Candidates were announced today for the periodic Legislative Council elections in Montgomery, Nelson and Pembroke to be held in three weeks’ time.
Thirteen candidates will contest seats in this election, including five in Montgomery, just three in Nelson and another five in Pembroke.
In the north-western / central coast seat of Montgomery, former Senator Stephen Parry appears to be the favourite to replace outgoing Liberal Leonie Hiscutt. Parry will be looking to ‘do an Abetz’, transitioning from Senate dumpee to comfortable seat in the Tasmanian State Parliament.
Trading on the family name – ‘Hiscutt, a name you can trust’ – is challenger Casey Hiscutt standing as an independent. Aiming to continue his mother’s 12-year legacy, he is currently a Central Coast councillor.
The remainder of the field have all stood in previous elections for the House of Assembly for their respective parties (Briggs – Greens; Pickin – SFF) and as an independent (Burnett).
In the southern Hobart seat of Nelson stretching from Sandy Bay to Kingston, independent Meg Webb is the likely winner following a strong first term in the Legislative Council. Her challengers are Greens’ Nathan Volf and Liberal Marcus Vermey, both unsuccessful candidates at last year’s House of Assembly election.
Pembroke is another southern seat, made up of the inner suburbs of Hobart on the eastern shore of the River Derwent.
This is potentially a three-way contest. Sitting member Luke Edmunds has just one term under is belt and a string of Labor fizzles to his name, such as the stadium backflip and recent whining about the container deposit scheme the party actually voted for.
Independent candidate Tony Mulder is a former Legislative Council Member for Rumney who was in office from 2011 to 2017 before being ousted by Labor’s Sarah Lovell. He has been biding his time as a Clarence City councillor, although in a statement in March he described himself a reluctant candidate.
“In the absence of a Liberal Party nominee or a right-leaning independent, voters should not be forced to choose between a current and a former member of the Parliamentary Labor Party,” Mulder said.
The former Labor member he refers to is Allison Ritchie, who was elected as MLC for Pembroke in 2001. She resigned due to ill health in 2009 before eventually leaving the ALP and recontesting unsuccessfully in 2013 as an independent. She is currently Deputy Mayor of Clarence and standing again as an independent candidate.
Once again the Greens and SFF look to be making up the numbers with both parties unlikely to deploy major campaigning resources to a contest they cannot win.
Voting and Counting
Voting in these elections is compulsory for more than 78,000 Tasmanian electors, with figures for each division as follows:
Montgomery: 29,824
Nelson: 25,560
Pembroke: 23,438
Early voting options are available from Monday, ahead of polling day on Saturday 24 May 2025.
Next week, all eligible electors will be mailed an information pack containing the names of candidates, details for early voting and polling locations on polling day.
Further information about ways to vote in this election is now available on the TEC website.
Following a range of amendments to the Electoral Act in 2024, the process for counting postal votes has changed. The Act now requires the Commission to verify that no postal voter has already voted through other means before counting postal votes.
The counting of postal votes returned before polling day will no longer take place on polling night and will commence later in the following week.
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