Prime Minister Tony Abbotts Liberal party won an election in Tasmania, giving it control of all but one of the nations states and helping his bid to cut red tape and sell infrastructure assets.
Tasmanias Liberal Premier Will Hodgman defeated Labor Premier Lara Giddings, whose party was in power for 16 years. In the South Australia election, with 69 percent of votes counted, neither Liberal leader Steven Marshall nor Labor Premier Jay Weatherill received enough votes to form a majority government.
Abbotts Liberal party consolidated control of state power after Labor under former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007 controlled government at federal, state and territory level. This will help Abbott push through his agenda of removing unnecessary business regulation, and encouraging governments to sell assets to fund new infrastructure investment. South Australia and Tasmania, with the highest unemployment rates in Australia, have been hampered by the states faltering economies and voter fatigue after more than a decade of Labor office.
The results confirm the swing of Australian voters to the right of center is still on, Zareh Ghazarian, a Melbourne-based professor at the Monash University School of Political and Social Inquiry, said by phone. Labor is in a very brittle position. Even if the Liberals dont win in South Australia, it still highlights just how unpopular Labor is.
The Tasmania election victory gives Abbott control which rivals that of former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who controlled all but one state in 1996. Abbott led the Liberal-National coalition to federal victory in the September election.
Its not the complexion of the state governments that counts, its the competence of the state governments which counts, Abbott said in a March 14 Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio interview. The problem that weve had in South Australia and in Tasmania is that weve got very long-serving state Labor governments which are well past their prime.
The loss in Tasmania is a further blow to Labor, Australias oldest political party. Now it only holds sway in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, pending the outcome of yesterdays poll.
The only way is up for Labor, when youre that far down Haydon Manning, an Adelaide-based politics professor at Flinders University of South Australia, said by phone. Its usually only been a short period when weve had the country one way or the other before its broken. The problem for Labor is that in Queensland and New South Wales, there doesnt look like much hope.
Abbott will see the wins as an opportunity to help fix what he described in his 2009 book Battlelines as a dysfunctional federation -- the overlapping of responsibilities between state and federal governments that can result in the duplication of regulations.
Stalemates at meetings of federal, state and territory governments meant the pursuit of national reforms becomes a frustrating political merry-go-round, always needing just one more meeting or just another funding agreement to finalize, Abbott wrote.
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Abbotts Liberals Win Power in All But One of Australias States