EMRS has released its quarterly read on state voting intention in Tasmania, which despite a rocky three months for the government finds Liberal support up a point to 39% and Labor down three to 29%, with the Greens down two to 12% and others up three to 19%. The results at the May 2021 election, at which the Liberals won 13 out of 25 seats, were Liberal 48.7%, Labor 28.2% and Greens 12.4%. Jeremy Rockliff’s lead over Labor’s Rebecca White as preferred premier widens from 42-39 to 42-35. The poll was conducted November 20 to 27 from a sample of 1000.
Electorally relevant news from the state since the last poll:
• Former Attorney-General Elise Archer is gone from parliament after text messages were leaked in which she denigrated each of the three Liberals who have served as Premier since 2010, and others besides. This occurred against the backdrop of an Anti-Discrimination Commission inquiry into allegations against Archer from at least two staff members of bullying and inappropriate behaviour. Archer initially announced she was resigning from parliament but then prevaricated, leaving open the possibility that a government that had already been reduced to minority status after Lara Alexander and John Tucker quit the party in May. The crisis was defused when Archer went ahead with her resignation, and her parliamentary vacancy in the electorate of Clark was filled on a countback by Simon Behrakis, Hobart alderman and adviser to Treasurer and Deputy Premier Michael Ferguson. Given suggestions Ferguson is a potential leadership challenger, this may have weakened Rockliff’s position, Archer having reportedly been even less keen on Ferguson than she was on Rockliff.
• Sue Bailey of The Mercury reports the Jacqui Lambie Network will field candidates at the next election in Franklin, Lyons, Bass and Braddon, but not Clark. Lambie’s party failed to win any seats when it last contested a state election in 2014, but faces a lower bar with the enlargement of the House of Assembly from 25 seats to 35.
• Sue Bailey of The Mercury reports Josh Willie, who holds the northern Hobart seat of Elwick for Labor in the Legislative Council, will run for the lower house in Clark at an election due for early 2025. This will require a by-election in Elwick, to which Willie was elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2022.
Please note that this thread is about Tasmanian politics. The open thread for general discussion is here.
According to that report, 17% of the remaining 19% said they would support an Independent candidate, so that seems to put “Other Minor Party” at 2%.
But still, it’ll be interesting to see how the JLN will go at the next state election, since they seem to like to posture themselves as Independent options.
Also the Liberals seeming to go well might be an effect of Eric Abetz’s hard-right internal guerilla campaign against the moderates being a non-starter.
This is all giving a bit of a test to the well-worn aphorism that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win elections.
That Labor is still polling so poorly in Tasmania after 11 years of Liberal government is probably a sign that they should probably think of some dramatic transformation plan.
In this time they put probably their best Senator in the past decade, Lisa Singh into continually potentially unwinnable positions below backbench hacks in 2013 and 2016 until she finally lost out in 2019, where she was put in 4th position below some nobody who would have presumably been another hack, John Short, and Labor only won 2 seats in the end.
They need to be as transformative as the Tasmanian Liberals were in their time out of power from 1998 to 2014, where at the start they were a hard-right party that were happy to aggressively re-criminalize homosexuality to a relatively moderate centre-right party.
*Whoops, made an error, Singh was first elected as the No.3 Labor candidate in 2010, taking her seat in 2011, so was not up for election in 2013. Still, being shoved down to No.6 in the Double Dissolution of 2016 and then No.4 in 2019 was shameful.
https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2023/11/emrs-says-tasmanian-labors-getting.html
EMRS Says Tasmanian Labor’s Getting Nowhere
Hmmm.
being not the liberals is not good enough.
You actually have to stand for something. And vocalise it.
The Mercury talks of Labor losing votes to independents. The JLN sit in that bucket.
My Labor mates reckon Tas Liberal should be more concerned about the JLN that the Tas Labor party. Their reasoning being that there is more Liberal votes for JLN to take off the Libs and that they are running more northern seat candidates which is the Lib heartland in Tasmania. I’m not sure I back their thinking, and this polling seems to suggest the opposite.
https://archive.md/nJklg
Technically JLN should be in “other parties” which only got 2% in this poll, but I think a lot of voters don’t draw a distinction.
EMRS polls voting intention by asking an open question about who you would vote for, then if respondent is unsure a follow-up with options of Liberal, Labor, Green, IND or some other party.
The last time JLN ran, preferences leaving them split very weakly to Labor, but that was partly because they ran the late Michael Kent in Lyons, a former supermarket boss who was a rather Liberal-type candidate. In federal elections JLN preferences split about 60-40 to Labor, suggesting they are drawing more votes from working class Labor voters than from Libs, especially with Lambie having moved away from her right-wing origins over her career.