
Labor's no-confidence motion to oust Tasmanian premier Jeremy Rockliff set to succeed
A no-confidence motion in the Tasmanian premier appears likely to succeed on Wednesday.
Jeremy Rockliff has been under increasing pressure over his handling of the state's budget, Bass Strait ferry delays, a plan to sell assets and a new stadium.
The Labor opposition on Wednesday moved a no-confidence motion in the Liberal premier, after a day earlier threatening to if it could find the numbers.
The motion will be debated on Wednesday.
The independents Craig Garland and Kristie Johnston and Jacqui Lambie Network MP Andrew Jenner have indicated they will support the motion.
The Greens, who have five MPs, voiced their support for the no-confidence motion on Wednesday morning, meaning it has the numbers to pass.
'The deals the premier struck for minority government after the last election have collapsed,' the Labor leader, Dean Winter, told parliament.
'Three independent members of the crossbench have lost confidence in the premier.
'(This is) due to his financial mismanagement, his appalling handling of the Spirit of Tasmania project, and his plan to privatise Tasmania's most precious assets.'
If a no-confidence motion against Rockliff is successful, convention dictates he resign.
In a social media post, Rockliff said a successful no-confidence motion would force Tasmania back to the polls.
'An election just over 12 months since the last one,' he said.
'That's the last thing Tasmania needs. That's the last thing Tasmanians want.'
The Liberals, who have been in power since 2014, are governing in minority with just 14 of 35 seats in the lower house.
Last week's 2025-26 budget predicted debt would more than double to $10.8bn in four years' time, with deficits each year.
The Greens leader, Rosalie Woodruff, said the premier had brought the no-confidence motion on himself.
'Poll after poll have made it abundantly clear that Tasmanians do not, will not, support a new stadium at Macquarie Point in Hobart,' she said.
The stadium, which is supported by Labor, is a condition of the Tasmania Devils entering the AFL in 2028.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
43 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Queensland's Donald Trump - how a ruthless Aussie pollie wrote the playbook for the US President
As US President, Donald Trump uses federal agents, police and threatens National Guard intervention against opponents - but it's a blueprint first drawn up in Australia. Queenslanders who lived through Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's 21-year reign over the state will recognise the right-wing premier's fingerprints all over that playbook. Bjelke-Petersen began life as a farmworker on his father's rural property near Kingaroy, 220km north-west of Brisbane - but went on to dominate state politics for a generation. New Stan docudrama 'Joh: The Last King of Queensland ' drops on Sunday - featuring Rake star Richard Roxburgh as the notorious politician- and has drawn astonishing parallels between the Trump and the controversial premier. 'You look at Joh and you think [he was a] once-in-a-generation character,' Queensland author and journalist Matthew Condon told the filmmakers. 'And then you look at Trump - and some bells start to ring in terms of what we've gone through a generation or two before. 'The template was already here with a peanut farmer at the bottom of the world.' The comparisons to Trump are frequent throughout Bjelke-Petersen's time in power from 1968 to 1987, when he was known as the 'law and order' premier - a catchcry often now repeated by Trump. In 1970s, at the height of South African apartheid and battles over Indigenous land rights, Bjelke-Petersen welcomed an all-white Springboks rugby squad to Queensland, sparking protests across Brisbane. Police were deployed to disperse protesters gathered outside the team's Tower Mill Hotel, where excessive force was used. Actor Roxburgh, playing the National Party leader in speech recreations for the film, relives the politician's famous insistence: 'I declared a state of emergency.' It was reported that he brought in country cops housed in military camps, and gave the force 'the green light to do what they needed to do without repercussion'. 'He gave police carte blanche to do whatever they wanted,' said one commentator. Lindy Morrison OAM, member of indie rock band The Go-Betweens, accused police of 'bashing people in the head'. 'We were trapped. It was massively brutal,' she said. Lawyer Terry O'Gorman, who was also there at the time, said police 'in effect took it into their own hands'. 'They chased protesters in the dark,' he added. Bjelke-Petersen also railed against union strikes and the city's punk music scene, prompting graffiti in Brisbane reading 'Pig City'. Bjelke-Petersen proudly embraced his ties to the police and described it publicly as a 'jolly good relationship'. Others claimed he ran it as his private militia. And like Trump, he had a penchant for describing anyone who opposed him - notably ousted former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam - as socialists and communists. He was described as 'not liking protests, hippies, unions, the unemployed, and gays - and used his police force against them'. But Bjelke-Petersen was of the attitude that it was 'law and order - if you don't like it, you know what you can do.' He was described in Stan's docudrama as everything from 'innovative' and 'mundane and boring' to a 'power-hungry, hillbilly dictator' who 'wrote the playbook for Trump'. Bjelke-Petersen was finally ousted from power in 1987 after an unsuccessful tilt to be prime minister, which John Howard described as 'showing appalling judgement'. He died aged 94 in 2005, and in the Stan docu-drama, Queensland MP Bob Katter recalled his final meeting with the onetime political powerhouse. 'I carried him to bed the last time I saw him,' he said.


