Things are getting complicated on the environment front. Late last year the prime minister withdrew plans to create a federal environmental protection agency (promised before the 2022 election), partly at the behest of Western Australia’s Labor premier. Motivations also included Anthony Albanese’s determination — some might say obsession — with propping up his own government’s support in that state, and difficulties getting the legislation through the Senate.
With premier Roger Cook’s government now re-elected (massively, despite an unfriendly two-party-preferred swing of almost 13 per cent) some of the pressure is off, and Albanese has been dragged by caucus into promising — internally and then publicly — to create the agency in the next term. (This time he means it. Although he might hope voters in the west take it with a grain of salt.)
Then, last week, environment minister Tanya Plibersek again found herself under the proverbial bus when Albanese announced that he was taking advantage of the weeks of extra Cyclone Albert–induced parliament to turn an election commitment into law by ramming through legislation “specifically aimed,” according to the ABC, “to end the minister’s reconsideration of salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour” in Tasmania.
It’s about jobs, job, jobs — in Tasmania, and specifically in Strahan, in Liberal-held Braddon.
Not surprisingly, the Coalition has said it will support the bill, give or take a few amendments. Equally expected were the fierce and loud objections of the Greens, which is music to the ears of Labors MPs (and candidates) in the island state, though not to many of their mainland colleagues concerned about losing votes to the minor party.
A further complication is former Greens leader Bob Brown’s suggestion that his party hands out open how-to-vote cards across Tasmania, rather than recommending Labor ahead of the Liberals, which could, in a close contest, make a difference. (At the last election, such a strategy might have seen Lyons go to the Liberal candidate instead of Labor’s Brian Mitchell; this time, of course, we don’t know in advance which electorates will come down to the wire. Mitchell is retiring this year.)
Leaving aside the merits of the salmon-farming legislation — not to mention the government’s successful bypassing of meaningful parliamentary examination of its bill — the move does make sense politically.
A formulation that you’ll have heard or read countless times and are set to hear again in upcoming weeks is “this election will be won or lost in” such-and-such an area, demographic or state. It is always meaningless; the rest of the country doesn’t remain frozen in the status quo. Elections, including close ones, are decided everywhere, by all voters.
When it comes to federal contests, Tasmania is notable in several ways. One is that its voters are pro-Labor, and haven’t returned a statewide Liberal two-party-preferred majority since 1990. Yet a big chunk of the Labor vote is locked up in its “safest” seat (against the Liberals), Hobart-based Clark (formerly Denison), which since 2010 has been held by independent Andrew Wilkie. At least three of the other four electorates are contestable; even Liberal-held Braddon — current margin 8 per cent, which would normally be called safe — was won by Labor as recently as 2016. For Labor-held Franklin, with a 13.7 per cent margin, you have to go back to 1990 for a Liberal win; but even this, a cumulative 16 per cent shift away from the Libs during thirty-five years in one electorate, would be unusual on the mainland.
Partly because of its small population, Tasmania is also volatile. Between 2004 and 2022 it was the second-largest average swinger after Queensland. And because the Constitution mandates a minimum five electorates for every state, Tassie’s five contain significantly fewer voters than the mainland average. The latest enrolment figures show an average 82,000 enrolled per Tasmanian seat against 119,0000 in the rest of the country. That’s 34 per cent more bang for the voting buck.
(The two Northern Territory electorates have similar enrolment numbers to Tasmania thanks to a multiparty agreement that all but ensures it gets two seats in redistributions rather than one.)
Partly because of the scarcity of published polling across those five electorates (pollsters do include them in their national samples but deem the sub-samples too small to release) — the state can also be unpredictable. You might recall election night 2022, when the first reported results, from Tasmania, showed a swing to the Morrison government. Election-watchers around the country experienced palpitations of various kinds, but in the end every other state swung to Labor.
Tasmanians sometimes just move to their own beat. At the 2001 “Tampa” election, it was the lone state that swung to Labor. It was the one hold-out in the 1983 election that brought Bob’s Hawke Labor to office, although on that occasion the reason was obvious: Labor’s high-profile promise to stop the Gordon-below-Franklin dam from being built. Labor held zero House seats there anyway, so it didn’t need to fret over sitting members when formulating that element of its manifesto.
Because Labor emerged victorious that year, this part of the platform was filed under “everything the winner did was politically clever.” But we don’t really know if it was smart politics. A uniform 2.7 point swing to Labor in Tasmania (the national one was 3.4) would have hauled the party three seats. The election promise and subsequent drawn-out intervention probably also delayed Labor’s recovery in that state.
In 2004, Labor under Mark Latham went into the election holding five out of five Tasmanian seats, and lost two. The setback was blamed, with some validity, on the party’s forests policy, but as every other state also swung to the Howard government, there must have been more to it than that.
To sum up the last half-century: in 1972 and 1974 Labor won all five Tasmania’s seats. Then from 1975 to 1984 the Liberals did. It was Labor again in 1998, 2001 and 2007. And in 2010 and 2016 Labor won four and Wilkie took the fifth. It’s a state that can be prone to extremes.
The brush wielded above will be too broad for some readers (particularly residents of the state). The five electorates aren’t all the same, and don’t always move in unity. But in no other state have voters ever delivered all their seats to one major party, let alone (at different times) to both. Parochialism, state identity and mixed feelings about the mainland and Canberra (“keep out of our affairs; please send more cash”) are not totally of the past.
A federal party doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the Apple Isle in an expected close election. So, would we be justified in saying that if May’s election result is line-ball then the overall outcome will depend on Tasmania?
Put like that, with at least three seats up for grabs, we just might. •
