EMRS: Liberal 55, Labor 23, Greens 18 in Tasmania

The latest Tasmanian state poll has the Liberals doubling Labor’s vote with 9% to spare.

The latest quarterly EMRS poll of Tasmanian state voting intention has Labor slumping four points to a new low of 23%, with the Liberals sustaining their majority-busting 55% and the Greens up three to 18%. Premier Lara Giddings and Liberal leader Will Hodgman are both down a point, to 24% for Giddings and 46% for Hodgman, with Nick McKim up two to 13%. The poll targets 1000 respondents and has a theoretical margin of error of 3%.

NOTE: Apologies for reading off the wrong column in the table in the first version of this post, though luckily the numbers weren’t much different.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

35 comments on “EMRS: Liberal 55, Labor 23, Greens 18 in Tasmania”

  2. Thanks for pointing that out Kevin – now corrected. EMRS have gotten a lot less confusing now that they’ve dispensed with their “Table 3” nonsense, but they’re not quite there yet.

  3. It’s a good result for the Libs, and would see them getting 15 seats if the election was held right tnow (I cannot believe that the Libs are going to get 3 members in Denison on a primary vote of less than 50%: remember, they rather fluked their second seat last time).

    But, come election day, the Libs are still going to have to win 4 seats in Braddon and 3 in Bass (or vice versa, but I reckon Braddon is their best shot) or else one extra seat in either Lyons or Franklin. Assuming that there will be some sort of swing back to Labor from these figures, then I don’t think a third seat for the Libs in any electorate south of Campbell Town where the Greens can muster a quota will be easily achieved.

    I’m a bit dubious about the findings for Lyons. This seat must be a bugger to poll. Its demographics are becoming more “Hobart-like” by the day: any population growth that is happening can be expected to be taking place on the urban fringes and in the holiday areas along the east coast. I would imagine that the distribution in these areas would be more similar to that of Denison and Franklin, which means that – if this poll is correct – the results in the more rural and northern areas must be even worse for Labor than in Bass and Braddon. Lyons is definitely the Libs’ best chance for a 3rd seat outside of their northern strongholds, but this surely can’t be considered to be a certainty.

    My feeling is that, if the Libs get 13 seats, the most likely carve up is 4 Braddon, 3 Bass and 2-2-2. The next most likely scenario is a third seat in Lyons. If they get 4 in Braddon AND 4 in Bass, they’ve already won anyway. Likewise, I think if they win a 3rd in Franklin they will have already picked up 13 seats somewhere else.

    So it’s going to be won for the Libs in the north (assuming that a 3rd seat in Lyons will be the result of a big swing to the Libs in the northern parts of that electorate). What this illustrates to me is the growing cultural gap between northern and southern Tasmania. There has always been a parochial rivalry between the regions, but this is something different: it’s like the emergence of two quite different worlds.

    The economies of both the north and south are in bad shape, but there is an emerging idea in the south that a set of new niche sectors – with boutique tourism at the vanguard – is going to transform the economy over time. In the north, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of new ideas other than a yearning for the past: pump a whole lot of taxpayers’ money into woodchipping, irrigated farming and building up our port facilities and it’ll all be bonza again (let’s not worry about the high dollar and depressed global markets, shall we).

    So, under the Libs, what you can expect to see is a whole lot of taxation dollars being sucked out of the south into the north (both by slashing public sector activity in the south and also possibly by upping land tax and harvesting some of the higher land values in Hobart). In other words, plundering the shoots of growth from the “new economy” in the south to feed the subsidisation of the “old economy” of the north and places like the Huon. And so we can expecting to see a growing anger among emerging business leaders in the south about how the subsidised “browning” of rural Tasmania will damage the “clean, green” image that the southerners are trying to project to the outside world.

    It’s all going to be rather ugly, in my view. But it sure will be interesting to watch. Will Hodgman’s heart is clearly with the new economy of the south but his major constituency is in the north. He doesn’t appear to me to be a talented enough politician to resolve these contradictions (his father could have done it).

    In the end the unresolvable problem for Tasmania is that neither the old brown industries or the new green activities are going to generate enough income to sustain the population in the lifestyle to which it wishes to become accustomed. I can’t see any politician in Tasmania who has a good answer to that problem. So we’d better hope that the mainlanders are going to keep bankrolling us for ever and a day!

