Islanders Just Like To Do It Differently

by Norman Abjorensen - The Australian

Party politics means something different in Tasmania, as we saw by this week's seemingly bizarre example of sitting federal Labor MP Harry Quick out there openly supporting the Liberal candidate, Vanessa Goodwin, for the seat of Franklin, from which he is retiring after 14 years.

Putting it mildly, Quick does not like the candidate his party selected in preference to him, unionist Kevin Harkins. Clearly, he would prefer the voters who have supported him to change their allegiance from Labor to Liberal. Politics in Tasmania is emphatically non-ideological. It is as though ideological labels have merely adorned the surface of a deep-seated tribalism in Tasmania that works at a far more primitive level than we see on the mainland, and it is by no means recent.

That old bounder, King O'Malley, who played a big role in Federation, driving the creation of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the national capital, was a case in point. O'Malley, who was almost certainly born in the US and not Canada as he claimed (and was therefore ineligible to sit in parliament), rose to prominence as a Labor politician in Tasmania, but his ties were flexible in the extreme.

Originally elected as an independent in 1901, O'Malley drifted into the Labor camp and quickly became a luminary, but when the crunch came over conscription in 1916, and the ALP suffered its first serious split, the anti-conscriptionist O'Malley cunningly contrived not to be around when crucial votes were taken on the issue, keenly aware that his own views were in contrast to those of his electorate.

O'Malley, as it turned out, was not a key player in that split, but another Tasmanian, and this time a native-born one, was next time around: former Labor premier Joe Lyons. He brought down the Scullin government in 1931, in which he had been a minister, in a dispute over policies towards the Depression, accepting the leadership of the new anti-Labor grouping, the United Australia Party, and the subsequent prime ministership after the 1931 election.

Ratting ran deep in the Tasmanian Lyons genes. One of Joe Lyons's sons, Kevin, followed his parents into non-Labor politics (Enid Lyons was a federal Liberal MP) in the Tasmanian parliament as a Liberal, for a time serving as speaker under a Labor government, but fell out with his party.

Establishing his own Centre Party, Lyons in 1969 held the balance of power and joined the Liberals in a coalition in which he became deputy premier and chief secretary. It was the first non-Labor government in Tasmania in 35 years.

If Lyons had helped it attain power, he was singularly instrumental in its downfall, resigning in 1972 in unexplained circumstances after a long dispute with the premier, Angus Bethune, who obtained a dissolution, went to the polls and lost. It gave the Lyons family the dubious distinction of having brought down governments of every political persuasion.

Another prominent Tasmanian political figure, Reg "Spot" Turnbull, was a long-serving minister in successive Tasmanian Labor governments before falling out with the party and returning as an independent state MP, later transferring to the Senate as an independent, where he was, briefly, a representative of the short-lived Australia Party.

A persistent streak of independence continued to permeate those representatives sent by the island state to represent it in Canberra. The formidable Liberal (and later independent) senator, Reg Wright, who sat in the Senate from 1949 until 1978, had no regard for party discipline at all, seeing his membership of the Liberal Party nominal at best. He crossed the floor on a staggering 150 occasions, a parliamentary record unlikely to be matched, let alone broken.

Fellow Tasmanian Liberals, including Michael Townley (originally elected to the Senate in 1975 as an independent), Peter Rae, Shirley Walters, Max Burr and the eccentric Bruce Goodluck, often voted as they saw fit, not as the party decided. It has given Tasmania the honour of producing the greatest number of politicians prepared to vote against their own party. But, it seems, one does not even have to be born in Tasmania to acquire the propensity to rebel; passing association with the smallest state can induce such a tendency.

Take Bert Kelly, for example, long-serving Liberal MP for Wakefield in South Australia and a tireless campaigner for free trade at a time when it was far from a popular issue. As the Whitlam government was disintegrating in 1975 and the former deputy prime minister Lance Barnard quit his Tasmanian seat of Bass to take a diplomatic post, Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser asked Kelly to campaign in the ensuing by-election. Yes, said Kelly, but added that he would support the Labor candidate because Whitlam had cut tariffs.

And then there is a certain senior Howard Government minister, one Brendan Nelson, who spent some time working in Tasmania before his political career started. And that same Nelson was a member of the ALP in Tasmania.

So, is the Harry Quick affair really such a big deal after all? In the panorama of Tasmanian political history it's simply par for the course.


Norman Abjorensen teaches politics at the Australian National University in Canberra.