Garlands and bows or Lambies to the slaughter in Tasmania?

Well, the votes have been counted, the agonisingly complex preferences calculated, the writs have been issued, and the result is that something has really happened in Tasmania. And it’s a doozy. 

Having taken the state to an election to gain stability, Premier Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberals have gained 14 seats in the new 35-seat Parliament, which is only one more than they were elected with in the old 25-seat Parliament at the last election.

Against them are 10 Labor representatives and a whopping 11 on the crossbench: five Greens, three Jacqui Lambie Experience, and three independents: former Labor member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly (and party leader) David O’Byrne, genuine independent Kristie Johnston, both reelected, and joining them, on his sixth go, Craig Garland, the northwest-coast fisherman and boatswain.

Garland’s election in the seat of Braddon was a Hare-Clark classic, the preferences careening between him, a fourth Liberal, and the Greens, who came achingly close. Ultimately, according to the redoubtable Kevin Bonham, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party preferences gave Garland an unreachable lead. 

The result has returned Rockliff to the crisis position in which he believed himself to be on election night, when he gave a “victory” speech that sounded like someone reciting Fiona Apple lyrics while cops tried to talk him down from a ledge. Then, “JRock” (“he is a, er, rock, and he, er, rocks” E.Abetz) thought Labor was going to steam ahead to form government, and JRock would become a proverbial joke for his epic miscalculation. When Labor renounced that possibility, Rockliff regained a cockiness, a tone predicated on the Liberals picking up a 15th seat, and attaining a working majority with the three members from the Jacqui Lambie Experience. 

It’s a measure of how difficult the position he is in now, that relying on the Experience looked like the good times. The Liberals now need one independent to give them confidence and supply. Kristie Johnston has said she will do so, but that’s as far as it goes. Johnston, a former mayor of Glenorchy, is a trained criminologist and can be assumed to be on the statist, progressivist side of the political divide.

Rockliff is not only claiming government; he has doubled down on claiming a mandate to implement the Liberals 2030 growth manifesto. He has nothing of the sort, and he will be fighting his way, vote by vote, until in a year or so, exhaustion looms, and Eric Abetz administers the Vulcan death grip and slides into the premier’s chair. 

So the line goes, especially from Dean Winter, running for nomination as new state Labor leader, from the party’s fervently anti-Green right. But it might not be the windfall Labor is hoping for. The anger at Labor, for not allowing Rebecca White to stay in place and see what possibilities arose, is widespread, amplified by the 14-10-11 result, and baiting the Libs for trying to govern with minority support looks tacky when the Libs can say they are only doing their duty, and someone has to govern the state. Not making a play for government, with 18 left or progressive seats there without the Lambies, just looks pathetic, a betrayal.

Labor is also getting a bit red-cordialled about the reliance on the Lambie Experience. Given everything about the history of Lambie’s groupings — most recently, the departure of recently elected Senator Tammy Tyrrell from the Lambie Experience, to become an independent, with a resignation letter that sounds like it was written after a failed cult deprogramming in a Launceston motel — that’s ostensibly a reasonable assumption, with three almost-randoms elevated on a policy of having no policies. 

However, that hope may be a little misplaced. While the Lambie Exp— okay, the Network, has only the most vestigial existence, and will take a major effort to hold itself together even if it wants to, there are obvious reasons why its members might make a go of it if they want to remain for more than one term. They were all elected on Lambie’s name, the even distribution of the vote across the ticket in each seat (due to the rotating ballot system) suggesting none had the least skerrick of a personal following. They will not develop one in three years, or two, or five months of government before the next election. 

So who are they, the political Wonka ticket holders? In Braddon, Miriam Beswick, a Christian, a family carer and a former laser tag venue owner, and it don’t get much more north Tasmania than that (she beat out James Redgrave, the detective with Doddie, the campaign van); in Bass, Rebekah Pentland, who wants to shrink the state’s revenue base by abolishing land tax while massively expanding specialist health care; in Lyons, Andrew Jenner is a former lecturer in self-defence at the police academy and a Tory mayor of Maidenhead in the UK, who believes the Rockliff government was “well past its prime” and is an enemy of wasteful bureaucracy.

So, all three JLN members can be reasonably said to be of the political right, though there is nothing resembling a programmatic statement about taxes, spending and debt, the basics of government politics. But they are also to the right of Lambie herself, who has been left-shifted, after being staffed by the Australia and Grattan Institutes.

