On the stage of the Wynyard Theatre, the giant polished wood frame and red curtain hanging above, Andrea Courtney, sixth in a line of seven independents seated across the stage, is in fine form. Her green hair shines in the mid-afternoon light, as she jumps up and down in her seat, to answer a question. “The answer is hemp!” she say “Hemp is the key to this.”
Hemp, it must be said, turns out to be the answer to quite a lot of questions for Courtney, independent candidate for Braddon, a mental health worker and local shire councillor. Actually she’s sharp and focused on corruption, lack of transparency and lack of services. But as the afternoon wore on, she couldn’t help coming back to the weed.
It’s a measure of where we’re at that she is the third most idiosyncratic candidate here. In Wynyard’s old theatre, attached to its grand old wharfside hotel, it is independents day at last.
“Well the Liberal Party hasn’t sent a candidate but we did get apologies from…” says Corey Speers, the local kinda everyperson, activist and doer, before reeling off a list of half a dozen Liberals. “So I’ll leave you to decide what that means.”
The Libs may get four, and are aiming for five seats here, and the lead candidate is Premier Jeremy Rockliff. They’ve got nothing to gain from turning up to be the target. So, despite Labor’s presence, the “everyone else” is hanging out their stall. Greens, two Labor, gray Jesus Craig Garland (second most idiosyncratic candidate), the Shooters, Courtney. Even the Jacqui Lambie Experience has turned up in the form of James Redgrave, firefighter, private detective, who is doing the electorate in a little French van called Doddie. Who is the most… you’re way ahead of me.
The candidates were perhaps less than prepared for the barrage of questions that came at them over the two and a half hour event. Wynyard is a fading town of about 8,000 on the far north-west coast, a delicious fading ’70s holdout, with uniformed waitresses offering service at the formica tables of Noah’s Coffee Lounge, rissoles, ham steak and pineapple, and the fearsome Blue Heaven milkshake much in evidence, skegs in mullets and wet boardshorts at the bain-marie, buying lovebites and Hartz limeade while outside, the fierce old skool facade of the Toy Sun Chinese restaurant, blood red with jet black finishings, very Forbidden City, glares over the main street.
But Wynyard has had its sea changers too, and they had turned out for the forum, with their written-out questions and their statistics, and they weren’t letting the candidates get away with what had been a fairly waffly set of opening remarks in the usual style — “a bit about myself, I’m a former deep sea diver who runs a bespoke paper company with my fourth wife Johnette. We’re building a net zero house from driftwood using the skills I developed in ASIS during the ’70s when I assassinated Anwar Sadat. I believe in integrity and we need a new spirit in government, if we could all just get together and sort it out without the politicians. My policies are, oh are we out of time sorry, vote for me.” The identity schtick was a bit in evidence, but the audience wasn’t satisfied. Questions came thick and fast on policies on native forests.
“None of you mentioned the environment, and yet the environment is crucial. My question is in three parts. Firstly native logging…” The Greens’ Darren Briggs got a round of applause for a blizzard of stats on the ridiculous reverse boondoggle that logging now is in Tasmania, the government paying out tens of millions to keep native logging going, rather than transitioning to other products. “The sawmills should have been processing hemp,” said Courtney. Craig made a basic and vague commitment to stopping native logging, to supporting sawmill workers, and for a Parliament where “35 people get together and sort it out, and stop the bickering”.
That became very much the back and forth of the afternoon. The candidates would drift towards folksiness, the audience would keep dragging them back to explicit facts. The Labor duo, Chris Lynch and Adrian Luke, had to spruik party policies that were well to the right of the audience — or at least the vocal part of the audience. Dale Marshall, the fairly cogent Shooters’ candidate, was wont to begin with “well I’m a businessman,” while Redgrave would drift off into anecdote about travels in Doddie, his preference for rugby league, and a few other things.
