This was published 14 years ago
Greens back on the brink of power
Tasmania faces a return to a hung Parliament next weekend and the Gen Xers leading the political parties are playing it as safe as they can, writes Andrew Darby.
This can't be right. Here is a man whose CV once might have won him a slacker award. What is he doing on the verge of controlling a Parliament? Nick McKim had an idyllic childhood messing about in boats and bush in a waterside Hobart suburb.
He studied one year of an arts-economics degree, and then five years backpacking around the world. A spell of sailing was followed by an odd bunch of jobs: mineral explorer, wilderness guide, advertising copywriter.
Then he was tapped on the shoulder by the Greens' guiding light, Bob Brown, and life turned serious. Now he is the party's Tasmanian leader on the brink of a balance of power at next Saturday's state election.
As a proud Generation Xer, the slacker tag rankles. ''It's as if we're people who don't care,'' says McKim, at 44 the oldest of the state's party leaders.
''But the fact that there are three people leading the parties from one generation shows that we do care. I think ultimately, what [our generation] learned as we grew up has given us no excuses. We know enough to realise that the way current policy is set is not going to deliver for future generations.''
The trio - McKim; the Labor Premier, David Bartlett, 42, and the Liberal leader, Will Hodgman, 40, are, unsurprisingly, fans of The West Wing and The Simpsons.
The spirit of these two seminal television series infects the way they do things. The finesse of White House politics and the dark humour of Springfield seem more natural than the angry brawling of their predecessors.
Since becoming leaders the three have often done gigs together.
This week they competed in a penalty shoot-out to promote A-League football. They also performed at a Christmas charity concert as the three wise men.
The Premier, naturally, had the gold, and Hodgman the sweet smell of frankincense. ''I am, after all, the wise man who is not on the nose,'' Hodgman said, as Bartlett broke up laughing.
Then there was McKim with the myrrh. ''Organic,'' he said. ''Herbal is best.''
Now these lines have an extra ring. The premier has been out promising cash but the little polling done says that Labor indeed stinks. McKim's herbal remedies are wafting convincingly over the campaign trail.
In this first state election of Gen X leaders, old party loyalties in Tasmania face being binned. A month ago, Labor and Liberal support was being eaten by the ascendant Greens.
An independent poll by EMRS showed that, despite a long campaign with the benefits of incumbency, Labor's support had slumped to 23 per cent, its lowest in a decade.
There was little daylight between Labor and the Greens, on 22 per cent. The Liberals held the best prospect of leading a minority government, with 30 per cent, and a huge 23 per cent were yet to give a clue of their intentions.
But before they can start counting seats, the Greens have a mountain of political history to climb.
At one of their election rallies in the early 1990s a super-confident former MP rounded off his speech with ''and it's go, go, go Green government'' shortly before the party was dumped by voters.
Their most defining success was a long 21 years ago, when they won the balance of power with Labor in the 1989 election against the Liberal hard man Robin Gray.
So offensive was this combined single seat majority to a timber and media businessman, Edmund Rouse, he tried to bribe a Labor MP to cross the floor of Parliament. Rouse went to prison, and the scandal helped give the Greens a permanent foe in the shape of the timber industry.
A second, Liberal minority government supported by the Greens in 1996 lasted just two years before the premier, Tony Rundle, became fed up and the major parties moved to do what Rouse could not - cut the pests out.
Labor and the Liberals combined to ram through a reduction in the size of the House of Assembly from 35 to 25 seats. Cloaked as cost-saving, the deal was meant to raise the quota of votes for an MP's election beyond the reach of the Greens.
It worked in that the Greens lost three of their four seats at the next election. But political analysts widely believe it also sowed seeds of the major parties' undoing.
In effect it emptied the talent pool. There was virtually no backbench needling for ministerial jobs, and not enough opposition to fill a minibus. And voters refused to abandon the Greens.
Now the Greens are pitching for power again with a softer voice. McKim, who replaced the more hardline Peg Putt as leader, recognises an electoral nerve is touched by frequent use of the term hung parliament.
