Here’s a quick refresher course in electoral history. Bob Hawke won in 1983 and 1984 without winning a single seat in Tasmania.

We hear a disproportionate amount about the state at election time. It provides just five of the 150 electorates in the House of Representatives. Tasmanian environmental debates have been fought nationwide in federal elections for almost quarter of a century now. That’s warped our perspective.

Glenn Milne writes in The Australian today:

Internal Liberal Party polling suggests that when it comes to the Gunns pulp mill, mainland Australia may have misconceived the local electoral impact of conservation politics in Tasmania… Coalition candidates in Tasmania who hold their nerve in the face of a mainland-driven campaign against Gunns could actually pick up votes.

The polling is described as “private polling commissioned for the Tasmanian division of the Liberal Party”.

Well, the Tasmanian division of the Liberal Party is a broke and busted-a-se bunch. It’s reflected in the poll. The sample size is small. It’s just 300. That’s a cause for concern to begin with. Crikey understands the feds have been doing the polling in Tasmania. Not the locals. Who did this? Anyway, leaked internal party polling should always be treated with not just a pinch of salt, but enough to cause serious blood pressure problems.

The recent Possum’s Pollytics analysis of the quarterly Newspoll cumulative polling from July to September found that on those figures, 49 seats would change hands in the five states Newspoll track: 16 in NSW, 11 in Queensland, five in SA, two in the West and 15 in Victoria.

The Tasmanian Liberal Party director, Damien Mantach, has been out on local ABC radio talking up the polling. The Newspoll extrapolation suggests Bass and Braddon simply don’t matter.

You can add the Northern Territory seat of Solomon to Possum’s total. That makes 50 seats.

If more than a third of the 145 House of Representatives seats on the mainland could change hands, Tasmania’s five become irrelevant.