Well, that resolved the doubts, including mine. Prior to Saturday, the Liberal Party only surmised that it was in an existential crisis. Now it knows.
The Liberal vote in South Australia on Saturday (see my preview here) fell to 19.2%: not merely its lowest ever, but more than twelve points below its previous low mark. The far-right One Nation outvoted it by nearly three points, exactly as the opinion polls had said. The Liberals will probably still finish with more seats than One Nation, although even that is not certain.
But let’s stick with votes for the moment. At the previous South Australian election, in 2022, Labor, the Greens and Animal Justice won 49.7% of the vote between them; the Liberal Party and five small parties to its right won in aggregate 42.8% (the rest nearly all went to independents). This time, the vote for parties on the left (now with the addition of Legalise Cannabis) is unchanged at 49.7%, while the right-of-centre parties (mostly the same six) now have 43.9%, with the independent vote down slightly.
But whereas the internal balance on the left is also barely changed – there’s a bit of a swing from Labor to Greens – on the right it has shifted massively. One Nation, which in 2022 had 2.6%, has picked up nearly twenty points, now at 22.0%. The Liberals, having never previously fallen below 30%, are down more than 16 points to 19.2%. Family First, the only other noteworthy player last time, has lost more than half its vote to finish a distant fifth on 1.6% (These numbers will all change a bit with late counting, but not enough to matter.)
The coincidence of numbers suggests a simple hypothesis, that all the movement is on the right: that the left’s voters haven’t changed, but a huge number of Liberal voters (plus a few from independents and Family First) have switched directly to One Nation. The alternative view – beloved of the media, who always want to talk about working-class discontent – is that there has been a large shift from both Labor and Liberals to One Nation, which Labor has compensated for by taking an equivalent number of votes from the Liberals.
The truth is somewhere in between. The first hypothesis cannot be accepted as it stands, because although the statewide numbers match nicely, those at seat level don’t. There are a bunch of seats, particularly in the outer northern and southern suburbs of Adelaide, where the Labor and Liberal votes are both down sharply to the benefit of One Nation. Look, for example, at Elizabeth (Labor -14.7, Liberal -12.5, One Nation +22.9), or Kaurna (Labor -10.2, Liberal -12.7, One Nation +18.5), or Ramsay (Labor -9.8, Liberal -15.3, One Nation +27.0).
But on the other hand, those seats are not typical of the whole. Numbers alone can’t falsify the second hypothesis, but there are a number of seats where it looks deeply implausible. Take Colton, for example, in the beachside suburbs, which Labor has won from the Liberals: the drop of 27.3% in the Liberal vote seems to have gone mostly to One Nation (up 16.6%), but Labor is also up, by 7.9%.
Or look at Hammond, on the lower Murray, a Liberal seat that One Nation appears to have picked up. There too the Labor vote is up, by 4.2% (which looks to have mostly come from the Greens and independent); the Liberals are down 18.0%, but that’s a good match for the One Nation gain of 20.2%.
What about the seat totals? In metropolitan Adelaide, which has 35 seats, it’s almost a whitewash: Labor seems to have won 32 seats to the Liberals’ three. A couple on each side are still doubtful; the Liberals could still be reduced to one if Labor can reel in Morphett and Heysen (the Greens are also some chance in the latter), while Labor is at risk from an independent in Kavel and from One Nation in Light.
In the twelve non-metropolitan seats it’s a very different picture. It currently looks like two Labor, three Liberal, four One Nation and three independent. But not all the One Nation seats are yet secure (the Liberals are still in the hunt in Hammond and Narungga), and the Liberals could conceivably beat the independent in Finniss. (Kevin Bonham’s site is probably the best place to follow the late counting.)
That makes it look as if One Nation is almost entirely a regional phenomenon, and in one sense that’s correct. But if you look at the way it’s eaten into the Liberal vote, there’s no difference between the two: in the metropolitan area One Nation is ahead of the Liberals in 22 seats as against thirteen the other way, whereas in the rest it’s eight against four.
The nearest counterpart we’ve had to this in recent times was the New South Wales election of 2011, where (as I reported breathlessly at the time) “In an extraordinary 24 seats – a quarter of the total – Labor failed to finish in the top two. … Right across Sydney’s northern suburbs the Greens have, at least temporarily, replaced Labor as the second party.” But that was nothing compared to this: on Saturday the Liberals fell out of the top two in thirty seats, almost two-thirds of the total. (Ben Raue has a nice table of this, plus lots of other interesting statistics).
The other comparison that will probably come to mind is Queensland in 1998, during One Nation’s first flowering. Similarities include the Liberals being reduced to single digits (nine seats out of 89, although they fell further from there) and One Nation taking second place to Labor. But in Queensland there was the National Party: it and the Liberals individually both fell below One Nation, but in combination they were still well ahead, 31.3% to 22.7%. Whereas in South Australia the Nationals contributed just 1,165 votes to the total, no more than a rounding error.
Perhaps the most interesting precedent is the previous lowest vote for the South Australian Liberals, way back in 1975. It was an election that they almost won (Labor was dragged down by the unpopularity of the Whitlam government), but their primary vote was only 31.5%. That’s because the Liberal Party had split, with its progressive wing forming the Liberal Movement, which garnered 18.3% of the vote.
That too was a crisis for the party, but it was a solvable one. The Liberals swallowed their pride, opened negotiations with the Liberal Movement, and ultimately reached agreement on reunification (although a few stayed out to help form the Australian Democrats). That was possible with a rival on the more liberal side; the party’s conservatives might grumble, but they had nowhere else to go.
But that strategy won’t work with a far-right rival. If the party compromises with One Nation, its more liberal voters will jump ship to Labor or the Teals. This time its crisis truly is existential: having opened the door to the tiger of the far right, it now faces being eaten by it. Or as William Bowe neatly puts it this morning, “another possibility that seemingly no-one wants to countenance is that the party is stuffed either way.”
The World is Not Enough 