The tyranny of minority

THERE’S a palpable feeling of it’s time ... for Labor to go.

The best-case scenario for Tasmania’s Premier Lara Giddings is to deny the Liberals a maj

HAVING engineered a quickie divorce from the Greens, Tasmanian Labor now is seeking to speed-date its traditional supporters, pleading with them to come back to the fold on polling day.

Labor had hoped its decision last month to tear up the power-sharing deal with the Greens would win back jaded blue-collar workers and suburban and small-town battlers to the party’s fold.

However, the latest polling suggests few have bought the “never again” assurances of their former political sweethearts.

Labor polling had suggested dumping the Greens would add 3-4 per cent to its statewide vote, but the actual bounce in two polls published in the past week is an almost statistically inconsequential 1-1.4 per cent.

Premier Lara Giddings is publicly insisting Labor - tied with the Liberals on 10 seats each in the House of Assembly, with the Greens on five - can still win majority government on March 15. In reality, she knows she has about as much chance of leading Tasmania to a seat at the UN as she does of winning the magic 13 seats needed to claim a majority in the 25-member assembly.

Labor’s entire election strategy is built around denying the Liberals a majority. This is not just a spoiler tactic; it could deliver Labor government by default.

Liberal leader Will Hodgman has repeatedly ruled out governing in minority, with or without minor party assistance.

Labor has promised only that it will not do any more formal power-sharing deals, leaving wide open the option of governing in minority but at the constant mercy of the Greens and possibly the Palmer United Party.

The ALP’s best-case scenario is to limit the Liberals to 12 seats, one shy of a majority. Under this scenario, Hodgman would have to break his majority-or-nothing pledge - as Labor did after the election in 2010 - or else hand government back to Giddings.

Tasmania would be governed by a party with as few as eight seats out of 25, less if PUP exceeds expectations, reducing governance - often a show of high drama and intrigue - to the level of farce.

This is how far Labor has fallen since Jim Bacon led it out of the political wilderness in 1998 and proceeded to lift the state to new levels of prosperity and Labor to new highs of popularity.

The ALP never really recovered from the sad loss of the charismatic Bacon to cancer in 2004 and has been essentially on a downwards spiral ever since.

Paul Lennon was hamstrung by a succession of scandals, as he focused myopically on an elusive and divisive pulp mill. David Bartlett began steering the state towards newer industries in value-added agriculture and technology but was accused of taking his eye off the ball of budget management. And finally Giddings failed to deliver her full promise: bravely beginning a clampdown on government spending, but ultimately relenting under the pressure of union bosses and a nervous and near-sighted caucus.

For the past four years, Labor’s power-sharing deal with the Greens has alienated its core base, allowing the Liberals to broaden theirs.

The Greens have suffered some decline in support as a result of wearing unpopular decisions as a part of government. But the minor party has fared far better than Labor in terms of quarantining its political brand from cross-contamination by its power-sharing partner.

Labor has real achievements to talk up. As Giddings will spend the next four weeks pointing out, it has helped modernise and broaden the state’s economic base by fostering the emerging industries of niche agriculture, aquaculture, dairy, alcohol (beer, wine, whisky and cider), high-end tourism and the arts.

It has helped largely resolve the decades-old forest wars, with the promise of a new green-certified future for the troubled timber industry, and boosted mineral exploration to historic levels.

Recently, there have been signs the stagnant economy has started to stir, such as growth in retail spending and business confidence, and a dip in unemployment.

These are all positive themes on which Giddings will elaborate. But Labor knows that, coming from so far behind after 16 years in government, it needs a good old-fashioned scare campaign, too.

The bogeymen of choice this time are Tony Abbott and Queensland Premier Campbell Newman.

Hodgman has proposed $500 million in savings measures, including the cutting of 500 public service jobs. Labor is painting the cuts as the tip of an iceberg, claiming the Liberals’ election promises will force them to slash and burn public services. “They are going to have to cut deeper to pay for their promises at a time of declining budget revenues,” says ALP state secretary John Dowling. “In Queensland 14,000 jobs went when Campbell Newman got in, so we know what to expect.”

Labor’s latest slogans is: “Think again.” It is an implicit concession that the election is already lost; unless it can pull off a miracle by muddying voter perceptions of Hodgman’s Liberals.

A second line of attack is to paint Hodgman as weak-kneed in dealing with Canberra, just as Tasmania - reliant on federal funds for 60 per cent of its budget - needs a premier to fight for GST revenues and full delivery of Gonksi education funding, national disability insurance scheme and the National Broadband Network.

