Tasmanian state election 2021: Health becomes talking point for major parties

As we enter the second week of the campaign, the major parties are starting to talk about health - an issue at the forefront of the minds of Tasmanians.

On Easter Monday, the Liberals unveiled a $154 million pledge to slash the state's ballooning elective surgery waiting list.

It's said the funding injection will provide for an additional 8300 surgeries statewide in 2021-22, bringing the total completed surgeries for that year to more than 22,000.

The Liberals say this would be "the largest year of surgery ever in Tasmania".

And while a temporary halt was brought to non-urgent elective surgeries across the country last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, critics of the Liberals' handling of health say the waiting list should never have been allowed to swell to more than 12,000 people and that funding boosts aren't the sole answer to the crisis plaguing our health system.

Labor has spruiked its policy to employ mental health workers in all state-run primary and high schools, while also detailing a $5 million school solar fund. But the party has continued to be wracked by internal discord after popular Kingborough mayor Dean Winter was snubbed as a state election candidate.

In the latest development in the ongoing saga, the Australian Workers Union has written to the ALP's national executive, asking it to overturn the administrative committee's preselection decisions or to see that Mr Winter is preselected as a sixth Labor candidate in Franklin.

Hardly the distraction Labor leader Rebecca White needs right now.

Meanwhile, the Greens have adopted a small-target strategy and are letting the majors do their best to embarrass themselves.

Drip-feeding policy announcements, the minor party is running a quietly effective campaign, so far having revealed a vision for modernising climate legislation, as well as a plan to overhaul tenancy laws.

What could the next week in the campaign have in store? If it's anything like the last 10 days, it's bound to be interesting at the very least.