David Bartlett has fooled many people in the last week or so. He has not only fooled the Liberals by raising their prospects of being installed as the new government without needing to deal with the Greens only to dash those prospects to pieces, but he has also fooled practically the entire mainstream commentariat into thinking he was really trying to abdicate from government when actually he was only risking doing so.
He has even fooled members of his own party who were found to be mounting reluctant sycophantic defences of his desire to throw away power and go into Opposition, only to find that that was not what he was up to at all and that the course they were condemning as a bad idea (attempting to continue governing) is exactly what he was up to after all. Bartlett even fooled me briefly, but only on April Fools’ Day, and that was after midday, so it doesn’t count. Once I got back online after Easter I wrote this (Pollbludger, April 6):
“The argument being advanced by Bartlett now, concerning why he is supposedly unable to govern, is obviously bogus and will presumably be seen as such by the Governor, which makes me wonder whether Bartlett’s apparent capitulation is really all that meets the eye, as opposed to a sneaky ploy to attempt to be reluctantly reappointed.”
But this is not to say that Bartlett’s little power-play was some kind of strategic masterstroke. Rather, it was a nifty save from an embarrassing position, and the embarrassing position was one of the Premier’s own making.
To see why, we need to go back to the election campaign, and to Bartlett’s sudden reversal of his previous position on governing in minority if Labor got badly thumped. Initially, David Bartlett expressed the intention to continue unless defeated absolutely or voted out on the floor of the House. But on 22 Feb, he came up with a new formulation, seemingly out of nowhere:
“It is my expectation, and a legitimate and reasonable position and the one that the Tasmanian people can have confidence in, that the party that wins the most seats or in the event of the same number of seats the most votes, should be able to be the first to attempt to form a government on the floor of the House”
If the fear that Bartlett might try to carry on with a crippled and rejected administration of just eight or nine members was really such a negative for him in the electorate, he could have made things easier for himself on that score. He could have said he would only attempt to govern in minority if his party won at least ten seats, or if his party won at least as many seats as the Liberals. In terms of the argument that a too-small minority government would be farcical, there was no strategic need for him to say anything about a tiebreak situation that would lead to giving the Liberals first bash in some possible instances of 10-10-5. The answer he is giving now (that there are “various democratic ways you can assess the electoral intent of Tasmanian voters”) would have been an objectively reasonable answer to that question at the time, but a better practical one would have been to simply not go into it. But for whatever reason Bartlett did.
When, of course, the voters did return exactly that outcome and with a relatively narrow primary vote margin between the parties, Labor found itself in a tricky situation. The party needed to be seen to honour its leaders’ pledge to give the Liberals first bash, but to actually hand government to the Liberals on a platter would be seen as a lame betrayal of Labor voters who wanted their party to govern, and would involve huge risks of being out of office for an unforseen time if a Liberal minority government did not turn out to be so big a flop as everyone thought it might. So the point of David Bartlett’s initial stance was to set up two alternatives for Hodgman. The first was that Hodgman could deal with the Greens, thus flagrantly breaking his pre-election pledge not to do so, which would probably be worth being in Opposition for, although Bartlett may have figured Hodgman would never do it anyway. The second was that Hodgman could refuse to deal with the Greens, in which case there was no way Hodgman could confidently advise the Governor of an ability to form a stable government unless either Labor or the Greens granted his administration confidence and supply.
Labor made noises in that direction at David Bartlett’s press conference on April 1, but clearly did not make them in the presence of the Governor. Exactly what noises were made, and whether any commitments have been breached, will be the subject of much debate and doubtless endless replays by the Liberals if they think that it proves anything. But the point for the legitimacy of Bartlett’s rule at this stage is that those noises came after the election, and are not commitments that he went to the people with. Thus, even if he defaulted on them, Bartlett could pass it off as a change of circumstances following the announcement by Nick McKim, point out that he stuck to the commitment he went to the people with, and really nobody would care. Will Hodgman’s case that David Bartlett going back on whatever he said on April 1 makes Bartlett’s government illegitimate is simply nonsense, and if Will stays blue in the face about it for too long he will end up sounding like Gough Whitlam, only with a great deal less to complain about. The voters do not like sore losers, so once their initial no-confidence motion is presumably defeated, the Liberals will just have to get over it. So Bartlett is sneaky, unpredictable and perhaps a little bit cruel (it is hard to conclude otherwise after he played up the dearly cherished hope of Michael Hodgman to see his son installed as Premier only for it to be denied for the time being) – well, try telling his detractors something they didn’t already know.