Thus Labor’s second major slogan is “Standing up for Tasmania”, pitching a fiery Giddings against a meek and mild Hodgman. “Who is going to stand up to Tony Abbott for Tasmania on the big items - NDIS, GST, Gonski, NBN?” asks Dowling. “Will Hodgman will roll over.” The Liberals know this is a potentially potent line of attack. This is why Hodgman flew to Sydney yesterday to urge Malcolm Turnbull to back Giddings’s demands the NBN rollout in Tasmania be completed as a fibre-to-the-premises project, as promised during the federal election campaign.

However, Liberal state director Sam McQuestin believes Labor’s tactics are failing to resonate. “We saw Tony Abbott attacked on the basis of Campbell Newman’s actions all the way through the September (federal) election - and I expect it will have about the same level of success,” he says.

He denies the Prime Minister and federal ministers have been asked to stay north of Bass Strait for the duration of the campaign to avoid fuelling Labor’s campaigns over the “downgrading” of the NBN and Gonski. “Mr Abbott will be here during the campaign,” McQuestin says.

Labor’s main problem is that voters appear to have stopped listening long ago. An “it’s time” factor is palpable and reflected consistently in the polls during the past two years, which have shown Labor’s support languishing at between 22 per cent and 28 per cent since February 2011.

The Liberals are running a relatively low-risk campaign, believing they need only refrain from frightening the horses to achieve victory. Liberal campaign slogans - “Change for a Brighter Future” and “Vote for Strong Majority Government” - will not win any marketing awards.

It’s a softly-softly strategy the Liberals can afford because Labor has not rated above 30 per cent in the regular surveys by local pollster EMRS since November 2010.

EMRS does not provide an electorate-by-electorate breakdown. ReachTEL polling does, however, and an analysis of a poll published by The Saturday Mercury last weekend suggests the Liberals would win a clear majority of 14 seats, Labor only six, the Greens four or five and the PUP potentially one. The poll, of 2912 Tasmanians, has the Liberals on 47.2 per cent of the vote to Labor’s 24.6, the Greens 17.2 and the Palmer United Party 7.5.

Under Tasmania’s Hare-Clark electoral system, each of the state’s five electorates return five MPs, with parties running tickets and the quota to get elected set at 16.7 per cent of the vote.

In 2010, each electorate returned the same pattern of two Liberal, two Labor and one Green MP. If the Liberals are to increase their current 10 seats to the magic 13, they must pick up a third seat in three electorates.

ReachTEL, backed by swings recorded in the federal election, suggests the Liberals will achieve these extra seats in Lyons, Bass and Braddon, as well as the southern electorate of Franklin, giving it 14.

Some of the most interesting local contests will be among Labor MPs. With how-to-vote cards banned in assembly elections, preventing set positions on party tickets, there is fierce competition between candidates of the same party.

In Franklin, which takes in eastern and southern parts of Hobart, as well as rural areas south, a failure by Labor to score two quotas will leave Giddings or her likeliest leadership successor, David O’Byrne, out of a job.

In western Braddon, failure to achieve two quotas for Labor would see Deputy Premier Bryan Green or Labor backbencher Brenton Best defeated.

The PUP’s best chance of a seat appears to be in Braddon, where candidate Kevin Morgan polled well in the mirror federal seat in September. Greens MP for Braddon, Paul “Basil” O’Halloran, may be a casualty in this rural and regional seat where there has been a large blue-collar backlash against greenies wanting to prevent mining in the wild Tarkine region.

Labor and the Greens have been largely ignoring the PUP, but the Liberals issue almost daily press releases exposing the seemingly endless supply of embarrassing tweets and gaffes by PUP candidates. McQuestin concedes the PUP could be a threat in a tight finish. “Minority government is a threat to Tasmania and a vote for PUP is a vote for minority government,” he says.

The vagaries of Tasmania’s electoral system, the volatility of its voters and the weeks of campaigning to go all make firm predictions unwise. Most likely, the Liberals will end 16 years of Labor rule and take majority government.

If they fall a seat short, a Labor rump may limp on in a diminished and barely functional minority government. This could well prove a hollow victory, leaving a Labor team small enough to fit on a lounge suite at the day-by-day mercy of its jilted lover, the Greens, or PUP. It would also deny the party the chance to rediscover its mojo in opposition, free from the constraints of trying to govern.

Sixteen years after Bacon led Tasmania’s ALP out of the wilderness, there are no easy roads ahead for the party, whatever the outcome on March 15.