Former Tasmanian Labor minister Graeme Sturges and lawyer Madeleine Ogilvie will battle it out in the recount for the electorate of Denison.
The Denison vacancy was sparked by the resignation of former Premier David Bartlett earlier this month.
There will be a recount on Thursday and it is expected a Labor candidate will take Mr Bartlett’s place.
In a statement, the ALP’s Secretary John Dowling says the party is cautiously optimistic.
The former minister Lisa Singh has ruled out joining the contest, as she will take up a Senate seat in July.
Tasmania’s electoral commissioner says that while Labor appears likely to win the recount in Denison, it is not a certainty.
• Dr Kevin Bonham, Comment 7:
Re #2 I have pointed out the problems with a by-election on previous discussions. If you could determine what the people who voted for David Bartlett thought now, that would be a better guide than what they thought a year ago (especially in a contest between a limited range of candidates). But because voting is secret, you can’t.
A by-election of all voters would not be a fair way to decide a replacement for a member elected by a specific portion of the electorate. I’ve pointed out that this would be an especially pressing problem in the case of a Green member resigning – if a by-election was ever held for a resigning Green member, the Greens would almost certainly lose that seat.
By-elections are fair in single-seat systems because successful candidates are elected by the prevailing view of the whole electorate. In proportional elections this is deliberately not the case, and by-elections (except in extreme circumstances such as that when a party has no candidate available) are a gross violation of proportionality and a gross violation of one vote, one value. Why should people whose votes elected Groom, Bacon, Archer or O’Connor, all of whom are still in parliament, now get a second vote on who replaces Bartlett?
The only proportional way to do a by-election under Hare-Clark is to conduct an election for all the seats in an electorate at once. This happened in Denison in 1980 because three Labor candidates for that electorate in 1979 were found to have breached electoral spending limits. However, if such a full by-election occurred every time someone resigned, it would be possible for the threat of such by-elections to be abused to create instability – not to mention the cost. Furthermore you would get some members working their guts out to be elected only to have to face the people again a few months later because someone from the opposing side quit.
As for the recount, Labor will win it. Given that most of Bartlett’s votes came in areas where Sturges polled much better than Ogilvie, Sturges seems to have the better chance. Ogilvie’s hope is that Sturges was sufficiently on-the-nose that Labor voters who didn’t vote for him tended to put him below all other Labor candidates, even the ones they had not heard of. I think there is unlikely to be quite enough juice in that for Ogilvie to win but we will see.
The primary votes for Ogilvie and Sturges are not directly relevant because the only Ogilvie and Sturges primaries that will feature in the recount is those that went to David Bartlett as preferences during the count. The main factor in the recount will be, of those voting 1 for Bartlett, which of Ogilvie or Sturges did they prefer?
