Jacqui Lambie and her underlings could do big things for Tasmania. Instead they’re acting like Liberal fanboys

Dear reader, should you get a little sad that there is no more Monty Python, can I suggest you read the transcript of the press conference by the Tasmanian state branch of the Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN), published by the Tasmanian Times. It is one of the most genuinely funny things you will read in recent times. 

Having won three seats, from voters allegedly sick of the existing parties, and with Liberal leader Jeremy Rockliff having no real capacity to form stable government without them, the Lambies made not a single concrete demand of a battered and beleaguered Liberal Party. 

The written agreement not only commits the JLN to supporting confidence and supply, but notifying the government if it intends to vote against it on other bills. At the press conference on Monday, the group’s de facto state leader Andrew Jenner laid it out:

Journalist: Jeremy Rockliff wants confidence and supply. To give him that, what do you want in return?

Andrew Jenner: I just want to work with him at the moment. I mean, we’re just getting our feet under the desks. You know, there’ll be times when we will be asking for our own agendas and things that we feel that are important to the Tasmanian public. But we can’t give you that answers just yet.

Journalist: [You’ll give Rockliff a written agreement] in return for what?

Jenner: No, in [re]turn for nothing at the moment, apart from working with him.

Pathetic. But on message. The Lambies went to the election with no policies, and a faux naif pitch about not having access to government documents etc, as if they couldn’t read a newspaper or look at the state budget online. 

Commentators are saying that Rockliff can’t believe his luck, you only get one JLN in your life etc etc, but it’s a bit more gnarly than that. Lambie relies on Liberal preferences to be elected to the Senate, as she did for her (now-expelled from the JLN) co-Senator Tammy Tyrrell.

Thus in the 2018 Tasmanian election, watching the JLN effort, I witnessed what was either the worst run campaign in modern history, or a deliberate throw of the election, for the then 25 seat state Parliament. The JLN’s failure to take the fifth seat in Braddon, its for the win, allowed the Liberals to take three seats there, and form bare majority government. 

Had the JLN taken even one seat, it would have held the absolute balance of power, and could have made demands. But, as this week’s episode shows, its member don’t want to make demands. They don’t want to be in that position. “I was told in no uncertain terms that the purpose of this is to help Jacqui get elected in two years time,” James Redgrave, a Braddon JLN candidate told me, during this election campaign.

That result involves not pissing off the Libs so much that they divert their preferences. Lambie, or her candidates, get 30,000 primary votes in each campaign. It never changes. It’s practically the same people (except those over 45 in Burnie who have of course died of old age). Lambie and JLN always need that bump up. 

The de facto leadership of Andrew Jenner dovetails well with that imperative. He’s a Conservative in the UK, a former mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead, to London’s west, and a magistrate with locking up powers of youf, as he emphasised. A shires Tory from Windsor and a lay magistrate: it doesn’t get more “shire Tory” than that. 

People are jumping up and down screaming, with all the state’s problems, is this what they think the Lambie voters voted for? The melancholy conclusion has to be not necessarily not. Lambie’s steady vote seems to be overwhelmingly an affirmation of Lambie’s personal style, the garrulous assertiveness not backed up by too many facts at the fingertips. 

Yet to say that’s all they do want is to renounce the full complexity of politics. Part of the political process is to move public sentiment from fatalism to demand, and that’s what a good populist party occupying the Lambie slot could have done — and then presented Rockliff with a set of six non-negotiable demands for extending confidence and supply. 

Such an outfit would have demanded — leaving aside left and green demands — raised taxes on the gambling, salmon, mining and tourism industries, and an expanded deficit, to cross-fund a state-owned home builder, the reopening of community health clinics (if necessary with nurse-practitioners, rather than unobtainable GPs), the funding of preventative health measures, and campaign funding and disclosure laws. 

Better health, housing and integrity are the things Tasmanians very much want, and the absence of a party in the swing position willing to demand it and push the envelope is a real missed opportunity, and a mild tragedy for Tasmania. Many voters may not know how to achieve these things, but that’s not their job. It’s the job of an insurgent party to be something more than Jeremy Rockliff fanboys.

That said, one has sympathy for anyone at state politics level, because they face a series of impossible demands. The truth is that Tasmania now suffers from both the neoliberalisation of the Australian Commonwealth and the widening inequality between centre and periphery, not least in expectations. Tasmania’s problems need, in the first instance, a federal solution, and in longer term, a more radical rethink about how life is lived. 

The problems are circular and complicated. Tasmania’s health system is suffering from a lack of primary care doctors. Why? Decades ago, people went away to uni and came back to be GPs in their community. Less global mobility, more return. Now? Medical training is national and global portable intellectual capital. Tasmania’s charms are not sufficient to retain those who have it. Same now, with agency and specialised nursing. 

This leaves Tasmania with permanent shortages, which means huge expenses on FIFO locums ($1,500-$2,500 a day for GPs, $4,000 for specialists), and an increased load on hospital emergency departments as primary care outlets. This is occurring in a creaky old monolithic health system, neoliberalised in all the wrong bits, while left inflexible in other parts, and unprepared for an era of increased demand for specialist service and, put bluntly, greater expectations of survival. 

The housing system is similar. In the post-WWII years, there was no question that a peripheral place such as Tasmania would have to have substantial public housing, with substantial federal involvement. In the neoliberalisation of what was once a Commonwealth, that imperative falls away, and so there is a permanent housing gap. 

Much of this could have been brought to a pitch by Lambie and her offsider at the federal level, with two vital Senate crossbench votes. In a way, it’s not fair to blame Lambie for it. Tasmania’s major party senators don’t make much of a ruckus as state’s representatives, and that probably includes the Greens to a degree. 

But Lambie’s the one who campaigned as a “Tasmania firster”, and she has really never got these matters to the boil. She got the state-to-federal housing debt — $150 million — knocked off. But this standard accounting write-off could have been accompanied by a substantial emergency housing fund offered in addition, if Lambie had been willing to push the issue.

Ditto with health. Andrew Wilkie has called on the federal government to specifically fund the reconstruction of the Tasmanian health system, which essentially needs to rebuild itself while maintaining business as usual. Really, health should have passed from state to federal management decades ago.  

Better health care should be demanded for Tasmanians as Australian citizens, and the politics of rights mobilised. That could have been the politicisation of Lambie’s “I’ve had a gutful” routine. But that would require its actual application of demand. In fact, Lambie’s angry routine tends to match the learnt fatalism of many voters. It serves as a release valve for an unchanging situation, not as a process for real change itself. 

Well, maybe the Lambies will surprise us. But we are not filled with hope. On these core non-left/green issues, there’s no plan, no agenda, no sense of urgency. And on matters such as native logging, dirty salmon farming, and the gambling industry’s open slather, they look like being a conventional boosterish pro-business, anti-regulation group, who will allow Rockliff to go to the right, and support Eric Abetz when he takes over in 2025. 

The question is whether this will buttress Lambie in Canberra, as Tammy Tyrrell drifts like a banshee through the corridors of exile. Or whether this near demented complacency — “we’re just getting our feet under the desk”, don’t make me quote the Silly Party sketch — and lack of assertion of actual politics at the state level will finally create some sort of demand on its Dear Leader, who has been selling sizzle with the promise of steak for a long time now; perpetual anger perpetually denying action. 

Should the Jacqui Lambie Network be demanding more for Tasmania? And what about Lambie herself up in Canberra? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.