18 March | South Australian Election Preview

South Australians will head to the polls this weekend, with Labor widely tipped to return to government after only four years in Opposition.

All 47 seats in the House of Assembly (lower house) will be contested, along with half of the 22 seats in the Legislative Council.

Liberal Premier Steven Marshall began the current term with 25 seats but enters the election with 22 after a series of scandals and disagreements with sitting MPs.  

All three MPs who started the term as Liberals will re-contest as Independents.

Marshall’s re-election pitch points to a growing economy, a balanced approach to COVID and being the only state apart from Western Australia about to deliver a budget surplus.

Labor leader Peter Malinauskas, on the other hand, says SA has the highest unemployment rate in the country and that the government has lost control of the health system.

Labor had been in power for 16 years until the last election and enters this weekend’s race as the strong favourite, in part because Nick Xenophon’s SA-BEST is not contesting this time around.

Even though SA-BEST did not win any seats in 2018, the party picked up 14 cent of the primary vote off the back of Xenophon’s strong personal following and a majority of those votes are expected to return to Labor.

The re-entry of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation for the first time since 2006 plus active campaigning by the Australian Christian Lobby – alongside Marshall’s support for abortion and euthanasia reforms - will split the conservative vote.

The Adelaide Advertiser’s YouGov poll has Labor well ahead of the Liberals on a two-party preferred basis, 56 per cent to 44 per cent.

Malinauskas is also well ahead as preferred Premier, 45 per cent to 40 per cent.

If he loses, Marshall would be the first one-term premier in the state in the past 40 years but conversely would also be the first Liberal Premier since David Tonkin in 1982 to make it through a full term in office.

Management of the COVID-19 pandemic helped to return state governments in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania over the past couple of years but the same may not be true in South Australia.

Cost of living, jobs, access to health services and funding for public hospitals have taken precedence over the management of COVID-19 during the election campaign.

South Australians did not experience anywhere near the lengthy lockdowns of Victoria and NSW, yet the YouGov polling suggested only eight per cent of voters saw management of COVID-19 as their top issue going into the election.

Instead, ambulance ramping – whereby patients are forced to wait in ambulances outside Emergency Departments due to a lack of beds – has become a key election issue and is widely seen as evidence that the public health system is struggling to cope.

Just this week, the ambulance union highlighted multiple deaths including that of an elderly patient who waited 56 minutes for an ambulance while another patient in their 20s waited 45 minutes.

These cases will be reviewed by the South Australian Ambulance Service (SAAS), in line with protocol, but have added to the perception of a health system in crisis.

The future of the Adelaide 500 V8 Supercar race has been a big issue in suburbia. Marshall scrapped the race – long known as the Clipsal 500 – and Malinauskas has pledged to bring it back.

The Liberals expect to win the seat of Frome after a redistribution but a uniform swing in line with the polls would see the Opposition pick up Newland, Adelaide, King and Elder.

All of this means it is highly likely that Labor will hold more seats and could even form majority government.

There is no doubt that Prime Minister Scott Morrison would dearly love a surprise victory by Premier Marshall.

Marshall has been a strong ally in National Cabinet for the PM while Malinauskas, who has already been campaigning for more money from Canberra for health and hospitals, would provide a headache just months before a federal election.

With the Liberals in power at state level only NSW and Tasmania, a strong health and hospitals campaign by the states and territories would be reminiscent of 2007, when the issue contributed to the Howard Government losing after more than a decade in office.

Marshall was broadly considered to have done a good job until the arrival of Omicron late last year amid accusations of opening up too quickly and leaving vulnerable members of the community exposed to the new strain.

An electoral rout could be interpreted as Omicron being the turning point for incumbent governments relying on their strong COVID response as central to their re-election bid.

Many see Marshall as lacking a substitute narrative post-pandemic, while fellow state premiers Mark McGowan, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Peter Gutwein ran almost entirely on their record of keeping residents safe while cushioning the impact on families and jobs.

Most political pundits agree that the federal election will be won or lost according to who can develop a stronger positive narrative on what life will look like once we finally put COVID-19 behind us.

Nick Xenophon hasn’t yet declared whether he will contest the upcoming federal election for the Senate, although he did float the idea via The Australian newspaper in October last year.

The political maverick first entered South Australian politics at state level before switching to the Senate, maintaining a high profile due to his astute judgement on what voters care about mixed with a keen eye for the theatre of politics.

Rex Patrick and Sterling Griff are in the upper house courtesy of Xenophon’s electoral success and without his undoubted star power, both are unlikely to make it into the top six this time around.

If Xenophon runs federally, he has said that part of his motivation is to help keep the balance of power in moderate hands amid the rise of right-wing populists such as Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.