Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings has confirmed March 15 as her government’s date with the polls, which for the second successive occasion means a super Saturday on which elections are held in both Tasmania and South Australia. My most recent poll aggregate chart is featured below, encompassing the crudely bias-adjusted results of 14 EMRS and four ReachTEL polls.
UPDATE (17/1): Kevin Bonham and Ben Raue at The Tally Room have typically excellent reviews of the situation, complete with candidate overviews and such. My own overview will appear in Crikey later today.
Poor Giddings is going to get creamed. 16 years is probably too long for a government anyway.
I’ve heard that the Greens might consider a no confidence type motion. If they do go ahead with it, l imagine it would be a difficult temptation for the Libs to resist. So, the election could conceivably be earlier, I guess.
My election guide and candidate list:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/2014-tasmanian-state-election-candidate.html
March 15 is not formally confirmed yet as Parliament is being recalled on Jan 28. But my suspicion is that even if the Greens and Liberals bring down the government on that day then the date may well be preserved.
March 15 is a shocker of a date for me on many levels, not just the clash with SA but also the possibility I’ll be doing a lot of remote field work around that time.
That assumes parliament is recalled, I guess. I really don’t know that much about it all, TBH.
Greens conspiring with the reactionaries to undermine a centre-left party?
Tell me it ain’t so, Ma!
What a bugger, I hope Antony Green will stick to covering the SA Election and not troop off to Tassie like he did last time .
The plan is to issue writs on 12 Feb which gives PUP nearly a month to get their registration sorted.
[What a bugger, I hope Antony Green will stick to covering the SA Election and not troop off to Tassie like he did last time .]
You’re out of luck, I fear. Worse – his replacement might be me.
Actually now being announced as Feb 19 for issuing of writs.
Giddings has wimped out by not going with the Green alliance (not that i totally agree with the Greens)but McKim and O’connor were good Ministers and it is fairly weak doing what she has done just before an election
Carey at 2. Can you supply any basis for your rumour. It really sounds like mischief making without foundation?
The main rumour’s valid enough, Kim Booth has explicitly said he will move it and the remaining Greens are considering their position.
I think what will happen with the no-confidence motion is that the Libs will just refuse to support the motion to suspend standing orders in order to put it. They’ll say they have no confidence in the government but that the motion is pointless when there’s an election coming anyway. That was the impression I got from Hodgman’s language today. The Libs will look right turkeys if they kill a motion to protect the pulp mill that they support for the sake of bringing down a government that was going to the people in six weeks.
So I reckon the pulp mill motion will be passed by Labor and the Liberals, the Upper House will rubber-stamp it and the Premier will ask the Governor to prorogue parliament and that will be the end of it. Or something like that.
[Carey at 2. Can you supply any basis for your rumour. It really sounds like mischief making without foundation?]
Kevin Bonham has answered it but I would appreciate it, in future, if you made such requests in a less accusatory tone. I am not in the business of making shit up just to make mischief.
Carey 14 – comment accepted. It just seems bizarre that Greens and Labor are behaving the way they are having been in a coalition that each has supported up to now.
Actually I suspect Tasmania will see a real minority government in the next few years (probably not after this election) where the largest minority party governs without any “guarantee” of confidence and just accepts that some legislation will be defeated in the lower house. And if a budget is defeated then all options are looked at again.
[They’ll say they have no confidence in the government but that the motion is pointless when there’s an election coming anyway]
I understand your point and definitely defer to your superior knowledge of Tasmanian politics but isn’t there a case for forcing an early election to show that Giddings has completely lost control of things. One more nail in the coffin, so to speak?
Very smart move by Giddings to end the Coalition and run against the Greens. 20% of Tas voters like the Greens but the other 80% hate them, and this is the best strategy for Labor to get its base vote back in the three regional seats.
Wakefield@14
Labor knows the coalition is unpopular but also knew all along they would be in trouble at the next election. So they’ve stuck with the coalition to stay in office and ditched it as soon as there is no longer any stability benefit in keeping it. As for the Greens they have to oppose attempts to prop up the pulp mill; their core supporters think they have sold out quite enough in this term. Indeed the sort of pulp mill legislation being pushed would have triggered a Green no-confidence threat at any stage, which is why it is only being pushed now and not when it was first recommended.
