Category: Tasmanian Election 2014

A ReachTEL automated phone poll of 2600 respondents conducted last night for The Mercury shows the Tasmanian state election situation much as it’s been for a very long time now, with the Liberals on a commanding 47.4% (up 0.2% from the last poll on February 13) and Labor on a dismal 23.6% (down 1.0%). The Greens are on 18.2%, up 1.0% on last time, while the Palmer United Party is down 0.8% to 6.7%. Electorate breakdowns and other detail presumably to follow in tomorrow’s paper.

UPDATE: Kevin Bonham has detailed results and better-informed analysis than I would be able to manage.

Part two of the five-part B-to-L guide to the Tasmanian election, which continues to proceed alphabetically (and for which I should probably pick up the pace). The first entry, for Bass, can be viewed here.

Dominated by Burnie and Devonport, the electorate of Braddon covers Tasmania’s north-western coastal areas plus King Island. Smaller centres include Currie, Penguin, Savage River, Smithton, Stanley, Ulverstone, Waratah and Wynyard. This is an electorally mixed area, with conservative small towns and farming districts balancing timber and mining industries that traditionally provided a solid working-class base for Labor. Antony Green observes that the parties “tend to try and balance their tickets with candidates from different areas”: for Labor, Brenton Best dominates in Devonport while Bryan Green does so in Burnie, which for the Liberals were respectively the strongest areas for winning candidate Adam Brooks and defeated incumbent Brett Whiteley at the 2010 election.

Labor was dominant in Braddon in the 1960s and 70s, but decline in the area’s industries combined with the Franklin Dam controversy dramatically tilted the balance in the Liberals’ favour in the early 1980s. The pendulum would not swing back until the late 1990s, with Labor dominating at state and federal level from 1998 to 2007, barring the telling interruption of the 2004 federal election when a backlash against Mark Latham’s conservationist forestry policy returned the seat to the Liberals for a turn with a 7.0% swing. This result also pointed to the area’s relative weakness for the Greens, who failed to win seats at the first three state elections held after the number of seats per electorate was cut from seven to five in 1998.

The Greens broke through at the 2010 election when the Labor vote fell from 50.8% to 40.2%, putting them well below three quotas, while the Liberal gain from 37.3% to 45.2% remained well short of what they needed for a third seat. With the Greens up from 10.3% to 13.7%, their lead candidate Paul O’Halloran was able to absorb much of Labor’s surplus after the election of their second member, allowing him to poach a third Labor seat that had been vacated by the retirement of former Deputy Premier Steve Kons. On the Liberal side of the equation, incumbent Brett Whiteley was unseated by newcomer candidate Adam Brooks, who outpolled Whiteley 10.8% to 8.6%. Whiteley has since returned to politics by winning the federal seat of Braddon from Labor’s Sid Sidebottom at the 2013 election.

Labor has two incumbents, both of long standing – Bryan Green, a member since 1998, and Brenton Best, since 1996.

Bryan Green emerged as his party’s strongest performing candidate in Braddon at the 2002 election, and comfortably remained so in 2006 and 2010. He was mentioned as a potential rival to Paul Lennon when talk of a leadership challenge briefly surfaced after the 2004 federal election debacle, and became Deputy Premier when David Llewellyn stepped aside after the 2006 election. However, he was in the position for only four months when he was obliged to stand down over a deal that offered a company part-owned by former Labor MPs a monopoly over accreditation in the building industry. Green faced two trials on charges of conspiracy and attempting to interfere with an executive officer, but both ended with hung juries and the charges were dropped in March 2008. He returned to cabinet after the 2010 election, since which time he has served in the primary industries and water, energy and resources, local government, planning and racing portfolios, and resumed the deputy premiership when David Bartlett made way for Lara Giddings in January 2011. This amounted to a clean sweep of the leadership positions for a Left faction with which Green has been associated since his pre-parliamentary career with the Forestry Union.

Brenton Best is also a member of the Left, having emerged through the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman’s Association. He was elected to Devonport City Council in 1994 and then to parliament in 1996 off 4.4% of the Braddon vote, which increased to 7.3% in 1998. His vote was again up in 2002, to 10.6%, but was nonetheless only narrowly able to win Labor’s third seat on the latter occasion, holding off Latrobe deputy mayor Michael Gaffney. In 2006 he went untroubled, despite his vote easing slightly to 10.5%, and he managed to increase his share of a diminished Labor vote in 2010 to record 11.0%. Best’s fiercely critical attitude to the governing alliance with the Greens has made him a thorn in the side of Lara Giddings, whom he has called on to make way for David O’Byrne as leader. He has at all times remained on the back bench.