  4. meher baba@3


    It’s a good result for the Libs, and would see them getting 15 seats if the election was held right tnow (I cannot believe that the Libs are going to get 3 members in Denison on a primary vote of less than 50%: remember, they rather fluked their second seat last time).

    The only reason their second seat was so close last time was that Wilkie, who was taking votes mostly from the Greens and Liberals, nearly nicked it. Without that they would have had about two quotas and won the second reasonably comfortably. If the state swing is close to a quota (as on current polling) and they get most of that in Denison, they could well get three. Especially since one of the two Labor will be defending is Sturges who will very likely lose his seat again, the question being whether Labor can find someone else who will poll a decent primary to replace him.

    The projections in my article are very rubbery – they’re based on seat swing data from three polls last year modelled against the state swing. A reservation about three in Lyons is that Hidding and Shelton is a weak team even assuming Hidding recontests.

  5. Re Denison:I don’t think it was just Wilkie, I just don’t think there is much of a Liberal constituency there any more. I’m sure that Archer and Groom will be returned, but I just can’t see them pushing beyond that. Franklin is a much better chance for them, and it’s no certainty either.

    I agree re Sturgess and it is also my impression that there isn’t much Labor talent in the wings (people like Dean Winter: nice guy, but seems so young as to have a touch of Andy Hardy about him). But surely to goodness Labor will get to two seats in Denison: if they don’t, they’ll be at risk of the Greens becoming the official opposition party!!

    Yes, the Lib candidates in Lyons are weak. Polley has a constituency (god only knows why), White is good at getting media attention (being easy on the eye doesn’t hurt), and Morris is a very good local member. So maybe three seats for the Libs will be a hard ask.

    There’s clearly still a long way to go for young Will. His aura is not really that of a political winner. Maybe he won’t be.

  6. Any Tassie readers who have not already done so please vote (if you have a view) in my Not-A-Poll (because it’s an optin!) on Best Tasmanian Premier of the last 30 years

    http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/emrs-expected-today.html

    Currently the vote is skewing heavily to Labor which I think reflects the fact that my main audiences (TT, here, Twitter) are all left-leaning on average. Plus we have had no Liberal Premier since 1998 so the younger voters do not know the three Libs in the poll.

    Giddings’ staffers (and probably Green and feminist voters too) are keeping Giddings near the lead but at present it’s Bacon leading Giddings and Field. Lennon is a distant last although I suspect those who liked him would not be big internet users.

    I got the idea from the much-misinterpreted Galaxy best PM of the last 25 yrs poll.

  8. [Good result for the Libs, but they deserve better than 15/16 out of 25 seats with results like this. Hare Clark is a rotten system.]

    They deserve more than 60-64% of the seats with 55% of the vote?

    Right.

  9. It’s just that Hare Clark doesn’t allow a landslide majority to any one party. Look at how well the Libs have to poll just to win government. Also, if the ACT didn’t have Hare Clark, the Libs would be in power there.

  10. [It’s just that Hare Clark doesn’t allow a landslide majority to any one party.]

    And that matters how?

    [Look at how well the Libs have to poll just to win government.]

    They have the exact same chance to win as any of the other parties. If they don’t appeal to enough Tasmanians, that’s their problem.

    [Also, if the ACT didn’t have Hare Clark, the Libs would be in power there.]

    How so?

  11. Just saying that I don’t support hung Parliaments, and I think that the majority should rule.

    I read that, looking at the swing and results in the ACT, the Libs would be in power, if the system everywhere else in Australia, were in place.

  12. [Just saying that I don’t support hung Parliaments, and I think that the majority should rule.]

    The majority does rule. That’s how parliaments work. Sometimes one party doesn’t compose the majority. Again, that’s how parliaments work.

    [I read that, looking at the swing and results in the ACT, the Libs would be in power, if the system everywhere else in Australia, were in place.]

    I don’t know. But as both Lab and Lib were at the same PV with the Greens getting 10 odd percent, I imagine it’d be easier for Labor to win in a single member electorate parliament. I could be wrong though. I haven’t really had the chance to look at the numbers closer, nor do I know how the seats would be distributed. I think any speculation would be difficult actually. Perhaps one of the more expertly pseph people here could speculate?

