Labor flees to Opposition in Tasmania

The Tasmanian caretaker Premier David Bartlett has conceded defeat in the March 20th state election now that the final result has been clarified.

Labor and the Liberals have tied with ten seats each, with the Liberals attracting more votes, and the Greens picking up an extra seat to hold a total of five.

In a bizarre declaration, Bartlett has cited the Opposition parties moving a no confidence motion in the integrity of his government on November 18 last year as part justification for his decision to not seek to form government. At the time, Labor held majority numbers, so the motion failed.

More relevant is Labor's recognition that the people have spoken and it has been trounced at the polls. The swing against Labor has been unequivocal at 12 per cent, while the Liberals picked up 7 per cent and the Greens 5 per cent. The big winner with the electorate has been power-sharing government. Tasmanians did not heed the warnings of ex-Premiers and the major parties on the perils of minority government.

Indeed, since the election, Get Up online has commissioned a poll that shows 72 per cent of Tasmanians preferring power sharing than one party trying to govern alone. It is now time for the Liberal party to talk to the Greens who want a negotiated agreement rather than an informal, less certain deal.

The Greens are looking for a power sharing arrangement, probably one that guarantees a process both for ensuring stability and for progressing policy.

It is unlikely that power sharing can work without an agreement, such as the ACT Parliamentary Agreement between Labor and the Greens. This agreement was struck in 2008. It is little known because it has been uncontroversial. And now it is being credited with delivering stability, reform, and fiscal responsibility. It includes a process for delivering policy as well as arrangements for staffing, resources, committees and dispute resolution.

Talking to the Greens was beyond Labor, and indeed worth fleeing to Opposition to avoid. The reasons are simple: history, bad blood and more history. Labor last tried to govern in minority with Green support from 1989 to 1992 and was rewarded with its lowest ever vote at the next election.

Michael Field was Premier at the time and took Labor to its rock bottom vote of 28.9 per cent, not far off the Green vote of 21.61 per cent in 2010. It took two terms for Labor to return to office and only then after persuading the Liberals to cut the House of Assembly and raise the electoral quota from 12 per cent to 16 per cent.

This “electoral reform”, undertaken without reference to the people, was intended to rid the Tasmanian parliament of the Greens, and saw Labor return to office in 1998, as it reaped the benefits of the implosion of the Liberal minority government that the Greens had been supporting in power.

The Greens hung in, however, after the 1998 election, with one seat in the depleted 25-member House of Assembly, held by Greens leader Peg Putt, and assisted by researcher, Cath Hughes. Between them, they worked harder than the Opposition and were rewarded with three more seats in 2002.

Since then there has been no turning back for the Greens, who have been a presence in state parliament now for 30 years. Their tactical, political, and policy sophistication has heightened and, at this last election, their campaigning skill was recognised for the first time as being second to none.

The Greens have been a growing threat to the Labor vote ever since the world's first Green party, the United Tasmania Group, formed in 1972 in a bid to stop Labor flooding Lake Pedder. Rather than green up in response, Labor has driven itself further away under the banner of resource exploitation.

But the electorate has moved way past hydro-industrialisation and resource exploitation as economic panaceas and resonates far more clearly with the Greens message of clean, green, clever industry. The battle over the proposed billion-dollar pulp mill in the Tamar Valley wine district was the last resort.

The Greens have also bought with them a push for open and accountable governance and an end to shady deals with favoured Labor mates that have dogged the Labor government in recent years and cost Ministers and Deputy Premiers their jobs, which has been tough for a nine-member Cabinet.

When David Bartlett was brought in as a clean skin Premier following the departure of the scandal ridden Paul Lennon, he brought with him Michael Field as a mentor. With Field came all the bad blood with the Greens and the baggage following the fall out of the Field minority government.

It will be Michael Field, now as a respected party elder, despite the drubbing received by David Bartlett in his care, who will be leading the flight into Opposition, where he would reckon that Labor can sit it out and watch a failed minority government deliver Labor back into power within two years.

And besides, the reasoning would go, Labor can dedicate itself to undermining a Liberal minority government and any arrangement it has with the Greens, and so accelerate its own return to power, as it did between 1996 and 1998 when the Liberals were last supported in power by the Greens.

The irony is that while Labor has the most to gain in electoral terms from attempting to reintegrate the green vote by addressing its own out of step environmental and development policies, it has instead dedicated itself to a burning enmity with the Greens borne of history and bad blood.

Labor's strategy will only work if history repeats itself. If the Liberals do not strike any deal with the Greens, the Labor caretaker government may be called on by the Governor to test their power on the floor of the House.

They can't give away government, but they can be voted down in parliament.

The Liberals are, however, ready to assume Government, and need to consider whether they would after 12 years in opposition court another election by failing to strike an arrangement with the Greens. If such an arrangement convinces the Governor and survives in the House, and then goes on to offer stability, longevity and policy productivity, then Labor's carping from the sidelines will fail.

This could be a turning point in Tasmanian politics.

If a deal between the Liberals and the Greens does deliver stability, reform, and fiscal responsibility, as has the deal in the ACT between Labor and the Greens, then the Liberals will have found their pathway to majority government, the Greens will garner respect, and Labor will become irrelevant.

In the depleted 25-member House of Assembly, governing is tenuous without a majority. How is a Cabinet to be formed from 10 members? Where is the back-bench? Who can be sacrificed to be the Speaker? The answer is to strike a deal and draw on the Greens, and this would indeed be historic.

Wednesday, May 8, will be the critical day when we see what happens next, after the polls are declared and Labor formally advises the Governor that his caretaker government wishes to resign its commission. The Liberals have this week to stitch up an alternative arrangement with the Greens that will survive a vote in the House to be ready to show they can take office and form a government.

If the Liberals enter this terrain and make it work, it will be an unheralded political achievement.

Whichever party can deliver stable minority government in cooperation with the Greens will be making history. No green supported minority government has lasted more than two years, so the task is daunting. But the difference now is that there is overwhelming public support for it to work.