2025 Tasmanian Election Guide: Main Page

TASMANIAN STATE ELECTION 19 JULY 2025

SEATS AT ELECTION LIB 14 ALP 10 GREEN 5 IND 4 NAT 2 (1 IND and 2 NATs were elected as JLN at 2024 election)

CAUSE OF ELECTION: No confidence motion passed in Premier Jeremy Rockliff, no alternative government could be formed

This election has been run and the Liberals have won the most seats - Click here for tallyboard page with links to postcount pages

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Welcome to the main page for my 2025 Tasmanian state election coverage.  Yes we are really here again! This page will carry links to all the other articles about the election that I write prior to the close of polling, and will contain general big-picture stuff and links to all the specialised articles (once these are written).  It will be updated very frequently.  Each electorate will soon have its own guide page, to be rolled out in the next few days. These are my own guides and I reserve the right to inject flippant and subjective comments whenever I feel like it; if you do not like this, write your own.  This guide and all the others will evolve over coming weeks.  

Very pleased to annunce I will be covering the election counting night for Pulse Tasmania, presumably from the tally room; this coverage will not be paywalled.  All post-count coverage will occur on this website.  

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Labor Tables No Confidence Motion In Premier Rockliff

No confidence motion in Premier Jeremy Rockliff passed 18-17.

By convention Rockliff will resign unless he can secure a fresh election from the Governor.

At this stage of term Governor should seek to appoint a replacement Premier if possible.

However it seems doubtful that a stable and willing alternative government can be formed as Labor does not appear willing to form government without an election.

House will sit on Tuesday to pass supply after which Rockliff will request election.

Election seems most likely but there are paths by which it might be avoided. 

Earliest possible date July 19.  

In-theory alternatives:

* Rockliff resigns, new Liberal Premier (no-one yet appears willing, unclear they would command confidence)

* Mid-term transfer to Labor (Labor appears unwilling to govern with Green support)

* Crossbench Premier (very unlikely either major party would support)

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Things might come to a head quickly here or it might be a fizzer but I thought I should put something up following today's news that Opposition Leader Dean Winter has used his budget reply speech to table a no confidence motion in Premier Jeremy Rockliff.  

EMRS: Government Trails Placebo Opposition

EMRS LIB 29 (-5) ALP 31 (+1) GRN 14 (+1) JLN 6 (-2) IND 17 (+5) Others 3
Independent is generic option - likely overstates support at actual election
Election "held now" would result in a very hung parliament

When Brad Stansfield tweeted the above spoiler yesterday it was easy to imagine what might have been coming.  At the recent federal election the Liberals were sent packing in northern Tasmania, losing Braddon and Bass with enormous swings and being thrashed in previously ultra-marginal Lyons.  There was a federal primary vote swing across the state of 9.3% to Labor and 8.4% against the Liberal Party.  Perhaps the federal election was a sign that the Liberal brand was more on the nose at state level than might have been expected and that Labor would be surging towards an election-winning position?  Or perhaps just the timing of the latest EMRS poll could see a degree of federal contamination such that state Labor picked up an afterglow from the federal triumph?  Well, no.  The poll is "wow!", unlike Peter van Onselen's infamous "Newspoll wow"s which were habitually followed by meaningless changes in the Newspoll.  But it is not the sort of "wow" that narrative would have expected.  

Instead, it's a tale that's been running for years - the ageing and stumbling Liberal government shedding and shedding more vote share and Labor still picking up little or nothing in this poll series.  Currently the government trails 29-31.  In August 2022 it led 41-31.   Tasmanians separate state and federal politics - strongly - and Labor is still not breaking out of the very low 30s.  The overall picture is that Labor is content to avoid rocking the boat, being as bipartisan as possible on wedge issues like the stadium and salmon farming, and wait for the government to fall over.  Presumably some point is eventually reached where the government is so on the nose that Labor support has to grow at least enough to make Labor the biggest party.  That said if we continue this trend indefinitely the crossbench will govern before they will.

