It’s on for young and old, down here in Tassie right now. I often describe Tasmanian politics as like a cross between a local Rotary club and a special school. But, as the 1996 documentary of local council elections, Rats in the Ranks, showed, just because politics is local and parochial, doesn’t exclude any of the blood and drama.
Tasmania currently hosts Australia’s only incumbent Liberal government (although, despite the hyperventilating of the left-media, blanket governments of either side are fairly recurrent in Australia), which, against the tide of the state’s hare-brained electoral system (think MMP, but even more Byzantine), has managed to win three successive elections.
But, as state Liberal parties are wont to do, the Tasmanian lot seem hell-bent on pissing it all away.
The Tasmanian government minister who quit the Liberal party on Friday over allegations of bullying and leaks of damaging private messages says she is reconsidering leaving state parliament and may sit as an independent, which could trigger an early election.
These people really are their own worst enemies. First, it was jumped-up weather girl Sue Hickey trying to make it all about her, by ratting on the party which had just got her elected, in order to do a dodgy deal with Labor for the plum Speaker’s job. Then popular leader Will Hodgman decided to walk, handing the towel to Peter Gutwein. Largely thanks to the Covid factor, Gutwein in 2021 defied Cam Slater’s maxim that bald guys don’t win elections. Having won the election, Gutwein threw in the towel, mid-term, too. In between all of this, the Liberals slid into minority government.
Now, former attorney-general Elise Archer’s become the latest spanner in the works.
Former attorney-general Elise Archer announced on Friday that she would resign from the Liberal party and the parliament, but while she has left the party she has not yet tendered her parliamentary resignation to Tasmania’s governor.
Her departure from the government and Liberal party came after Premier Jeremy Rockliff kicked her out of the cabinet, blaming an allegation of bullying by a former staff member, and leaked private messages, one of which he said was “unacceptable by any standard”.
ABC Australia
To be honest, most of the messages are pretty petty stuff: typical office gossip and bitching. Calling Rockliff “too gutless to be leader”, for example. Or deriding former leader Gutwein, apparently after some kind of spat, for his “Glass jaw and insecurities. Knee jerk reactions like a child.” Calling a female adviser an “airhead”.
Much more damaging in the current climate is a message asking a staffer to turn off comments on social media, because she was “sick of victim-survivors”. Because, as we all know, “victim-survivors” are a sainted bunch, who cannot be criticised, under any circumstances.
Ms Archer said the leaked message was referring to victim-survivors who had been sending her abusive messages on social media, not to victim-survivors in general.
“It was meant as ‘I am sick of them attacking me’,” Ms Archer said […]
“I was being hideously attacked with F words and C words too by some on my Facebook page and their Twitter accounts,” she told the ABC on Saturday.
Still, Archer has the backing of prominent advocate Steve Fisher.
Mr Fisher said he accepts Ms Archer’s explanation about the message.
“I believe it’s been taken way out of context,” Mr Fisher said.
“I’ve worked with Elise Archer a lot over the past five years, and she has always been totally survivor-focused in anything that we bought to her.”
Behind the leaks is a clear narrative: that Archer is supposedly a bully who runs a toxic office. Which sounds like every politician, then. Still, it’s claimed that her office has an unusual turnover of staff, even for a politician.
Whoever is doing the leaking, and why, the result is clear: the Liberal government is on the ropes.
A recount in the Hobart-based seat of Clark will be held to elect Ms Archer’s replacement, with fellow Liberal and Hobart City Council Alderman Simon Behrakis likely to win.
But Mr Behrakis won’t be elected before the House of Assembly next sits, meaning Mr Rockliff will have to choose between proroguing the parliament for a third time in this term of government, or facing a likely no-confidence motion when his minority government has one fewer member.
ABC Australia
Archer’s apparent second thoughts on quitting altogether appear aimed at leveraging a change of premier. If, she says, she remains as an independent, she will not guarantee supply and confidence — unless, perhaps, the party dumps Rockliff as leader. Depending on who, she says, the replacement is.
At present, the most widely-viewed contender for replacement leader has been Launceston-based deputy and Treasurer, Michael Ferguson. Yet, Archer has said she sees Ferguson as, “support[ing] the Premier’s actions and my treatment in not affording any procedural fairness in recent days”.
Her comments could provoke a leadership spill by Liberal MPs seeking to avoid an election by electing a leader in whom Ms Archer might express confidence.
Any new leader would also need the support of the other two former Liberals who quit in May to sit as independents.
The prospect of Ms Archer remaining as a hostile independent could also prompt Mr Rockliff to call a snap early election.
The Australian
One thing’s for certain: who needs an opposition, when a government seems so continually determined to queer its own pitch?
