Helped by gaming industry money and a strong economy, premier Will Hodgman looks on course to win re-election on Saturday

Jokes about two heads aside, Tasmanians like to think of themselves as different to mainland Australians. When it comes to politics, they have a good case.



Where political parties nationally and most states often fall over themselves to stress they are not the favourites coming into an election, lest complacent supporters drift away, in Tasmania they tend to go the other way.

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“Tasmania is different,” University of Tasmania political scientist Richard Eccleston said at an election forum this week. “There is a kind of underdog theory in terms of Australian politics generally but here – with the paranoia about minority government – both of the major parties fall over themselves to try to make the claim that they can form majority.”

This has been one of the stories of the state’s election campaign, which concludes as voters go to the polls on Saturday.

The Liberal government, under premier Will Hodgman, has stressed it is the front-runner, and the party able to hold power in its own right. Though starting well behind, Rebecca White – the 35-year-old former political staffer who breathed life into Labor’s failing fortunes when she assumed the leadership a year ago – has tried to make the same case the ALP can win a majority of seats in the state’s 25-seat lower house.

There is a science to this. Uniquely in Australia, Tasmania has a history of hung parliaments, with the Greens as a legitimate third force denying either major party a majority. Polls suggest most voters believe majority governments are best for the state. Recent history shows a large proportion are willing to swing between the major parties in the space of a couple of elections to deliver it.

But the state’s electoral system, with the Hare-Clark model delivering five members each from five very different electorates, means even a landslide win in pure votes is likely to yield what looks a paper-thin majority, no bigger than a couple of seats. It means – though the Liberals go into polling day as the favourite – the result is more unpredictable than at an average election elsewhere in the country.

Outwardly, the defining issue of the campaign has been Labor’s pledge in December that it would make Tasmania the first state in the country to remove poker machines from pubs and clubs. It has been an historic stance, breaking the ALP’s close ties with gambling giant the Federal Group, and has triggered an historic level of election spending.

Voters will not be told how much the major parties have received in political donations until 2019, but the perception is there has been an unprecedented flood of money from gaming and business interests to the Liberals. It has dominated advertising across all media, prompting estimates the government has outspent its opponents by a factor of at least five-to-one – and claims that the election was been “bought” by vested interests.

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David Walsh, the founder of the Museum of Old and New Art, got to the heart of this concern on Thursday when he revealed he had given $250,000 to the anti-pokies campaign in a bid to “de-bias” the election. In the final days, Hodgman struggled to respond when repeatedly asked why voters should have to wait nearly a year to find out who funded his campaign.

Analysts say this may have had some traction in the last week of the campaign, particularly in the Hobart-based seat of Denison. They say it has raised serious issues about transparency likely to echo long after the election. But they also stress it would be wrong to assume it will be decisive in how most people vote. An overwhelming majority would prefer pokies were removed, but a ReachTEL poll published by News Corp found it was of major issue for only 14%.

The issues most likely to persuade voters are more time-honoured – principally, the state of the economy. This has been at the heart of the Liberal’s message: that the state has been strengthening since they came to power four years, with 10,000 jobs created.

Hodgman came to office after 16 years of Labor rule that, as often happens with governments of that age, ended badly. Labor shared the government benches with Greens in its final term, but the deal between them collapsed in its final months. Hit by the financial crisis and the collapse of the forestry industry, the state was struggling. Tasmanians responded by elected the Liberals with more than 50% of the vote.

Saul Eslake, the Tasmania-based economist, says Hodgman has a good story to tell, having delivered most of his 2014 election commitments and an economy that is clearly in better shape, though most of the jobs added have been part-time.

This was Hodgman’s message at his final press conference on Friday. “I ask Tasmanians: why would you want to change… given how far we’ve come?”

Some of the improvement has little to do with the government. The birth of Mona has changed the way the state presents itself to the world and led a tourism boom, helped by a favourable dollar, and the budget has been boosted by the carve up of the GST shifting in its favour. But the Liberals can justifiably claim business confidence is up – Tasmania is the only place in the country where business sentiment towards the government is positive.

“In the ordinary course of events, you would expect this government to get a second term,” Eslake says.

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This view has been reinforced by the widely shared view that the Liberals ran a better organised and targeted campaign. Polling by Tasmanian market research company EMRS suggests it is on track to get 46% of the vote, ahead of Labor on 34% and the Greens on 12%.

Pokies has been Labor’s major point of differentiation. White pinned much of her campaign on improving the state’s perennially underfunded health system, promising to spend $560m, but was trumped by the Liberals, who promised $757m over six years. The bulk of the government’s pledge was pushed beyond the 2022 election and therefore basically meaningless, but the size of the commitment nullified the issue as a point of difference.

The environment – traditionally a central feature in Tasmanian elections – was largely absent. The pace of expansion about salmon farming has raised concern in some communities, but neither major party released a forestry policy. The lack of attention may be bad news for the Greens, led by former journalist Cassy O’Connor. Analysts says that, combined with Labor stealing their thunder with a similar pokies policy, it has been difficult for the third party to gain its usual traction.

On the final day, a wild card was thrown into the campaign when The Australian reported the government had quietly told farmers and shooting groups that it would meet many of their demands to soften the state’s gun laws. Its impact late in the campaign is difficult to measure: 22 years on, the scars from the Port Arthur massacre still run deep in the Tasmanian community, particularly in the south.

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The Liberal party starts today with 15 seats, Labor seven and the Greens three. The government can afford to lose only two seats to retain a majority.

It is expected to drop one MP in Braddon, a north-west electorate based around Devonport and Burnie, where it won an unlikely four-out-of-five in 2014. It should hold its three seats in Bass, centred on Launceston. It means it will need to hold on to three in either Lyons, a largely rural seat in the centre of the state, or Franklin, in Hobart’s southern suburbs and the regional south. Polls suggest Lyons is a better bet.

Labor is pinning its hopes of denying the Liberals majority on winning a third seat in Denison, the state’s most left-wing electorate.

It is unclear what will happen if it does. The Greens have promised to move a no-confidence motion in the Liberal party on the first day of the next parliament regardless of the result due to its refusal to reveal who has bankrolled its campaign. But Labor has said it will not support the motion, and will never again govern in partnership with the minor party.

Assuming the Jacqui Lambie Network does not snag an unlikely seat, it means the most likely short-term scenario is the Liberals governing precariously in minority. How long that would last is anyone’s guess.

Eslake, for one, believes the issue of whether the government is a majority or minority should not be decisive. He says the benefits of a majority are regularly overplayed, and argues two of the state’s three minority governments in recent decades – under Labor’s Michael Field and Liberal Tony Rundle – have been more successful than others with more seats.

“I think a good minority government is much better than a bad majority government, and Tasmanian history supports that.”