Whether or not Labor succeeds in forming a majority government, it could draw important lessons from its achievements in northern Tasmania.
The party has suffered setbacks in Bass, Braddon and Lyon, where two-time MP Brian Mitchell is locked in a tense battle with Liberal challenger Susie Bower.
Liberal Gavin Pearce has made Braddon’s northwestern electorate a safe seat, by a margin of more than 8 percent.
His challenger, Chris Lynch of Labour, has won just 22 percent of the vote, a huge blow of about 10 percent against him.
In Bass, Liberal Bridget Archer looks set to break the trend of instability and become the first MP to be re-elected there in 20 years.
With nearly 70 percent of the vote counted, she has increased a razor-thin margin of 0.4 percent.
And in Lyon, where Labor insiders were confident Mr Mitchell would secure a third term, he is just ahead, but the margin has eroded from 5.2 percent to 0.2 percent.
Mr Mitchell’s lead vote has fallen below 30 percent, with a significant drop of 7 percent.
It could be seen as Tasmania maintaining the status quo – all five sitting MPs re-elected – but a closer look at the numbers reveal a far more worrying picture for the Labor party.
The main vote failed to reach 30 percent in any of the three voters (the nationwide average is about 32 percent), despite more than $480 million in election promises and repeated visits from the country’s next prime minister, Anthony Albanian.
It is not clear whether the Labor message and candidates did not catch on, or whether the dissatisfaction with the coalition felt in other states simply did not exist in Tasmania.
In all likelihood, it is probably a combination of both.
In Bass, Ms Archer has publicly distanced herself from her party and leader Scott Morrison, regularly denouncing party policies and crossing the floor twice during her first term to vote against the government.
Some might say that her outspoken nature, which Ms Archer described on election night as “sometimes too real,” meant voters saw her differently from the other Liberal MPs she’d voted out across the country.
It could also be that the Labor candidate, former MP Ross Hart, simply failed to convince voters that he was worthy of a second chance at federal politics.
Mr Lynch, a fairly low profile Burnie councilor, also struggled to convince Braddon voters of the need to distance himself from Mr Pearce.
His chances were probably also not helped by revelations that in 1994, when he was 31 years old, he was convicted of possession of a negotiable amount of methamphetamine.
But his result gives the Labor party a lot of headaches and means that the seat in the next federal election can no longer be seen as marginal.
There is some opinion that the 2019 election result in Lyon, where Mr Mitchell won by a margin of 5.2 percent, did not really reflect the mood of the electorate after his challenger Jessica Whelan was rejected by the Liberal Party over anti -Islamic posts on social media.
Some argued that this meant the seat would always be significantly closer this election.
But party leaders didn’t see it as close to Mr. Mitchell who was still fighting for his political life at the end of the election night tally.
It explains the gloomy mood of Labor supporters at the party’s election rally at the Glenorchy Football Club, a world away from the elated party faithful in Sydney during Mr Albanese’s victory speech.
Labor has enough work to do to convince the Tasmanians that they are worthy of their vote.
But with more than 70 election promises made to the state during the campaign, they have a lot of opportunities to do it.
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