After the Liberals failed to win enough seats at the 1996 election to govern in their own right, then Liberal Premier Ray Groom, who, along with Labor Leader Michael Field, had vowed not to strike a deal with the Greens to form minority government, asked his Braddon colleague if he would be prepared to lead the state in his stead.

“It came as a shot out of the blue when Ray said he was standing down and would I be prepared to put my hand up,” Mr Rundle told Fairfax Media.

“I had not contemplated ever being put in a position where I might become the Premier.”

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With some trepidation, Mr Rundle accepted, knowing full well the party line: minority government is equivalent to a death sentence.

And, ironically enough, the newly minted Premier found himself at a funeral soon after he took on the top job.

A mutual friend of Mr Rundle and Greens leader Christine Milne had died and a service was being held at Devonport Uniting Church.

It was there in the churchyard after the funeral that the two sworn enemies - from the state’s foremost conservative and progressive parties, respectively - first met to discuss how the new Parliament was going to function.

“This was all new territory,” Ms Milne said.

“How are you supposed to behave when there’s no arrangement and every day there’s no agreement on anything so any day the government is just held on a knife edge?”

Ms Milne said that even though the Greens held the balance of power, the fact that both Mr Groom and Mr Field had ruled out ever governing in minority left her with no leverage.

“The Libs went from majority government to minority government and didn’t have to talk to the Greens because Labor had clearly said that they wouldn’t and didn’t and walked away,” she said.

While nothing concrete came of the churchyard rendezvous, a dialogue was created, however frosty.

Then, the Port Arthur massacre happened.

The day lone gunman Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people at the Port Arthur Historic Site fell just 8 weeks after the 1996 election.

Ms Milne said it united all sides of politics.

“A lot of that hostility just went away because it had to in the practical reality of dealing with the aftermath of a disaster,” she said.

“So that’s how the dynamic changed.”

Mr Rundle told both Ms Milne and Mr Field that he was going to the Royal Hobart Hospital to visit those injured at Port Arthur and that the two leaders were welcome to join him.

While the Labor Leader did not attend, Mr Rundle and Ms Milne there faced the ire of the relatives of the afflicted.

“The initial reaction was anger: ‘What’s your government doing? There’s not adequate security. How could this have happened?’” Ms Milne said.

“At least I felt like [Mr Rundle and I] were showing a united front of trying to say we will do everything we can.”

In the wake of Port Arthur, the Rundle government, supported by Labor and the Greens, enacted sweeping new gun laws, serving as the model for then Prime Minister John Howard’s own much-lauded reforms.

While Ms Milne says Mr Rundle was loath to be seen fraternising with the Greens, even after Port Arthur, the former Premier recounts public negotiations between his government and the minor party, conducted in the “full gaze” of the media.

“We set up an open meeting with the Greens to discuss how the Parliament could work and what needed to happen to make it work,” Mr Rundle said.

“We [the Liberals] were left with the position that Tasmanians had voted as they had and we didn’t have a majority and we had to get on and provide a government that was going to be effective and deliver for Tasmania.

“You simply couldn’t abandon it or say, ‘No, we’re not going to be part of it’.”

And so Mr Rundle’s “crash or crash through” philosophy was crystallised.

“If we were booted out after 12 months, we were prepared for it,” he said.

“If it went on longer, that was fine. But we weren’t going to compromise.”

Former Labor MHA Michael Polley, who was Speaker of the House of Assembly for a total of 19 years and sat on the Opposition benches from 1996-98, said minority governments tended to be reformist.

“They’re hanging in there by the skin of their teeth,” he said.

“They tend to throw caution to the wind quite a bit.”

Mr Polley said the Rundle government governed well and that its relationship with the Greens was “reasonably workable, from what I could see”.

“Rundle himself was a competent Premier. He made a pretty good fist of it,” Mr Polley said.

The Rundle government was notable for the sheer breadth of social reforms it managed to implement, driven in no small part by the influence of Ms Milne.

In 1997, Mr Rundle needed to ensure that the budget had the support of the Greens.

So he went to Ms Milne to get an idea of what she wanted in return for a guarantee of supply.

Tasmania was, at this point, the only state in which male homosexuality and cross-dressing were still illegal.

“[The Premier] agreed that if I could get gay law reform through the lower house, he would facilitate, by requiring the Leader of Government Business in the upper house, who was [Russell MLC] Tony Fletcher, to get it through the upper house,” Ms Milne said.