''The last two periods of minority government have been quite successfully demonised by people who have a political imperative for doing so,'' he says. ''But when you consider what we've had to put up with under majority government for the last four years, majority certainly doesn't equal transparent and accountable.''
Two deputy premiers quit after scandals, followed by a premier, Paul Lennon, who was tainted for bypassing planning processes in support of the Gunns pulp mill project. Bartlett was virtually the last man standing and, since he came to power, he has been unable to clean the Labor slate.
He sacked the tourism minister, Paula Wriedt, after she attempted suicide, and allowed to stay in office the Infrastructure Minister, Graeme Sturges, who said as he stood over a security guard who had stopped him: ''Don't you know who I am? I'll have your f---ing job.''
In the campaign Bartlett has tried to get better traction for Labor's record of economic management and his vision for Tasmania's future. Instead he has found himself repeating mea culpas. ''Sometimes I have perhaps run too fast,'' he said at Labor's campaign launch on Monday. ''And sometimes I have made mistakes.''
Tiredness with 12 years of Labor counts. The political analyst Richard Herr says: ''It's typically very hard for any government to win a fourth term outright.''
Gradually the Liberals have taken the lead. The party is running a smooth campaign under the less than gripping leadership of Will Hodgman, son of the retiring party warhorse Michael Hodgman. The worsening unemployment revealed this week, taking Tasmania 1.1 percentage points above the national average, may encourage more voters to try them.
Herr thinks campaigning on all sides lacks the fire of earlier polls. It is possible, he agrees, that this is a generational effect. ''Perhaps they've grown up in a world where ideological values are less hardwired into politics.''
But it is more likely to him that everyone is just keeping their options open.
Labor and the Liberals have left open the possibility of governing in minority, and refused to talk beyond that. McKim says a formal negotiated solution would offer the most stability, and insists everything is on the table.
He is attracted to the Australian Capital Territory model. There the Greens support Labor and have the post of speaker of the Legislative Assembly but McKim insists the Greens will go into post-election talks without preconceived job demands.
Herr sees this calm, small-target approach as a comfort to electors. ''Nick is already positioning himself to be seen as a good negotiator.''
Some darker Greens are voicing concern. Speakers were well into the party's campaign launch this week when the word ''environment'' came up. ''Let's hear more of that!'' came the shout from one in the audience.
But experience has taught the Greens what awaits them when they edge too far out.
Apart from its affront to democracy, the Rouse affair has shown McKim where power lies in Tasmania. ''It was a real lesson in what the environment movement was up against in Tasmania in terms of vested interests,'' he says. ''I think that some of the circumstances that were exposed by that still exist today.''
At the last election pressure took the form of a well-funded, mainly anonymous group called Tasmanians for a Better Future, fronted by a former spokesman for Gunns. The group pleaded for majority government.
This time McKim has carefully built bridges with business, large and small.
Over winter he stood beside the other two leaders at a dairy farmers' rally. He started and finished his short speech by thanking the farmers for the honour of letting him speak to them.
In 2006 the then chairman of the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Michael Kent, owned up to being part of Tasmanians for a Better Future. This time the chamber's chief executive, Robert Wallace, said: ''We are looking for stable government, however it's formed.''
The bizarre can still happen. Last election it took the shape of an Exclusive Brethren intervention linked to the Liberals warning of dire consequences the Greens would have for families.
The Greens do not always help themselves. They were caught this week suggesting Tasmania could buy out loggers by imposing a state export tax on woodchips - a constitutional impossibility, the Forest Industries Association says.
McKim is quick on his feet, though. Responding to a claim that a Green policy to let prisoners vote would give the Port Arthur gunman, Martin Bryant, a ballot, McKim found an unpublicised clause allowing judges to remove the vote for heinous crimes.
It may be a measure of the mood of the electorate that such mistakes are not gaining more traction. It is also a measure of the man.
In his roaming days McKim was on his old sloop, Borrachita, off Wollongong when its mast snapped and the remains began thumping dangerously at the hull.
''We cut it loose, fired up the donk and motored in,'' he says. ''Sailing and politics are really quite similar, I think. You really are only moments away from great events at any time. You try to do everything you can to think about looming issues but sometimes things happen that you just can't foresee.''