It's a Tassie thing: the upside-down and inside-out Senate race

There are 350,000 voters who select six senators every half-Senate election and it's a weirdly wonderful battle for the crossbench.

The back wall of the Martini café in Burnie is lime green, just one wall, the way they used to do it in the ’70s. It’s been repainted since, but always in the same hue I’m told by the proprietress. You can still do that in Tasmania. The lace curtains go back further.

It’s in an arcade of which Burnie has more, per capita, than Paris — little art deco warrens running inwards. Things just stick around in Tasmania: the gold-bevelled windows of the “manufacturing jeweller” in Ulverstone; the brown-brick and star-shaped mirrors in the Voyager seaside motel’s restaurant; the lolly store in each town; and the railyards around rusting metal chutes folded three storeys high; the old cinema restored and its red velvet-raked seats; the broad green sweep of the racecourse at the edge of town. Sometimes when you’re here, it is impossible to believe that you have not dreamt it, the mirage across a cold sea.

That is no less so than in its politics. Everything is upside down, Ruritanian. The lower house is Australia’s only multi-member system, five times five elected on the Hare-Clark-Robson system, the last of these designations dictating that the five names on a ticket are randomly rotated ballot-by-ballot. When they get there, there’s only about 10 of them, and they all have six ministries and collapse from exhaustion, like wild salmon. The upper house, meanwhile, is a set of 15 single-member electorates with staggered elections, three one year, two the next. It was until recently wholly non-party political.

So when the federal Senate elections come around, the weirdness is exported. There are about 350,000 voters selecting six senators every half-Senate election, two Liberal, two Labor and the magic sixth, which used to be the fifth, the slot which has been taken by Brian Harradine, Bob Brown as a sole Green, and most recently, Jacqui Lambie. The numbers here get very small: Lambie won it in 2019 (after exiting the red house on a section 44 issue) with 31,000 primary votes (for her group ticket) after a heroic 18-month campaign visiting every pony show and church fete — and possibly meeting 30,000 voters in person.

The prize is worth it, since both major sides (Coalition and Labor-Greens) struggle to get the 39 required for a majority in the upper house. The Coalition has 35 (plus NT’s ex-CLP Sam McMahon, now a Liberal Democrat) and the left also 35 (Labor 26, Greens nine). The Greens could pick up two or three, and Labor (outside Tasmania) one. Take the low side, one or two new Greens, none or one Labor, and Labor would still need two senators to pass legislation.

If the Greens and Labor do badly, it would mean Nick Xenophon has returned in South Australia but Rex Patrick has not made it back. That would leave two One Nation, one Xenophon, a possible Queensland sixth, such as Clive Palmer or Campbell Newman (now a Liberal Democrat), Jacqui Lambie, and the Tasmanian sixth. Labor’s chance of getting much done, should it win, may depend on that final seat.

The small vote means the field is wide open. The contenders include Lambie team candidate Tammy Tyrrell, One Nation candidate Steve Mav, United Australia Party’s Diane Adams, Labor’s No. 3 Kate Rainbird, good old auntie Eric Abetz, dropped by the Liberals to number three slot and running a below-the-line campaign, and Leanne Minshull, of new outfit The Local Party.

Were Lambie up for election, she’d be the strong favourite, and maybe a few will think that they’re ticking the box for her. But with a largely unknown candidate in Tyrrell — Lambie’s office manager and one who doesn’t have Lambie’s strident manner and style — her primary will dip. A quota is about 50,000 votes. Lambie got 31,000 primaries last time, a 0.6 quota, with One Nation next on 12,000 primaries (these are all rounded figures), UAP on 10,000, Shooters on 6000, Bernardi conservatives 4000, Fraser Anning’s mob 1500, and then on down.

Lambie won the seat on the 139th count. Since she’s the only one of that mob who can get some of these preferences, she just needs to stay ahead of the pack to prevail. That will be a relief, since Tyrrell might, with bad luck, lose a quarter of the previous primary, down to about 22,000. But no one really knows. This is essentially a test to see how much charisma can be transferred by a group ticket — and a makeover which has made Tyrrell look eerily similar to Lambie herself.

There would be a chance, then, for minor parties to muscle up and leapfrog Lambie/Tyrrell, but that would take more organisation than has so far been displayed. The UAP campaign was launched last week by Craig Kelly in Launceston, out the front of Neil Pitt’s menswear, a one-storey-and-mezzanine shop, nevertheless with its own café, unchanged since the ’60s, pure Mad Men (magical, as I said). But the phone hasn’t been answered by them since.

One Nation is making a strong push to get organised, but Senate hope Mav is a perennial candidate who has sailed under several flags and does not enthuse many. However, since UAP is so weak, One Nation may benefit from Lambie’s rejection of anti-vax positions, and “great reset” conspiracy stuff, all growing like topsy in Tassie, especially in the north.

That leaves Labor, which may benefit from a national surge, push towards 2.5 quotas on group primaries, a local alt vote for Rainbird — Tasmanians love to vote below the line, showing off really — but who may be less likely to get populist votes.

Minshull — ex-Bob Brown staffer, Greenpeace, Australia Institute and now publican of a groovy mountainside pub — started The Local Party with TV producer, Australia Institute (compulsory), ex-Lambie comms director Anna Bateman, to tie greenish politics to democratic renewal, with rules that candidates had to be community-involved before standing, and that citizen juries will determine policy. To have a chance it will have to grab equal handfuls of Liberal, Labor and Greens votes — one can’t see it getting much of the minor right parties, and it remains a tall order, but once again a strong result would tell us what we don’t yet about the demand for a politics that is not exactly teal, but not Green.

And then there’s Abetz. Dumped to third after lording it over the inner party for so long he’s not going down without a fight. His wilfully tacky billboards — a square photo with blue writing on white: “Eric Abetz Puts Tasmania 1^st” — are his main effort to date. He can usually rely on a solid base in the Christian Reformed Church network, founded by extreme Dutch Calvinists in the 1950s, but they are also loyal to the Liberal Party machine. Plus a lotta lotta Tasmanians love putting Eric last. It’s their democracy (silly) sausage.

So knock out the Shooters and UAP and it’s still a four-way between Local, Labor, Tyrrell, and One Nation. That may be a few thousand votes to be the crossbench of the crossbench. Stakes are high and time is tight, and once done, like Shangri-La or the land of Misfit Toys, Tasmania will fade behind the lime green mists once again, land of lost teashops going back below the line for the duration.