This was reportedly part of the bust-up with Tyrrell, who was given carte blanche to vote independently, and then outrageously proceeded to do so — opposing Lambie’s support of the teals’ two-prescriptions-for-the-price-of-one measure, which the Pharmacy Guild had fought, for example. All three members of the JLN state “members” have more business experience – i.e. some — than Lambie did when she entered the Senate. Rather than coming apart, they may form a working bloc independent of Lambie, and either push the Libs to better government or help them enforce a de facto austerity regime. Anything’s possible. 

Ditto with Craig Garland, whose lead policies — remove the habitat-killing salmon pens from coastal waters, no vast windfarm on the far-northwestern Robbins Island, and more integrity and anti-corruption reform — are recognisably left-wing. But he’s also alarmed some people with anti-vax views, the company he keeps and some relatively mainstream views of gender and sex. And like many Tasmanian indie types, he talks an anti-political language of plain folks getting together and sorting it out. But like all independents, he’s going to have to vote a budget up or down. 

The problem for the government, the Parliament and the state is that the vote they’ve made has utterly borked the Westminster-style politics that has been laid across it for more than a century. From World War I to the late 1980s, Hare-Clark reliably delivered a dual-party system, usually with small majorities at best and a couple of independents, usually former-party MHAs. This system put a strong emphasis on consensus and governing towards the centre. What it has now produced, in a post-class bloc political era, is something that its progenitors never really imagined happening. Tasmania has a European-style continental Parliament onto which Westminster adversarialism simply cannot be mapped. 

The Tasmanian political system is desperately unwilling to accept this. Both major parties are insisting on the manly virtues of single-party government — strong, decisive, STRONG! — in a system that may never deliver majority government again. The majors’ belief that it will, as voters become exasperated with impasse, is a desperately cynical strategy that will produce the stasis and chaos it warns of, condemning the state to wasted months and years, reform left in limbo. 

The Germans have a solution for this inevitable result of a multi-member proportional system. No, not dictatorship. Their parties negotiate prior to the poll, and minor groups announce what their conditions would be to support government after the vote. The majors announce what they would accept. So people know what combinations are possible as they vote. 

That is obviously what should happen from now on, but for the moment the obvious solution, that will not be pursued, is also a German one: that the Liberals and Labor should form a “grand coalition”, with a shared program, the Greens forming the opposition, and the Lambies and independents the crossbench. 

The advantage of this is that it reflects political realit and addresses the problem that the re-expansion to 35 seats was designed to solve: the impossibility of forming effective government. If the Liberals form a single-party government with 14 seats, they have barely got out of the ghetto of having eight or nine key members occupying the whole ministry, committee chairs, etc. They will crash again. With 24 members on the government benches, a full ministry would be possible.

The “grand alliance” would make visible the fact that the Liberals and Labor are much closer to each other, simply two variants of a simple-minded growth politics that will fail even more in the coming years. A grand alliance would allow the Greens to give the state a genuine opposition, and to elaborate an alternative vision. Eventually, it would produce the full undermining of the two-party dominant system. 

Labor won’t go into a grand coalition, because it doesn’t want to admit its proximity to the Liberals. But any notion that it will go into alliance with the Greens is fond hope; Tasmanian Labor is two parties, and really, the Democratic Labour Party squats like a toad at its centre. The logic of Hare-Clark suggests it should split and run entirely separate tickets. 

Thus, the most radical event has happened in what is simultaneously the most radical and backward state in the Commonwealth, and the backward dimension means there will be a period of stagnation before the contradictions of the result start to shake apart the status quo. Thirty-five years ago, the two-party system was breached by the Greens and Democrats getting to five seats. Twenty-five years ago, Jim Bacon chainsawed out the crossbenches to try and stop it. The efflorescence of the system now is a product of Bacon’s cynical act, done under the cover of a class politics. 

Labor, not the Liberals, will lose more from what’s about to happen if it doesn’t admit the categorical shift in Tasmanian politics, the historical importance of what has just happened — the first Parliament to fully reflect the fragmented character of the present — and cut with the grain of it. They are in part holding out for federal reasons: Labor doesn’t want a nine-card, federal-state-territory full house, ahead of the Queensland election, and is happy for the Liberals to have Tassie, as a sort of bogan Taiwan.

They, and the state, will suffer for it. But for the moment it is all on the Lambies, who will get a ribbon round their necks, or go to the slaughter.