Category: Tasmanian Politics

Details of yesterday’s EMRS poll published in the Launceston Examiner have been frustratingly hard to come by. The full release has not been published on the company’s website in the usual fashion, presumably due to some sort of exclusivity arrangement with The Examiner. The only figures published yesterday were of raw responses to the first question on voting intention, which remarkably had the Greens ahead of Labor. However, this excludes the follow-up pollsters invariably ask of the undecided as to who they are leaning towards. Today, courtesy of Felicity Ogilvie on the ABC’s AM program, we learn that the latter figure brings the results up to Liberal 30 per cent, Labor 23 per cent and the Greens 22 per cent, with “almost a quarter” still undecided – a remarkably high figure. The normal practice is to exclude the undecided from consideration: whether we take almost a quarter to mean 23 per cent or 24 per cent, rounding gives us results of Liberal 39 per cent, Labor 30 per cent and the Greens 29 per cent. However, there is little doubt that this figure flatters the Greens, who have a tradition of over-performing in EMRS polls in any case, and who tend to do less well out of disengaged undecided voters who tend to view politics in Labor-versus-Liberal terms. The poll also went so far as to query voters in each electorate as to the candidates they favoured, but the sample sizes are so small that I’m not inclined to read much into them. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Scott Bacon apparently rated at least as well as David Bartlett in Denison. We also learn that Greens supporters – a sample of about 220 – favoured a Liberal over a Labor minority government by a margin of 51 per cent to 43 per cent. Of all respondents, 29 per cent would prefer a majority government led by the Liberals compared with 26 per cent by Labor and 12 per cent by the Greens.

UPDATE: More from Kevin Bonham at the Tasmanian Times.

Other news from the campaign trail:

• Labor suffered ill-timed bad news on the economy on Thursday, with the release of figures showing unemployment in the state up from 5.3 per cent to 6.4 per cent. Matthew Denholm of The Australian notes that the state’s north-west – i.e. Braddon – has been hardest hit, with the loss of 190 jobs at McCain’s vegetable processing plant in Smithton, 250 “going or gone” from the PaperlinX mill at Wesley Vale, and a further 150 jobs threatened unless a buyer is found for its Burnie plant.

Sue Neales of The Mercury has run an excellent series of articles which have provided a goldmine of local intelligence on each electorate:

• In Bass, Labor “privately admits it has no idea” which of its candidates is most likely to win a second seat, the re-election of Michelle O’Byrne being a foregone conclusion. CFMEU forests division secretary Scott McLean was presumed to be the front-runner due to his basis of support among logging workers and the organisation clout of his union, but he “has not been campaigning hard and seems not to have established a high-profile presence in the minds of Bass voters”. Brian Wightman, “the preferred candidate of Premier David Bartlett”, is thought unlikely to rate outside his home base of Winnaleah. That leaves Beaconsfield mine disaster survivor Brant Webb with a serious chance of riding off his famous exploit on 2007 into parliament. The remaining candidate, Michelle Cripps, was apparently not thought worth a mention. The article also assess the state of play for the Liberals, arguing the health-related withdrawal of Sue Napier “threw the party’s high hopes of winning three seats”. Former federal MP Michael Ferguson is rated a near certainty to take the second seat.

• Neales reports that Labor has understandably abandoned hope of retaining three seats in Franklin, with a 2-2-1 result reckoned a certaintly. Labor MPs Daniel Hulme and Ross Butler are mounting highly visible campaigns to retain the seats they acquired mid-term on the vacancies of Paul Lennon and Paula Wreidt, notwithstanding a general perception they will lose. O’Byrne has been running a “high-profile campaign heavy on expensive TV advertisements, much of it funded by interstate unions”, with Hulme in particular complaining he “has more than $100,000 to spend from union funds”. Hulme has been endeavouring to inherit the logging industry vote from Paul Lennon, with whom he is closely associated, partly be establishing his electorate office in Huonville. Liberal candidate Tony Mulder “is expected to poll well”, but Jacquie Petrusma – a former Family First Senate candidate and ally of Right faction warlord Senator Eric Abetz – “is more likely to help Ms Petrusma across the line than to win a third seat in his own right”. Mulder was told last week to withdraw advertisements focusing on his past career as a police commander, which featuring images of him in uniform. The police force has deemed it a possible breach of the Public Service Act, an offence carrying a $2400 fine and a maximum of two years in prison.

