In the interesting but under-appreciated world of state politics, Saturday’s Tasmanian election looks like being something of a milestone: the first of the current crop of state Labor governments to be decisively rejected by the voters.

The “wall-to-wall Labor governments” that we were famously warned about — first elected between 1995 and 2002 — were already looking pretty shaky: one, in Western Australia, fell in 2008, but that was a knife-edge election that could have gone either way (and the Western Australian government was unique in never having won a landslide in the first place). At worst, the same thing could happen in South Australia on Saturday.

Meanwhile, New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Queensland have recently won fourth, third and fifth terms respectively, but all in the face of some clear voter dissatisfaction. Now the Bartlett government in Tasmania looks as if it could lose office on a large and unmistakable swing.

No one really knows why voters do what they do, and there are probably a few things at work here. Governments do get tired; talent and luck  start to run out after a while. And there’s no doubt that the Liberals have lifted their game. The quality of most of their MPs may be abysmal, but Will Hodgman, Isobel Redmond, Ted Baillieu and Barry O’Farrell all represent a major improvement on their recent predecessors.

But the big thing seems to be the 2007 change in federal government. The Labor premiers don’t have John Howard to kick around any more: for a long time their vote was artificially inflated by a hostile federal government that the electorate disliked but seemed curiously unable to get rid of. Take that away and the Labor vote falls back to earth.

However, not all is lost for Labor in Tasmania. Proportional representation makes it almost impossible to win a real landslide: even in 2002, when Labor almost doubled the Liberal vote, it still only won 14 seats out of 25. This time the Liberals could easily outvote Labor but still end up with the same number of seats — or even one less, if they should happen to slip behind the Greens in Denison.

That must have been in David Bartlett’s mind when he gave his undertaking on Monday (televised by the ABC last night) that he would resign in the event of the Liberals winning a plurality. He also wants to trade on the threat of instability, hinting that he could just abandon the state to an unworkable mix of Liberals and Greens.

But the idea of minority government doesn’t seem to be frightening the voters any more. Monday’s Examiner reported the opinion poll preferring majority government as if it was a breathtaking discovery, but all it means is that people would rather have their own side clearly in power than have to rely on the Greens. If the alternative is seeing the other side in power, then of course they’ll take minority government.

So if you have to, bet on a minority Hodgman administration after Saturday. But you might be better off not risking your money on this one.