Tasmania 2018: But What Does It All Mean?

LIBERAL 13 LABOR 9 GREEN 1 UNDECIDED 2
Undecided: Franklin - Liberal vs Green - tossup
Undecided: Bass - Labor vs Green vs Liberal - Labor slightly favoured, Liberal chance remote

After the last Tasmanian election, I saw no need to unpack possible meanings of the result, as I thought it was all obvious to anyone who had followed the state's politics through that time.  This one, however, is different, though I certainly won't claim to have all the answers.  A government that seemed to be sleepwalking to a loss of majority has rebounded to the point of suffering just a trivial swing against it.  The Labor opposition did rebound to a degree, but mostly at the cost of the Greens.

Some facts and stats

A few facts about the election first.  For the first time since the 1970s, and the first time for a conservative party since 1912-3, the Liberal Party has topped 50% of the primary vote for a second election in a row.  The charge was led by Premier Hodgman, whose 38.3% is the highest candidate vote since Robin Gray in 1986.  (Hodgman will also break Doug Lowe's 1979 record for the largest number of votes recorded by a candidate, though this record is somewhat meaningless because of population growth. Lowe's record for the highest candidate percentage, 51.2%, may very well never be beaten - and I don't think the fact it was achieved before Robson Rotation really makes much of a difference.)

Poll Roundup: 2015 Budget Polling

2PP Aggregate: 51.8 to Labor (-0.5 in a week, closest since last October)
Labor would probably win election held "right now", with small majority or in minority

Apologies for the boring heading.  I was going to call this piece "Poll Roundup: Budget Less Than Random Noise" but passing judgement on a week of polling with only four of the six polls released would have been risky, and thus it proved once Morgan came out.  With two polls implying a budget bounce to the Coalition and three implying no change, my aggregate moves to its best position for the government since the week of 20 October last year.

It's possible that there is really no bounce and that the two good polls are just down to sample noise, but the results are consistent with a slight Coalition gain from a budget that has been fairly well received by voters.  Still it is nothing so far as dramatic an impact as the usual storm of Budget-poll-fuelled commentary might suggest.

This isn't unusual at all; last year's shocker was the exception that proves the rule.  Budget polling is a vast source of excitable nonsense but most budgets aren't a big deal immediately to the average voter; see Mark Graph's first and second laws of budget analysis for more of this.

That's not to say that the noises surrounding the Budget are necessarily meaningless in the long term, and this week we did get some insight into possible election strategies concerning economic management.