There’s something deeply rotten in the state of Tasmania
With counting nearly complete, Tasmania’s 2025 state election has delivered a near replica of 2024: no party with a clear majority, a recalibrated but still divided crossbench and a premier claiming a mandate without one.
Jeremy Rockliff has announced his intention to seek reappointment. But this is not a return to government, it is a return to gridlock. The parliament remains hung, stability elusive, and the governor once again tasked with resolving a dilemma no Australian jurisdiction has faced in living memory. If 2024 tested Tasmania’s capacity to cope with fracture, 2025 has exposed the limits of the system itself.
But beneath the political deadlock lies a deeper problem. The Hare-Clark system, long admired for its proportionality, is proving ill-equipped to deliver stable governance. The expansion from 25 to 35 seats in the House of Assembly was intended to improve representation. It has, but at the cost of coherence. Parliament now mirrors the electorate’s diversity but resists any functional alignment into an executive.
This isn’t simply the product of electoral mechanics. Tasmania’s political culture – cautious, inward-looking and resistant to ideological compromise – has long struggled with the collaborative instincts required for coalition-building.
Unlike larger jurisdictions with more pluralistic political traditions, Tasmanian politics historically has operated within a narrow network of institutional actors: concentrated within the legal profession, public sector and established party structures. Informal consensus, personal relationships and unwritten understandings often have done the work that formal coalitions or codified conventions might do elsewhere.
In such a setting, stability frequently has been less a function of institutional robustness than of interpersonal trust among a relatively small and familiar political class. When that trust breaks down, or when the parliament diversifies beyond the bounds of those traditional networks, the system has little capacity to absorb the disruption. So, it is not voters who have failed. It is the system around them that has failed to adapt.
Other jurisdictions with proportional representation – New Zealand, much of Europe – have introduced rules and thresholds to ensure that minority parliaments still can form durable governments. Tasmania, by contrast, has layered representativeness on top of a governance culture still more comfortable with preservation than reform.
The result is a parliament increasingly capable of reflecting difference but decreasingly capable of resolving it.
In March 2024, Tasmanians elected a hung parliament. Rockliff formed a minority government with the tentative backing of the Jacqui Lambie Network and a handful of independents.
That arrangement collapsed in June after a no-confidence vote. Rockliff secured a fresh election, arguing no alternative government could be formed. Governor Barbara Baker agreed.
Yet Saturday’s result brings little clarity. The numbers remain effectively unchanged. The new crossbench is more progressive and less inclined to support a Liberal-led executive. Labor argues the Liberals have had their chance. The Greens are in no mood to prop up the status quo. And the independents are making no rush towards coalition.
Baker is now staring down an extraordinary choice: reappoint a premier with no guarantee of support or send voters to the polls for a third time in two years, with no assurance that the result will be any different.
Hung parliaments are not unknown in Australia. Victoria in 1999, NSW in 1991, Queensland in 1998 and 2015, and federally in 1940 and 2010 – all saw minority governments emerge and endure. Governors observed, then stepped back. Tasmania has its own history: the Labor-Green Accord of 1989, the Liberal-Centre alliance of 1969 and the short-lived minority government in 1996. In each case, someone stepped forward with the numbers – barely.
This time, that step may never come. And that leaves the Governor in a far more active role than convention prefers.
Under section 8B of Tasmania’s Constitution Act 1934, ministers not reappointed within seven days of the return of the writs automatically vacate office.
That deadline gives the Governor little time to identify a viable government or to install a caretaker. And a caretaker without confidence is no real solution.
Another election would resemble collapse, not renewal. The Governor must act, but no path is risk-free.
This is not 1975. There is no blocked supply, no covert intrigue. But Baker, like Sir John Kerr, may find herself forced to act without precedent and under intense political pressure. If she authorises a third election and gridlock returns, she’ll be blamed for escalating dysfunction. If she commissions a premier with uncertain support, she risks being drawn into a partisan firestorm.
Even a “correct” decision may prove politically unworkable.
Tasmania is now caught in a recursive loop: election, negotiation, stalemate, dissolution. The answer is not to abandon proportionality or to shrink the chamber again. But reform clearly is needed. That may mean constitutional amendments to clarify government formation, better-defined post-election procedures or supplementary confidence thresholds. None of these would distort Hare-Clark. They would strengthen it by restoring its capacity to support government, not just representation. But any reform will require political courage and a willingness to move beyond longstanding assumptions about how Tasmanian politics should function, and for whom.
This election was meant to resolve a crisis. Instead, it confirmed that the crisis is systemic. If Rockliff cannot govern and no credible alternative emerges, the system itself may be judged unfit for purpose. Whether that reckoning comes from parliament, the palace or the public remains to be seen.
But one thing is already clear: Tasmania is no longer just navigating a democratic impasse – it is demonstrating what happens when the structure of democracy fails to evolve.
Unless reform follows recognition, the state risks becoming a case study in democratic decay: not because citizens stop believing in democracy but because the system stops delivering it.
Michael Stuckey is honorary professor of law at Victoria University and the former dean of law at University of Tasmania.
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