  13. Matty D@11


    Just saying that I don’t support hung Parliaments, and I think that the majority should rule.

    I read that, looking at the swing and results in the ACT, the Libs would be in power, if the system everywhere else in Australia, were in place.

    I think whoever said that is just wrong.

    Labor and the Liberals got almost exactly the same primary vote in the ACT. Of the remaining parties the Greens (Labor friendly preferences) had 10.7%, the Motorists (Liberal friendly) 4.7% and Bullet Train (all over the place) 4.2%. The rest was shrapnel. There is just no way the Liberals would have got 50% 2PP out of that with all preferences distributed as per the national system; it might have been 52-48 Labor’s favour. With optional preferencing like in Qld/NSW it might have been closer.

    As for majority rule, at the last election here (Tas) no party had a majority or anything near it. Both polled below 40%. Bit hard to argue either deserved to win outright. If we’d had single-seat elections here in 2010 we may well have got a hung parliament anyway.

    I do think that proportional representation here in Tas has issues. One is that it doesn’t mean proportional power. In a situation like this, with 10 Labor, 10 Liberal, 5 Green, the Greens have as much power as the other parties when all members of each party vote together. Arguably even more, because the other parties that would normally govern depend on Green support to do so and hence have to give the Greens concessions or risk being brought down.

    Another issue is that voters game the system. When only one major party looks like winning, voters for the other party who don’t like the Greens switch over to ensure a majority. So often a major party’s vote is inflated or deflated by tactics.

    It’s not necessarily in a party’s interest to have a massive majority. But the Libs would definitely want to win 14+ seats as having a majority of only one is annoying.

  14. [Just saying that I don’t support hung Parliaments, and I think that the majority should rule.]

    Then advocate a shift from a parliamentary to a presidential system. If parliament’s just going to be a rubber stamp for a disciplined party that holds a clear majority, why bother with it? Why not just elect a president and give him or her a fixed term to get on with the job?

  15. WB
    “Then advocate a shift from a parliamentary to a presidential system. If parliament’s just going to be a rubber stamp for a disciplined party that holds a clear majority, why bother with it? Why not just elect a president and give him or her a fixed term to get on with the job?”

    Your talking to someone who has just received his long trousers who thinks he knows it all!.

  16. What is the odds that the ALP and Liberals will unit get rid of the Hare-Clark systems after the next election? Afterall the last 2 ALP-Greens government has worked so well?

    And it is pretty hard to see ALP governing without the Greens under Hare-Clark anytime soon

  18. dovif@16


    What is the odds that the ALP and Liberals will unit get rid of the Hare-Clark systems after the next election? Afterall the last 2 ALP-Greens government has worked so well?

    I don’t think the Libs would even need Labor’s support to get rid of it if they won a majority, just the Legislative Council’s.

    I think they would be extremely foolish to do so without holding a plebiscite first. One feature of HC that Tasmanians really like is that you can kick out sitting members without voting against your own party.

    One never knows what the Libs might try once in government though. I did rattle Hodgman’s cage about whether he was a closet UK Tory-style first-past-the-post supporter in 2011 prompting his COS to state “And for the record, of course Mr Hodgman supports preferential voting. “.

  20. I think Tasmanian politicians (major party ones at least) might have gotten a bit less used to Hare-Clark since it started regularly throwing up minority governments as of the early 1990s. Before that it was, if I’m not mistaken, no more prone to producing minority government than the mainland state parliaments.

  21. Sportsbet has opened at:

    Lib $1.15
    ALP $6
    Green $13

    to provide Premier after the next election.

    —————–

    Pre the Greens era, Hare-Clark under the 30 seat system produced four cases where one party had exactly half the seats but there was one independent, one case of 14-13-3, one Nationalist/Country coalition, and two deadlocked 15-15s. This from 17 elections so nine outright majorities in that time. After the two 15-15s the House was expanded to 35.

    There were then two hung parliaments in the next three elections, followed by five majority results in a row under 35 seats.

