EMRS: Liberal 42 Labor 30 (+1) Greens 13 (-1) IND 13 (-2) (likely to be inflated) Others 3 (+2)
Seat estimate if election "held now" Lib 16-17 ALP 11-2 Green 4-5 IND 2-4
An EMRS quarterly poll of Tasmanian state voting intention taken Feb 14-19 has just emerged, together with an update on the snazzy albeit slightly odd bells and whistles thingy (more on that later).
This poll was taken before this week's resumption of Parliament in which the government has been attacked over two political class scandals. The first involved conflict of interest accusations against the Speaker Mark Shelton concerning very large grants for the upgrade of the Bracknell Hall. Speaker Shelton has used his casting vote to block a referral of the matter to the Privileges Committee, to block a no-confidence motion against him from being brought on, and to block two rather unusual motions that his vote on those motions be disallowed on the grounds of "pecuniary interest". (I have been unable to find any precedent for pecuniary interest provisions being used in this way.) In the second, after one of the parliament's longer exercises in dental extraction there was finally an admission that Racing Minister Madeleine Ogilvie had known the former TasRacing boss Paul Eriksson had been dismissed days before she first misleadingly claimed he had moved to Sydney for family reasons. At times Labor and the Greens were almost tripping over each other trying to work out which scandal to target first.