Labor’s newcomer candidates are Shane Broad, a Central Coast councillor and former staffer to Sid Sidebottom, who was the best performing of Labor’s non-incumbent candidates in 2010, polling 5.1%; Justine Keay, a Devonport City Council alderman and former electorate officer to Bryan Green; and Darryl Bessell, who “works on a dairy farm at Smithton, after being made redundant from McCain Foods”.

Seeking re-election for the Liberals are Jeremy Rockliff and Adam Brooks, who have respectively held seats since 2002 and 2010. Jeremy Rockliff was a former state Young Liberals president and factional moderate whose family’s connections with the Sassafras farming region reportedly go back 150 years. He was one of two new Liberals elected when incumbents Tony Rundle and Carole Cains retired at the 2002 election, emerging the star performer of the Liberal ticket with 13.1% of the vote, and his share of the vote progressed to 14.8% in 2006 and 17.1% in 2010. Since 2006 he has served as the party’s deputy leader, having secured the position in a post-election party room vote. He presently holds the shadow portfolios of health, primary industries and industrial relations.

Adam Brooks was well known around Devenport before his election in 2010 due to business interests which a local newspaper report identified as including “Total Performance Sports and recently opened Essentially Mobile in Devonport plus Xcel Fitness in Shearwater as well as Port Sorell take away”. He by all accounts put a considerable amount of his own money into a high-visibility campaign which enabled him to pull off the difficult feat of unseating Liberal incumbent in Brett Whiteley, recording 10.8% of the vote to Whiteley’s 8.6%.

The new Liberal candidates are Kyron Howell, who has worked as a musical performer and tour manager in Japan, and currently works as a Japanese interpreter and trade consultant; Roger Jaensch, executive chairman of the Cradle Coast Authority and a former member of the Tasmanian Climate Action Council; and Joan Rylah, founder of pro-development group Unlock Tasmania.

Greens member Paul O’Halloran was assistant principal at the Tasmanian Academy’s Don campus before entering parliament at the 2010 election, at which he succeeded on his third attempt as the party’s lead candidate. Rounding out the Greens ticket are Chris Cornell, Melissa Houghton, Philip Nicholas and Sally O’Wheel.

Others: Kevin Morgan of the Palmer United Party candidate is being styled by his party as its “candidate for Premier of Tasmania#148;. He worked as an adviser in the Department of Premier and Cabinet from July 2010 to April 2013, during the tenures of David Bartlett and Lara Giddings, and polled 9.3% as PUP’s candidate for Braddon at the September 2013 federal election, and 14.5% as an independent candidate for the upper house seat of Montgomery the previous May. Also in the field are three Nationals candidates, one for the Australian Christians and two independents.

Welcome to part one of a five-part B-to-L guide to the Tasmanian election, which I’ll eventually get around to gussying up with charts and photos and publishing as a Poll Bludger election guide in the usual fashion. We shall proceed alphabetically, so first up …

Bass covers the eastern part of Tasmania’s northern coast along with Flinders Island, and derives 70% of its voters from Launceston. Other centres include George Town, a Labor-voting coastal town at the mouth of the Tamar River, and the more conservative Scottsdale, a hub of surrounding timber and farming communities. Bass has long been an arm wrestle between the major parties at federal level, changing hands in 1975, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2013. This has been reflected at state level both in terms of vote share and seat totals. Relatively mild shifts were recorded amid the statewide realignments to Liberal in the early 1980s and Labor in the early 2000s, and the division was the only one in the state which delivered equal numbers of seats to Labor and Liberal in 2002 and 2006.

This trend was disturbed by the 2010 election result, at which Bass joined Franklin as one of two electorates to record well above-par swings against Labor, in this case a 15.1% drop to 34.5%. The yield was divided roughly evenly between the Liberals, who were up 8.8% to 42.6%, and the Greens, who were up 7.4% to 21.0%. However, the seat result was again unchanged, with Labor and Liberal winning two seats each and the Greens winning one, as had been the case in 2002 and 2006. This reflected the extreme narrowness with which Labor failed to win third seats on the two previous occasions, and in particular the 138-vote margin of Greens member Kim Booth’s win over a third Labor candidate in 2006.

Labor’s aggregated vote share of 2.07 quotas in 2010 illustrates the difficulty they will have in sustaining the status quo in the face of a further swing. With both opinion polling and the 2013 federal election result pointing to a surge for the Liberals in northern Tasmania, a Liberal gain here looms as an indispensable element of any scenario in which they achieve a parliamentary majority. The Greens also cannot take a seat in Bass for granted, as illustrated by their failure to win a seat at the last election under the seven-member regime in 1998.