But Redgrave has at least had the courage to front a panel, which the other Jacqui Lambie candidates have demurred from, usually turning up instead in their black and yellow jackets to sit ostentatiously in the audience. “We’re not going to form government, so there’s no point having policies,” they all announce in suspiciously identical phrasing. This is an obvious kludge devised by the Lambie team to cover what is now its leader’s utterly hybrid politics, a mix of centre-right populism and Green talking points, a product of her origins in hard-right populism and her current embrace by the Australia and Grattan Institutes. This may well turn out to be a magnificently missed opportunity, because this zen “policy-of-no-policy”, far from being some sort of populist challenge to the status quo, really exemplifies the post-politics of the media sphere and the celebration of image.
“When I was interviewed for standing, they were clear with me, that this is to get Jacqui elected in two years time,” Redgrave told me after the event. Oh Christ, I thought, actual news.
“Are you sure you want to say that?” I said. Jonathan Swan I am not.
“Yes, yes, I don’t care.” Redgrave may well get up, as Braddon is Lambie country. But since the network will not bind its elected members, and couldn’t even if it wanted to, and, uh, has no policies in any case, it is all the white card of a white card.
Dammit, I thought, why won’t these people campaign? I mean really, really campaign. With the Hare-Clark system and 35 seats, the Tasmanian House of Assembly is wide open for anyone who wanted to make a real red-hot go at it. Tasmania’s shonkiness — virtually no political donation disclosure until a new law was passed last year which, oh dear, doesn’t cover this election, what a pity, who could have seen that coming — can be counteracted by the combination of the multi-member proportional system and the low quota: 9,000 votes for a seat, which can be got with about 4,500 primaries.
Build a team, start working a year out from the election, and I reckon almost any group could win three seats on a policy of a Henry George tax, Douglas social credit, Vickrey auctions for public tender, the reestablishment of avoirdupois weights and measures, Australian baronetcies, the guinea as currency, the compulsory Portuguese “Hcesar” keyboard, and Kelvin as standard (“it’s a cool 285 degrees out there this morning!”)
The split at the moment is that the organised parties run like machines, while the smaller groups and independents turn up and have sort of a go. Both Courtney and Garland — with a bit of backup — are impressive candidates and would make great members, and Garland may just make it this time. But it’ll be touch and go. With a bit more grunt, an independent or even two in Braddon — a place both conservative and radical, wary of capital-P politics, to an unprecedented degree — would be a sure thing.
But this is in part a product of the other side of the Hare-Clark system, its expression of a 19th century progressivist liberalism, which sees a rational truth as out there, and obscured by politics. Andrew Clark, who designed the system, wanted to ensure that minorities in the two great divisions of the era — labour vs capital, and Catholic vs Protestant — were not disenfranchised by majority tyranny, and, as in the US and Ireland of the time, withdrawing their consent. Politically Hare-Clark is a means for the expression of pure political will, to organise to be heard and represented, to count. But ideologically, it suggests that if we all got into a room together, we’d sort it all out.
Even at the end, several independents had to be pushed to name a policy that was non-negotiable, that they might use their balance of power to get: for Craig it was, eventually, getting salmon fish farms out of the bays; for the Shooters it was moving the proposed (and mega-destructive) Robbins Island windfarm; while Redgrave will not extend confidence and supply unless the Department of Premier and Cabinet is abolished. But overall, it was a more general commitment to transparency and consensus. Which leads to the question around the paradox here, the big 35, and the lack of public engagement: what if you organised a political orgy for campaign junkies and no-one turned up?
Afterwards, we drifted out into the late afternoon light and I headed for the last bus. I imagine they were setting out fingerbowls and hot towels on the white tablecloths of the Toy Sun, families turning up in buttoned white shirts and dresses, the newsagent bundling up the unsold papers for pick up, Disney World of Wonder on TV screens seen through windows from the street. But maybe not. The ’70s is a compliment. It’s the last time we were free. God had died and surveillance had not yet been born. Yahweh no longer squatted inside our head, and the CCTV was not yet perched outside it. Things were still possible, and by some freak of history, they still are in Tasmania. Whether the public has taken advantage of that we’ll find out.
