Denison is going to be a fascinating contest in this Tasmanian election. Names are important in Hare-Clark, and when voters get in the booth and look at their ballot papers the only big names are going to be Putt of the Greens and Hodgman of the Liberals. It’s a strong electorate for Labour, but with no real high profile candidate I suspect there’ll be a lot of leakage. The Greens have suffered a lot of leakage in past State elections, but this is because they have only been promoting one candidate per election at the State level. In Local Government elections Greens voters have shown great disclipline in sticking to the ticket (eg in Hobart City last year when Cocker was elected off a low primary vote on the back of a very strong flow of lead candidate Burnett’s preferences), and so you would expect O’Connor to pick up the vast majority of Putt’s surplus. The exception to this is Putt’s non-Green personal vote, however, this may be balanced out by Green voters putting O’Connor 1 to improve her chances knowing that Putt is safe. It will be a difficult ask for O’Connor, but if she can get a reasonable primary vote and enough of Putt’s surplus to end up on 0.6 or so of a quota after Putt is distributed and the Labour/Liberal vote is sufficiently scattered (due to lack of profile candidates) then she has a realistic chance. I doubt that Barns’ analysis is correct, Putt shows no signs of retiring and the reason to have O’Connor run in Denison is that it’s where there’s the best chance of two MPs, plus she is the kind of candidate that people in Denison go for. Putt has bought the party out of nowhere in the State arena, she is hardly going to disappear just as her influence and success is increasing.

Majority Government is less of an issue in Denison, but to the extent that it is, soft Liberal voters will switch to Labour to get a majority making it harder for both the Liberals and the Greens to win the 5th seat. The closer the Liberals and Labour end up, the more likely a Green is to get the final vacancy.

Putt, Hodgman and Sturges should all be OK, with Bartlett, Singh, O’Connor, Dixon and Sullivan going for the last two (roughly in that order).

It was a similar story with the federal expenditure limits, which were left to fall into desuetude. First with A/G Billy Hughes ruling that over-expenditure by losing candidates would never be looked at, then by the parliament only increasing the limit once in 70 years. The inverse of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ seems to be ‘death by non-indexation’.

Ultimately when the Tasmanian courts treated the Tassie limits seriously – admirably – Mr Fraser had the perfect ‘death of politics’ bipartisan hysteria that enabled him to abolish the federal limits rather than rationally restructuring them.

Or are you just objecting to the $1500 limit at the time (dunno how much Tassie tv time that would have bought in 1979).