Legislative Council 2015: Windermere

Live coverage of this elections from 6 pm polling day here.

With NSW run and won (bar the odd seat here and there) it's time for my coverage of the 2015 Tasmanian Legislative Council elections.

I am going to start by posting the seat of Windermere, which at this stage is by far the most interesting of this year's three contests.  A separate article will cover Mersey and Derwent if there are actually elections in those seats.  At this stage I am unaware of any opposition to independent Mike Gaffney and Labor's Craig Farrell, both of whom are probably unbeatable anyway.

There will be a live coverage thread for Windermere and the other seats on the night of Saturday 2 May.  There may be other threads should a campaign issue warrant it.

Seat Profile

Windermere covers the east side of the Tamar River including George Town and the north-eastern and some eastern Launceston suburbs.  It is a diverse electorate, including the strongly Labor satellite suburb of Ravenswood, the pro-Liberal suburbs of Norwood and St Leonards, and some good areas for the Greens along the river.

Polling And The Proposed Pulp Mill

What's big, doesn't exist and eats Tasmanian Premiers?

The release of Mercury-commissioned ReachTEL polling about the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill and its impact on state election voting seems a good time to write something I've been meaning to put up here for some time.  There's a view doing the rounds, among some of the green and gullible, that the last time this proposal was about, a huge body of credible polling showed very strong opposition to it.  As well as discussing the current poll, this article takes a little trip down memory lane and points out why we never knew as much about public views of the pulp mill as some of its more ardent opponents told us that we did.  It also includes a few of my own thoughts on the "issue" of the proposed pulp mill.

Anyway, here is the new pulp mill poll result: