Tasmania 2025: What Went Down When Gray Met The House In 1989

The State Of Play

It's been a rather slow lead-in to Tuesday's resumption of parliament following the as-yet not-firmly-resolved 2025 Tasmanian state election.  Although it has been known for eleven days now that parliament will be resuming on Tuesday, it took til today for any of the seven crossbench units (David O'Byrne for Rockliff) to clearly state support for one side or the other.  Three (the Greens re Labor, Craig Garland and Carlo di Falco re Liberals) have so far said at some stage that they weren't backing one side or the other unless something changes, but all have left the door open for the target of their disappointment to come good.  (See my confidence position tracker for a summary of who has said what.)

An apparently major issue for Labor's foreshadowed constructive no-confidence motion that would be designed to replace Jeremy Rockliff with Dean Winter is the position of the Greens, although it's not clearcut that the motion will pass even if the Greens support it.  There is an impass here in that the Greens are saying they cannot support Labor's motion without concessions on key policy areas but Labor is saying it won't provide any because it went to the election with a clear platform of doing no deals with the Greens.  I'd suggest that the two parties badly need a neutral mediator here except it's not clear these positions can be mediated, and presumably Labor would consider any outcome of a mediation to be a deal with the Greens.  (I have devised a magnificent scheme in which it would actually be a deal with the mediator, which the margin of this page is too small to contain etc ...)

2025 Tasmanian Election: Pathways To Government

This article is part of my Tasmanian election 2025 postcount coverage.  

Link to tallyboard thread

Links to individual postcount pages: Bass Braddon Clark Franklin Lyons

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I did write a fair amount about the formation of the next government in the tallyboard thread but it's got somewhat buried in the postcount pages and I wanted to do a new thread to discuss the different pathways to government that might occur after the election. At this time we are starting to see what I suspect will be rather a lot of gnashing and wailing on the pages of The Australian (especially if Labor keeps trying to form government) but a lot of it is clueless.  (Just a note in case anyone thinks I am part of the gnashing and wailing for my tallyboard heading "Tasmania Remains Ungovernable" - nup, it was a reference to "become ungovernable"; I am celebrating the way Tasmanians collectively refused to be told what to do and gave the major parties back another mess.)

As I start this article the numbers sit at Liberal 14 Labor 10 Greens 5 IND 4.  The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers are strongly placed in Lyons and the last seat in Bass is a multi-party scramble with five or six contenders - we will know the outcome of that around August 2.

Meeting the House

The first thing I want to underline is that whatever the numbers, whatever the deals, whatever the deal-shaped objects, Jeremy Rockliff is the incumbent Premier.  As the incumbent he has the clear right by convention to be recommissioned in order to "meet the house" and enable it to decide his destiny.  Also he clearly intends to do it.   It is common for Premiers in minority governments who appear to have lost the election (and it is not clear this is the case for Rockliff yet) to do this, because in theory an MP who was going to back the opposition might change their mind in the middle of the debate, and because decisions about whether a Premier has lost confidence should be made by Parliaments and not by the Governor's reading of MP's letters.  The widespread misreading of Johnston's 2024 letters is a good example of why confidence needs to be determined on the floor.  It is only where the office of Premier is vacant that the Governor must make a provisional decision.  

The Governor's Role In The 2021 Tasmanian Election

The 2021 Tasmanian election campaign (link to main guide) has seen various claims about the role of the Governor Kate Warner, both in calling the election and in resolving the aftermath should the election produce a hung parliament.  Not only are these claims incorrect, but some of them (concerning the calling of the election) are both unfair to the soon-to-retire Governor Warner and by implication anti-democratic.  

Calling the election

The first set of claims that have circulated concerns the Governor's role in calling the election.  The claims being made fall into two groups:

1. That the Governor may have made a mistake in accepting Premier Gutwein's advice to dissolve the Parliament and hold an election.

2. That the Governor made the correct decision, but that she must have relied on false or misleading advice from the Premier in so doing, and would otherwise have not called the election.

I first saw claims of type 1 in an April 2 op ed by Charles Wooley  (paywalled, and need to scroll down).  It's far from being the only thing I disagree with in that article: