The Jacqui Lambie Experience triumphs with absolutely no policies

So after all the tumult and the shouting, the Hare-Clark-Robson system roaring away, the votes flying in all directions, Tasmania is to get another Liberal government, this time buttressed by the Jacqui Lambie Experience, a group that went to the election proudly stating it had no policies. 

Labor folded its tent immediately. Now former leader Rebecca White, after a placeholding speech on Saturday night that left open the possibility of seeking a coalition, announced on Sunday morning the party had knocked that on the head. She then vanished into obscurity after a decade in the thankless, joyless role of opposition leader, having foregone the chance to commit fully to a coalition and dare the caucus to pole-axe her later (they would have pole-axed her, so fast as to get bronze in one of the state’s wood chop competitions). 

The Liberals’ need to turn to Lambie (leaving a few wildcards aside) does ostensibly give Lambie, and the group of elite policy professionals who staff her, a sudden leap in power, controlling two-thirds of the swing vote on the federal crossbench and balance of power in the state house (although, if the Libs stick at 14, they will still need one more stray vote for a majority). Ostensibly is the operative term. 

Lambie has expressed her surprise that Labor folded so early. But had White gone the tonk on Saturday night, would she have opened negotiations? What’s that you say, irregular? Mate, Westminster-wise, it’s all shonky, with Premier Jeremy Rockliff negotiating with someone not in Parliament to secure public commitment to a backing that can’t be guaranteed, by members whose actual identity is unknown. It’s a Parfit storm. 

But leaving that aside, the dismal fact is that the whole Jacqui Lambie Experience is, so far as actual populism goes, a bit of a Travelling Snake Oil Road Show. People’s vote is, in a sense, nothing other than what it is. You vote what you vote for. Nevertheless, the Lambie Project combines political support for the Liberals when it’s required (to guarantee preferences), which is to the right of her supporters, but policies well to the cultural left of her supporters, thanks to her left-wing think-tank staffing. 

Well, they know their stuff. This is politics for the post- and anti-politics era. The state campaign was slick and well thought out, focused on the shining personal integrity of the candidates as endorsed by Lambie herself. It is both a perfectly legitimate way to campaign and maddening to anyone who believes that politics is about saying how you think the world works and what you’ll do to make it do so better. 

Lambie is now in a tantalising position. She has a federal-state axis of balance of power, of great potential. But she is also in the same position as Clive Palmer when he elevated her to the Senate in his own rentaparty. Nothing binds whoever, by a degree of chance, ends up in the Assembly. 

There are eight candidates — three each in Braddon and Lyons, and two in Bass (one Bass candidate has a lower personal vote) — from among whom will come the two or three members for the Experience. They include several military vets, an ex-Tory mayor from the UK, child protection lawyers and small business owners — and some are several of these. 

They are, in other words, very different people from the insider policy and media professionals who currently staff Lambie, and they are particularly different in coming from outside knowledge class milieux and mindsets. They do not strike one as people likely to defer to abstract expertise, or possibly anything. It will be fascinating to watch.

What else was possible? That a genuine grassroots movement might have been organised, with an actual program — left economically, right culturally — for militant action on health, housing, boondoggles and the like, and actual joined-up politics? Could it have gone up against the Lambie starpower?

Probably not. But had there been, could Labor have considered a three-way coalition with the Greens and a stable third party? Could the entire crossbench have become an “Assembly group”, constituted itself as the opposition and sent Labor to the crossbench? Possibilities, possibilities, all going down the chocolate fountain drain. Well, it’s an experiment and a test. But it’s always a bloody experiment and a test. Total victory would be, occasionally, nice.

Nevertheless, Team Lambie will surely have to visibly and actually deliver concrete improvements in Tasmanian life, things it can point to that the Rockliff/Abetz/Tubby Quinn* government wouldn’t have done, to go back to the people with in four years. There is surely a limit to spectacle and personality politics. Lambie is now, to some degree, hostage to the actions of the state members working under her name. For as long as they are.

*Tubby’s not a Liberal. But the only other name sufficiently winsome to go in here is Tabatha Badger, incoming Greens member for Lyons.