Quick note added 9 Mar 2024: I believe that a Labor page linking to this article has been the subject of an SMS campaign. I should note that this article analyses the actual impact of Green preferences, which is not the same thing as analysing every way a Green voter might use their preferences (eg if someone votes Greens and then preferences Labor, then the point about votes exhausting becomes irrelevant for that voter.)
Beyond that the reason Green or independent prefs don't have as much impact in our system is that they are more likely to be used electing Greens and independents, unlike federal where the vast majority of Greens votes go to Greens who are excluded. If voting out the Liberals is all-important to you and you're considering voting for a Green or Independent, you might consider how committed that candidate is to voting out the Liberals if they win.
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Secular seasons greetings to all, except the IPA, who get a great big HAPPY HOLIDAYS for the grinchy effort on the crosstabs in their latest
scientifically unsound poll-shaped object. It is a nearly annual tradition on this site to release something every Christmas Day. I've now added a "Xmas" tag to all the Christmas Day articles so anyone sufficiently bored can see how varied these offerings have been.
This year's Christmas Day article idea arose in mid-November following reactions to Tasmanian Labor's decision to
letterbox fliers attacking the Greens and promising never to work with them in government again, a promise that I expect to expire immediately the next time Labor gets a majority then loses it. Whatever might be said of the authenticity of Labor's messaging, I can't help thinking of the whole thing as something that you might see in a vintage British comedy skit:
"The Greens! They're holding Tasmania back! They're leaving people behind!"
"That's very unfortunate. How many of these, er, Greens are there?"
"Two!"
In online commentary about this, a theme sprang up that Labor was biting the hand that feeds it preferences, and that this (perhaps together with Labor's junking of its 2018 poker machines policy) could very easily backfire. However, my own experience is that Greens preferences are not as big a deal in Hare-Clark as they are in other elections. I thought it might be worthwhile to examine the history of Green preferences in Tasmanian state elections since the rise of the Greens in the late 1980s, and look at how much difference they have actually made and might make, or not make, in the future.
