Croweaters go to the polls: South Australia State Election (Final Results)

[AustralianSwingVoter]

In a months time Australia's second smallest state will be heading to the polls to elect a new state government.

Just by making it to re-election Steven Marshall has done what no SA Liberal has done in 40 years. Win an election and last the full term. The SA Liberals are the least successful and most incompetent of all the state major parties and it shows in their electoral record, winning just 4/15 over the last half-century. A sign of how useless they are, over that 50 year span they won the popular vote 9/15 times. On 5 occasions ('75, '89, '02, '10, '14) they've won the popular vote but won fewer seats than Labor thanks to a mix of a strong geography bias, incompetent campaigning and constant factional warfare.

The Liberal breakthrough in 2018 was facilitated by a measure they introduced in their previous term of office in the 90s, the electoral fairness provision. Akin to the antics of redistricting in America today, this required that electoral boundaries be drawn so that whichever party won a majority of the vote would win a majority of seats on uniform swing from the last election. As you can tell from the last paragraph this failed thrice so after 2014 the electoral commission got real and took an axe to the old boundaries, sculpting a malapportioned gerrymander that deliberately underpopulated rural seats and overpopulated urban Labor seats in the vain attempt of forcing "electoral fairness". This proved to finally be a success when the Liberals won in 2018 in spite of a swing to Labor.

However Labor got the last laugh when they rammed through a constitutional amendment on the last sitting day before the election to repeal the electoral fairness requirements with the support of the crossbench. This lead to the Redistribution conducted this term being the first in 30 years conducted without an eye to electoral fairness. Thus the commission removed the more egregious rural overrepresentation and silly boundaries in Eastern Adelaide, however the most controversial change was biting the bullet and dealing with the continued population decline of the rural north by cutting a seat from the Iron Triangle and splitting the city of Port Augusta in half in the process. The resultant ugly seat of Stuart is a marquee race, with the Liberal Deputy Premier Dan van Holst Pellekaan taking on Independent Geoff Brock transferring from Frome. Other than Stuart the boundary changes have little partisan implications, with the most relevant being Liberal weakening in ultra-marginal Newland and Elder.

While on paper this should be an easy win for the Liberals, what with ending 16 years of Labor rule and the popularity from covid the reality is far less rosy for the right. The last 4 years have been a master class in squandered opportunity, textbook factional infighting and horrendous scandals. By the end of the term they'd lost their majority in the lower house and Labor and the crossbench elected their own speaker. How did this happen? Well firstly backbencher Sam Duluk slapped the ass of a crossbench MP at a christmas party and barely got off conviction for assault and is now running a quixotic independent re-election campaign. Then it turned out half a dozen country members were rorting an expense allowance for city accomodation to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. This led to the expulsion of Stephan Knoll (who's also running a quixotic independent re-election campaign) and Stephan Knoll (thankfully retiring). Meanwhile Tim Whetstone was slightly less blatant with his rorting and got away with demotion from cabinet and has been re-endorsed by the Liberals for re-election. The final loss was freshman MP Dan Cregan who quit the party for vague reasons of anti-corruption and opportunism (and his opportunism was rewarded by being elected Speaker by Labor). Hilariously there were two more backbenchers (Nick McBride & Steve Murray) who've defected on some key legislation who publicly mused defecting before deciding to stay in the party and run for re-election. And to cap it all off at the end Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman was forced to resign from cabinet after Labor and the crossbench passed a no confidence motion against her for misleading parliament over a conflict of interest as Planning Minister when she rejected a timber port on Kangaroo Island that would run right through her family property, which would've hurt its property value and income from airbnb rentals.

For more detailed information and profiles of specific seats, here's two fantastic guides:
ABC/Antony Green
PollBludger/William Bowe

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Thanks for the rundown and the links.
Antony Green is one of the greats.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Polls I hear you ask? Well the first public poll in 8 months (statewide public polls are painfully rare and only more so with the declining trust in polling) was released this week by Dynata/InDaily (new unproven pollster, so not even incredibly useful) with 2pp of Labor 51-49 (3% swing) off primaries of ALP 37 (+4) LIB 35 (-3). On those numbers Labor would certainly win government, 23-25 seats. But until we get some reliable pollsters (Newspoll/YouGov, Essential, ReachTEL)

The seats to watch? No Labor seats look particularly vulnerable given the swing seems to be in their favour, and even if it turns the most marginal is the miracle man Leon Bignell in Mawson. Beyond that its Wright, Badcoe, Lee and Torrens, none of which have broken against Labor since 1993 and look highly unlikely to do so now. So our focus is instead drawn to the Liberal side of the pendulum and the Independents. First, among the 6 crossbenchers Labor should easily regain Florey with Bedford's retirement, Frome is an automatic Liberal gain with Brock's move to Stuart, Bell looks very safe in Mt Gambier, Duluk looks dead in the water in Waite and Ellis scarcely looks better in Narungga while Cregan in Kavel is a big unknown that we'll get a better idea of from campaigning.

The 4 Liberal seats that will decide the election are Newland, King, Adelaide and Elder. Adelaide and King are unaffected by the redistribution but the margin in Newland has dropped from 2.0% to a razor thin 0.1% and halved in Elder from 4.4% to 2.0%. Adelaide covers the city centre and has the demographics you'd expect, with the highest proportion of high school graduates, Chinese speakers and second highest proportion of Bachelors holders in the state. Newland, King and Elder on the other hand are typical middle class middle Australian suburbia. What little distinctions do exist, Newland is more established middle suburbia with a higher proportion of elderly voters (though not many retirees), King is outer suburbia dominated by mortgage paying families having the some of largest proportions of mortgage payers, teenagers and people in their 40s in the state and Elder is denser inner suburbs with more singles and younger couples.

