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info@prsa.org.au | 2025-08-02 | ||
OUR LEADERS NEED
TO WORK WITH THE PARLIAMENT WE ELECTED — NOT
THE ONE THEY WISH THEY HAD
BYLINE:
Dr Jeremy Lawrence, elections expert and President
of the Proportional Representation SocietyCOPY: There’s an old adage in politics — voters always get it right. But the same mainland commentators who parrot that line at every election are this week blaming voters for a result that reflects exactly what everyday Tasmanians want. With Professor George Razay clinching the final spot in Bass on Saturday, neither Labor nor the Liberals have close to a majority of Assembly seats in Parliament. There are now more crossbenchers than there are Labor MLAs. No matter what Labor and Liberal figures might wish for, neither party was anywhere close to winning over a majority of voters. They didn’t even get two-thirds together.
While Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberals kept the 14 seats they won in 2024, he’s facing an even tougher battle forming government than he did then. Despite the conservatives having the largest single bloc — a plurality of seats in political terms — the majority of Tasmanian voters voted for progressive MHAs, electing the same number of Labor and Green MHAs as in 2024, but a more left-leaning cohort of Independents. Neither Labor nor the Liberals convinced a majority of Tasmanians that they should govern in their own right. Tasmanians voted for a collaborative government that would negotiate and compromise with the Parliament they elected. Two elections in eighteen months “failing” — in the minds of some mainland commentators — to deliver a majority for either side has them fantasising about stripping away Tasmania’s world-class electoral system, like they’re taking toys away from naughty children. Clearly Tasmanians can’t be trusted to vote the right way think these mainlanders, so we’ll make them. Labor has claimed to have won the “two-party preferred vote” — and that might be true. The progressive side of politics won more seats than the conservative side after all. That’s why some strategists have been talking in the media about dividing Tasmania into “single-member districts” like Queensland has. Single-member districts tend to elect majorities on smaller votes, by design. That would be a travesty though. A “Labor majority government” getting elected with barely a quarter of the vote cast for Labor’s candidates would desecrate Tasmania’s proud legacy of electoral innovations, and make Tasmania’s elections meaningfully less democratic. This election result is the will of the voters. Nearly 90% of Tasmanians got a local MHA that they actually voted for. At a federal election, or in the other state parliaments, just 51% get that honour. Tasmania’s Hare-Clark electoral system delivers results that actually reflect voters' real preferences among candidates, and prevent “safe seats” where parties park their politicians that they don’t want to fight to keep. Every single seat in Tasmania’s House of Assembly is a genuine contest. No other Australian parliament can claim that. |
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