Ah, Tasmania. It’s a special place – in every sense of the word. A stunningly beautiful place, with abundant wildlife, some of the best (if cold) beaches you’ll ever see and a food and wine industry that’s the envy of Mainland Australia. It’s also home to the Most Bogan Suburb in Australia, according to ‘Boganologist’ Housos star Paul Fenech.
So bogan that the local boy racers were out doing burnouts on a brand-new bridge, just hours after it was finally completed.
The brand new $786 million Bridgewater Bridge has been targeted by hoons, less than 30 hours after it opened to traffic.
Police are investigating an incident of reckless driving that occurred around 1:15am Tuesday in the northbound lanes of the bridge.
Video footage posted on Snapchat and subsequently shared with Pulse shows a vehicle performing multiple burnouts in a single location while traffic continued to flow in the opposite direction.
The person who filmed the dangerous driving decorated the video with celebratory party popper emojis.
Stay classy, Tasmania. At least, classier than the politicians just down the road from Bridgewater.
Tasmanian politics blends the vicious in-fighting of small-town local council and the charm of an early 20th-century asylum. Not helping things is our Byzantine Hare-Clark voting system, which makes MMP look straightforward. The system is explicitly designed to make stable, majority governments near-impossible. And, hoo boy, does it show.
Premier Jeremy Rockliff has been forced out of the state’s top job after a majority of MPs supported a no-confidence motion in his leadership.
In fact, the vote was split down the middle. It took the Speaker’s casting vote to pass it – and that was a foregone conclusion to anyone familiar with Tasmanian politics.
Speaker Michelle O’Byrne is a Labor hack, through-and-through.
“I have voted with my party since assuming the chair in 2024,” she said.
“I am a member of the Labor Party. When I was elected to this position, it was made clear to this house and the public that despite no longer attending the caucus and strategy meetings of the Labor Party, that I would always vote with them.
“No one in this chamber could realistically expect me to provide confidence to a Liberal government.”
Even if it means to throw the state in a chaos with no functional government at all.
Because, complicating the whole tawdry affair is the fact that the governor is currently out of the state. So, it’s been thrown in the lap of an acting governor, who’s barely taken up the job as a recently appointed Chief Justice.
If the Liberals were governing with a minority, holding just 14 seats in the 35-seat chamber, Labor are in an even more shaky position, with just 10 seats. In fact, it’s Labor’s near-irrelevance that precipitated the crisis.
The cause of the crisis is a too-clever-by-half gambit from a relevance-deprived Labor, trying to capitalise on the last, narrow, state election win and the recent federal Labor win, by challenging the cross-bench. As is the way of the Hare-Clark system, the Liberals only narrowly won the last election and had to form government with the support of cross-benchers. Labor leader Dean Winter was worried that Labor, having lost a straight 15 years of elections, was losing its status as the ‘real’ opposition party.
So, Winter challenged them to back a no-confidence motion in Premier Jeremy Rockliff. The proximate reasons are: the state’s deteriorating budget, the fracas over a new stadium at Hobart (conditional for the state getting an AFL team), and the cock-up that has seen the state’s brand-new ferries mothballed in Scotland for at least two years.
If they refused to back the motion, he said, “they will show Tasmanians that a vote for anyone except Labor is a vote for the Liberals”.
So, here we are, being herded to an election nobody wants. Tasmanians’ third round at the polls, in state and federal elections, in just over a year.
“This will be an election that Tasmanians don’t want, and Tasmania cannot afford,” [Rockliff] said.
“Be that on Mr Winter’s head. This has been a selfish grab for power of which Tasmanians will look upon very poorly indeed.
“I’ve got a lot more fight in me. We have built a better Tasmania, we have invested in health, we have invested to keep children safe, we have invested in our schools, in community safety and we have created an economy that’s leading the nation with record low unemployment.
“I cannot let Mr Winter’s selfish grab for power destroy what we have built over the past decade.”
For his part, Winter is self-righteously arguing that he had no other option. Spare us the bullshit: this is grubby politics at its lowest and it’s Tasmanian voters who are copping it.