The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
News live: nearly 4,000 Australians trying to evacuate Israel and Iran, Marles says; body found in search for missing man in NSW
Update: Date: 2025-06-21T22:49:34.000Z Title: Richard Marles Content: The defence minister, , is up on Sky News in the first of the Sunday morning political interviews. Marles has provided an update on the number of Australians attempting to leave Iran and Israel amid the latest conflict between the two nations. As of Sunday morning, he said there were 3800 Australian citizens - 2600 in Iran and 1200 in Israel - seeking government assistance to evacuate the countries. Marles said the government had a civilian charter plane on standby but it couldn't yet depart because the airspace over Iran and Israel remains closed. 'So we really are poised to provide whatever assistance we can in the event that airspace opens.' Update: Date: 2025-06-21T22:49:00.000Z Title: Good morning Content: Welcome to another Sunday morning Guardian live blog. The defence minister, Richard Marles, says nearly 4,000 Australians have applied for government assistance to leave Israel and Iran. Marles said the Australian government had a charter plan on standby to assist in an evacuation but it could not depart as the sky over Iran remains closed. New South Wales police have found the body of an 81-year-old man in the Moruya area after midnight on Saturday. Police found the body in a white ute after a search of the area but are not treating the death as suspicious at this stage. I'm Royce Kurmelovs and I'll be taking the blog through the day. With that, let's get started …


The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
King or crook?: the enduring legacy of Queensland's political strongman Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen
'Sir Joh will be remembered, and he will long be remembered. But not for what he wanted to be remembered for.' This was my prediction when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, heading up one of a number of obituaries. Propelling my pen was a sense of obligation to do justice to the stunted opportunities and deliberate and casual cruelties inflicted on the state and many, many, Queenslanders under Australia's most blinkered, authoritarian and corrupt postwar regime. The balance in the initial flood of obituaries was about two-thirds more adulation than condemnation. Cranes on the skyline and huge holes in the ground carried more weight than stamping on civil liberties and corruption. There is much better balance in newly minted television documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland, airing on Stan this weekend. Its signature touch is having Sir Joh present as actor Richard Roxburgh delivering characteristic monologues to answer or more typically homily his way around any questions or criticisms of his conduct. Vignettes from family, friends, political luminaries, journalists, historians and opponents and a wealth of available footage keep the narrative going. Back then, Joh's quite deliberate – even trained – incoherent rambling was all too frequently excessively tidied up by reporters and then judged by commentators as evidence of his political acumen. Of course, it also opened up opportunities for us reporters. Once, on a slow news day when he was still speaking to me, I asked Joh whether he was contemplating sending the then Liberal leader, Sir Llew Edwards, off to a coveted London posting. Nothing in his 'Well, you know Phil …' constituted a direct denial so yes, there was a story. It is easy to caricature much of Bjelke-Petersen's reign. Presumably Sir Joh had a hand in the wording of the citation for his 1984 knighthood, which noted he was 'a strong believer in the concept of parliamentary democracy' who had made 'many improvements in the parliamentary process'. This not long after the Liberals had abandoned the Coalition due to Joh's refusal to countenance parliamentary committees and while the legislative assembly continued to turn in new records for the brevity of its sitting sessions. In truth, Sir Joh (1968-1987) was the last and second-longest lasting of a string of strongmen Australian state premiers – Robert Askin (New South Wales: 1965-1975), Henry Bolte (Victoria: 1955-1972), Sir Charles Court (Western Australia: 1974-1982) and Thomas Playford (South Australia: 1938-1965). All were conservative and variously notorious for riding roughshod over Westminster traditions and disregard of civil liberties, abuse of the electoral system, and tolerance or participation in corruption. Even considering Askin's organised crime associations, Bjelke-Petersen was to surpass them all. Of many biographies, my vote for both best and best titled goes to Evan Whitton's The Hillbilly Dictator. That Queensland suffered for longer and graduated into such a relic of poor governance was, in Sir Joh's only valid defence, in part because a long string of Labor governments had demolished an inconvenient upper house and thoroughly gerrymandered the electorate. The Coalition government which