In Stanley, an impossibly beautiful hamlet on the rugged north-west coast of Tasmania, Scott Morrison could easily be a creature from another planet. Alastair Houston, who owns the Ship Inn, says the prime minister is “so distant, in distance and in everything that goes on … He doesn’t know much about Tasmania.”
Stanley, population 553, is in the federal electorate of Braddon. The Liberals hold the seat on a 4% margin. In the neighbouring electorate of Bass, also Liberal-held, the margin is even tighter. Bridget Archer won the seat in 2019 by just 600 votes.
While the Liberals grabbed the two seats from Labor in 2019, locals aren’t sending the Coalition any herograms. In the north and north-west of Tasmania, it’s reasonably hard to find a voter with a good word to say about Morrison.
In the port town of Burnie, office workers Brad Lucas and Adam Koutsoukos are returning after a lunch break. Lucas doesn’t think much of Morrison. “He’s useless,” he says. “Through all the crises that we’ve had, he’s been useless. I’m trying to do this politely.”
Koutsoukos picks up the excoriation: “I don’t think he’s fit to lead, he’s only interested in consolidating his own power and status. He’s not interested in the people he’s supposedly serving and it just shows through his actions. He’s not a leader.”
The sentiment is similar over the boundary in ultra-marginal Bass. In downtown Launceston, we meet Cassie (who didn’t want to share her last name), passing through Civic Square. “[Morrison’s] an idiot. He’s an absolute flaming idiot. He doesn’t do anything. He just goes on holidays and does whatever he wants. He doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, clearly.”
Patience Stewart concurs. “Morrison? I think he should be buried, quite honestly,” she says. “I have no time for him. He’s reactive, there’s no forward thinking, I find him very difficult to watch now. I turn the television off when he’s on because I don’t have any faith in what he says.”
Back in Braddon, Norris Hayes, in the coastal town of Penguin, feels sorry for a prime minister who has been “solid and consistent” during the pandemic. “I think he gets a hard time,” Hayes says. That’s about as adulatory as it gets.
While it’s hard to find people with a good word to say about the prime minister, it’s also clear that Anthony Albanese and Labor are yet to seal the deal with many disaffected Tasmanian voters. In Penguin, a conversation with a local barber, Linda Murphy, plays out this way. What do you think of Morrison? “Not a lot.” How about Albanese? “About the same.”
Over the road and out for an evening ramble, Sophia Elder thinks Albanese is not out there enough. “When there’s something major going on, you just don’t hear from him at all,” she says. “Where is he? What is he doing? Because I’m from New Zealand, I keep comparing him to [Ardern], she’s there every time something happens, just like that – I’d like to see him do that more. You just don’t hear from him.”
Our Burnie duo, Lucas and Koutsoukos, distil the message we hear frequently. People aren’t negative about Albanese – as many voters were about Bill Shorten in the 2019 campaign. But the Labor leader, and his offering, remain a bit of a mystery.
“Albo … he’s not a very known quantity,” Koutsoukos says. “I think the Labor strategy is let the Liberals hang themselves, let them do the work.”
Lucas interjects: “But that’s done Labor a disservice because we don’t know much about him so we can’t really comment.”
Koutsoukos: “Yeah.”
Lucas: “Whereas the other one, we know a lot about and have a lot to comment on.”
Lucas summarises the local ennui with a memorable observation. He characterises the major parties and their leaders as “two cheeks, same arsehole”.
In an environment of voter disaffection, independents and minor parties are certainly on the radar of local residents. Northern Tasmania is Lambie country. A number of people we speak to struggle to identify their local member, but everyone knows the independent senator, who is now running candidates in the lower house under the banner of the Jacqui Lambie Network.
Kevin Phillips in Burnie says: “I think the Jacqui Lambie party can be compared to the old-school Democrats – keep the bastards honest ... We need that voice. Will she ever become prime minister? No. But we need people like that in our parliament. I would vote for Jacqui Lambie before I’d vote for the Liberals.”
We meet Gwen Grosvenor, a lifelong Liberal voter, at a garden club in Beaconsfield. She thinks Morrison performed well during the pandemic, although in her view he spent too much money. But she likes Lambie as well. “I don’t like Labor. I would never vote Labor. I like the independents. Definitely not [Clive Palmer]. I like Jacqui Lambie.”
Back in Launceston, Patience Stewart, who leans Labor, says she has “great respect” for Lambie. “I feel she’s been through the mill, she’s one of the people. She doesn’t pull any punches, and I respect her for that. I don’t know whether I’d support her for a direct seat but I think Jacqui Lambie has to be in parliament because she’s one of those voices who tells it like it is.”
Pantea (she won’t give her last name) in Burnie is normally a Coalition voter but she is viscerally opposed to vaccine mandates. “I’m frustrated enough not to vote for any of the major parties,” she says. “I’m definitely going with the minors this time. If we lose bodily autonomy we lose everything. There’s nothing left to lose.”
Fish farms and wind farms
Asked to nominate the big issues locally, voters across the two electorates identify rising consumer prices, a shortage of affordable housing and poor health services. Local businesses are also desperately short of staff.
Julian Jacobs, a business owner in Stanley, praises the work ethic of the Braddon incumbent, Gavin Pearce. But he says things have become desperate. “If we can get people, we’ve got nowhere for them to live, with all the people coming back from overseas. I don’t think that problem is going to change quickly either. We’ve got so desperate for housing for our staff that we’ve had to buy houses in the last couple of years to put staff in.”
