Why does Tasmania have so much power?

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This is the script for my video posted on August 21, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Most people are only aware Tasmania even exists because of the Tasmanian Devil, either the real animal or the cartoon character. But Tasmania, like so many islands, is both fascinating and vulnerable, with incredible wildlife and a fragile connection with mainland Australia. So how does Tasmania survive, and how does it influence Australia’s geopolitical dynamics?

Tasmania is separated from the mainland by the Bass Strait, which averages only about 60m deep but runs over 250km across. Rising glacial seas flooded the land bridge roughly 12000 years ago, isolating the island’s indigenous people, who had already been there for at least 35000 years.

British colonists arrived in 1803, and the Aboriginal Tasmanians resisted. But the frontier conflict known as the Black War and disease introduced from abroad devastated their population within a generation, and survivors were exiled to Flinders Island.

Historians still argue over the death toll and whether it amounts to genocide. What isn't disputed is that the old story of their extinction is false, because the Aboriginal people are still around today.

Like much of Australia, Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was known until 1856, hosted convicts. In fact, about 40% of convicted criminals sent to Australia, some 73k people, ended up there until transportation to the island ended in 1853. This legacy produced a longstanding social stigma, but also a distinct culture of settlers.

In 1901, Tasmania pushed hard for federation with the rest of Australia so it could access mainland markets and ideally fiscal support.

It had already pioneered hydro power back in 1895, and through the 20th century it dammed river after river to attract energy-hungry industries like aluminum and manganese alloy production.

Of course, this caused huge political battles over the environment, like the fight to stop the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam in the late 70s and early 80s. The Wilderness Society formed in 1976 after the hydroelectric industry drowned Lake Pedder, a glacial lake full of species found nowhere else.

But the 1983 Tasmanian Dam Case saw the High Court rule that the Australian federal government could use its external affairs power to enforce a world heritage treaty over the state's objection and ultimately prevent the dam. That ruling still underpins Australian environmental law.

Combined with the notoriously rough weather patterns of the so-called Roaring Forties between 40-50 degrees south latitude, the Bass Strait is too long for a tunnel and too dangerous to build a bridge, so Tasmania has to rely on freight by sea and air.

But it does have an electrical connection with the mainland via the Basslink interconnector, which runs all the way across the strait. Basslink is privately owned though, and for about six months from late December 2015 to mid 2016, it suffered a complete outage.

Tasmania trades power both ways across that cable, and it was leaning hard on imports at the time to let its dams recover after drought and years of exporting to the mainland. With storage near 13%, the state fell back on diesel generators and an old gas plant, at a cost of around 180m dollars.

The outage exposed just how vulnerable Tasmania is. A second power interconnector called the Marinus Link has been proposed since, but it’s repeatedly been scaled back and prices have repeatedly risen to over 5b AUD. Construction is expected to begin in 2026, but there are still disputes over who’s going to pay for it.

Fortunately, Tasmania hit 100% renewable generation in 2020, meaning it now produces at least as much clean power over a year as it uses, and it has legislated a 200% target by 2040. A new plan called Battery of the Nation is trying to expand their output to actually send more to the mainland than they receive. The limiting factor is whether the Marinus Link actually comes online.

Meanwhile, the island’s dangerous winds have an upside. The Roaring Forties are a world-class source of wind power, and Tasmania runs large onshore wind farms, and an offshore zone was declared in Bass Strait in 2024 but licensing stalled. There are also proposals to use that power to make green hydrogen and eventually green iron, smelting ore with hydrogen instead of coal.

But Tasmania is a tiny state of about 576k people. It has the oldest population and the lowest economic output per person of any Australian state, as well as a small private sector, heavy reliance on government jobs and payments, and the highest rates of socioeconomic disadvantage. So it leans on federal redistribution, taking far more than it contributes.

But dependence cuts both ways. Tasmania elects 12 senators, the same as New South Wales and its 8 million people, and the constitution guarantees it at least five seats in the lower house too. This means that a handful of Tasmanian votes can swing national outcomes.

The Tasmanian House of Assembly uses the Hare-Clark electoral system, in which regions elect multiple representatives simultaneously, allowing a diverse range of people to hold office. There’s ranked choice voting too, and in general Hare-Clark emphasizes choosing individual candidates rather than voting along party lines. While this sounds good on paper, it makes majorities very difficult to form and can cause chronic instability. Tasmania has had three consecutive early elections.

But Tasmania is geopolitically important to Australia. Hobart is one of five Antarctic gateway cities, and the Australian Antarctic Division HQ is just south in Kingston. Tasmania is also home to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CAM-lar, which operates under the Antarctic Treaty System to manage fisheries and ecosystems.

You might not know that Australia claims 42% of Antarctica, though like every Antarctic claim it's frozen under the treaty and not recognized by the US, Russia, or China. The Antarctic and Southern Ocean sector contributes more than 200m dollars per year to the island's economy.

But Russia and China are expanding in the Antarctic region, and because they are party to the Antarctic Treaty and CAM-lar operates by consensus, they’ve deadlocked the creation of new marine protected areas.

Meanwhile, Chinese firms have been purchasing Tasmanian companies, most prominently the Van Diemen's Land Company, the state's biggest dairy operation, which sold for 280m in 2016. There are no known Chinese port or critical infrastructure holdings on the island, but the trend has raised concerns about foreign investment and security.

Tasmania is a perfect example of an island peripheral to a larger federation, similar to Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland in Canada or the islands off the coast of Scotland. They are all over-represented politically, they struggle to balance resource extraction with environmental preservation, they deal with out-migration and aging populations, and they are dependent on their government to survive.

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