Carey: I don’t think an early election can be forced. Even if the government falls on Jan 28th, Mar 15 is within the permitted window for an election to be held even without considering the Governor’s powers to go beyond the time limits. It wouldn’t make sense for the Governor to bring the election forward and mess up the Electoral Office’s planning just because the government had fallen. It might still be the Liberals want to do it as a symbolic gesture but the Greens will not support any Liberal no-confidence motion so the Liberals would have to agree with one from the Greens, which wouldn’t be a great idea given the likely subject matter. Maybe they’ll find a way to do it as an empty symbolic gesture but I don’t really see much point.
Psephos: It might limit the rout but the base would have to be remarkably unwary to fall for it in very large numbers. After all Giddings hasn’t ruled out governing with Green support, only governing with Greens in Cabinet, and even that is a very late arrived-at position. Any minority government that relies on Green support will implement Green policies or perish.
And she’s not even really running against the Greens yet, just not with them – there’s some differentiation and sharp words going on but a lot of mixed messages too. Bryan Green was even more revealing on this when he spent quite large chunks of one radio interview saying that the government had done fine but just had trouble selling its achievements to voters because the presence of the Greens interfered with their message. Until he got wound up about the pulp mill he was basically saying that it is not the Greens’ fault it has come to this, but rather a sad necessity because the voters refused to understand. Giddings explicitly said the Liberals are the “enemy” in this election.
I think anyone gullible enough to believe a vote for Labor is not also a vote for more Green power over government is probably also gullible enough to vote for PUP.
Come on how cynical is the move to seperate from the Greens at this stage. McKim has been a good Minister. To get the forestry agreement up has been a great achievement. If the Pulp Mill had been proposed at another site it would have got up. From here it seems the Liberals are running a good campaign and started a long time ago (at every community event i have been to) while Labor has been fighting internally (sounds a bit like the federal scenario). It is annoying when you believe in the Policys of one party who does not have their act together and the other one will win ….a lot of Stephen Bradbury happening. Kevin – if people voted for that arangement what is wrong with it besides perception?, think they actually worked well together (the Libs actually approached the Greens as well but never admitted it). Believe it is weak of Giddings to back away now
scoutdog@18 You are correct, the Lab-Green coalition worked well. But the underpinning factor in Tassie politics is the one Psephos has identified: the large majority of the electorate (IMO it’s more like 65-70 per cent rather than 80) who identify any involvement by the Greens in government as creating an impermeable barrier to economic growth and job creation.
The basic demographics of this thinking is that it is disproportionately represented among Tasmanians who were born here, are over the age of 50, have no tertiary educational qualifications (and in many instances haven’t completed secondary school) and do not live in Hobart.
While I don’t have a lot of time for the Greens (especially their policies on anything other than environmental issues), I find the anti-Green sentiment down here pretty disturbing, as it is based on a pipe dream that a sustainable economic future for Tasmania could be established largely on the backs of relatively low-tech primary and secondary industries: in short, forestry, fishing and factories.
In my view the only really viable future for the Tasmanian economy is through the further development of a number of niche primary and tertiary areas: tourism (focusing on bushwalkers, foodies and arty farty types), high quality forest products (ie, timber rather than pulp), lifestyle (eg, high income teleworkers moving here from the mainland), scientific research (Antarctica, etc) and boutique, high quality agriculture (cheese, wine, berries, etc.)
These niche sectors fit neatly with a pro-environment political framework for Tasmania. Any return (as seems likely after the election) to an environment of global media coverage of protesters chained to trees and the like will be highly detrimental to the promotion of these other sectors. As will any return to large-scale government subsidisation of plantation timber activity, which will lead to land being lost to the burgeoning boutique agriculture sector.
