Tasmanian Liberals set for narrow majority according to exclusive ReachTEL poll

THE exclusive first poll of the election campaign points to tight contest.

Premier Will Hodgman looks set to retain his majority government after next Saturday’s election. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

WILL Hodgman’s Liberals are on track to narrowly win majority government at next weekend’s State Election, exclusive polling conducted for the Mercury indicates.

The first independent polling of the campaign, conducted by ReachTEL on Thursday night, gives the Liberal Party 46.4 per cent of the vote to Labor’s 31.1.

Figures from each electorate suggest the most likely result would be 13 seats for the Liberals, 10 for Labor and two for the Greens.

The Government currently holds 15 seats after its landslide victory in 2014, to Labor’s seven and the Greens’ three.

The loss of two seats — most likely in Braddon and Franklin — would leave the Liberals with a slender one-seat majority.

The result represents a swing of nearly five percentage points away from the Government, from its 2014 performance.

Analysts had tipped corrections in Braddon, where the Liberals have four seats, and Franklin, where they hold three. Labor would win a seat in each of those electorates, along with one in Bass, the ReachTEL poll suggested.

The Greens sit on 12.1 per cent statewide and would lose Andrea Dawkins’s seat in Bass.

That would leave the party with one each in Denison and Franklin and continuing a slide from five seats won in 2010.

But the poll confirmed that, should a hung parliament be the result, it would be the Greens the major parties would need to work with to form government.

The Jacqui Lambie Network, as expected, polled highest in Braddon, at 7.4 per cent, but looks unlikely to win a seat.

Its overall vote of 5.2 per cent means its preferences could affect which party wins the fifth seats in Bass, Braddon and Lyons.

Those contests, likely to be decided as the count continues in the days after polling day, will determine whether the Liberals can grab a 14th seat and a more workable majority.

A one-seat majority would mean a Liberal speaker needing to break with the Westminster tradition and vote with the Government, as Michael Polley did during the Labor-Green accord of 1989-92.

ReachTEL polled 3179 residents equally across electorates on Thursday night. The results were close to internal Liberal polling given to the Mercury two weeks ago.

But they were markedly different to the last independent polling conducted by EMRS in December.

That poll had the Liberals and Labor level pegging on 34 per cent.

The ReachTEL poll suggested the most likely outcome would be:

BASS: Liberals 3, Labor 2.

BRADDON: Liberals 3, Labor 2.

DENISON: Liberals 2, Labor 2, Greens 1.

FRANKLIN: Liberals 2, Labor 2, Greens 1.

LYONS: Liberals 3, Labor 2.

Opposition Leader Rebecca White’s personal popularity would not be enough to secure two quotas outright in her electorate of Lyons, the poll found.

The Greens vote of 11.1 per cent in Lyons, likely to be fuelled by the Okehampton Bay salmon farm controversy, would be higher than Ms Dawkins’s in Bass.