable because in a 7x5 system there would be more scope than in 5x5 for an independent to win by having a high profile in a modestly sized area. (I further discussed this in a 2022 submission here.)
The Australian paraphrases a particularly silly argument for 7x5: "He said currently some electorates were so socially and economically diverse, it was difficult for MPs to adequately represent everyone within their boundaries." Um er what? No MP has to represent everyone within an electorate as there are seven MPs in each electorate! Indeed Tasmania has the lowest ratio of voters per lower house state MP of any state in the country, a ratio that is of course the same under 7x5 as it is under 5x7. Since we went up to 35 seats we are now even slightly more represented per head of population than the ACT - and we have upper house MPs to represent us too!
I wish this to be the last that is ever heard of the 7x5 proposal in the history of debate about our system. It has been debunked many times now but the same suspects keep supporting it. Apart from a voting formality benefit that could (and urgently should) also be obtained through better savings provisions, the proposal is nothing but expensive and confusing system vandalism. It's disappointing that the TCCI, having floated this nonsense and had it shot down in 2023 are still at it. Do they bother to follow debates they are engaged in? Are they receptive to the evidence presented in those debates at all?
35x1, zzzzzz...
The TCCI's alternative proposal, and a pretty common one over the years, is to switch to single-member electorates (at present this would be 35), elected by some form of preferential voting (usually compulsory preferential is supported). This appeals to those who think the natural state of a lower house government is to have a majority, as is normally the case in other states and territories and federally. Simply changing the lower house to such a system without changing the upper house would be a particularly bad idea, since the electoral systems of the two houses would be too similar, which weakens the upper chamber's status as a house of second opinion, and means substantial minority groupings might have no MPs in either chamber. However, supporters of this change will sometimes support changing the upper house to a single statewide proportional chamber or a Hare-Clark chamber, so that there is still a proportional aspect. This would bring Tasmania into line broadly with the mainland states except Queensland, and with the federal system, and would end the history of Tasmania having an "upside down" system compared to most of the other states.
Given the number of chaotic and/or unpopular minority governments Tasmania has had in the last four decades, making Tasmania's lower house system more like other states and moving minority representation to the upper house may seem to have a lot of appeal. Proportional representation is very democratic in representation terms but can have drawbacks beyond chaotic minority parliaments. It can lead to disproportionate power for crossbench parties and can result in parties that would have clearly lost a two-party preferred vote becoming the government. However there are several specific problems with a single-seat system for Tasmania as compared to other states. Those who think we could just transplant the lower house system in say Victoria into Tasmania with similar results are at least as misguided as those who think nationwide Hare-Clark would be a good idea.
Firstly, the electorates would be tiny. Each MP would represent about 11,800 voters; some seats would be little more than a few adjacent suburbs. This would make each Assembly seat less populous than 13 current Tasmanian councils, which is really saying something given that Tasmania has 29 councils, which is widely considered too many. Seat contests would be prone to intense localism and would tend to have a large crossover with local government areas and voting. We have seen this in the Legislative Council where the overlap with local government is such that prominent members of local councils are often elected, usually as independents. Particularly given the general decline of major party support, it is easy to believe that local independents would win in such a system. Indeed, the Legislative Council, which is 15 single-member electorates, has been majority independent for its entire history but for a recent hiatus of a few years. Voter support for having independents in the house of review rather than it being a party house plays into that heavily, but it is by no means the only reason.
I also don't think this system would be effective enough for the majoritarians' liking in getting rid of Greens and the more Green-adjacent independents. It would surely reduce their numbers from the current eight but they would quite reliably win a few seats within the Hobart City part of what is now Clark, at least, and could well be competitive elsewhere (parts of Franklin, inner Launceston perhaps). I think there would still be hung parliaments in this system - not as deeply into minority, but I doubt they would be rare. Of course if we saw landslide vote share results on the scale of 1992, 2002, 2014 and 2021 then that would lead to big majority governments (and possibly with oppositions all but wiped off the map, in itself not ideal). However a contributing factor to some of these results was Hare-Clark itself (some voters vote for the side that can win a majority and this produces vote share blowouts).
