In March 2024, a rostered nurse in Ulverstone filled in a Tasmanian ballot paper the length of a placemat, numbering seven boxes under a system built to give minor parties and independents a genuine share of power. Sixteen months later, in July 2025, she was handed the same ballot paper for the same seven-member electorate, because the government she had helped elect had lost a vote of confidence on the floor of its own Parliament and gone back to voters rather than hand power to the opposition that had just beaten it in a division. In between, the state-owned company running the Spirit of Tasmania ferries she relies on to freight goods off the island was found by the state's Auditor-General to be, on the numbers, insolvent. The budget had to be argued over twice. And a half-built stadium a hundred kilometres away in Hobart had already cost two backbenchers their party membership and one premier his majority before a single brick was laid.
None of this is an aberration. Tasmania is the only Australian jurisdiction that elects its lower house by the Hare-Clark system, a full form of proportional representation using the single transferable vote across multi-member electorates, in continuous use in some form since 1907 — one of the oldest proportional parliaments in the world. Under Hare-Clark, a party that wins roughly a third of the statewide vote wins roughly a third of the seats, not the near-total exclusion from power the same vote share delivers under the single-member systems used almost everywhere else in Australia. That design choice is the direct cause of everything that follows: the fragile numbers, the crossbench deals, two elections since March 2024, and the governability questions now hanging over the state's two biggest financial commitments — the Macquarie Point stadium and the budget itself.
A decade of narrowing majorities
The instability did not begin with the current parliament. At the 2021 election, under the then-25-seat House of Assembly, the Liberal government led by Peter Gutwein won a bare one-seat majority of 13 seats (Tasmanian Electoral Commission, 2021 election results). Gutwein resigned the following year and was succeeded by Jeremy Rockliff. The majority lasted barely two years: on 11 May 2023, Liberal backbenchers Lara Alexander and John Tucker quit the party over the government's handling of the proposed $715 million Macquarie Point stadium — mandated for Tasmania's entry into the AFL — dropping the government to 11 of 25 seats and into minority for the first time. Their confidence-and-supply guarantee collapsed by early 2024, and on 14 February 2024 Rockliff sought, and was granted, an early election from Governor Barbara Baker, a year ahead of schedule, under a newly enlarged parliament. The Expansion of House of Assembly Act 2022 had restored the House from 25 seats to 35, reinstating five seven-member electorates (Bass, Braddon, Clark, Franklin, Lyons) under Hare-Clark — meant to deepen scrutiny, but also raising the bar for majority government from 13 seats to 18 just as the major-party vote share was shrinking.
Two elections in sixteen months
The 23 March 2024 election, the first under the enlarged parliament, returned the Liberals with 14 seats, Labor with 10, the Greens with 5, the Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN) with 3 and independents with 3 — no party within reach of the 18 needed to govern alone (Tasmanian Electoral Commission, Candidates Elected, 2024 State Election). Rockliff secured an agreement with the JLN's three members to support the government on confidence, supply and censure motions. Even with that deal the government held only 17 of 35 votes, one short of a majority, leaving every other vote to be negotiated with a five-strong Greens bench and independents whose support was never guaranteed.
The arrangement held just over a year. In late May 2025 the government tabled a budget forecasting consecutive deficits and rising net debt (Department of Treasury and Finance, Budget Paper No. 1, The Budget 2025-26, May-2025). A week later, on 4 June 2025, Opposition Leader Dean Winter moved a no-confidence motion against Rockliff, citing that debt trajectory, roughly $2 billion in additional debt the stadium was projected to add over a decade of financing (approx.), turmoil over delayed Spirit of Tasmania vessels, and flagged asset sales. It passed on 5 June by 18 votes to 17: all ten Labor members, all five Greens, independents Craig Garland and Kristie Johnston, and JLN member Andrew Jenner voted for it, with Speaker Michelle O'Byrne, a Labor MP, casting the deciding vote (Parliament of Tasmania, Hansard, Division on No Confidence in the Premier, 5-Jun-2025). Jenner's vote against a government his own party had agreed to support showed how little a crossbench deal could guarantee.
Rockliff declined to resign and hand Labor the chance to test its own numbers, instead asking Governor Baker for a second early election within a single parliamentary term. She granted it, and Tasmanians voted again on 19 July 2025, sixteen months after the last election. The result changed almost nothing: Liberals 14, Labor 10, Greens 5, and the remaining 6 seats split between five independents and, for the first time in Tasmanian history, a Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party member (Tasmanian Electoral Commission, Candidates Elected, 2025 State Election; counting finalised 2-Aug-2025). By convention Rockliff was recommissioned, and his third ministry was sworn in on 11 August 2025 after fresh crossbench talks. Eight days later Labor tested the new numbers with its own no-confidence motion; it failed 24 votes to 10, suggesting the crossbench that had brought the government down in June would not force a third election in eighteen months (Parliament of Tasmania, Hansard, Division, 19-Aug-2025).
The strongest case
Hare-Clark does what it was built to do
Judged against its own design goals, none of this is a system failure. Hare-Clark exists to stop a party that wins around 40 per cent of the vote from claiming close to 100 per cent of the power — the routine outcome under the single-member systems used in the House of Representatives and most other state parliaments. Tasmania's House of Assembly is, by design, one of the most representative chambers in the country: the Greens, independents and micro-parties who together drew a third or more of the primary vote at both the 2024 and 2025 elections hold roughly a third of the seats, not the handful a majoritarian system would grant them. That is the accountability the system promises — a government that cannot pass a budget, approve a billion-dollar stadium or wind up a struggling ferry company without persuading MPs outside its own party room the decision is sound.