But Tasmanian is a democracy, and the problem for the Greenies and the (largely Hobart-focused) economic sectors which find synergy with their view is that the bulk of the Tasmanian electorate cannot see a future for themselves or their children there. A large proportion of the Tasmanian population actively discourage their children from becoming too educated for fear that they might move to the mainland. These same people look back nostalgically to the days when most of the kids aspired leave school at 15 and go to work in the forests, on the fishing boats, building dams for the Hydro or at the chocolate factory or the zinc works.
The Libs have been shamelessly promising for some time that they can fulfill these “back to the future” aspirations of the majority of Tasmanians, and – as was always inevitable – Labor is now set to follow suit and promise something broadly similar.
Of course, it can’t be done. If, as seems likely, the Libs win, they are going to have massive problems in terms of managing public expectations: particularly about a sudden resurgence of forestry. There is a real risk that, if the recent forestry agreement is torn up and logging commenced in heritage-listed areas, the global media coverage of screaming protesters, etc. will encourage large parts of the world to boycott/sanction Tasmanian forest exports: particularly any pulp produced by a pulp mill. This will be extremely counter-productive.
Of course, a Tasmanian Lib Government will immediately seek additional help from the Feds and will undoubtedly get some. In that sense, the electorate’s likely choice of the Libs to govern will probably turn out to be quite a canny one. But, sadly, I would expect most of the additional help to be wasted on subsidising unsustainable “private” ventures like pulp mills and cable cars up Mt Wellington and the like, rather than being used to further develop the niche sectors I listed above.
I think it will all come right in the long run. The Greens can help the process along by moderating their demands: something that has indeed happened over the past few years through the excellent efforts of the current leadership of the State party and The Wilderness Society: the recent forest agreement was a triumph of pragmatic commonsense on their parts, for which they are likely to reap the reward of seeing the agreement torn up in their faces. So it goes.
Anyway, it’s going to be a really interesting campaign.
William Bowe said:
[Worse – his replacement might be me.]
Couldn’t think of a better person to fill in for Mr. Green.
Good post as always MB.
scoutdog@18
It could well be argued that people did not vote for that arrangement and that that is a big part of what is seen as wrong with it. David Bartlett (ALP Premier before Giddings) strongly indicated prior to the election that he would not do deals with the Greens. In mandate terms the deal that was done had the support of Greens voters only.
Eco-blockades are not “peaceful protest”. They are designed to achieve a desired outcome by force and such people should be treated as the gangsters they are. Remember that the Federal Greens have a member of a notorious Australian Communist family as one of their Senators. Given that fact, they seem a bit too fond of 1970s leftism. It isn’t the seventies anymore.
MB good post. Well articulated and good summary, I actually have no problem with cable cars and the right Pulp Mill
But Kevin why did the Libs contact the Greens to form Govt? The revisionist stuff does not work. Mandate was preached by Abbott re the Carbon Price (tax was a lie) I believe the current arrangement has going ok but Giddings has lost me by copping out now. We as a State need substance not zipping out at the tough time and going for the base debate; the level of discussion should be a lot higher we deserve that.
In reality I think the Greens do not mind the fact that this arrangement is going to be broken as they need to play to their base at this stage.
The Labor Party in Tas should be stronger than it is and should have ditched Brenton Best but was to worried about its vote
scoutdog@24
Some Libs did sound out some Greens about possible support. The funny thing about that is how long it took to come out (years) because at the time the line from both parties was that the Liberals were not interested. All the same Labor are the ones who actually did the deal they said they would not do; the Liberals may have flirted with breaking their commitments but did not actually do so.
I think the mandate situation federally was slightly different because it was reasonable for Gillard to say that she did not envisage a hung parliament (as poor an excuse as it is in that Gillard did not need to give the Greens so much.) On the other hand if you are asked specifically what you would do in a hung parliament, and all the polls are pointing to a hung parliament, then you do not have that escape hatch.
I think they were also worried he would quit the party and run as an indie or for PUP thus losing them a seat. He would then be aggrieved enough that he would probably support the Liberals in exchange for the Speakership. If the Libs get only 12 seats I will not be surprised if he does this anyway.
