As you know, Tasmania and South Australia both go to the polls on 20 March. Faced with this choice, the Antony and Kerry show has opted to go to Hobart. Why?
The result down there is, in broad terms, almost a fait accompli: neither side gets a majority, Liberals with a plurality, we’ll have to wait a few days to see who the Greens support to form government (or might we see a ‘grand coalition’?)
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South Australia, on the other hand, could be interesting.
My guess is that opinion polls will, as in Queensland last year, make the result, by election day, appear to be up for grabs. Mike Rann might win comfortably as Anna Bligh did, or … maybe not.
There will be a huge swing against the Rann government, of at least five percent (maybe much more than that), and seats will fall. Enough to change government? Perhaps.
Don’t forget, the SA Electoral Office has done its best to eradicate the incumbent’s on-paper two percent electoral advantage.
On the other hand, Tasmania’s Hare-Clark delivers its own rewards, with surprise candidates dropping out/getting up thanks to personal votes. Probably Antony enjoys it more.
One day the ABC will be able to clone Antony. In the meantime, Dean Jaensch will make an excellent SA stand-in.
(And he’s home-grown, always important to folks in that state.)
- Recent 2010 outlook.
Anyone faced with a choice between Tassie and South Aussie, the answer is a no-brainer.
I’m not biased, of course.
Anyone who is tired of Hobart is tired of life.
It couldn’t be the Tasmanian wine could it?
The corollary for SA 2010 could end up being Qld 2006 not 2008 – slight swing against yielding almost nothing in terms of net seats. Tasmania will definitely be more fun in any case. Some good local members can probably pick up votes on their new boundaries, esp transferees unaccustomed to having Labor representation before.
I think it is a bit premature to (more or less) write off Labor’s chances of a plurality of either votes or seats in Tassie – after all the only polls we have had here are EMRS polls which are not very reliable or frequent. The swing should be big here but the Libs need almost a 9% swing to get the most votes and that would be about the 3rd biggest swing in Tas history. It still could fall short of that although there’s quite a few reasons to project it into low double digits a la 1996 state election in reverse.
Centrebet still have Labor favourites to be “the party which provides the next Premier” (bets settled at swearing in) but the odds have closed a lot, now at 1.77 vs 2.00. I’ll be interested to see where the odds end up as the betting market was extremely slow to smell the coffee in 2006.