Labor would love to retrieve the Southern seat, and already has thrown money at neighbouring Franklin to keep new minister Julie Collins intact.

Mr Wilkie's enormous power under Prime Minister Julia Gillard's minority government seemed assured until rogue Queensland Liberal MP Peter Slipper accepted Labor's offer of the House of Representatives speakership.

The Slipper deal made the PM a little less reliant on the Wilkie demands for gambling reform.

It was evident yesterday when Mr Wilkie gave ground on key elements of the reform.

He is now in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. The national media is feasting on his loss of crossbench power.

His poker machine rhetoric and ultimatums have gone.

His ultimatum for legislative reforms by May this year has now been put back until 2016, and, he may have cost Tasmanians precious GST funds through his minority government deal for $340 million towards the Royal Hobart Hospital.

He forgot to exclude the RHH deal from the calculations on our GST share. Now he has laid himself open to state government taunts about selling out the state on GST.

In Perth this week, Mr Wilkie appeared to suggest that Western Australia should receive more GST because it didn't have the gambling tax revenue of other states.

He denied the Labor taunt, and said he was not saying Tasmania should be disadvantaged.

But he should know that one-tenth of Tasmania's tax take comes from mainly pokies gambling, and that WA wants Tasmania to lose more of its GST share to the resource-rich states like WA and Queensland.

Mr Wilkie is a former army lieutenant-colonel and senior intelligence analyst, who resigned his commission in protest over the Howard government's part in the Iraq war. He is definitely no slouch, but he could do with a refresher course on the tactics of survival and relevance at home. Some doorknocking might help.