My view so far is that the Greens have handled their dumping from Cabinet very reasonably. They’ve showed a lot of perspective and realism about it. To their credit.
23
Peaceful protest means non-violent protest. Sitting a blockading is not violent. The environmentalists are not the ones beating people up in Tasmania, pretty much any violence around these protests comes from the other side. There has to be some ability to protest in a way that actually has an effect rather than just noise making.
The Greens are a party of the left but not the extreme left. They are a party of principals of the left such as equality and social justice. In a free society, people are entitled to hold any principals they like. People do not have to hold free market extremist views just because that is the direction western society has been heading in for the past 35 years because that is where we are in the economic and political cycle at the moment. The left is an important part of society. They balance the right and keep a lid on the excesses thereof.
Good post Kevin Bonham
William @ 8:
As much of an honour it would be to have you in SA for our election coverage, I feel Antony should come to SA for our election.
Surely Antony couldn’t choose Tassie over us?
Tasmania has great forests, hydro power, the Tassie Devil and MONA.
SA has Jay Weatherill and Steven Marshall.
Um, needing a place to stay in Adelaide, William?
Now, joking aside, the quality of this thread is miles above that of the main one.
I could say it is due to Kevin Bonham (another reason perhaps Antony prefers Tasmania to SA) but KB has a few erudite friends on this thread.
Well done all!
Tom the first and best@26
There always is but groups that want to go down that path should be prepared to pay the price. A big problem in Tasmania is that many environmental protest groups think they should be allowed to break the law by blockading, obstructing and trespassing and then either not get prosecuted or else get off with a slap on the wrist sentence level.
I believe strongly in the right to public protest but I am strongly opposed to the claimed right to disrupt industry for the sake of protest. If those who want to exercise this claimed right are really on the side of angels or Mandela or whatever they should be prepared to cop punishments specified by law for that behaviour, and let history judge if they were right.
Mainly these groups go in for the obstructive stuff because it gets more publicity than just a peaceful rally. And also because they can’t seem to convince too many people via normal peaceful protests – and there’s probably a reason for that.
[Surely Antony couldn’t choose Tassie over us?
Tasmania has great forests, hydro power, the Tassie Devil and MONA.]
And, of course, Hare Clark. Which as I’m sure you’re aware is the salient factor here. And yes, this is a very good thread, isn’t it.
This is a great thread. Thanks Kevin and MB for your enlightening posts. I’ve voted here all my life, but I’m blowed if I know who to vote for this time. But my thoughts are crystallising now. As a Franklin voter, I have all three leaders in my electorate, and don’t really want any of them.
Does anyone *really* think there will be a pulp mill? Are the markets even still there? I suspect that once any interested party gets a look at the books, they’ll walk away. If they don’t, the state will be split right down the middle again.
And dog knows why Brenton Best keeps getting elected. His rejection of the Greens was the only thing I can ever remember him doing, and I’m assuming it was done to keep his redneck vote.
meher baba @ 19
That was an excellent explanation (to me) of the Tassie political situation (and therefore the economic/environmental one). A microcosm of the mainland Australia, perhaps.
I have great difficulty ordering my vote for the coming election because all three parties in parliament were fundamentally unpalatable to me at some stage or other. The Liberals when they all opposed abortion law reform and same-sex marriage, Labor and the Greens when they supported an amendment to anti-discrimination law that I viewed as having extremely dangerous implications for political commentary and internet debate. The latter was fixed by the Legislative Council but not before I put a lot of work into putting the case that it was not just right-wingers who had reason to be worried about the proposed changes.
Then there is PUP who have not fundamentally annoyed me in the same way but who I’m very wary of as they seem to be an incoherent mess of populism with low quality control and no valid political purpose.
I may only feel obliged to vote all the way down if there are right-wing religious types who I need to put last.
On that score the Australian Christians have applied for registration but they’ll be pushing it to make it in time; indeed any properly-framed last-minute objection (however spurious) will scuttle them.
Kevin@30,
Mostly love your work, but I have to differ with you on the subject of protests.
