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.
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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.
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About the Author
Kate Crowley is Associate Professor and Head of School, School of Government, University of Tasmania. She is author of many papers on Tasmanian minority government and Green politics, including the newly released 'Against Green minority government: themes and traditions in Tasmanian politics', Tasmanian Historical Studies, 14 pp. 137-153, (2009). She is author of “Climate Clever?: Kyoto and Australia's Decade of Recalcitrance” forthcoming in K. Harrison and L. Sundstrom The Comparative Politics of Climate Change MIT Press, and A Framework for Action for Reducing the Tasmanian Government’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions which has been adopted in full by the Tasmanian Government.
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