A party without a purpose.

In May, federal Labor surged to power with its best result since the second world war. Eleven weeks later, Tasmanian Labor got its worst result since 1903. Why?

Two Labor leaders: one succeeded, one failed

It’s not just the needless and hopeless election, though that didn’t help. Tasmania is sullen and depressed, in the down phase of a bipolar cycle. It’s happened before.

It felt like this thirty years ago. In the 1990s, there was the same pervading sense of opportunities being wasted, living standards declining and of Tasmania being a forgotten and forgettable backwater.

At that time, the biggest political issue was the dogged refusal of the political class to reform punitive anti-gay laws which made gay men liable to 14 years in gaol. The display of virulent homophobia in the north of the state made headlines around the country. So did the arrest, at the instigation of the Hobart City Council, of activists at the Salamanca Market.

Nationally, Tasmania was dismissed as rednecked and intolerant: not a place to move to or work in.

That emblematic issue was finally resolved in the dying days of a struggling, visionless Liberal government that had been in power for too long. When Labor came to government at the 1998 election, the state was eager for new hope and a new direction. Responding to that hope, migration turned around: more people started arriving than leaving.

The same thing happened again when the Labor government, after 16 years and an irresponsible slash-and burn budget, was booted out of office and the Liberals, under the personable Will Hodgman, took over.

But that optimism vanished. In the past five years, the Liberals’ failure to provide adequate services in health, housing and education, its poor budgetary management and its basic administrative incompetence have shown up in the population figures. Tasmanians, particularly the young, are leaving for the mainland and not being replaced.

The trend in migration is repeated in property prices, which languish during the dog days of tired, incompetent governments and rise again (with a lag of about three years) in a burst of hope and optimism when a new government is elected. Inevitably, that optimism turns sour when the promises of better times and greater competence are seen, once again, to be hollow.

The present Liberal government is now deeply unpopular. A YouGov poll taken before the 2024 election found only 27% thought the Liberals deserved to be re-elected. But, in the absence of a viable pitch from Labor, they were. Now, having forced an election they were clearly unable to fight, Labor has lost again. Their share of the primary vote is the worst since the formation of the state party at the beginning of the last century.

Times change. The script does not.

Labor’s consistent share of just over a quarter of the primary vote cannot be explained simply by the decline in support for both major parties in Tasmania and elsewhere. It points to a problem at the heart of what Labor offers the community – not, of course, that anything coherent has been offered for a very long time.

For half a century, from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, Labor had a stranglehold on Tasmanian politics. The party held government for all but three of the 48 years from 1934 to 1982. It did so on a solid working-class agenda of hydro-industrialisation and job growth. This, it was thought, would lift Tasmania out of its social and economic malaise: poor educational outcomes, poor health, low population growth and low incomes.

“The orthodox Tasmanian political response to this situation is industrialisation,” wrote Professor David Bowman of the University of Tasmania. “This logic underpinned the hydro-schemes that systematically dammed nearly every great river on the island until the Franklin was saved in 1983.

“It is true that industry followed the building of hydroelectric infrastructure in Tasmania – but the scale of industrial investment was never enough to solve the state’s economic problems. The environmental costs were great, such as the loss of Lake Pedder. And there is an enduring legacy of debts and maintenance costs of the postwar surge in public capitalisation associated with hydro-industrialisation.”

Meanwhile, vast areas of native forest were clear-felled, mostly for woodchips. Apart from a newsprint mill established in 1941 just outside Hobart, most of those chips went overseas, feeding industries and employment in other countries.

Those dams did transform Tasmania, but not in the way its boosters in both parties believed. The state is not an industrial and manufacturing hub and never will be. Its carbon emissions, though, are significantly below net zero – due solely to renewable electricity and the remaining forests which, despite predations, still cover half the island.

The jobs-jobs-jobs mantra that underpinned the Labor ascendancy in the middle of the 20^th century doesn’t work any more. Jobs are needed, but they are increasingly in industries dominated by the public sector – health, education, public administration. Those three broad industries employ 134,100 people, or 31% of the entire workforce. In contrast, mining and manufacturing combined employ just 30,800, or 7%.

And private-sector service industries related broadly to restaurants, accommodation and tourism, employ almost twice as many as those “industrial” sectors.

Politicians in both major parties have yet to acknowledge that the world, and their state’s economy, have changed beyond recognition. They are still pursuing policies that became redundant over 40 years ago.

That lack of any relevant vision in the state’s political class provides the most cogent reason for the debilitating, repeated sequences of thwarted hope that so bedevils the collective psyche. The sullen electorate, faced yet again with an election few believed would make any difference, punished the blundering Labor leadership for bringing it on with no coherent plan to change anything except the seating positions in the House of Assembly.

Labor in vain

Two elections – one federal, one state – eleven weeks apart, with utterly divergent outcomes. Both electorates wanted and needed change. One gained the trust of voters – overwhelmingly – and the other did not.

Trust is built on performance. Federal Labor has a long and honourable history of reform. Look at the record: the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, pensions, Medibank/Medicare, free public hospitals, the Hawke-Keating economic revolution, the National Broadband Network, the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Compare that with the record of Tasmanian Labor over the same period – except that you can’t. There are no comparable achievements at state level. Not one.

