7 August 2025

Demands for the Hare Clark voting system to be replaced should be rejected because it is one of the, if not the, most representative of voter’s intentions. The system is more likely to produce a power-sharing House of Assembly but history shows that’s when reforms and progress are made.

The Liberal and Labor majoritarian parties don’t like sharing power and so every election they warn chaos will result from a party not having a majority. And when we wait two weeks for the ballot count to be completed and, we don’t know if Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff’s government will last beyond the Assembly’s first sitting day, the majoritarians are quick to say we need to change the system.

That’s another way of saying we don’t like what the people have voted, so we’ll change the system to get the result we want. Andrew Inglis Clark – who added to English lawyer Thomas Hare’s ideas for a preferential electoral system – wanted to guard against tyranny by limiting the power of governments and parliaments. And he wanted every elector to have as much of an equal say as possible.

The Hare Clark system was designed to ensure the representation of a wide range of voices in the House of Assembly. At the 19 July election, the Liberal party won 39.9% of the vote and 40% of the seats; Labor, 25.9% and 28.6%; independents, 15.3% and 14.3%; Greens, 14.4% and 14.3%.

Voters did not want a majority government. On 19 July, 31% of Tasmanians voted for the Greens, independents or Shooters and Fishers. If Tasmanians had elected a majority government in March 2024, they  wouldn’t have the benefit of the respective reports by independent economists Saul Eslake about the state’s finances and Nicholas Gruen about the stadium.

There were legislative achievements: barriers for extending Family Violence Orders were lowered which improved safety and access to justice for survivors of family violence; the harming or threatening of a pet was included in the definition of family violence; bosses were made liable for manslaughter if a worker was killed at work; begging was decriminalised; political donations laws were improved, which included a reporting threshold of $1,000.

And there were reforms to how the House of Assembly operates. One of the changes is government backbenchers can no longer ask questions of ministers that gives the latter the opportunity was lyrical ad-infinitum; ministers’ answers are limited to three minutes and if the questioner believes the question was not answered, they can ask a supplementary question at the discretion of the Speaker.

The evidence shows there are compelling reasons for power-sharing governments. Respected former Mercury political editor, Wayne Crawford, has written: “The problem with minority government in Tasmania has never been that it does not work or that it threatens the democratic process. Quite the reverse. The ‘creative tension’ generated by no single party being able to dictate the political agenda has led to some of the best examples of reformists government in the state’s history.”

Power-sharing governments are good for Tasmania and good for democracy.