Politics in the 21st century: Labor first, Liberals last

Tasmanian House of Assembly (State) Vote Percentages

The Liberal low point was 2002 when leader Bob Cheek could scarcely get over a quarter of the votes. In 2006 Rene Hidding did better with 32 per cent, but Labor still romped it in by capturing 50 per cent of the voting public.

Putting ten years’ worth of federal and state elections together results in an unavoidable conclusion: in this new century, Tasmanians have largely rejected the Liberal party. Since 1998 scarcely more than a third of voters have marked their ballot paper with a Liberal candidate on top, while Labor has consistently attracted close to half.

There has been a steady rise in the Green vote at both state and federal levels (partly attributable to the demise of the Democrats) but Green voters still, and will always, preference Labor over Liberal by about 4:1; the maxim that “a vote for the Greens is a vote for Labor” still holds.

Just how good a decade it has been for Labor and how bad for the Liberals is graphically illustrated by a look at the number of seats each party holds.

The graph shows the percentage of seats held by the parties in Tasmania at the end of each year since 1999. In that time there has been a total of 57 seats available to Tasmanian politicians: 25 in the House of Assembly; 15 in the Legislative Council; five in the House of Representatives; and 12 in the Senate.

It can be seen that in the past decade Labor has consistently captured about twice as many seats as the Liberals.

The Greens have been lumped in with the independents, not because tracking their seat share is not valid (the Greens have gone from two seats in 1999 to six in 2007), but rather to illustrate how the Liberals, over the decade, have slipped in comparison.

The sobering truth is that, as 2008 dawns, the order of seats held in Tasmania is Labor first, “others” second, Liberals last.

A long last.

Elections aren’t due in Tasmania until 2010, when both federal and state come around again. That means more than two full years for the Liberals to recuperate and make some headway into Labor’s electoral supremacy.