ALP caught on the hop by poll

TASMANIAN Labor has been embarrassed by a leaked email showing it was scrambling to complete planning when an election was called.

TASMANIAN Labor has been embarrassed by the leaking of an email from a senior government adviser showing it was scrambling to complete election planning on the day its premier called the poll.

The Australian has obtained an email from a senior adviser to Premier Lara Giddings seeking an urgent meeting in front of a "whiteboard" to plan which candidates would announce which election policies, where and when.

The email, from Melinda Maddock, to fellow advisers Astrid Wootton and Ben Coates, was sent at 2.03pm on February 12 -- just hours after Ms Giddings visited Governor Peter Underwood to call a March 15 election.

It says government media advisers Rohan Wade and Rowan Dix "want to sit down with the table and the whiteboard and candidates' suggested dates and see what we can match up".

Ms Maddock says in the email that information from Labor's electorate co-ordinators on suggested dates for policy announcements is urgently required. "We need this tomorrow," she tells her colleagues.

The email suggests a lack of early planning, at least on candidate announcements, and its leaking points to disaffection among some Labor candidates.

The Labor government would not comment yesterday.

However, the Labor camp, facing what opinion polls suggest will be a devastating loss on March 15 after 16 years in government, played down the email as relating merely to small, candidate-nominated policies.

But Labor did concede that the leaking of an email during an election campaign was unfortunate

It is understood the party's major policy strategy had been planned and scheduled long in advance.

The scale of the potential wipe-out for Labor -- poll analysis suggests the party will struggle to hold more than six seats in the 25-seat Assembly -- appears to be causing campaign dilemmas and disputes.