In the north-west there is also significant controversy about a proposed windfarm development on Robbins Island, and salmon farms in Bass Strait. Alastair Houston and his wife, Kerry, are vocal opponents of the wind development. “The windfarm is currently the biggest threat we feel to our paradise,” Alistair Houston says. “It’s too close to the town. We are all for green energy, all of us are, but we feel we are being threatened by this huge development that doesn’t belong on a beautiful peninsula that is huge for tourism – 100,000 people are drawn here every year because of its beauty and unique history.”
Pearce says he has shared negative community sentiment with the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley. “We had over 100 objections to that [Robbins Island project],” he says. “I can understand their concerns about the balance. Most reasonable people … understand we need that renewable sector and that means windfarms, but where do you draw the line?”
The Liberal incumbent says that’s why there’s a regulatory process under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. On salmon farms in Bass Strait, Pearce says the state government has been trying to move farms away from shorelines. “Some local fishermen in Stanley are all for pushing the farms off the coastline to make sure the waste dissipates,” he says. “If a development is 12km offshore people won’t see it.”
Chris Lynch, the Labor candidate, says a lot of people in Braddon “feel they need to fight for their rights when they get up in the morning”. He says not everyone has the economic, emotional and social support to feel they are experiencing the upside of the economic recovery after the pandemic, and the region needs to balance regional job creation opportunities with strong environmental oversight. He’s conscious that his position sounds like fence sitting. But he says new developments need “calm and considered investigation”.
Lambie says wind turbines should be placed further down the remote west coast rather than “ruining” Robbins Island. She says salmon are now being over-farmed and could “ruin the Tasmanian brand”.
The Jacqui Lambie Network is running candidates in both Bass and Braddon, and their preferences will probably determine the outcome. Lambie predicts she’ll be “queen-maker” on election night. At the time of our visit, she had not yet decided where to direct her support, but she doesn’t hide her dissatisfaction with Morrison and the Liberals.
“Surely Morrison’s got to be gone,” she says. “I know change is a big thing … but quite frankly, the Liberals … have hit rock bottom. They are a very divided party and they are struggling. You can walk around and see change is in the air, but [voters] are just not 100% sold on Albanese.”
Craig Garland, a fisher with a significant local profile, is also running in Braddon. The independent is a vocal opponent of the windfarm and of salmon farming in the north-west – and these days, an opponent of vaccination mandates. He will fund his campaign from income from a reality television program. “I’m a marginal-income fisherman,” he says. “This time around I had nothing. I had to borrow money off friends just to get to this point. I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’ Signs are going to cost you eight or 10 thousand. Then, out of the blue, the Survivor show came along, believe it or not. They needed a couple of boats to conduct their filming … so they hired two boats and that’s freed my next two months up, thank God.”
Over in Bass, Archer says with typical candour “it’s hard to know” whether Morrison is a plus or a minus for her in trying to hold her ultra-marginal seat. But she says it’s her name on the ballot, not his.
“If you want drones and warm bodies you can have that, but if people care about local representation then they should look to the candidate – are they going to have a strong voice in the parliament? I don’t work for Scott Morrison and the Liberal party, I work for the people of Bass.”
Archer stood up to Morrison on a number of issues in the last parliamentary term, but Lambie contends that, if she were serious, she’d quit the Liberal party. Lambie is also telling locals Archer can’t deliver for the seat because she has a strained relationship with Morrison.
The MP says Lambie has tried and failed to recruit her, and she can’t have the argument all ways. On leaving the Liberals, she retorts: “Why should I leave? Why should I go? If your question comes from a place that all people in the Coalition are nasty, I think sometimes that’s a nebulous view … why should I go? Why shouldn’t they go? I have something to bring, I have something to offer and they can make room for me.”
Ross Hart, the Labor candidate who lost narrowly to Archer in 2019, says he’s pushing Labor’s policies on sovereign capability and local manufacturing because they resonate with locals. “People are very interested to see we are trying to reinstate those well-paid secure jobs that used to be here in this community,” he says.
In Beaconsfield, we meet John Farrar. He was a Labor branch president in the mid-1970s when he lived in Victoria. But he thinks Archer has what it takes to hold the seat. “Archer has twice crossed the floor against her party’s intended legislation that would be detrimental to Tasmania but more importantly her constituents,” he says.
“Bridget has that moral and ethical fibre that unfortunately the vast majority of her peer group do not possess.” He says it would be a “criminal injustice” if she lost the seat because locals have had enough of Morrison. “I now vote either for the Greens or an independent such as Jacqui Lambie – although I might just change my mind and vote for Bridget in her re-election bid.”
Back in Launceston, I meet an old friend, Martin Flanagan, a journalist who has moved from Melbourne back home to Tasmania. I ask him for thoughts about the contest. Flanagan calls Morrison a “failed ad man”. He says Anthony Albanese is “real”. He says Archer is real too. “I’ve said to her, she should be leader of the Liberal party. She’s a real person. I don’t think Morrison is. These are times we need to get the best people we can representing all the different viewpoints.”
He says this is a consequential election. “I think we are at a critically low ebb and an historically low ebb. I think throughout the western world we are in a pretty dangerous time. The standard of our elected leaders is dropping. We live in an over-populated world, and an overheating world.
“Joe Biden said about six months ago that one of the great battles of our era is going to be about whether democracy survives. I actually believe in democracy. I worry a lot for my grandkids. What sort of world are we going to be leaving them? It can’t keep going down. People will start looking for other solutions. Something like 82% of Republican voters in the US think Putin is a better leader than Biden.
“This is where we are headed.”
