Tomorrow’s state election in South Australia is the first electoral test of any significance in Australia since last July’s Tasmanian election. But a lot has happened in those eight months, with turmoil in the Coalition parties, both of which have changed federal leaders, and the associated surge in the polls for the far-right One Nation. Now the voters will get to play a hand.
The last South Australian election, four years ago, saw Labor return to office with 40.0% of the vote (54.6% two-party-preferred) and 27 of the 47 seats in the lower house. The Liberals with 35.7% won 16 seats, and the Greens with 9.1% won none – South Australia remains the only state where the Greens have never won a lower house seat. Two far-right parties, Family First and One Nation, had 6.3% of the vote between them, also failing to win a seat; the remaining four seats all went to independents.
Since then, Labor has won two seats from the Liberals at by-elections, taking the numbers to 29-14-4. The independents all sit for what would normally be thought of as Liberal seats; two of them are retiring, but like-minded independents are hoping to succeed them so I shall continue to count them as independent-held seats. In addition the MP for MacKillop, elected as a Liberal, has resigned from the party and is seeking re-election as an independent (although he is currently on home detention facing charges of domestic violence).
The Liberals have changed leaders three times since the 2022 election; current leader Ashton Hurn has been in the job since last December. Together with Victoria’s Jess Wilson and New South Wales’s Kellie Sloane she is one of a trio of first-term female leaders installed last year after more experienced men had made a right mess of things. The experiment is yet to pay dividends, but they had to try something.
Opinion polls in South Australia have consistently shown two things: first, a big lead for Labor and premier Peter Malinauskas, and secondly, a surge for One Nation on the opposition side, with the latest polls (as with their federal counterparts) putting it ahead of the Liberals. So while this might not be a particularly exciting election for South Australians – their government is going to be re-elected with a large majority – for the country as a whole it could be a real watershed.
Federally, as I’ve noted before, the Liberal Party has the option of not directly confronting One Nation but leaving it to a life-and-death struggle with the National Party. That option, however, is not there in South Australia. There is, to a first approximation, no National Party (it has not won a seat since 2006; last time it received 0.5% of the vote), so it is the Liberal Party that has a rural base and is therefore in direct competition with One Nation.
South Australia is highly urbanised; 35 of the 47 seats are based in metropolitan Adelaide.* But of the Liberals’ 14 seats, only half are metropolitan, and they are much the more marginal half: with the exception of Bragg (8.2%), all of them have margins under 5%. So with those seats all at risk to Labor, the Liberals cannot avoid fighting One Nation in the bush if they are to remain any sort of viable force at all.
This, then, is the big test. If One Nation’s poll results are mostly a bubble (as I and others have suggested), South Australia could be the place that bursts it. The state polls are putting it above 20%; if it matches that it will prove the doubters wrong. But if it fails to even get close – say, staying below 15% – then I suspect its tide will quickly run out.
Setting a target in terms of seats is much harder. Even with Labor riding high it has little support outside of Adelaide; it holds only two of the twelve non-metropolitan seats, with a strong chance at a third (Ngadjuri). In most of the non-metropolitan seats that will be contested between Liberals and One Nation there is a good chance that Labor will finish third, in which case its preferences should prevent One Nation victories. But the presence of strong independents in many of those seats will complicate the position (Kevin Bonham has done some interesting modelling of this).
If the Liberals are doing as badly as the polls indicate, many of their candidates will be eliminated and their preferences will favor One Nation; that’s particularly likely in outer suburban seats, where the base Liberal vote is low and the chance of Labor being eliminated is negligible. One or perhaps two seats could be dismissed as anomalies, but if three or more One Nation MPs are elected on Liberal preferences it will set off a firestorm in the Liberal Party, just as it did in Queensland in 1998.
And regardless of whether they are going to Labor, independents or One Nation, if the Liberal seat tally falls much further, say into the low single figures, it will add greatly to the atmosphere of existential crisis that already surrounds the party nationwide.
For coverage tomorrow night, check out Ben Raue’s livestream, William Bowe’s live updates and the ABC’s comprehensive guide. We’ll be back next week to have a look at what it all means.
* Ngadjuri, Schubert and Mawson are debatable; I’m classifying them as non-metropolitan.
The World is Not Enough 