    Since the rise of the Greens as a statewide force (1989) there have been three minority results out of seven – two out of three with 35 seats, one out of four with 25.

  23. The main reason for the five in a row was that the Lowe government imploded over the Franklin Dam dispute, with Lowe being rolled by Holgate and quitting the party, which then suffered a 17-point swing. Thus there was a switch from a majority of one party at one election to a majority of the other at the next, the only time this has happened under HC.

    Jim Bacon is rocking and rolling from beyond the grave in my Not-A-Poll for best Tassie Premier of the last 30 years; out to a 30-18 lead now, if no-one stacks it I think the ABC computer might be giving this one away soon. (It runs til the end of the month). Voting in the sidebar at http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/

  25. In very UNLIKELY event this result were to be replicated federally Labor and the greens would walk away with one seat each.

  28. The reason the ACT has PR rather than single-member seats is that Canberra has been deliberately designed to be a socially-homogenous city. There are no strongly working-class areas or strongly upper-class areas as you have in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth (less so in Brisbane). Single-member seat systems only produce a reasonable approximation of a proportional result when both major parties have geographical bases. That is not the case in the ACT, so in most ACT elections Labor would win nearly all the seats. (This is what happens in Singapore, for example. The PAP polls about 55-60% of the vote across all the seats, so the opposition wins nothing despite polling 40% of the vote.)

    I’d be interested in Kevin’s view on how Tasmania would vote if it was divided into 25 or 35 single-member seats.

  29. Viktor Pasztory@25


    In very UNLIKELY event this result were to be replicated federally Labor and the greens would walk away with one seat each.

    Yes I had a question about this on my site the other day. The short answer is that while the swing is probably about the same the federal base vote for Labor is much higher and therefore it isn’t at all likely to happen. The swing needed for 4 Lib Senators in Tas is about 21%.

  30. Psephos@28

    I’d be interested in Kevin’s view on how Tasmania would vote if it was divided into 25 or 35 single-member seats.

    Denison cut into five would probably be two ultra-safe Labor, one safe Lib, one Green and one that might be won by a Wilkie-style left independent.

    Rest of the state I haven’t looked closely but I don’t think there’d be many very safe seats for either side. Outside the Denison area the Greens would really struggle to get anything. It’s likely Labor would be advantaged and would win much more often than not in the long term. Especially if preferencing was compulsory.

    Swings would be much less dramatic. A lot of the swings we see now are a result of voters trying to elect majority governments and jumping on board whichever side looks like winning. We just wouldn’t keep getting really lopsided vote-share results like 1992, 2002, (2014) etc.

    I think we’d also see less dud strategising from the major parties. Hare-Clark tends to cushion the impact of failure – if you can poll a mid-20s primary and still hold most of your seats then the backbench pressure for being competitive isn’t as strong. Under a single-seat system there’d be a lot more incentive for parties to fight hard for the middle ground.

  32. Psephos@31


    Where would the safe Lib seat in Hobart be?

    Southern suburbs centred around Lower Sandy Bay. LegCo seat of Nelson minus its ultra-Green fringes would make a seat that would sometimes be Lib-Green 2PP and sometimes Lib-ALP, but it wouldn’t matter which because the Lib primary would be pushing 50.

  34. Kevin, based on LGA population figures, my estimate of the 25 seats in a single-seat Tasmanian House would be:

    1. North West (Circular Head, King Id, part of Waratah-Wynyard)
    2. West Coast-Derwent (West Coast, Central Highlands, Derwent Vally, part of Waratah-Wynyard)
    3. Burnie
    4. Ulverstone (Central Coast)
    5. Devonport
    6. Kentish-Latrobe (including eastern Devonport)
    7. West Tamar
    8, 9, 10. North, Central, South Launceston
    11. North East (George Town, Dorset, Break O’Day, Flinders Id)
    12. Meander Valley
    13. Midlands (North and South Midlands)
    14. East Coast (Sorrell, Tasman, Glamorgan-Spring Bay)
    15. Brighton and North Glenorchy
    16. Huon Valley and South Kingborough
    17, 18. Central, South Glenorchy
    19, 20. North, South Clarence
    21, 22. North, Central Kingborough
    23, 24, 25. North, Central, South Hobart

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