At present, it seems the best the Liberals can do is point to Bartlett saying that Labor “will only ever move no confidence motions in the most serious circumstances of gross maladministration, of corruption, or incompetence.” But since “incompetence” in politics could mean just about anything, that is hardly sufficient to guarantee stability, and furthermore, in the absence of Bartlett ruling out supporting a Green motion of no confidence (something which the Greens had not ruled out moving), the Liberals have no case anyway. And even if they do have a case, as I have pointed out above, it scarcely matters.
A line run by Richard Herr and also Bruce Montgomery was that it was not constitutionally open to the Governor to accept Bartlett’s advice to attempt to appoint Hodgman. I greatly doubt that, and indeed if the Governor had thought that was so, I cannot see why he would have met with Hodgman twice, let alone even at all. My view is that the Governor was prepared to act on Bartlett’s advice that Hodgman be given an opportunity to form government, but only if Hodgman could demonstrate supply and confidence. This Hodgman could never do, from either Labor or the Greens, and that is why he has not been appointed.
The telltale sign that there could be more to Bartlett’s “abdication” than met the eye was the manifestly bogus nature of the argument he gave for being unable to govern. Obviously a no-confidence motion which was for the sake of theatrics and rhetoric, in him not his party, on the floor of a different parliament, before the election, and which failed anyway, would not prove that his government lacked the confidence of the new Parliament and the Governor was never going to buy it. So the purpose of that argument was to dress up the abdication attempt for public consumption, while still conveying to the Governor that Labor still wanted the poison chalice to be tossed to Hodgman first, but were certainly not averse to taking it themselves if Hodgman failed.
So given that Labor was not giving confidence and supply, the question is what would the Greens do. Some may be puzzled by Nick McKim’s actions in throwing a lifeline to a government his support base dislikes to the point that voters for its minor candidates only narrowly favoured Labor over the Liberals. But don’t take too much notice of the McKim rhetoric about keeping the incumbent government in for the sake of stability, and it making more sense for Labor to govern as they have more members in the Upper House. Those points are vaguely relevant, but the real strategic picture for the Greens looks like this. The best outcome for them is a successful coalition government with either major party in which they deliver some policy goals and prove to the people that they can provide stability as a junior partner. But because of the fear level in the electorate, both major parties had to promise not to go there or else get wedged to death, so that wasn’t going to happen.
The worst of all possible worlds for the Greens would be another election more or less right away. They would be blamed for the instability and the only way for them to go, in any meaningful sense, would be down, and worst of all there would be the prospect that somebody might actually win a new poll. The best of all possible non-deal worlds for the Greens is to have one party in power, and the option of dealing with the other party and/or bringing down the party in power over a key policy issue, without triggering an immediate election. That is what they have. However, had they allowed the Liberals to be installed without a deal (effectively deposing Labor by offering the Liberals confidence and supply) then it is constitutionally questionable whether they would have ever been able to get rid of the Liberals without triggering a new election – not to mention the fallout from actively putting the Liberals in only to get rid of them again. So that would have been a bad outcome, which is probably why McKim was scrambling to make it clear that the Greens did not agree with Bartlett’s gimmick about a motion from the previous Parliament. Of course, the Greens could have just sat tight and done nothing, but then the Governor may have been unable to confidently commission anyone, and that was probably not a rock the Greens would have been keen to turn over – although it turns out that he would have recommissioned Bartlett anyway.
