By Tom Flanagan
HOBART — The February 1 Tasmanian state election, in which the Liberal Party increased its primary vote by 7.4% to 54.3%, has implications for greens and other progressives working towards an ecologically sustainable and socially just future.
Current figures indicate that the Liberals have won 19 seats, Labour 10, and Green Independents four, with two still in doubt. (Green scrutineers think Di Hollister will retain the doubtful seat in Braddon and maintain Green parliamentary representation at its pre-election level of five.)
In comparison to the May 1989 state election, the latest available figures show that the Green Independents' vote dropped from 17.1% to 12.8%. This means one in four Green Independent voters in 1989 did not vote for the Greens this time.
The Labor Party's vote dropped from 34.7% to 29.1%, reflecting an abandonment of Labor by about one in six of its 1989 voters.
While the Green Independents are heartened by the re-election of at least four of the five Green MPs elected in 1989, their apparent acceptance that their support should slump in hard economic times indicates a weakness.
The Greens suffered a voter backlash for keeping Labor in office while it slashed funding of government services and retrenched 2100 public servants. They were undermined by their association with the Labor government and its "hard decisions".
The achievements of the 1989 accord with Labor now look very shaky. While Labor made some concessions on environmental matters, these are now under threat from the new Liberal government, which says it will permit mineral exploration in the 620,000 hectares included in national parks since 1989 and will open up 360,000 hectares of forest for logging.
Meanwhile, the cost of in effect supporting Labor's social service cutbacks may be a big setback to the process of building a political alternative to challenge the Labor-Liberal agenda.
The Green Independents are now squarely confronted with the question of whether they are prepared to accept the domination of the political agenda by the business sector, and therefore be subject to the same overall policy constraints as Labor and Liberal, or whether they are prepared to challenge the status quo and put the community first.