Seen it all before

Extracts:

THERE was a powerful sense of déjà vu about Thursday’s front page headline which screamed “Dirty tricks.”

Indeed, the feeling that we’d been down that same track before was so strong that a flick back through past editions of The Mercury seemed appropriate. And there it was — a little over two weeks before, on February 20, barely three days into the election campaign, precisely the same headline (or “splash,” as it’s known in tabloidese) — “Dirty tricks.”

That time, though, instead of the Greens and the Liberals complaining that the Government had set up a “dirt unit” in the Premier’s Department to dredge up muck on political opponents, it was the Premier lashing out at the Liberals and Greens for using “smear and innuendo” — dirty tricks — to damage him by alleging the Premier had breached his own Ministerial Code of Conduct over the awarding of Government contracts to his brother, John Lennon’s company.

And,

You only have to talk to staffers, or candidates or Members on any side of politics, to get an earful — on or off the record — on how pathetic, wretched and villainous the other side is. If it’s not the Liberals and Greens claiming Lennon is in the pocket of the Packers, or that Health Minister David Llewellyn is incompetent; it’s Infrastructure Minister Bryan Green making hurtful (and apparently wrong) allegations that Liberal health spokeswoman Sue Napier had been trying to hide details of her part ownership of properties left to her and her siblings by her late father; it’s the Greens claiming the Labor and Liberal parties are there to do the bidding of Gunns Ltd; or Labor claiming that the Greens used a company to hide donations (something they have angrily denied and branded as the work of the “dirt unit”).
Politics is a dirty, spiteful business, but the dirt and spite is certainly not restricted to one side.

And,

But the fact that the Labor Party has been spending so much effort to scratch the Teflon off the holier-than-thou Greens — whether or not with the use of a dirt unit — does show how vulnerable the Government is feeling … and not to the Liberals.

With just a week before we all trudge off to the polling booths, it’s London to a brick that Labor will still be on the Treasury benches after next Saturday. The only question is whether it will be in majority — unlikely, but still possible — or in minority and needing the support of the Greens to govern.

Such an arrangement would require, under our Westminster system, any Green ministers to accept collective ministerial responsibility for all Cabinet decisions. And given the stark divergence of policy between Labor and the Greens on major issues — poker machines, industrial development, forestry, and a pulp mill for instance — it just could not work.

Conceded, there are exceptions to this rule — for instance in New Zealand where Winston Peters, the outspoken New Zealand First Leader is Foreign Minister in a Labor minority government; and any number of European parliaments where coalitions of convenience have been formed and lasted. But given the personalities involved here, I just can’t see it happening.

This did not mean Labor could not govern in minority, and govern in a quite stable fashion for a full term, but it would depend not so much on the Greens, but on the Liberals (who are philosophically close to Labor on most of the important issues) being willing to put state interests ahead of partisan ones for the sake of the stability they say is so badly needed.

Crawford concludes:

Judging by the most recent TasPoll done for The Mercury, the threat of minority government — even though it is a major issue in the pages of the newspapers and on the electronic media — is not at the front of the mind of the electorate as an issue of concern. Given the opportunity, not one of those polled even mentioned it as a cause for anxiety.

So it would seem the expensive advertising campaign being financed by Tasmanians For A Better Future, a shadowy group of people who refuse to identify themselves, and who choose to be fronted instead by their PR and advertising outfit, are probably wasting their money. The Hare-Clark system of proportional representation — with its unique Robson system of rotating the order of names on the ballot papers — tends to encourage electors to vote not with majority or minority government in mind. The 18% or so of electors who vote Green will do so regardless of the pleas of Tasmanians For A Better Future; and the remainder will be split between Labor and Liberal, with the ALP getting the most, although probably not enough to form majority government.

All the Tasmanians For A Better Future campaign has really served to do is evoke memories of the Edmund Rouse bribery scandal of 1989 when an equally shadowy group called Concerned Citizens for Tasmania ran a campaign to voice protest about the then Labor-Green Accord government and try to drum up support for a fresh election. The Royal Commission into the bribery affair found the group was entirely “fictitious,” and was a partisan Liberal device to mislead the community into believing a group of concerned citizens had come together spontaneously to express their concern.

waynecrawford@msn.com.au

A mad old HAG addendum, just in: Hag is very puzzled by this reference in the Eminent Crawford’s column:

And as for this secret dirt unit anonymously distributing anti-Green propaganda … well, I have no evidence one way or the other about the existence of such a unit, but none of the material coming out questioning the Greens’ transparency of their fund-raising, has been anonymous. One of the Greens’ election staffers, Wes Young, made great play this week of having “exposed” the Premier’s Chief of Staff Rod Scott as the originator of the so-called secret e-mails sent to media outlets, raising questions about how the Greens manage to publicly declare only part of their considerable donations. Evidently he did so by some whiz-bang computer sleuthing. Well, young Wes could have saved himself all that trouble. All the e-mails I’ve seen have Rod Scott’s name in bold letters at the top. You’d have to be blind to miss it. Now, the contents of the e-mails might or might not draw the wrong conclusions about the Greens’ financial set-up, but anonymous they certainly are not.

Well the major media outlets’ emails certainly were anonymous. Perhaps Mr Craw was one of two favoured ones to benefit from Rodney’s largesse …