The 2023–2025 turmoil can just as easily be read as the system working as intended. Two backbenchers who disagreed with a stadium decision could cross the floor and be heard, rather than disciplined into silence by a majority that did not need their vote. A Premier who lost the confidence of the chamber was not permitted to keep governing regardless; he had to resign or seek a fresh mandate, and the Governor — exercising the check the vice-regal role exists for — was free to grant or refuse it. Twice, voters, not backroom numbers, had the final say on who should govern.
The evidence: a governability problem with a paper trail
Whatever the merits of the design, the record since 2023 shows a genuine and worsening governability problem. The clearest evidence: the arithmetic barely moved between the two elections, handing voters, twice, close to the same problem to solve.
The strain shows in the institutions voters rely on day to day. On 19 August 2025 — the same day Labor's second no-confidence motion failed — the Auditor-General tabled a report finding TT-Line, the state-owned company operating the Spirit of Tasmania ferries, was insolvent on the balance sheet tested, after an underlying loss of $23.86 million in 2024-25 driven by rising wages and terminal costs, on top of $237.91 million spent on vessel replacement and $119.98 million on a new Devonport berth (Tasmanian Audit Office, Report of the Auditor-General No. 4 of 2025-26; TT-Line Governance Review). TT-Line's board rejected the insolvency finding but not the scale of the losses. A ferry service central to the state's freight and tourism economy went through a governance crisis while the government answerable for it fought to survive two elections.
The state's cost of borrowing has moved the same way. Moody's downgraded Tasmania's rating one notch, from Aa2 to Aa3, on 25 November 2025, placing it equal-lowest among Australian jurisdictions alongside the Northern Territory; S&P Global Ratings followed within days, cutting to AA/A-1+ — its first downgrade of the state since first rating it in 1993 (approx.; S&P Global Ratings, Research Update, Nov-2025; Moody's Ratings, rating action, 25-Nov-2025). Both agencies cited persistent spending growth, commitments made to hold together fragile numbers, and debt-financed capital projects — naming the stadium specifically as a project whose cost overruns the state, not a private partner, would ultimately absorb. Its price tag moved with the political cycle: $715 million when it first split the Liberal party room in 2023, revised to $945 million, then reported at roughly $1.13 billion (approx.) by December 2025, when Parliament passed the enabling legislation.
The critique: instability's price on the biggest decisions
The steel-man case is genuine: a parliament reflecting a third-of-the-vote crossbench should, in theory, subject major spending decisions to more scrutiny, not less. In practice, 2023 to 2025 shows the opposite dynamic on Tasmania's largest commitments. The stadium was not stopped, slowed or redesigned by the extra scrutiny a fragmented parliament is supposed to provide; it survived a party-room revolt, a change of premier's majority, a no-confidence motion that named it explicitly, and two elections, arriving at its final vote roughly 58 per cent above its 2023 estimate (approx.), with a funding structure that leaves the state carrying the largest uncosted share of any future blowout. Fragmentation did not sharpen the decision; it made the decision harder to reverse, because no election delivered a parliament willing to kill the project — only ones willing to keep punishing whichever premier held office while it proceeded regardless.
The budget has fared no better. A government renegotiating its authority every few months has little room for the unpopular, multi-year fiscal repair a credit downgrade demands. Concessions made to hold together a JLN deal, a Green vote or an independent's support tend to run one way — toward more spending, not less — because a government fighting for survival cannot easily alienate the votes standing between it and its next confidence test. The November 2025 downgrades are not, on the evidence, a verdict on Hare-Clark itself; they are a verdict on budgets shaped as much by the arithmetic needed to survive the next vote as by the fiscal strategy needed to survive the next decade.
Tasmanians voted for the same 14–10–5–6 parliament twice in sixteen months. What changed between the elections was not the arithmetic — it was how many times the state could afford to keep testing it.
There is a direct cost to the instability itself, separate from any single decision. Running a full state election — booth staff, postal ballots, a preferential count across five seven-member electorates finalised only on 2 August 2025 — is a significant undertaking each time (Tasmanian Electoral Commission, 2025 election administration timeline). Holding two within sixteen months, rather than one every four years, consumed money and public-service capacity at the exact moment Treasury was warning that spending discipline, not extra cost, was what the budget most needed.
The risk to the future
A parliament built for consensus, tested by narrow majorities
Nothing in the 2025 result suggests the arithmetic is about to resolve itself. Major-party primary votes have been trending down across Tasmania's past three elections, and an enlarged 35-seat Hare-Clark parliament makes it mathematically harder, not easier, for either the Liberals or Labor to cross the 18-seat threshold alone as that trend continues. Unless one of the major parties rebuilds a vote share it has not held in over a decade, the state should expect its next election, and the one after that, to return another crossbench of ten or more seats — and another government whose survival depends on MPs whose support, as the JLN's split vote in June 2025 showed, cannot be assumed to hold under pressure.
The compounding risk is fiscal. A state now paying a higher cost of borrowing after two rating downgrades, with net debt on Treasury's own numbers still climbing past 2029, has less room than ever to fund the next crisis — a further TT-Line shortfall, a stadium overrun beyond the current estimate, or an ordinary downturn — without borrowing at a higher margin or cutting services voters were not warned about. If minority government keeps meaning budgets built to survive the next confidence vote rather than the next decade, the accountability Hare-Clark is designed to deliver risks being remembered less for the scrutiny it added than for the bill it left the next generation of Tasmanians to pay.