Legislative Council 2025: Nelson

NELSON (2019 margin IND vs Lib 9.3%)

Slightly delayed by a three-week bump to avoid a clash with the federal election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections will be upon us soon enough and I'll be chipping away at guides to these alongside articles about the federal election.  Recently I released my usual survey of the Council's voting patterns.  Link to Pembroke is here, link to Montgomery is here but I am starting with Nelson as it is the most consequential and also as interest in the seat in 2019 was through the roof.  However, at this stage we don't seem to have the Melbourne Cup field that we had for the 2019 vacancy!  Nominations close on May 1.  There will be live coverage of all three seats here on the night of May 24 and as required through the postcount.

The current numbers in the Council are four Liberal, three Labor, one Green and seven independents, with the independents ranging fairly evenly across the political spectrum.  Labor gives up one vote on the floor and in the committee stages because it holds the Presidency, and as a result there are currently fine balances between major party and other MLCs (6-8 on the floor) and party and non-party MLCs (7-7 on the floor).  The balance between the major parties could be interesting if Labor actually opposes anything, but in the last year that happened only twice, leading me to classify the party's voting pattern as "Right" for the first time ever.

This year sees a vacancy for the retirement of Leonie Hiscutt (Liberal), the first defence for Labor's Luke Edmunds, and the subject of this article, the first defence for left-wing independent Meg Webb.

EMRS Says Tasmanian Labor's Getting Nowhere

EMRS: Liberal 39 (+1) Labor 29 (-3) Green 12 (-2) IND/Other 19 (+3)
Election "held now" would be some kind of hung parliament, but further improvement for the government would put it in contention for winning outright
Jeremy Rockliff increases slim Better Premier lead

In 2021 Tasmanian Labor had a poor election result.  Blighted by infighting and candidate disasters and facing a supremely popular Premier riding a COVID management surge, the party managed only 28.2% and lost a seat in Clark to an independent.  Two and a half years on the Premier is gone, and the "moat" phase of the pandemic that boosted his party has gone.  Also gone are two backbenchers who defected to the crossbench, three other Ministers who quit the parliament, another Minister from the Cabinet, and Adam Brooks after some number of minutes as a returned MP.  The government itself was almost gone two months ago when a crisis involving the resignation of then Attorney-General Elise Archer could have sent it to a snap election.  It remains at the mercy of two indies who at times say some very strange things.  These are hard times to govern in without this chaos.  The government is almost a decade old and has spent much of the year lurching from one crisis or shambles to the next and under pressure over a range of unpopular policies, including the now-shelved fire levy.  So where is the Opposition in this feast of opportunity?  According to the latest EMRS poll it's on ... 29%.  Pretty much back to where it started.  

Holding The Ball: Polling And The Proposed Stadium

Summary: There is adequate evidence of strong ongoing overall opposition to the Macquarie Point stadium proposal, but most of the individual polls being cited are unsound.

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A proposed stadium at Macquarie Point has now become a major Tasmanian political issue.  The proposed stadium, intended as part of a deal for Tasmania to finally get an AFL team, has been so divisive that two Liberal backbenchers quit the party citing concerns over the stadium approval process, taking the Rockliff Liberal Government into minority.  Unless approved or killed off by then, the stadium is highly likely to feature as an issue at the next state election.  

The stadium becomes the latest in a long line of Tasmanian contentious development proposals - the Bell Bay pulp mill, the kunanyi/Mt Wellington cable car and the Ralphs Bay canal estate proposal being some prior examples.  Typically these have in common that they greatly polarise the community for a long time and suck a lot of oxygen out of other political issues, but also that virtually none of them end up going ahead.  Something else they have in common (and share with some other long-running controversies such as old-growth logging) is that they inspire a lot of mostly terrible polling.   On this site I previously published reviews of polling about the cable car and polling about the pulp mill showing that the great majority of polls on both these issues were biased and/or of poor quality.