The Tasmanian state election is coming up in a week’s time, and I’ve managed to do a reasonable job of ignoring the whole horrible thing, modulo the promoted tweets, the signs on the highway, the junk the major (and semi-major) political parties pay to dump in my letterbox, and occasional discussions with friends and neighbours.

Promoted tweets can be blocked. The signs on the highway can (possibly) be re-purposed for a subsequent election, or can be pulled down and used for minor windbreak/shelter works for animal enclosures. Discussions with friends and neighbours are always interesting, even if one doesn’t necessarily agree. I think the most irritating thing is the letterbox junk; at best it’ll eventually be recycled, at worst it becomes landfill or firestarters (and some of those things do make very satisfying firestarters).

Anyway, as I live somewhere in the wilds division of Franklin, I thought I’d better check to see who’s up for election here. There’s no independents running this time, so I’ve essentially got the choice of four parties; Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Tasmania, Tasmanian Greens, Tasmanian Labor and Tasmanian Liberals (the order here is the same as on the TEC web site; please don’t infer any preference based on the order in which I list parties in this blog post).

I feel like I should be setting party affiliations aside and voting for individuals, but of the sixteen candidates listed, to the best of my knowledge I’ve only actually met and spoken with two of them. Another I noticed at random in a cafe, and I was ignored by a fourth who was milling around with some cronies at a promotional stand out the front of Woolworths in Huonville a few weeks ago. So, party affiliations it is, which leads to an interesting thought experiment.

When you read those four party names above, what things came most immediately to mind? For me, it was something like this:

• Shooters, Fishers & Farmers: Don’t take our guns. Fuck those bastard Greenies.
• Tasmanian Greens: Protect the natural environment. Renewable energy. Try not to kill anything. Might collaborate with Labor. Liberals are big money and bad news.
• Tasmanian Labor: Mellifluous babble concerning health, education, housing, jobs, pokies and something about workers rights. Might collaborate with the Greens. Vehemently opposed to the Liberals.
• Tasmanian Liberals: Mellifluous babble concerning jobs, health, infrastructure, safety and the Tasmanian way of life, peppered with something about small business and family values. Vehemently opposed to Labor and the Greens.

And because everyone usually automatically thinks in terms of binaries (e.g. good vs. evil, wrong vs. right, one vs. zero), we tend to end up imagining something like this:

• Shooters, Fishers & Farmers vs. Greens
• Labor vs. Liberal
• …um. Maybe Labor and the Greens might work together…
• …but really, it’s going to be Labor or Liberal in power (possibly with some sort of crossbench or coalition support from minor parties, despite claims from both that it’ll be majority government all the way).

It turns out that thinking in binaries is remarkably unhelpful, unless you’re programming a computer (it’s zeroes and ones all the way down), or are lost in the wilderness (is this plant food or poison? is this animal predator or prey?) The rest of the time, things tend to be rather more colourful (or grey, depending on your perspective), which leads back to my thought experiment: what do these “naturally opposed” parties have in common?

According to their respective web sites, the Shooters, Fishers & Farmers and the Greens have many interests in common, including agriculture, biosecurity, environmental protection, tourism, sustainable land management, health, education, telecommunications and addressing homelessness. There are differences in the policy details of course (some really are diametrically opposed), but in broad strokes these two groups seem to care strongly about – and even agree on – many of the same things.

Similarly, Labor and Liberal are both keen to tell a story about putting the people of Tasmania first, about health, education, housing, jobs and infrastructure. Honestly, for me, they just kind of blend into one another; sure there’s differences in various policy details, but really if someone renamed them Labal and Liberor I wouldn’t notice. These two are the status quo, and despite fighting it out with each other repeatedly, are, essentially, resting on their laurels.

Here’s what I’d like to see: a minority Tasmanian state government formed from a coalition of the Tasmanian Greens plus the Shooters, Fishers & Farmers party, with the Labor and Liberal parties together in opposition. It’ll still be stuck in that irritating Westminster binary mode, but at least the damn thing will have been mixed up sufficiently that people might actually talk to each other rather than just fighting.