Tasmania is broken, run by liars and clowns, MP says

Tasmania is broken, the state government are clowns, the Labor opposition are useless and voters are being lied to and treated like mugs, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie says.

Andrew Wilkie during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Tasmania is broken, the state government are clowns, the Labor opposition are useless and voters are being lied to and treated like mugs, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie says.

The veteran MP also described governance in the state as “a protection racket for vested interests”.

During a press conference in Hobart on Friday morning, Mr Wilkie said he had some matters he wanted to get off his chest — before launching a broadside against state politicians.

Morning traffic snarls appear to have focused his mind on a number of ongoing chronic government failures.

“At the moment, just about everything in this state is broken,” he said.

“It took me three-quarters of an hour to get into my office this morning from a nearby suburb. “The health system is broken. The public education system is broken. Regulation of the aquaculture industry is broken. Everything is broken.

“We’re on a pathway to $9.5bn of state debt over the next three and a half years, and $16bn of state debt over the next decade.”

Mr Wilkie took aim at the ministers and their advisers in the nearby Executive Building — and did not miss.

“I don’t know what the clowns are doing up there in that building — they sure aren’t running this state effectively, they sure aren’t managing the finances,” he said.

“All they’re doing is running protection rackets for their vested interests.

“And all the time, it’s the long-suffering Tasmanians who are stuck in traffic, stuck in the emergency department at the Royal, stuck at public schools and pay enormous levies because the schools are underfunded.

“They lie to us constantly and treat us like mugs and they get away with it, because in this state, we have no effective opposition except for some crossbenchers who do their best, their very best, to hold the state to account.

“And it upsets me, and upsets a lot of Tasmanians to see the jewel in this nation’s crown Tasmania being so appallingly governed.”

Mr Wilkie said the government’s approach to the current mass die-off in local fish farms was emblematic.

“I’m appalled at the state government’s hands-off approach to this,” he said.

“We have this terrible secrecy around the industry where we can’t find out what’s going on, where we have an EPA that is under-resourced and has limited legislative powers, and a state government — and a state opposition — I would add that are running a protection racket for these for these aquaculture industries.

“These industries if they’re not careful they’ll go the way of other Tasmanian industries, they will founder and they will be much, much diminished, and it will be their fault.”

Mr Wilkie is standing for re-eleciton in the seat of Clark at the upcoming federal election.