[they can’t seem to convince too many people via normal peaceful protests]
Obstructive protests are still peaceful. They are also pretty normal; they have been going on for decades. You mean “via protests which do not inconvenience anyone”.
[…and there’s probably a reason for that]
Indeed, and you gave it in your preceding sentence,
[…because it gets more publicity than just a peaceful rally.]
A rally would need large numbers to attract national publicity, and even then there is no guarantee of coverage if it does not suit the media proprietor’s interests. Remember how big rallies against the Iraq war were mostly ignored? A confrontation, especially if there are some arrests, is harder to ignore.
I am sure most protesters are well aware that they risk arrest and are prepared to cop a penalty for their activities. Like anyone who finds themselves before the court, they or their lawyers will try to minimise such penalties. Most protesters will indeed avoid prosecution or be given a “slap on the wrist” because in the scheme of things their offences are trivial; this is in the opinion of prosecutors and magistrates who make the decisions. The protesters’ own views of the seriousness of their offences is not a relevant factor in these decisions.
I do agree with your comments @17. The Labor Party could not go to the election as a coalition, and while the way it has been handled looks a bit clumsy it is probably the best available in the circumstances, both for Labor and for the Greens. It would probably have been better to include a sunset clause in their agreement, but it is understandable that this was neglected at the time. If the Green ministers had not been dismissed they would have had to resign over the proposed pulp mill legislation, damaging their narrative of stable power-sharing government. Being sacked absolves them of blame, while allowing the Labor Party to look at least a little bit hairy-chested to its base.
MagicPudding: The Green movement is getting more extreme. In Germany, they had the area around the former inner German border turned into a Mother Earth wilderness area simply because it had not been used by humans for years. They plan to do the same in Korea.
It’s only a small step from that to deciding that it’s ok to murder humans to clear the way for the restoration of areas of Mother Earth wilderness.
You have missed the most important aspect of a Tasmanian election “family size” if all your family vote for you you are in.
36
There is a vast distance between leaving a decades old existing wildlife corridor (created for non-environmental reasons) which has significant support, and killing humans which is only supported by the fringe of the fringe of the fringe. There are even more steps in between those two things, the most prominent being converting existing human use land back to wildlife use (not all that radical) to allowing and sometimes even encouraging the world population to decline.
MagicPudding@35
Not quite. For instance street marches cause inconvenience to traffic and cause costs to police that then come out of taxpayers’ pockets, but I don’t have a problem with those. Just as I don’t have a problem with the existence of government-funded media.
Whether obstructive protests are deemed “peaceful” or not comes down to what context of “peace” is being used and is not of great importance. What is important is the functional difference that some protests do not stop the target of the protest going about its lawful work, while others, temporarily, do. These are not just impacts that affect faceless big businesses but that can also affect the livelihoods of employees and contractors. If some protestor someday obstructed my work and caused me to miss out on income, I would consider that person to owe me the money I had lost, and would consider that at the very least the law should entitle me to recover it from them through the courts.
People have other ways of getting their word around these days. I think that if people will be sympathetic to a large protest then they are likely to find out about its existence. Of course some commercial networks will not give such events coverage but those who exclusively watch such networks are very unlikely to be convinced anyway.
In any case, I don’t think anyone has an automatic right to have their protest cause covered by commercial media should commercial media not wish to cover it.
It is also the opinion of politicians who set penalty ranges for courts to apply, and as a result of many years of slaps on the wrist we are now probably going to get the other extreme (mandatory sentencing). What I really have an issue with is that many protestors in Tasmania believe there is a democratic right to protest illegally – indeed to protest by almost any method short of direct physical violence or blowing things up. They not only seek to minimise sentences through the legal system but they seek to argue that what they are doing should not even be illegal. I do not think any such right exists and I do not agree that a person has the right to significantly obstruct the operations of law-abiding businesses just so they can get their cause in the paper.
