The Wuhan plague has been devastating for a great many people, but an absolute bonanza for politicians. They’ve been given – or seized – carte blanche to rule as absolute dictators, locking up populations in virtual house arrest on a whim and summarily shutting down entire economies. For all that, they’ve actually been rewarded by voters, terrified into willing submission by the most ridiculously exaggerated scare story since Y2K.
New Zealand’s very own ‘COVID Queen’ leveraged pandemic panic to secure a second term despite a record of shocking failure on almost every policy front. In Australia, two state premiers have already been returned with thumping majorities. Now a third is trying to cash in before the COVID crisis runs dry.
Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein has announced a snap election for May 1. His justification is that the government was forced into minority status by the resignation of Sue Hickey. This is true, but Hickey’s resignation was merely a formality. Hickey effectively deserted the government in 2018, when the former Pageantzilla took up Labor’s bribe of the plum Speaker’s job – thus depriving the government of its majority vote.
But it’s hardly surprising that Gutwein would try and make political capital now. Tasmania’s Byzantine Hare-Clarke electoral system and mere 25-seat lower house makes it extremely difficult for a party to attain a working majority. Hobart – where nearly one-third of workers are in some form of government-funded job – also wields an outsized influence on state politics. The result is that the Liberals have rarely held majority government.
In fact, the key issue of the 2014 election was majority government. Under former leader Will Hodgman, the Liberals won again in 2018: the first time the party won majority re-election for 87 years. Hodgman was only the third non-Labor premier to govern in majority in Tasmania. Hodgman’s personal standing was such that he received the highest-ever number of first preference votes in Tasmanian history. Ultimately, though, Hodgman elected to put family ahead of politics and go out on a high: he resigned from the premier’s job and politics altogether in January 2020.
Peter Gutwein, his successor, is no Will Hodgman. But the Liberal government have continued to deliver for Tasmania: the state held the title of best performing economy for four straight quarters, up to January 2020. How COVID will affect Tasmania’s rating in the next “State of the States” report, due soon, remains to be seen.
But COVID has already been a political gift-horse for two premiers, and it seems likely to work its magic for Gutwein, too. Polling shows the Liberals on 52%, compared to Labor’s 27% and the Greens 14%. While it might seem to make sense for Labor and the Greens to combine their numbers, the merest whiff of another Labor-Green rapprochement would be electoral poison in most of Tasmania outside the fashionable suburbs like Sandy Bay.
The plain fact, too, is that Labor has hardly anything to run on. Leader Rebecca White is likeable enough, but comes across as little more than Jacinda-lite. Very lite. Not even an electoral pregnancy is likely to work much in White’s favour.
The parliamentary sex scandals gripping Canberra are also leaking down to the state level. White is facing tough questions about Labor MP Bastian Seidel, who was preselected while under investigation for sexual assault.
In plain desperation, Tasmanian Labor is trying to repeat Federal Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign which nearly cost the Coalition government in 2016. On the basis of nothing at all, Labor ran a hyped-up campaign claiming that the Turnbull government was planning to privatise Medicare. It was a blatant lie, of course. But it nearly worked.
Of course, Medicare is a federal responsibility, so Tasmanian Labor have had to fish elsewhere for a fictitious privatisation scare campaign. Clearly banking on Labor’s undeserved reputation as the party of healthcare and eduction, Tas Labor are claiming that the Gutwein government is planning to privatise the local vocational education provider, the Tasmanian Technical and Further Education (TasTAFE) system.
This is utter baloney, of course.
Even the Premier’s Economic and Social Recovery Advisory Council (PESRAC) report, which Labor cites as proof of the privatisation plan, nowhere mentions privatisation. Instead, it points out what everyone in business in Tasmania already knows: TasTAFE is ossified and inflexible and out of touch with what employers want from vocational training, and its staff and students are treated to a relaxed, high school-like system, with eleven weeks of holidays, rather than a business-like environment. Put bluntly, TasTAFE has become little more than a pre-retirement home for unionised tradespeople. The PESRAC report recommends significant reform of TasTAFE, in part by making it a Government Business Enterprise or State-owned Company. Despite the Chicken-Little of the union tail that wags the Labor dog, this is not privatisation.
So, Labor have nothing to run on except a baseless scare campaign and the Liberals are flexing their COVID afterglow (not to mention four straight quarters of nation-leading growth). That’s the electoral choice facing Tasmanians in four weeks.
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