• In Denison, Neales reports Labor internal polling shows David Bartlett is “not popular in Glenorchy, Rosetta and Claremont”, owing to his “bike-riding, iPod values”. Furthermore, public servants and teachers who predominantly live in the south of the electorate are “fed up with endless education reforms, worried about cuts to public service jobs, concerned about the Government’s poor governance and decision-making record and distrustful of Labor’s promises that front-line services will be protected”. That being so, Labor is rated next to no chance of retaining its three seats, with Graeme Sturges an almost certain casualty. The Liberals’ plan has been to “run five candidates who each in their own right attract and command different segments of votes in Denison”: however, beyond that fact that Elise Archer is targeting the business community, details of this are vague. The Liberals made what seems a contentious political gambit in the electorate last week by promising a $25 million feasibility study into a cable car up Mount Wellington. Labor seemed on electorally safer ground when it made the showpiece of Monday’s campaign launch a plan to buy back and expand the Hobart Private Hospital, although it expects the federal government to pick up 60 per cent of the tab. Sue Neales noted that elsewhere that the policy was pitched “particularly in its battler heartland northern half, where cost-of-living pressures and concerns about health and education have sent voters flocking to the Liberals and Greens”. Labor was facing a particular problem among women voters, hence the promise for a dedicated new $180 million women’s and children’s hospital wing. For its part, the Liberal Party has promised to spend $250 million on a new central wing at the hospital.

• In Lyons, a gain for the Liberals is rated so certain that some in the party are talking of winning a third seat: the two scenarios in play being 2-2-1 and 3-2. Jim Playsted is reckoned the strongest newcomer, but the identity of a third winner would be anyone’s guess. Neales rates Tim Morris the most likely of the four sitting Greens to lose their seat, in part because of the redistribution which has transferred the West Coast region to Braddon and added the blue-collar northern Hobart suburbs of Gagebrook and Bridgewater.

UPDATE (18/3): The last remaining electorate profile, for Lyons, has now been added. Some of the earlier profiles could do with an update, though it remains to be seen if I’ll find time.

Guide to the Tasmanian state electorate of Braddon here. Two down, three to go: with only a fortnight to go until polling day, I might have to lift my work rate. UPDATE: Denison now up as well. UPDATE 2: Franklin too.

Highlights of the past fortnight on the Tasmanian campaign trail:

• Sue Neales of The Mercury reports Greens leader Nick McKim saying any negotiated agreement for Labor or Liberal to govern in minority “would not involve ultimatums, threats or even demands for ministries”. Specifically, McKim told Matthew Denholm of The Australian last week that he did not rule out backing a party that would continue to back old-growth logging, fuelling complaints from environmental groups that the Greens were giving conservation issues short shrift. McKim said the Greens would be ready to favour whichever party negotiated “honestly and in good faith”, and did not accept David Bartlett’s notion that whichever party won the most seats (or failing that, votes) should be allowed to govern. McKim also rejects the stated desire of both Labor and Liberal to govern in minority without a specific deal or agreement as “inherently unstable”. Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics weighs in on the possibility of a Green being given the Speaker’s job, as has happened in the Australian Capital Territory.

• The Greens’ decision might be made easier by David Bartlett’s apparent declaration he would not seek to stay in government if Labor won fewer seats than the Liberals. His particular formulation was that “the party that won the most seats or the most votes (would) be able to form a government first on the floor of the House of Assembly”, and that being so, he would “not be moving no-confidence motions and those things that have the potential to send the electorate back for another election”. However, there seems to be a few holes in this: the capacity of either Labor or Liberal to form a government in minority on the floor of the House would be entirely down to the actions of the other parties, and a no-confidence motion need not cause a new election if an alternative government could be formed. For his part, Will Hodgman claims he was misquoted when reported in The Australian as saying he would consider all options, insisting there would be no coalition with the Greens.

• The not-quite-dead canal estate development at Ralphs Bay was back in the news last week when the Tasmanian Planning Commission granted developers Walker Corporation a second extention on its response to the October draft report which declared the project “inherently unsustainable”. Both David Bartlett and the Greens have complained that a final decision before the election would have been preferable.

• The issue of water toxins in the east coast town of St Helens has continued to develop a life of its own since being the subject of an episode of the ABC’s Australian Story a fortnight ago. Local doctor Alison Bleaney claims, with support from independently conducted tests, that the George River is contaminated by toxins from upstream plantations, which Bleaney believes may be responsible for health problems in the town. Last week, Sue Neales of The Mercury wrote that the government believed the issue to be a “bomb deliberately timed to go off during the election campaign, lobbed with the full knowledge and agreement of the Tasmanian Greens”. Today, The Australian reports David Bartlett complaining Bleaney had also emerged in the lead-up to the 2006 election with “a whole range of concerns proven to be completely false”, describing her return as a “a happy coincidence for the Greens”.

• Labor, Liberal and the Greens will all hold their campaign launches next week: Labor at the Baha’i temple in inner Hobart on Monday, the Greens at the Mercure Hotel on Wednesday and the Liberals at Launceston’s Boathouse function centre next Sunday.

