Bagging a green vote. The fascinating thing about the Tasmanian State election is that almost certainly there will not be a winner. While the Liberal Party looks like easily getting the most primary votes it is unlikely to win the 13 seats it needs to govern in its own right from the five electorates which each return five members. Labor, although likely to record one of its lowest votes in history, is still favoured by the market to continue in office with some kind of support from the Tasmania Greens.

It is bound to be a very unstable arrangement because on forestry matters, the preservation of which is the fundamental issue for the Greens, Labor parliamentarians cannot do a deal without splitting their own party. As for the Liberals they will not even countenance talking with the dreaded Greens.

The best the Liberals can come up with is to attempt to lure a few potential environmentally concerned voters to their side by raising the spectre of government chaos if they do not manage a majority in their own right and by tossing in a few green policies of their own. So it was that yesterday leader Will Hodgman promised plastic bags would be banned within two years if he wins power in March. In a Liberal Tasmania shoppers would be able only to use biodegradable plastic bags, re-usable or paper bags.

Naturally Mr Hodgman dismissed suggestions that the announcement, and another Liberal policy to resurrect the axed Department of Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts, was an attempt to grab the green vote.

“This is mainstream, sensible policy,” the Hobart Mercury quotes him as saying. “There are all sorts of reasons why this sort of policy is about delivering practical outcomes, protecting our waterways. “The Greens don’t have a monopoly on environmental policy.”

Protecting the pizza. It won’t be long now before the European Union starts attacking your local pizza parlour for using the word Neapolitan to describe its offerings. The pizza producers of Naples this week succeeded in getting their local speciality given the Traditional Speciality Guaranteed label by the EU bureaucrats. The label is designed to stop pesky outsiders from using the word Neapolitan unless their product is vetted by a special commission that will check standards. These include using only San Marzano tomatoes and fresh buffalo mozzarella cheese.

South Australian Labor Shouldn’t be Too Worried. SA Premier Mike Rann should not be too worried that the Adelaide Advertiser‘s latest opinion p0ll shows the election race getting closer. The biggest problem for a long term government often is the public perception that it will win easily. The Tiser poll now has the gap on a two party preferred basis closing from 14 points to four — 52 Labor to 48 Liberal.

I am not aware of the track record of these polls, which have a relatively small sample size of 539 voters, but that there has been some narrowing of the gap was suggested by the speed with which Labor moved to defuse the controversy over internet blogging.

A little warning from Treasury. It is unusual for the Paris-based OECD to make a comment about one of its member countries without having the view vetted first by the member’s own officials. Thus we can perhaps conclude that there is within the Treasury in Canberra a growing concern about Labor’s national broadband roll out. The Australian this morning had the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Australia desk, Claude Giorno, calling on the Rudd government to apply more rigorous cost-benefit analysis to its infrastructure spending, including the $43 billion broadband network. The paper quoted Mr Giorno saying “questions need to be answered” about the network because of the amount of spending involved and the apparent lack of any cost-benefit analysis.