There have been a number of wins with this recent July election. I’ve also needed to revise a few previously held views!

The Tasmanian Liberal Party has now won five successive state general elections for which the Saturday polling dates were 15 March 2014, 3 March 2018, 1 May 2021, 23 March 2024 and 19 July 2025. On each occasion the Liberal Party leader became the Premier or was confirmed as such, Will Hodgman (2014-20) Peter Gutwein (2020-22) and Jeremy Rockliff (since April 2022).

On each election night, the leader claimed victory for his party, but the 2025 election differed from the others in that the Labor leader did not concede defeat. For that reason, I think historians will say that the recent election was not determined on polling day (Saturday 19 July): it was determined on Tuesday 19 August when the House of Assembly met and, by a vote of 24 to 10 determined that Rockliff should remain Premier.
Some of the winners and losers from this election will be assessed differently by different political analysts. For my part there are four winners, the Liberal Party, Jeremy Rockliff, the Hare-Clark electoral system and Tasmania’s refusal to go along with the current fad

of supposing that fixing the term of parliament is a genuine democratic reform. The four losers are the Labor Party, Dean Winter, party-list forms of proportional representation (PR) and fixed-term parliaments.
It is true that the terms of parliament for states/territories on the Australian mainland are fixed at four years but there are two lower houses where proposed fixing has been rejected. They are the federal House of Representatives and the Tasmanian House of Assembly. Let me, therefore, consider what would have happened if Tasmania’s term had been fixed at four years.
In the first week of June 2025, I read a story in The Australian newspaper by its Tasmanian correspondent, Matthew Denholm. Its headline was “Premier at mercy of House result”. It began with the assertion that “Tasmanian Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff appears to have lost the confidence of the House of Assembly.” As events unfolded, it transpired that Rockliff did, indeed, lose that confidence. Labor’s leader Dean Winter moved a motion of no confidence in Rockliff which was carried by 18 votes to 17.

Now suppose Tasmania’s lower house had a fixed term of four years. Rockliff would have been replaced as Premier, and the parliamentary term would have proceeded with someone else leading the state. That is what happened when the energetic reformist Nick Greiner was kicked out of the office of NSW Premier in June 1992. His lacklustre successor John Fahey kept the Liberals in office, but his government was defeated in March 1995.

In Tasmania, by contrast, the state’s constitution gave Rockliff the opportunity to go to the Governor, Barbara Baker, and seek a dissolution. She gave it to him. We now know that Rockliff took his opponents to the cleaners, so to speak, and prevailed. What had been an 18-17 vote against him in early June became a 24-10 vote in his favour in late August. That to me is democracy. That is why I do not support any further fixing of parliamentary terms in Australia.

Back on Thursday 3 July, there was published in Switzer Daily an article by me titled “Tasmanian election on 19 July impossible to predict”. It included this paragraph: “I have been through all the records of early elections in every Australian jurisdiction and discover that this is the second earliest in my lifetime. Back when I was a schoolboy there was a Queensland state election on 19 May 1956. The then Labor split caused an early election to be held on 3 August 1957. The present Tasmanian dates are 23 March 2024 for the most recent election and 19 July 2025 for the current one. The big difference is that the 1957 Queensland election was expected to create stability - in which it fully succeeded. By contrast, the current Tasmanian situation is a mess.”

The view that Tasmania is in a semi-permanent political mess was the conventional view at the time I wrote those words. I now wish to revise them. This early election has pulled the state out of any perceived mess. It has done so through the skill of Jeremy Rockliff combined with his ability to call this early election – an ability that was denied to Nick Greiner. Historians, therefore, will record that Rockliff has been greatly under-estimated just as Greiner has been greatly over-estimated.

There is another opinion of mine that I now wish to revise. In my Switzer Daily article published on Thursday 14 August “How the House was won: Tasmania finalises its election results” (LUKE, show in blue) I repeated a prediction I had made that Rockliff would not still be Premier in April 2026. I now cancel that. I can now see no reason why Rockliff would not still be Premier for the full four years of this parliamentary term. He could easily be Premier in April 2029 when he will celebrate seven years of his holding that office.

The fourth winner from this election is the Hare-Clark electoral system. In place continuously since 1909 I have often described it as the original and the best PR system in the world. So, I sum up the result by saying that the biggest party in votes, the Liberal Party, has emerged with 40% of the votes and 40% of the seats and it will be a stable minority government. The second biggest party in votes is Labor, and it is still the official Opposition. Labor secured 26% of the votes and 29 per cent of the seats while the Greens have won 14% of the votes and 14% of the seats. In addition, there is now in the House of Assembly a member of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party – Carlo Di Falco. He has secured one of the seven seats in the rural division of Lyons.

I wrote above that “the four losers are the Labor Party, Dean Winter, party list forms of PR and fixed term parliaments”. Back in 1906 the Tasmanian Labor party secured only 26% to of the vote before taking off into being the normal majority party. In 1909 it secured 39% – and the rest is history. Labor is now back to 26% of the vote, having learnt that it is most unwise to bring on a no confidence vote from such a weak position of having only ten members in a lower house of 35. Consequently, Winter has lost his post as Leader of the Opposition, having been replaced by Josh Willie.

Finally, why do I mention party-list forms of PR? Essentially my take on PR is that proportional representation is a concept which is neither good nor bad. It takes different forms, some good, some bad. Tasmania has a good form – as we have now learnt again. The world’s worst form of PR is that by which the Israeli Knesset is elected. It has produced bad government as the whole world now fully understands.