The 35x1 system also has the same problem as 7x5 in that it would require Tasmania to have its own redistribution system instead of using the federal one for free. The confusion might be less though if every federal electorate was carved up into seven.
35x1 would be bad for ensuring all parts of the state have local major party representatives. In even mediocre years for Labor they would not win many seats across the north - for instance in the current Braddon on 2025 vote shares they would probably win one seat around Upper Burnie and no more. In a bad year for Labor they would win almost nothing as they would be squeezed out by Greens and independents in some of their strongest two-party areas. In bad years for the Liberals they would be lucky nowadays to get any of the seats in Greater Hobart at all.
What I especially dislike about 35x1 is that it it is BORING! It would throw away the rich within-party contests that rejuvenate the major parties even in elections where nothing happen, and replace them with pocket personal fiefdoms, turning our electoral system into a bad copy of the Northern Territory's, and meaning an MP's security was determined by their ability to get selected for a safe seat more than by how voters viewed them against their ticketmates. No thanks; I think critics need to find a better alternative.
Many others have been suggested down the years. For instance the idea of a Senate-style system with ordered party lists was disposed of in the lead-up to the adoption of Robson rotation.
What is the problem here?
The problem with Hare-Clark is supposedly that the system "does make things very difficult and I’m not certain that Hare Clark has delivered in the last few decades the results that Tasmania wanted when they went to the polls." But I think what business lobbies mean when they say Hare-Clark makes things difficult is that Hare-Clark makes majority government harder. Business lobbies like majority governments partly because business then knows exactly who it has to talk to in search of outcomes and partly because majority governments have less impetus to be transparent.
Actually what Hare-Clark has done at the last few elections is reflect what voters wanted extremely proportionally, while single-seat elections become if anything more disproportionate. What then results from that reflection is in the hands of the parliament. What Tasmanians want is not at all a monolithic thing, and is probably as confused and diverse right now as it ever has been. Broadly speaking over a quarter of voters these days have political views somewhere in the green/enviro/teal/left spectrum and are voting for the Greens or candidates like independents Peter George, Kristie Johnston and Craig Garland. The rest run a gamut including conservatives, pro-development types, the remains of the labor movement, the alternative right and some voters who are very disengaged.
With the parliament now as complex as it is, the overall result of the elections is not currently being determined by the system itself or the votes cast. It's the decisions and tactics of the people elected that determine who will even form government, what kind of government will be formed, whether it will last or otherwise. If governments govern as if they are in majority when they are not, then they should expect a bumpy ride. It shouldn't be too much to expect that governments learn within reason not to do that, and that oppositions also shouldn't aspire to the same condition. This need not be about major policy concessions; it can also be about approach. A major factor in the 2024-5 parliament's collapse was the government squandering the chance to work sensibly with the non-Green/left crossbenchers by treating the newbie Lambie MPs with distrust. The post-2025 election fallout happened because Labor took advantage of the Government leaving itself open to collapse (which caused the election), but then polled poorly and had no plan B they were willing to execute. While Labor's "attempt" to form government after the election did often (though not entirely) merit the label of "farcical", there is nothing unusual in PR systems about a post-election phase of negotiating to see who will form government.
The origins of Hare-Clark
There are a few myths about why we have Hare-Clark. One that has popped up in the present debate is that we have it because of our smaller population. That isn't really a factor that caused us to have it from the start, but I do agree that Hare-Clark works better in a small jurisdiction with high candidate and electoral awareness. I don't recommend exporting it to Western Sydney.
Another I have seen is that Andrew Inglis Clark would not have anticipated such multi-party chaos as we have now when he promoted the system, which hadn't been implemented statewide until after his death. (1909 was the first statewide Hare-Clark election). However, there were trials of a forerunner of the modern Hare-Clark system in Hobart and Launceston at the 1897 and 1900 elections, and these elected a diverse group of candidates including from two parties and independents. Hare-Clark was removed prior to the 1903 state election, but the creation of five single Tasmanian federal electorates presented an opportunity for Tasmania to save money by no longer drawing its own boundaries. During much of the period leading up to Clark's death, the federal House of Representatives had a three-party system.
