I well remember the debacle of Australia’s first match at the 2010 football World Cup.

A poorly-organised team was walloped 4-0 by Germany, talisman Tim Cahill was sent off (and thus suspended for next match), and Australia’s prospects for the tournament were effectively extinguished in 90 minutes in Durban.

I felt a little of the same vibe today watching a shambolic Jeremy Rockliff before the media on the first full day of this election campaign.

Looking tired already, looking lonely despite grin-’til-yer-gormless bodyguards Madeleine Ogilvie and Simon Behrakis nodding silently behind him like dashboard bobbleheads, looking indeed as if he’d been just wedgied by the school bully and was struggling not to cry, the Premier had owt to say.

For Clark, the capital heartland, the jewel of Hobart, there was nothing to say. Bar some waffle about how the Crowne Plaza / Myer Building had been assisted by a majority Liberal government never-taken-up loan guarantee some 10 years ago and it had delivered ‘vibrancy’.

That was it.

In any case one could argue that the Liberals of 10 years ago, with some sharp and experienced talent like Will Hodgman, Peter Gutwein, Matt Groom and Rene Hidding in the ranks, are not the Liberals of today. Four of Rockliff’s 11-member Lower House team have had less than a term in Parliament.

Indeed. The Premier stumbled over words frequently, struggling to put together coherent sentences. Though every so often, about every millisecond, he remembered to try to divert his answers back to his mantra of ‘majority Liberal government’ and ‘our strong plan’.

Whatever the plan is – also referred to in a video being spammed to people’s mobiles (see rant below) – no-one has a copy of it and it is not on the Liberal Party website. If it’s imaginary, I guess it can be as strong as you imagine it to be when you clap your hands for Tinkerbell.

As for majority gummint, Tasmanians voted for that last time and look what we got. It’s an inescapable fact – one that will chase the Premier in nightmares like a heat-seeking missile – that we are at an election well over a year early because his majority Liberal government collapsed. All by itself.

Forget activists up trees or whining about salmon pens bringing state industry to a halt, ha!, the Liberals splintered on their own, largely over the immensely stupid AFL deal.

After secret negotiations even his Cabinet wasn’t privy to, suddenly unveiling a hideously expensive stadium project Tasmania doesn’t need on land that is manifestly unsuitable was almost guaranteed to make skittish backbenchers ornery much.

It did. After all, conservatives don’t like expensive whimsy as a rule.

And so the Tucker-Alexander rebellion ensued, then the uneasy minority government period. They glared their qualified but unaffectionate support from a fractious cross-bench determined to get answers, and increasingly frustrated by lack of same.

As a yawning summer recess morphed into jockeying ahead of Parliament’s return, bitchiness turned into might-vote-no-confidenceness and it all ended up in tears.

Where is the Liberal Party now? My sources tell me that one of Rockliff’s reasons for going early was to head off an Eric Abetz takeover, most clearly signalled by the former senator’s preselection for Franklin.

Not content with perhaps getting a life, or entertaining himself pulling wings off flies, the mastermind of the Managed Investment Scheme ponzi wants a crack at stuffing up state governance as well and to morally berate us for our lax tolerance for queerpoofterfagsluts these days.

Tucker was close to Abetz. Cop this Tucker statement from 30 January:

“The Tasmanian Liberals have been hijacked by an unrepresentative left wing cabal intent on pursuing policies that better belong in the Greens Party room. The Liberal base has had a gutful and the Premier and his minions are now terrified by both the Abetz insurrection internally and the external threat presented by the National Party, with increasing speculation that the Nationals are coming.”

It’s anyone’s guess if he’s somewhat distancing himself from Abetz here, or actually talking it up. In any case language like ‘left-wing cabal’ is very reminiscent of Eric fulminating over, well, anyone expressing even a modicum of support for anything of broad social value.

With Clark and other electorates now hosting seven members, the Liberals need at least five good candidates to be in with a chance of getting four or even three elected and thus have a chance at that holy grail majority. Yet only two were there today – both sitting members – to get the Clark campaign rolling, and no others have been announced.

Simon Behrakis, Jeremy Rockliff, Madeleine Ogilvie.

The only conclusion is that the Liberal Party don’t yet have the candidates. There are only 12 announced candidates so far among the other four electorates. In fact they appear to have lost two other candidates who had their profiles on the Liberal Party website but are now absent.

The party is so on the nose that even serial pest Louise Elliot felt unable to take a Hobart Council sabbatical in between Code of Conduct lashings to have a tilt in Clark. Yet former minister Jacquie Petrusma who resigned ‘for family reasons’ in 2022 now appears to want back and has booked advertising before even being pre-selected, so the shambles is shall we say multidirectional if not multidimensional.

The inarticulate Rockliff was unable to, ah, articulate exactly how he might form a minority government, with whom, and with what mechanism for stability. “Not the Greens,” was about all he could say, presumably foregrounding that that old hokum will be hauled out yet again, as if a legacy bogeyman is as comforting to a Liberal campaign as a teddy to toddler.

About the only key political plank Rockliff laid out today was regarding funding for the proposed AFL stadium in Hobart. It went south faster than a bogan on meth fleeing Burnie, with stadium advocates claiming before the end of the day the project was ‘dead’.

Rockliff pledged to cap Tasmanian government stadium spending at $375 million “and not a cent more.” The new plan is for private sector equity to make up the shortfall, which there will be in spades.

And this pledge was surely born, on a day when the Revised Estimates Report showed the budget is blowing chunks (what’s $200 million plus plus between friends, eh?), of the need to stake a claim on the better-economic-manger higher ground.

His problem however is, as you can see below, that he has already put the state government on the hook for cost overruns. This in the ‘unbreakable deal’ etched in holy AFL scripture and angel tears:

A little louder for those who’ve only just looked up from their headphone-induced life coma:

The Tasmanian Government agrees that it is solely responsible for the costs to develop and construct the Stadium, including any costs which exceed the Estimated Stadium Build Cost.

So.

The first round did not go well for a government that does has some achievements to talk about, but which are now covered by the skunk-stench of the circumstances in which they left the building and various bits of unfinished business that the public rightly may be skeptical of them ever completing.

I might be wrong, and the guy was just run down after A Few Bad Days, but Rockliff sure did not look like an actual Rocky girding up for a five-week fight of his life as stirring music swelled. Dancing, getting ready to throw punches, steely gleam in his eye, flame of desire-to-win illuminating the room. Nope. None of that.

He looked more like highway roadkill as trucks droned on past, impatient to get somewhere else, or at least through the effing roadworks.

Bring on March 23.

Alan Whykes is Chief Editor of Tasmanian Times and watched the first four Rocky movies before deciding that he’d suffered enough.