• A nifty new website called iElect seeks to pool collective wisdom by inviting participants to pick who they expect to win in each division, as well as offering useful details on the candidates.

Finally, there have been a number of incidents in which Labor candidates have attracted the wrong kind of headlines, two of which illustrate the friction that can develop in a party when declining electoral fortunes leave fewer pieces of pie to go round.

• Two Labor candidates for Denison, incumbent Graeme Sturges and newcomer Madeleine Ogilvie, were at each other’s throats last week with the latter accusing the former of telling voters she was “not really Labor”, reportedly promting a sharp telephone call from Ogilvie to Sturges. Sturges did not help matters when he explained he had “just been telling them to vote for a Labor bloke”. According to Sue Neales of The Mercury, “much more likely to be the intended target of his lovely message to voters that only the ‘blokes’ count is Sturgo’s fellow Labor minister in Denison, Lisa Singh”.

• Michael Stedman of the Sunday Tasmanian reports an ad by Labor Lyons candidate Rebecca White, “poking fun at the elder statesmen of her own party”, went “viral” on YouTube. The ad prompted two long-serving Labor incumbents in Lyons, David Llewellyn and Michael Polley, to complain to David Bartlett – and it now appears to have been discreetly dropped from White’s You Tube page.

• The Mercury this week carried reports of unpleasant behaviour by Labor Braddon MP Brenton Best after his daughter was dropped from an amateur theatre production for failing to attend dress rehearsals due to illness. Best reportedly threatened to sue the Hobart Music Theatre Summer School, and told the director of the program he would “sort him out”. David Bartlett said after discussion with Best he was satisfied he had not acted inappropriately, but The Mercury later reported the director’s account had been confirmed by a teacher who was present.

• Labor Denison MP was red-faced last week after reporters overheard her complaining of media reaction to the party’s asbestos policy announcement: “This is a f**king good policy, why do they always have to f**king pick negatives”. While this has prompted much tut-tutting, and was followed by an apology from Singh, I would expect voters to be more struck a politician being so so passionately convinced of the merits of their policy than by the fact that they chose to swear in private.

As before, this thread can be used for general discussion of the Tasmanian election campaign.

EMRS has kicked off the Tasmanian election campaign with a poll showing a remarkable surge in support for the Greens, who after distribution of the undecided are only four points behind Labor. Labor are down two points on their already weak showing in November to 31 per cent, but the Liberals are also down five to 39 per cent. The Greens are up six points to 27 per cent. If reflected on March 20, which I personally wouldn’t put money on, the result would probably be 19 seats evenly divided between the majors and six for the Greens. The number of respondents was 867, for a margin of error of about 3.3 per cent.

I will be unfolding my Tasmanian election guide electorate-by-electorate over the next month, starting today at the front of the alphabetical queue with Bass. Some highlights from the first week of official campaigning:

• The campaign began with the shock announcement by Sue Napier that she would be unable to contest the election due to a return of breast cancer, with which she was first diagnosed in 2008. Napier has been a Liberal member for Bass since 1992, and was Opposition Leader from 1999 to 2001. Her withdrawal further lengthens the already long odds on the Liberals gaining a third seat in the electorate. It’s likely to present an opportunity to former federal member Michael Ferguson, who is surely the front-runner to take the second Liberal seat. Following Napier’s withdrawal, the party promptly endorsed Michelle McGinity, said to have “worked in public relations in Canberra”. According to Sue Neales of The Mercury, McGinity hesitantly told a reporter she had been a member of the Liberal Party for “about a month”, prompting a party minder to step in to clarify she had in fact meant to say “for a day”.

• A surprise Labor promise to boost its existing $8 million commitment to a health facility in Glenorchy to $21 million prompted The Mercury to report the government was “seriously worried about its standing in the battler heartland of Denison’s south”. David Bartlett’s problems in the area are said to include the fact that he is an “iPod-loving, bicycle-riding, latte-sipping trendy whose interests, experiences and financial pressures are far removed from their own”. The report notes that Bartlett scored a hit with these voters when he “stood up to Aboriginal protest groups in January and announced he was barging through with construction of the Brighton bypass despite concerns that Aboriginal artefacts and middens might be destroyed”. Labor appears to be actively hoping that accident-prone Denison incumbent Graeme Sturges will lose his seat to Scott Bacon, son of the late former Premier Jim Bacon.

• According to Sue Neales of The Mercury, David Bartlett managed to “singlehandedly destroy the carefully crafted work of teams of public relations experts over the past two months” during Thursday’s appearance on ABC Statewide Mornings with Tim Cox. Bartlett’s “aggressive, arrogant, narky and cocky” performance, says Neales, was “definitely not a demonstration of good leadership, or the way to go about convincing a sceptical community that all the recent talk of listening, hearing, changing and fixing was anything more than a good PR line designed to win votes”.