fell, somewhat surprised, into government in 1956 ignored the pungent smell of corruption around Frank Bischof and appointed him police commissioner. In 1963, in the National Hotel royal commission, a future chief justice of the high court of Australia was successfully hoodwinked into a finding of negligible police corruption. Tony Fitzgerald, looking at many of the same names in much more senior positions 24 years later, found otherwise. Sir Joh, initially an impassioned critic of Labor's gerrymander, went on to embrace the innovation of making islands of Aboriginal communities within other electorates. Policing became political, increasingly aimed at opponents of the regime. A notable shortage of real communists (Queensland police had nearly beaten Australia's only ever Communist member of parliament to death in 1948) did not deter the anti-communist rhetoric Joh aimed at the Labor party, unions, university students and Aboriginal activists. Sir Joh long denied even the possibility of corruption in the police force, well beyond the optimum point to beat a hasty retreat to 'I knew nothing'. It is hard to reconcile this with the Fitzgerald inquiry's ability to acquire the records of any cabinet meeting of interest but one – the one that saw Terry Lewis appointed as commissioner of police. All of this is relatively well canvassed in Last King. My only quibble is that it leaves the question of whether Sir Joh was personally corrupt unnecessarily unresolved. When Sir Joh died, so did the defamation writ that he had issued years before for my publishing the details of the corruption charges that had been prepared against him in relation to brown paper bags of cash delivered to his office. True, he never faced these particular charges, but allegations of lying to Fitzgerald about the brown paper bags was the essence of the trial that brought him within a Young National juryperson of becoming the first Australian premier to be consigned to a term in prison. The special prosecutor judged Sir Joh too old to face a second trial before a fresh jury – unfortunate for the sake of history, and also in that it would have deterred Sir Joh from launching a ludicrous $338m claim against Queensland and Queenslanders for personal damages arising from the Fitzgerald inquiry. Other tribunals, however, were able to make definitive rulings. An outstanding A Current Affair program in 1989 detailed the largesse given to Bjelke-Petersen by construction magnate Sir Leslie Thiess. Thiess immediately sued for defamation and lost, the jury finding that Sir Leslie had bribed Sir Joh on an extravagant scale, defrauding his own shareholders in the process. Bjelke-Petersen's pioneering role in the bribe by way of defamation settlement racket was then highlighted by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. When Alan Bond let it slip that threats to his business were a feature of a 1986 $400,000 payment to Sir Joh in settlement of a 1983 defamation case, the tribunal delved deeper into whether Bond was a fit and proper enough person for a sizeable lump of the broadcast spectrum. Backing up the tribunal, the high court outlined Bond's proposal to pay Bjelke- Petersen the $50,000 Channel Nine's lawyers thought was a reasonable or at least defensible sum, with the $350,000 balance to meet his demands to come as 'a payment overseas related to assets, a loan without obligation to repay or an excessive payment for the sale of property'. But Bjelke-Petersen was too greedy and too needy – or too vengeful – for any of this, and the settlement made the television news and ultimately put Bond out of the television business. Karma also seems to have intervened after Bjelke-Petersen cajoled a large loan out of a foreign bank, with the internal documentation showing this as a balance of inducements and menaces decision somewhat at variance to the applicable credit rating. But appreciation of the Swiss franc then brought the Bjelke-Petersen family enterprises close to penury. Last King does note Bjelke-Petersen's deficient understanding of conflicts of interest, in his trying to put it over that it was perfectly OK for his wife, Florence, to hold the preferentially issued Comalco and Utah shares. In essence, enough evidence with enough in the way of judicial proceedings was lying for Last King not to leave the question of Bjelke-Petersen's personal corruption hanging. Last King deserves a notable place in the voluminous memorabilia around Sir Joh. The life and times (and crimes) of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen are indeed pertinent to the current state of the world and Last King should be wheeled out at regular intervals and be a curricula staple to remind us. Phil Dickie is a Gold Walkley winner and author of bestselling book The Road To Fitzgerald: Revelations of Corruption Spanning Four Decades. His reporting on the Bjelke-Petersen government is credited, along with an ABC Four Corners program, with sparking the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry Joh: Last King of Queensland premieres on Stan on 22 June