The Greens’ confidence guarantee comes with a few riders. Firstly, the offer to do a deal is left hanging to taunt the Liberals, and secondly, the Greens can abandon confidence in Labor in cases of malfeasance, corruption or maladministration. The first two are standard enough, but “maladministration” is a somewhat slippery term that, unless tied to an objective standard of proof, can easily mean “We may eventually find some policy failure pretext to beat up and toss you out if it really really suits us to do so.”
For the Liberals, the best they can probably now hope is that the new Labor government is a replay of the Rundle years and that it all ends in tears (with or without “electoral reform”) some time down the track, and that they then pick up a swing of a further 5% or so and win a majority. Given that Bartlett actually wanted to govern, they were never going to be appointed without dealing with the Greens anyway. But they have done themselves some damage in the last week or so. Firstly by getting their hopes up of governing unconditionally (and even commencing “transitioning”), only to have those hopes dashed, they have again been exposed as strategically naïve and have again showed that their current leadership team only shine when the government is in blunder mode. Secondly by responding in such outraged fashion to actions by Premier Bartlett that are in fact apparently consistent with Bartlett’s pre-election commitments (as he will not stop reminding them), they are limiting their own options to respond flexibly to the circumstances without being seen as blatant hypocrites.
Bartlett’s leadership, greatly weakened by an election result that was much worse than it should have been (though still not as bad as it could have been), may have been shored up by this display that on a good day he can still run rings around his opponent. Furthermore, he has done much better than all commentators initially expected – from a result that was supposed to force him to do at least one out of dealing with the Greens, resigning or losing his leadership, clearly breaking his pledges or taking his party into Opposition, he has managed to find a way, messy as it was, to thus far avoid all of those fates. Given his unpopularity with the electorate as demonstrated in the pre-election Newspoll, he will need to improve his performance if he is to lead the party to the next election.
As for the Greens, if it does turn out to be a rerun of the Rundle years (with a fairly hostile government in minority and refusing to deal) then the best they can do is study the lessons of 1996-1998 carefully. That period in minority was such an abject failure for the party that despite being given immense oxygen when the size of the House was reduced, their vote still went backwards (and from a low base at that). The challenge for the Greens then is to learn from those years and study the failures of the Milne approach. Probably their primary challenges are to ensure investor confidence and to maintain a belief that the government is not perpetually on death row.
While Bartlett has already made noises about increased cooperation to make the new Parliament work, it remains to be seen whether anything will come of this. It would be strange for him to go through such elaborate contortions to be seen to keep his word to give the Liberals the first opportunity to form government, only to immediately break his commitments not to do deals with the Greens. Thus, I will be quite surprised if the government he puts to the House for a vote of confidence contains Green ministers. But in the long term it will be very difficult for him to govern effectively without attempting to build somewhat better relations with the Greens, especially given the frequency with which Government bills were opposed both by Greens and Liberals in the previous parliament.
Finally, a concerning note in this whole saga is the use of the office of the Governor to play political games. The Governor has not (so far as I can tell) acted in a politicised fashion himself, but Bartlett has been able to exploit the whole ritual of the Governor appointing the Premier to humiliate Will Hodgman and to extricate himself from a mess while continuing in office. Had Tasmania adopted a standard in which the incumbent Premier remains in office until such time as the commission is resigned or a motion of no-confidence passed on the floor of the House, then little of the strange theatre of the last few days would have been possible. It is possible then that leaders’ positions on what they would do in the event of certain results would have been much less confusing in advance of the election. If the ultimate determinant of who is the Premier must be support on the floor of the House, then why not simply let the House determine it and, except in situations where the House is unable to resolve the matter, cut out the middleman?
PS: Shortly after this article was written the Governor released his reasons for his decisions:
HERE *
The contents were consistent with my expectations.
Kevin Bonham will in all probability be discussing the election outcome and possibly other things with Andrew Harper on Edge FM Saturday 11am-12.