• Labor opened the campaign by launching an attack site masquerading under the name of the Liberals’ own election slogan, www.liberalsrealchange.com. The site startlingly makes use of an L-plate in “Liberal”, copying a device from the last two Liberal federal campaigns. Featured are four YouTube ads: two hard-hitting frontal attacks, and two compare-and-contrast exercises – one quite effective, the other rather too smarmy. The site predictably drew a negative media response, to which the Premier responded by starting a poll on his Facebook page asking whether the site should be removed. Among the respondents was troublesome former federal Labor MP Harry Quick, who wrote: “David, if you really want to know what your ‘friends’ think about your strategies and the negative way you are travelling, why don’t you do a bit of old-fashioned doorknocking by yourself. Have you the balls to do something like this? I think not!”.

• A couple of noteworthy issues about electoral broadcasting have emerged. Followers of recent events in South Australia might be interested to learn that under the state’s laws, the Hobart Mercury feels compelled to demand that blog commenters provide a real name and suburb. However, my brief perusal of the site showed up one commenter who had been let through with a Christian name only, another who is a blogosphere identity I know to be using a pseudonym, and others that looked suspect. The Mercury evidently didn’t get the memo from its News Limited stablemate in Adelaide, offering the following in an editorial last Saturday: “That’s a rule that has long applied to newspapers during election campaigns and it’s always been our rule for our many letter writers every day of the year. Tasmanians have happily put their names to their opinions – just as candidates do. If it’s good enough for candidates to stand up and be counted, it’s good enough for those who hold opposing views to do the same.” The Electoral Commissioner has also revealed that new legal advice refutes the long-held view that negative personal advertisements on television and radio are effectively prohibited during the campaign period. As the laws had always been interpreted in the past, any use of a political candidate or figure in advertising during the campaign required their permission.

• According to Peter Tucker of Tasmanian Politics, we can expect an EMRS poll later this week.

Finally, here’s an overview of the election I wrote for last Monday’s Crikey Daily Mail:

That a Tasmanian state election will be held on March 20 is not exactly news – Premier David Bartlett has been making clear for the past year that the state would again go to the polls on the same day as South Australia, to the chagrin of election watchers across the land. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting Bartlett’s visit to the Governor on Friday, marking the official start of what promises to be a tough five-week campaign for the government.

Like a number of its mainland counterparts, the Tasmanian Labor government has suddenly begun feeling its age. After successive landslide wins, it now faces an election for the first time without the electoral asset of a conservative government in Canberra. The Liberals have found in Will Hodgman their most convincing leader in many years, and are presenting a relatively united front despite occasional public eruptions of factional hostility. Labor will no longer benefit from the perception of being the stronger horse, which in the past has attracted large numbers of voters hostile to minority government – a fact Bartlett has acknowledged in distancing himself from Labor’s long-standing position that it would not govern with Greens support.

The most recent poll in the state, an EMRS survey of 1000 voters conducted in early November, had Labor’s vote plunging to 33%, with the Liberals on 44% and the Greens on 21% (compared with 49.3%, 31.8% and 16.6% at the 2006 election). Liberal leader Will Hodgman had also opened up a commanding 40-28 lead as preferred premier, a dramatic reversal on earlier polling which suggested Bartlett had righted the ship after taking the reins from Paul Lennon. If this is even remotely accurate, Tasmania is all but certain to emerge with a minority government for the first time since the number of members per electoral divisions was cut from seven to five in 1998.

Labor would need to limit its losses to one seat to maintain its majority, and it can practically chalk up one loss to the Liberals already in Franklin. Labor won its third seat in Franklin by the skin of its teeth in 2006, and two of the three elected members have since quit parliament, leaving the seats to be defended by little-known newcomers. The swings required for the Liberals to make gains from Labor in Lyons and Denison are somewhat greater, but still in the eminently achievable range of 5 to 6 per cent. If Labor experiences any appreciable decline in Braddon, they will only be able to hold their third seat if a substantial lift in the Liberal vote freezes out the Greens. Should that lift be too substantial – in the order of 12 per cent – Labor would then be at risk of losing the seat to the Liberals instead. Only in Bass, where Labor is defending two seats rather than three, can they be truly confident of holding the line.

A majority for the Liberals would involve the enormous achievement of six seats gained from five electorates, requiring an increase in the primary vote far beyond even the most optimistic readings of the polls. The Greens on the other hand need only hold their ground to assume a balance-of-power position that has eluded them since 1998, and their record when faced by unpopular Labor governments suggests this will not be a problem for them. They would be hopeful of winning an extra seat in the only division that currently denies them, Braddon, and are perhaps fantasising once again about winning a second seat in Denison.