There is a widespread suggestion that the Evans Government's desire to enact Hare-Clark during the 1906-9 term was fuelled by a desire to stymie the growing Labour Party, which had gained seats in the 1906 election. I am still investigating whether this was actually true and if so on what basis. Perhaps if so the argument would have been that under first past the post (used in 1903 and 1906) Labor was benefiting from vote-splitting. The suggestion that there was a partisan motive apparently comes from Wikipedia, which traces it to a 2003 Aynsley Kellow book chapter, which in turn sort-of traces it to Townsley's "Tasmania: From Colony to Statehood, 1803-1945" which I have yet to read, though Townsley and Reynolds' "A Century of Responsible Government in Tasmania 1856-1956" contains no mention of a partisan motive. The Kellow chapter claims "The move failed, and at the 1909 election the Labor [sic] Party won twelve seats and John Earle was invited to form the first Labor administration, a minority government which lasted a week before being defeated in a vote of the Assembly".
That isn't really what happened. Forces described in various sources as either "Ministerialist" or "Anti-Socialist" and at least in theory supportive of the incumbent Premier John Evans won 17 of the 30 seats under Hare-Clark in 1909. Labour won 40% of the seats, but that was off about 40% of the vote. Evans resigned as Premier two months after the election, with poor health a factor. He was replaced by Elliot Lewis who was in the process of fusing these forces into a more formalised Liberal League (not the same as the modern Liberal Party). This however was unstable and over five months after the election an outbreak of that on the floor of the Parliament saw Labour's John Earle installed as Premier for a week before the anti-Labour forces found a way forward and Lewis could be reinstalled.
Overall the reason why we have Hare-Clark seems to have more to do with the convenience of using the same boundaries for state and federal elections, plus the fact that it was there thanks to Andrew Inglis Clark's advocacy at a time when a solution was being sought. After at least one in every two elections there is whinging, and yet, thus far, the system has survived. At this stage I am not convinced anyone has found a better alternative.
Update: Silly Op Ed Alert!
A remarkably silly op ed by Jody Fassina, former Labor adviser, was published in the dead tree edition of the thief paper on Sep 9. This argues that we should both go to single member seats and reduce the size of the House, ignoring that the reason the House was re-expanded is that it wasn't working particularly well even when a party won a majority. (And no amount of plausible reduction would solve the problem of single-member electorates being too small). This op ed is premised on the idea that the Liberals will never win a majority again (though they only missed doing so by a few percent this year) and that Labor will never outpoll the Liberals again (which is basically code for Labor are too hopeless to even get a third of the vote even when the government is a shambles, even though they were polling ahead of the Liberals early this year), The article also blames the expansion of parliament for the great increase in the size of the crossbench; in fact the latter was largely caused by the major parties losing 11.2% of the vote in 2024 between them and not recovering significantly in 2025, and would have happened with 25 seats as well.
The article also says the Greens are now the Liberals' partners in government (if one was to argue anyone is, it is in fact the whole crossbench not just the Greens) and most extraordinarily says that "Hare-Clark has served its purpose, but is now a handbrake on strong and effective government and just allowing one side or the other to 'just get on with the job'". What nameless purpose has Hare-Clark served that was so temporary that it no longer exists? Do we really want to go back to a guarantee of "strong and effective" majority governments that collapsed (1979-82), sent the state near broke (1986-9), were mired in scandal (2006-10), collapsed again (2018-21), and again (2021-4) etc? (Admittedly small proportional majorities contributed to these collapses but the NT also provides plenty of examples of instability in a 25-seat single-member House.)
Labor beat the Liberals or Coalition on primaries in the most recent elections federally and in NSW, Victoria, SA, WA and ACT, many of which have similar issues of the fracturing of the "left" vote, but Tasmanian Labor cannot do this? And cannot work with others to form a minority government, so we need to change our system to one in which those others will (supposedly) be eliminated with Labor getting their preferences?