Once the hydro-industrialisation era fizzled out, there were no big ideas to take its place. When Jim Bacon led Labor to victory in 1998, the one big change – decriminalising homosexuality – had already happened. Right-wingers in both major parties had opposed it to the end. Labor can take no credit for the change.

The new government had no major reform ideas of its own. Instead, it set up a long, somewhat lavish, consultation system under the title “Tasmania Together” to tell it what to do.

Tasmania Together was flooded with thousands of submissions from individuals and organisations. After three years, a report was ready for release: “a community-owned 20-year social, environmental and economic plan for the State of Tasmania”.

Not much happened. Recommendations ran quickly into determined opposition from powerful interests, particularly from forestry and gambling outfits. A parallel policy, Intelligent Island, with initial funding of $40 million, aimed to make the state a nation-leading IT hub. It folded too and is now generally forgotten, its lasting achievements somewhere between minimal and non-existent.

Eight years after Tasmania Together began, Jim Bacon was dead, the initiative was shut down and Bacon’s political headkicker, Paul Lennon, became premier.

Lennon’s signature policy was straight from the old industrialisation handbook: a $2.3 billion pulp mill near Launceston in the north of the state, to be built by a private forestry company, Gunns, and supported with state government money.

The issue split the community, just as the Franklin River dam project had done decades before. In the end, nothing happened. The project was abandoned. Gunns went broke. Lennon resigned.

Next behind the premier’s desk was David Bartlett. His big initiative was to fundamentally reorganise the school education system. But his ideas didn’t work and it all had to be put back the way it was.

Then he went. The fourth Labor premier was Lara Giddings. She, with Lennon, had planned a new public hospital on the Macquarie Point industrial site, to replace the ageing and decrepit Royal Hobart Hospital. But she cancelled it, citing budgetary problems. Perhaps her best achievement was the Forest Peace Deal, under which industry and conservation organisations agreed to end the divisive wars over forestry. It didn’t last: one of the first acts of the next Liberal government was to tear it up.

Giddings, who took the Treasury portfolio as well as the premiership, had considerable power in the government and used it in 2011 to push through a horror slash-and-burn budget, based on the incorrect notion that the state was running out of money. It wasn’t, but that budget – and particularly the swingeing cuts she made to hospital funding and to doctor and nurse numbers – created public outrage. Unions campaigned against the Labor government. And in 2014, Giddings led her party to its worst defeat since 1903.

“Labor,” said Gough Whitlam, “is a party of reform or it is nothing.” Tasmanian Labor is not a party of reform.

After the loss in 2014, Rebecca White led the party to three more defeats. The problem was the same each time: no coherent vision, no reason for the electorate to switch. White could not articulate even a convincing reason for why she was in politics. “We’re here for ordinary people,” she told me once. And that was it. Well, they all say that.

Finally Dean Winter, a darling of the party’s Right, took the leadership after a period of debilitating factional warfare led to the expulsion of his main rival, David O’Byrne. The state’s biggest union, the Health and Community Services Union, disaffiliated from Labor, taking with it around 20% of the party’s budget.

Winter, closely advised by Paul Lennon, pursued no significant policies beyond adopting the Liberal stance on two controversial issues: the Macquarie Point stadium and salmon farming. The stadium is now a potential election-loser for any party supporting it, with successive polls showing widespread opposition. The most recent, taken shortly before the election, found 30% in support and 57% opposed. But Labor gave the issue to the Liberals.

After a series of environmental scandals – a critically endangered native fish in the formerly pristine Macquarie Harbour, mass fish deaths and detritus from dead salmon washing up on beaches – polling shows strong support for curbing the salmon industry’s excesses. Again, Labor gave the issue to the Liberals.

 Unwisely, Mr Winter initiated a no-confidence motion – not in the government itself, which would be more usual, but in the still-popular Premier, Jeremy Rockliff. The apparent plan was to get rid of Rockliff so another, less popular, leader would take his place and be easier to topple at some time in the future.

The motion carried but backfired badly. Rockliff remained as Liberal leader and the Governor, with no viable option open to her, agreed to a new election for which Labor was clearly unprepared. During the five-week campaign, neither party proffered convincing proposals in any of the three areas of critical concern to voters: health, education and housing.

In the end, the electorate saw no difference between the two parties, so they stuck with what they had.

Tasmania urgently needs a new government. Under the Liberals, its public hospitals have been run down so far that they are the least capable in the nation. Education outcomes continue to languish, with a smaller proportion of students finishing high school completion than any jurisdiction other than the Northern Territory. Homelessness increased by 45% in the five years to 2021 and the waiting time for social housing has quadrupled.

The budget is deep in debt. The Liberals tried to save money by under-investing in infrastructure, causing massive inefficiencies and, particularly in hospitals, the highest costs in the nation. The government is now borrowing to cover its day-to-day expenses.

In such an environment, it’s a major accomplishment for an opposition to lose an election. Dean Winter managed it, though.