Who were they who did this to us? In the end it wasn’t a party or a movement, but a small clique of cronies and bully boys and bully girls, the members and their families and their mates and even their mates’ children, the spinners and the standover men with their large salaries in government agencies. They treated parliament and its perks and positions as their own magic pudding. They lied, they deceived, they sold our soul for a mess of pottage, all in order that they could keep themselves in privilege.

It’s hard to believe that for over eleven years we have let the Tasmanian ALP run our island as if it was a sub branch of Norm Gallagher’s BLF.

But we did.

— Richard Flanagan, The Tasmanian Times, today.

Could Tasmanian Labor be felled by a nine-year-old girl? Today Bruce Montgomery suggests so in Crikey. He says a single event, lasting less than a minute — an ALP robocall telling young Alice Bellamy that a vote for the Greens would be a vote to legalise heroin in Tasmania, the story then splashed on the front page of The Advocate — “represents the nadir of Tasmanian Labor’s appalling campaign …”

Pundits across the board predict that Labor will be cut at the knees at Saturday’s poll. The challenge for the party ahead?

Says Montgomery, it’s time to “bring younger and fresher minds to the incident room of Tasmanian Labor politics, to hold a post-mortem to determine where it unravelled and to start the process of re-education and renewal.”

Enough’s enough.