New Matilda commissioned me to write a thing about the election which is up on their website.
https://www.newmatilda.com/2014/01/19/tassie-will-be-gimme-libs
Some editing and the title is theirs not mine, eg “have predicted Will Hodgman’s Liberals could win an election” originally read “that had an election been held at the time, Will Hodgman’s Liberals would have won. “
William
Kudos to you for covering the SA election. I hope it is the start of a growing career.
MB
[In my view the only really viable future for the Tasmanian economy is through the further development of a number of niche primary and tertiary areas: tourism (focusing on bushwalkers, foodies and arty farty types), high quality forest products (ie, timber rather than pulp), lifestyle (eg, high income teleworkers moving here from the mainland), scientific research (Antarctica, etc) and boutique, high quality agriculture (cheese, wine, berries, etc.)]
I strongly agree. Tasmania’s economy has been a disaster in the past decade. The progress of Jim Bacon has been reversed, and turned back to traditional industries with little future. It is one thing for the majority of locals to be hell bent on enteenching poverty. They seem to expect the rest of us to subsidise them in the process. Neither major political party deserves credit for pandering to this. Not much leadership is evident across the Strait. My advice to young people in Tassie: leave.
Socrates, what we need in Tasmania is for some young people to stay, and run for Parliament. What we’re being offered is recycled people, like Amos and Llewelyn.
Not all of us are comfortable with the entrenched poverty culture. If culture you can call it.
meherbaba@19
For what it’s worth, I am
– born in Adelaide
– under 50
– have postgraduate qualifications
– live in Hobart
and generally despise the Greens!
So there you go. Does that make me an exceptional person? 😉
But what I actually came here to query was Kate Crowley’s piece in The Conversation today, in which she mentions the Greens polling at 19%. Does anyone know the source for this? 19% would be a lot higher than what they achieved at the Federal poll.
Oh, and hear hear Kevin Bonham (@30, @39) on what does and does not constitute legitimate protest.
The 19% figure comes from EMRS after they redistribute their rather high undecided rates proportionally. However, past experience is that the Greens’ actual vote never matches these EMRS figures – those flagged by EMRS as undecided do not vote Green.
Although EMRS gives Labor as 22 and Green on 19 a more plausible reading of their poll is something like 26.5 to 16 and even that is high-end for the Greens compared to some of their state polling in 2013. Both William and I have aggregates with Labor in high 20s and Greens in mid teens.
I went into this more here:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/emrs-another-shocker-for-labor.html
Cheers Kevin.
A mystery today is the candidacy of Barbara Etter for PUP in Denison. Denison is PUP’s worst seat and the best to run as an indie in. Etter’s existing branding is a perfect fit with a Wilkie-style indie bid and a dubious fit with PUP – unless Etter has gone over to PUP’s conspiracy-theory tinfoil-hat brigade.
Here we go again.
[MORE than 600 people packed into the Tailrace Centre in Launceston last night for a public forum against the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill.
The full house heard from a panel of anti-pulp mill speakers including Peter McGlone, Lucy Landon-Lane, Vanessa Bleyer and Bass Greens MHA Kim Booth.
Mr Booth said Premier Lara Giddings had let down a community that expected the “blight” of the Tamar Valley pulp mill to be removed.]
http://www.examiner.com.au/story/2040588/both-sides-out-in-force-for-forum/?cs=95
The pulp mill thing is a joke; anyone who thinks this election should be about building the pulp mill has forfeited the right to call PUP ridiculous.
I’m not opposed to the idea of the mill per se but I am opposed to massive or indeed any government subsidisation of a private project. And I don’t see any evidence that the thing is anywhere near viable on purely private funding at this time. Millions of dollars of state funds have been wasted on this pipe dream already.
Kevin, I completely agree. But I bet it does become an election issue, when the focus should be on other more real and realistic issues. What a waste of time and money this is going to be.
Strange to think the pulp mill is being revitalised thru such overt political interference on the eve of an election. The last time those actions were applied it forced the resignation of a premier ( Lennon ) and gave the Greens a solid 2010 election result, didn’t it? Is it not a politically poisonous issue for the majors to go anywhere near? I look forward to the release of the next opinion poll whenever that may be.