“A rollercoaster of revelation and despair” was how the Mercury’s David Killick described a week’s sitting of the House of Assembly in an excoriating opinion piece back in June.
“The basic structures which are supposed to ensure accountability and integrity are broken by intent,” wrote Killick, lamenting “the energy and creativity frittered away while we don’t face our real problems… We are funding a protection racket for the powerful. The foundations are rotten, the house cannot stand.”
Killick’s words pack a punch, but apparently not for premier Jeremy Rockliff. He gives no sign any such message has found its way to whatever lies behind his implacable public mask.
Last week saw draft gun laws that run counter to both a national push for tighter controls and the urging of police commissioner Donna Adams to limit gun ownership in Tasmania – the nation’s highest at four weapons per registered owner, plus stolen and other unregistered weapons estimated by police to number in the thousands.
It ought to be shocking that in the wake of the Bondi shootings, police minister Felix Ellis should post an image of himself proudly brandishing a rifle while openly defying legal, medical and police advice on gun ownership. The only advice the government seemed to hear came from gun owners.
It should be shocking, too, that in response to the state’s dire financial state and steadily building crises in housing, education and hospitals, instead of opening itself up to outside scrutiny and advice the government has opted for secrecy. But nothing shocks any more in this mad world.
Government failure becomes a thousand times worse when the Labor Party ceases to function as the official Opposition. The Liberals are floundering because they’ve overstayed their time in power, but what’s Labor’s excuse?
Labor spent a good part of this parliamentary term trying to fasten a “Liberal-Green” tag on the government, apparently in an effort to belittle the Greens and boost its own fraying credentials. But on critical issues Labor, not the Greens, has more frequently aligned itself with the Liberals.
In the August sitting of parliament, while questioning from Independent and Green MPs probed a range of government failures, Labor spent virtually all of a week’s allotted questions on the future of Bell Bay Aluminium – important, but just one of many topics that Labor needs to draw together to bring government to account.
The AFL stadium is a topic Labor has fallen over itself to avoid. We don’t need to discuss whether Tasmania should have an AFL team (of course it should), or whether the Devils need better playing and training facilities than are currently available (of course they do).
But the government is stretching credulity beyond breaking point to insist that these needs can only be met with a brand new stadium costing a billion dollars (or two), and that this stadium must be built at Hobart’s Macquarie Point, and that in Australia’s second driest capital city it must have a roof.
Yet for well over a year Labor has effectively taken itself out of the debate.
For both parties, aside from a competent enough response to the avian flu threat, environmental issues are a black hole. Aquaculture and the state of our waterways, native forest logging and water management, plus Tasmania’s blueprint (actually, the lack of one) for cutting carbon emissions while adapting to a changing climate, rate a mention only in passing.
In 2010, Labor was brave enough to join a coalition with the Greens, which for almost four years delivered innovative, reforming government culminating in an agreement to end the forest wars. That was quickly terminated by the new Hodgman government.
Under Rebecca White the party made gambling reform the centrepiece of its 2018 campaign. Under ferocious attack from gaming interests it gained some ground against the Liberals, but not enough to make a difference in seats.
That was the last gasp of reforming Labor in Tasmania. Two more lost elections saw White ousted by Labor hard man Dean Winter. In July 2025 the electorate showed what it thought of Winter’s “my way or the highway” attitude. While the Green vote held firm and the Independent vote rose 5.7 per cent, Labor crashed to its worst result in living memory.
With Liberals on life support and Labor everywhere except where it counts, this parliament is surviving on the goodwill of Independents and Greens.
History tells us parties can help corral competing interests, and democracy needs Oppositions standing up to be counted on all the big issues. Above all, both Liberal and Labor must open up to new ways of governing. But there are no signs anyone is listening.