WHICH GOVERNMENT – OUR WORST OR OUR BEST?
Richard Flanagan, 5 August 2025
Tasmania is faced with the strangest of choices: a government of our worst —or a government of our best.
Our worst? The Liberal and Labor parties who have brought our island to its knees.
Our best? Parliamentarians like Ruth Forrest, Meg Webb, Mike Gaffney, Kristie Johnson, Craig Garland, Peter George, Rosalie Woodruff, Vica Bayley, Bridget Archer and Ella Haddad joining in a cross party coalition.
That would be a government Tasmanians might believe in. That they might trust. That would be capable of leading us out of the mess we find ourselves in.
But Liberal and Labor insist government must be by them on their terms only. Yet it is neither law nor rule in the Westminster tradition of parliamentary democracy that one minority group of elected members can insist that all others must agree with their policies simply because they say so.
It is hard to fathom, for example, how Labor, which secured only 25.9% of the primary vote, its worst vote in 120 years, thinks it is its right to dictate terms to a crossbench that secured 34%.
Equally, it is implausible that a party as innumerate and economically reckless as the Liberals, a party that failed to increase it’s hapless minority position by even one seat in the election, would think it has earnt the right to govern again without any check on its arrogance and incompetence. As even the conservative Australian newspaper was forced to admit on Tuesday, in Tasmania ‘neither the Liberals nor Labor deserve to be trusted as parties of government.’
In times of great turmoil and threat, such as war, governments of national unity are formed across party lines in recognition that the normal rules of party loyalties are incapable of dealing with the threat to the nation. Out goes the dead wood from which all parties are jerry-built and in comes the best talent that parliament has to deal with the emergency.
And that’s what Tasmanians should be demanding happen in Tasmania now.
For we in Tasmania today face a frightening emergency that is going to impact every Tasmanian’s life over the next decade. The catastrophic incompetence of successive Liberal governments now see us facing an extraordinary financial crisis. Last year our total revenue was $9 billion. By 2028 Tasmania is looking at a $13 billion state debt. It gets worse. When government businesses such as the haplessly inept Tasports and the craven MPDC are added in, we have, according to the budget papers, a further $9 billion debt, taking us to $22 billion total debt.
What does this debt mean? Five weeks ago, the Tasmanian Treasury released it’s ‘Pre-Election Financial Outlook’ (PEFO). A bureaucratic report that reads more like a primordial scream of horror, Treasury declared in the unreported page 30 that unless serious measures are taken now, by 2028 ‘the challenge’ will ‘equate to’—
“• a reduction in total operating expenses of approximately 25 per cent; or
• an increase in State taxation of approximately 250 per cent; or
• a reduction in the State Service of approximately 20 700 FTE [jobs]”
If Jeremy Rockcliff ran his farm the way he runs government there would be no dirt left to grow spuds.
All those business supporters of the Marinus link—are they willing to pay for it with a 250% increase in payroll tax and land tax?
All those people backing the $1.86 billion stadium and calling for ‘stable’ government—are they willing to pay for it with the worst public health system in Australia having a quarter of its services cut? With their rego going up by 250%?
If you want to know what that sort of Tasmania looks like, I can tell you. It looks like the depressed, broken Tasmania of the 1990s. It looks like business after business closing, regional towns shrinking, net population loss year after year, savage cuts to health and education and essential services as government after government battled to pay down the debt, all of it leading to a Tasmanian society that was defeated and lost.
And why? Because of a series of eerily similar irresponsible Liberal governments led by Robin Gray in the 1980s, successive 1990s governments were left with the staggering bill and no choice but to slash and cut and sack. Ordinary Tasmanians paid for it with a decade long recession, with their jobs, lives and dreams.
Some have noted that there is already a majority in the house who share identical policies and beliefs, are similarly deeply incompetent, uncaring and completely out of touch with Tasmanian life, and hate all crossbenchers.
That’s the Liberal and Labor Party. They could just get honest with Tasmanians and form government together.
But then, if that happened, it would give the whole game away. It would be clear to everyone why our poor island has been brought so low. It would be clear who really was to blame for the instability, the poverty, the repeated failures of government services, the environmental destruction and the corruption.
We don’t have to accept our only choice is between the incompetence and chaos that has distinguished the previous Liberal governments, or a government led by Labor, a party with the moral spine of a rubber duck that has allowed itself to be reduced to producing advertorials for salmon corporations or ringing endorsements of key Liberal policies.
Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system was devised by the great Tasmanian Andrew Inglis Clark to give power to the people in a more democratic way. It was intended to act as a check on mass parties which he rightly saw as a danger to democracy. We need to honour our democracy and the result it delivers by showing a largeness of imagination and hope: with the best of our elected representatives leading us—and not the very worst.
If we could have the courage to dream that, to know it is possible that our true leaders can lead us rather than zombie parties that continue to defer to distant corporations it is only a matter of time before it becomes reality.
But if we don’t we are condemning ourselves to living in the nightmare of the 1990s forever. We have real leaders in our parliament. And it is time we looked to them to form government, rather than the corrupted clients of distant corporations.
Image supplied courtesy Richard Flanagan.
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