Party over for Greens as Labor counts cost

STATE and federal Labor leaders have vowed to shun the Greens as power-sharing partners in the wake of the Tasmanian election result.

Tasmanian Election

STATE and federal Labor leaders have vowed to shun the Greens as power-sharing partners in the wake of the ALP’s disastrous Tasmanian election result.

After four years of sharing power with the Greens in Hobart, Labor’s vote at Saturday’s state election plunged to a historic low of 27 per cent, after a swing against the party of almost 10 per cent.

Defeated Labor premier Lara Giddings said her advice to the party nationally would be to avoid any future deals with the Greens.

While suggesting her South Australian counterpart Jay Weatherill should be open-minded about governing with independents, she said the Greens were best shunned in future.

“I don’t think it would be so wise to go into a power-sharing agreement with the Greens,” she said.

Bill Shorten backed the advice, saying he could foresee “no set of circumstances” where the federal ALP would repeat the kind of alliance struck between the Gillard government and the Greens. “There’s no doubt that Labor having a relationship, a formal coalition, with the Greens was marked down by Tasmanian voters,” the Opposition Leader said.

Tasmania’s power-sharing deal with the Greens — which gave two Greens MPs seats in cabinet in return for the numbers in parliament on supply and confidence — was struck in March 2010. Ms Giddings said her decision in January to dump the Greens had helped avoid an even worse outcome for Labor.

“I was concerned that the Labor Party base — that did not like the arrangement with the Greens — was leaving us and that we needed to give them a reason to come back to Labor. And I think we’ve seen that.”

South Australian Greens leader Mark Parnell yesterday said for the first time Australia-wide since 2011, the party had increased its vote.

“It’s something that we can be proud of in South Australia,” Mr Parnell said.

“We’ve still got a solid level of support that we can build on and I’m pretty excited that in seats like Heysen, the two-party-preferred is no longer between Liberal-Labor, it’s now Liberal-Green.”

Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim said despite an 8 per cent swing against the party and the loss of two seats, he would not rule out another alliance.

“The Greens, of all parties, don’t go into politics for the primary reason of being popular. We go in to deliver green outcomes. And it is so important that when we get the chance we deliver green outcomes.”