“That’s why … I got gay law reform in Tasmania.”

History was made once more when an apology was made to Tasmania’s Stolen Generation.

“We invited the Aboriginal community to the Parliament,” Ms Milne recalled.

“They were going to be in the meeting room and I said to Rundle, ‘No, they can’t be in the meeting room - we have to have them on the floor of the house. If we’re apologising, we have to actually meet on equal terms.’”

Annette Peardon, who was taken from her family on Flinders Island in the 1950s, became the first Aboriginal person to address Tasmania’s lower house, telling her harrowing story to the state’s elected officials.

What’s more, Tasmania itself became the first state to make a public apology to the Stolen Generation, more than 10 years before Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised on behalf of the nation in 2008.

Another defining moment for the 1996-98 government was Mr Rundle’s Directions Statement, which was the result of a 1997 meeting of agency bosses.

The Premier had requested the state’s top public servants to devise a series of policy positions to thrust Tasmania into the 21st century.

Political scientist Kate Crowley, who has edited a book on the Rundle government, said the document “set an economic base up for today”.

It was both Mr Rundle’s magnum opus and his downfall.

Tasmania’s undersea interconnector Basslink, which allows us to import and export electricity from the mainland, was originally proposed in the Directions Statement.

“We set up the Basslink steering committee and got that moving,” Mr Rundle said.

“We weren’t there to finally tick [it] off but [it was an] initiative of our government that came to fruition.”

One of the elements of the Directions Statement that Mr Rundle did see develop in his time was what he calls the IT industry “renaissance”.

“We were responsible for attracting a lot of big employing call centres,” Mr Rundle said.

“They were big employers, employing hundreds of people, not just 40 or 50 jobs here and there.

“We were criticised by the New South Wales government for using some of the money that was given to Tasmania by the federal government to sweeten deals to get these call centres into Tasmania.”

While much of the Directions Statement was praised, some parts of it were anathema both to the public and to Mr Rundle’s political opponents.

And none more so than the proposal to lease the state’s poles and wires for 99 years.

The privatisation of Hydro Tasmania would have seen a return to the government of up to $5 billion but seemingly no-one but the Premier and his most loyal followers were willing to entertain the idea.

“It was becoming more difficult to actually deal with the Greens and actually get agreement on legislation,” Mr Rundle said.

“And that Hydro issue was an important one and a defining one.

“I believed that the longer we stayed [in the Parliament], the more difficult it would get and that we’d see ourselves continuing to slide in the polls.”

Ms Milne, however, remembers things differently.

“It’s a bit of hindsight glossing to say [Mr Rundle] went to the election over the poles and wires,” she said.

In fact, Mr Rundle cheated political death on several other occasions.

He was a signatory to the Regional Forest Agreement in 1997, which facilitated the logging of native forests on public land.

He thought that would be the end of the understanding between himself and the leader of the Greens.

“When we signed the Regional Forest Agreement, I called the Cabinet to Devonport and we had a meeting at my house and talked about the implications of signing the RFA and what was likely to happen,” Mr Rundle said.

“And I suggested I thought it was likely the Greens would move a vote of no confidence and send us to an election.

“However, that .... miraculously didn’t happen.”

Ms Milne said that was because she believed Labor was “worse” when it came to forests.

“[Labor resources spokesman Paul] Lennon came out and strongly criticised the RFA as being way too generous in protecting forests and if it was up to him he would take out the Savage River rainforest, you would take out a whole lot of areas,” Ms Milne said

“So the issue for us was … we could bring the government down, we could force an election [but] if Labor got in we’d actually be in a worse position on the forests than we were.”

For the former Greens leader, it was the reduction of the number of seats in the lower house from 35 to 25 that really spelled the end for the Rundle government.

“Rundle had said to me that he wanted to reduce the numbers, because he’s an economic rationalist and he believed in smaller government,” Ms Milne said.

“So he gave me an undertaking that he would do it in such a way that didn’t adversely affect any one group.

“However, Jim Bacon was of a different view.”

Mr Bacon had been elevated to the leadership of the Labor Party in 1997, following Mr Field’s resignation.

“His whole driving force was to bring in an electoral system that did in the Greens,” Ms Milne said.

Mr Bacon had also, according to Ms Milne, become “desperate” for the media to get a picture of Mr Rundle and the Greens leader together, to push the image of the Liberals getting into bed with the Greens.