The senior of Labor’s two incumbents in Bass is Health Minister Michelle O’Byrne, who entered politics as the federal member for Bass from 1998 until her defeat in 2004. On contesting the state election in 2006, O’Byrne emerged as Labor’s strongest performing candidate in Bass, outpolling 17-year Labor veteran Jim Cox. She was promoted to Community Development Minister seven months after her election, and then to Environment Minister in February 2008 and Health Minister after the 2010 election. Reflecting the decline in support for Labor, O’Byrne’s share of the vote fell from 23.3% in 2006 to 17.8% in 2010. Her brother, David O’Byrne, was elected in the division of Denison at the 2010 election, and immediately elevated to cabinet. Both have backgrounds in the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, and are accordingly aligned with the Left.

The second Labor candidate elected in 2010 was Brian Wightman, a former principal of Winnaleah District High School. Wightman won promotion to cabinet in the reshuffle caused by Treasurer Michael Aird’s retirement in November 2010, taking on the Attorney-General and environment portfolios. Wightman’s 5.9% share of the vote in 2010 placed him ahead of seemingly higher-profile candidates in Scott McLean, the forests division secretary of the CFMEU (4.8%), and Brant Webb, who won brief national fame as one of the two survivors of the Beaconsfield mine disaster in 2006 (4.2%)

Rounding out the Labor ticket are Andrew Connor, a Meander Valley councillor who works in information technology; Adam Gore, who has worked as a musician in the army and as a teacher; and Senka Mujkic, who works at the Migrant Resource Centre in Launceston and was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The highest-polling Liberal candidate in 2010 was Michael Ferguson, making his state electoral debut after serving as federal member for Bass from 2004, when he unseated Michelle O’Byrne, until 2007, when he was defeated by Labor’s Jodie Campbell. Ferguson polled an exceptionaly strong 25.0% to take a second Liberal seat vacated by former party leader Sue Napier, who bowed out a month before the 2010 election owing to a recurrence of the breast cancer to which she succumbed the following August. Ferguson was noted as a social conservative and a member of the state party’s ascendant Right, having been director of the Tasmanian Family Institute. He has accordingly been identified with causes including opposition to gay adoption laws, abortion and stem cell research.

In the wake of Napier’s departure, the only Liberal incumbent at the election was Peter Gutwein, who first won election in 2002 with 9.1% of the vote. His win came at the expense of fellow Liberal David Fry, who had filled a vacancy mid-term. Gutwein went against party policy in his debut term by calling for an end to old-growth logging, and was briefly dumped from the front bench after voting in favour of a Greens motion calling for a commission of inquiry into child sex abuse. He was restored after the 2006 election in education and further gained police later in the year, before recovering Treasury when Will Hodgman relinquished it in August 2008. Currently he holds Treasury together with forestry and industry.

The Liberals have a further three candidates vying for a hoped-for third seat for the party: Sarah Courtney, owner of a Tamar Valley vineyard; Barry Jarvis, the mayor of Dorset; and Leonie McNair, co-principal of the Launceston Preparatory School.

Kim Booth returned the Greens to Bass at the 2002 election after they emerged empty-handed at the last election held under the seven-member regime in 1996, and the first one for five members in 1998. Curiously, Booth’s background was as the owner and operator of a building and saw-milling company, and also as deputy mayor of Meander Valley. After running unsuccessfully in 1998, Booth was comfortably elected in 2002 as the party scored fractionally short of a full quota in their own right, easily making up the rest on Labor preferences. He had a much tougher time in 2006, when the Greens vote fell from 16.5% to 13.6%, and was initially thought by most observers to be headed for defeat. However, he eventually prevailed by 138 votes after benefiting from a high rate of exhausted Labor votes, and from Labor voters who crossed to the Greens after casting a personal vote for Michelle O’Byrne. There were no such problems in 2010, when the Greens vote rose to a new high of 21.0%. After the election, Booth revealed he had been the only dissenter in the five-person Greens party room against the Labor-Greens alliance which saw his collegues Nick McKim and Cassy O’Connor assume positions in cabinet. His running mate on the Greens ticket is Amy Tyler.

Others: The lead candidate of the Palmer United Party would appear to be Chris Dobson, a bus operator and former RAAF airframe fitter. Also on the ticket are Mark Hines, a former electrical engineer with the army; Tim Parish, a George Town councillor; and Brian Gunst, a teacher. There are two further candidates: Ray Kroeze of the Australian Christians, and independent Brett Lucas.