When the Huxley Hill Wind Farm on King Island was being opened in 1998, the state’s political leaders were invited to attend.

“Bacon instructed every Labor member that they could not attend,” Ms Milne said.

“Now, of course, we knew what they were up to.

“But I wasn’t not going to go because I absolutely supported wind power and had been supporting renewable energy and so on.”

The fact that it had been raining meant that Mr Rundle and Ms Milne looked like “drowned rats” on the day.

“We had our photo taken … and we deliberately stood so that the turbine was immediately behind us so anyone who looked at that picture can’t mistake the context,” Ms Milne said.

“Labor photoshopped the wind turbine out of the picture so it just had Rundle and I standing there like a married couple.

“And that is the picture they used in the election to say this was a Liberal-Green government.”

The reduction of the size of Parliament was seen by some as an effort to diminish the likelihood of the public returning minority governments - but the model Mr Rundle was forced to adopt was one which benefited Labor above all.

Political analyst Richard Herr once dubbed it an “act of political hari kari” on the part of the Liberals.

From the outset, Ms Milne and her Green colleagues had painted the reduction as a move to eradicate the Greens, given that it would make it difficult for minor party candidates to meet the new required quota of 16.7 per cent.

With his proposal to rip 10 seats out of the lower house, Mr Bacon had secured the support of influential Denison Liberal MHAs Bob Cheek and Michael Hodgman.

The Premier of the day was thus faced with the bleak prospect of having a no confidence motion moved against him should he propose any other model.

So he decided to back the Bacon model, knowing it would take the state to its second election in two-and-a-half years.

“I’d always said Tasmanians were doing more with less and that the politicians had to do more with less and that we needed a smaller Parliament and that it was based simply on that rather than as a device to get rid of the Greens,” Mr Rundle said.

Ms Milne, however, took it to heart.

“Why I always felt betrayed by Rundle was, from the very beginning, because there was no written agreement or any agreement of any kind in relation to the Greens and the Liberals … I had said to him, ‘Look, I will never ambush you with a no confidence motion in the House of Assembly. That’s not to say I [won’t] only inform you two minutes before we actually go in. … I would appreciate the same courtesy from you’,” she said.

It wasn’t just Mr Rundle and Ms Milne who were aware of this pact, though.

“When Rundle decided to switch and back Jim Bacon’s model, he didn’t ring me,” Ms Milne said.

“I was sitting in my office in the now-to-be-demolished old building in 10 Murray Street.

“And I got a phone-call from one of Rundle’s chief advisers, who is now dead.”

It was a conversation the former Greens leader would not soon forget.

“He rang me and he said, ‘Christine, I’m just telling you that the Premier is leaving our office right now to go and do a press conference to announce that he’s supporting [the Bacon model]’,” Ms Milne said.

“‘And because you have always respected the arrangement that you would never ambush the Premier, you would tell him even if it was a minute before, I’m ringing to tell you he’s on his way down to do it’.”

And so Tasmanians went to the polls again on August 29, 1998.

Mr Bacon was victorious, with Labor retaining all 14 of its seats and the Liberals losing six.

The Greens suffered the greatest defeat, losing three of their four seats, including Ms Milne’s in Lyons.

In the eyes of the fallen Greens leader, it confirmed that Labor and the Liberals had conspired to do in the Greens.

Denison Greens MHA Peg Putt was then the sole Green voice in the Parliament.

The cross-bench had been torn out of the lower house following the reduction.

So, on the first day of the new Parliament, Ms Putt, who was now the Greens leader by default, dragged a deckchair into the house and plonked it where her and her Green colleagues used to sit.

Ms Milne said Ms Putt brought the Greens back from the dead.

“Peg rebuilt the party from there and then the Greens were reelected in 2002 and 2006 and so on from there,” Ms Milne said.

Ultimately, the Rundle government was responsible for “major reform” and left a lasting legacy, Associate Professor Crowley said.

Like Mr Field before him, Mr Rundle continues to say that minority government arrangements are “a very difficult proposition”.

But Associate Professor Crowley urged Tasmanians not to be afraid of hung parliaments.

“We are turning the whole of Tasmania’s policies and directions and what we want to do for the state … around the fact of what’s going to be good for a party or not,” Associate Professor Crowley said.

“Who cares if it’s good or bad for the political parties?

“Live with it, rebuild, come back.”