Beyond those key four Labour might have a chance in Colton or Hartley if they have a strong campaign and the swing starts going their way. Both are fairly bland middle suburbia similar to Newland though Hartley warrants a brief mention for its large Italian community and Xenophon's failed candidacy last election where he got a underwhelming close third.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Other than the proper marginals there is one other Liberal seat to watch, the marquee race in Stuart between Liberal Deputy Premier Dan van Holst Pellekaan and Independent Geoff Brock. It's such an interesting race it absolutely deserves a deeper dive.

This race exists because of the redistribution. Thanks to continued declining population in the rural north the boundaries commission was forced to bite the bullet and consolidate the Iron Triangle cities from three to two electorates, and the only way to do this is splitting the middle point of the triangle (Port Augusta) in half. The western side of town joins Whyalla in the somehow still safe Labor seat of Giles meanwhile the existing seat of Stuart keeps the east side of town and snags the entirety of Port Pirie from Frome, which is transformed into a seat centred on the Clare Valley.

The redrawn seat of Stuart can be very easily divided into three roughly equally populated zones; the eastern half of Port Augusta, the rural agricultural shires of the Southern Flinders region, and the newly acquired entirety of Port Pirie.
van Holst Pellekaan has deep local connections across the Southern Flinders and gets soviet level majorities across the rural booths, breaking 90% in some booths. The region skirts the Goyder's Line with marginal conditions that are just good enough to support consistent agriculture. Wheat is the dominant crop across the region, with some of the largest grain silos in Australia scattered across the small rural towns.

Meanwhile the new addition of Port Pirie has long been a more conservative town but in the 2009 Frome by-election Geoff Brock shockingly won the seat off the back of 6 years as the popular high-profile Mayor of Port Pirie, and he's very comfortably held Frome since. In the last election he won an absurd 78% in the booths that have been transferred to Stuart. Port Pirie itself is a repeat winner of the S***test Town in Australia competition and quite accurately. It's an industrial town centred on the lead smelters in the southern hemisphere which has done wonders for the local ecosystem, not to mention the local population. But nobody can stomach tackling the pollution as if the Smelter closes the town will die.

Finally, Port Augusta is a fairly marginal town though van Holst Pellekaan has won mid-60s there in the past two elections thanks to strong campaigning and anonymous Labor candidates. But it still shows its Labor vote in recent federal elections and it's going to decide this race. The town itself is far above the Goyder line with desert climate and wildlife and was founded as a convenient seaport at the mouth of the Spencer Gulf. It never developed the heavy industry that Whyalla and Port Pirie did, instead becoming a major transport hub as a junction of railways and roads linking the west, north and east. Slightly less depressing as Port Pirie or Whyalla but still a depressing post-industrial sh*thole.

The notional first preferences after the redistribution is Liberal 44.4%, Brock 34.6%, Labor 15.3%. (Keeping in mind that Brock vote is only from half the booths there's not a lot you can extrapolate from this) Brock and van Holst Pellekaan each have their bases where they can expect upwards of 65-70% of the vote, and Port Augusta hangs in the middle. If van Holst Pellekaan can hold his vote in the 60s from last election he'll win, if Brock can get a decent primary vote and get it near tied on Labor preferences then he'll win.

(Before anyone brings it up yes we do have a seat poll for Stuart commissioned by a Forestry lobbying group and conducted by the consistently awful uComms which shows van Holst Pellekaan taking an easy win but it should be ignored. The track record of individual electorate polling in Aus in abysmal and the same goes for uComms as a pollster.)

[AustralianSwingVoter]

his full name is Daniel Cornelius van Holst Pellekaan btw (no I'm not joking it actually is) and doesn't just have a name that is more aggressively Dutch than 99% of actual Hollanders, he's also the tallest member of parliament at 6'4" and even looks Dutch! Yet he's the member for outback bogans and unemployed smelter-workers.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Yesterday we had the first credible poll of the year, and a shocking one at that. Newspoll/YouGov for the Oz offers a striking topline of Labor 53-47 with primaries of ALP 39 LIB 37 GRN 10. Most incredible is the preferred premier with Malinauskas leading 49-39. That's a shocking result for an incumbent premier, yet along a first-term premier.

The first week of campaigning (of four) went fairly smoothly, with both parties focused heavily on new health promises funded by creative accounting (Labor will pay for it by cancelling a stadium that hasn't been funded, Liberals have passed off funding that's already in the budget as "new"). SA has a fairly disastrous health system with endemic ambulance ramping, however neither party offers any solutions to the core problems, yet alone serious funding to fix them.

In a quieter moment Malinauskas engaged in a fairly bold photo op for an election campaign, shirtless in a swimming pool to promote a promised new $80m Aquatic Centre. Labor spin doctors are clearly thrilled at the column inches they got in return.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/elections/2022-state-election/candidates

The State Electoral Commission has released the full list of nominated candidates and ballot orders and there's a couple interesting points. Lab+Lib running in all 47 seats but shockingly the Greens are only running in 43 seats (not contesting Frome, MacKillop, Mount Gambier and Narungga), the first time in many years that the Greens haven't contested every seat in a state election. The moribund SA Nationals are contesting 8 seats in a bit of a shock, that's the most candidates they've put up since 1982. Normal mix of minor parties and independents with nothing particularly surprising. Hilariously ex-Xenophon SA Best has managed to put up one lone candidate in Giles.

[xelas81]

Is the upcoming federal election having any impact on this election?
Or are state elections and federal elections viewed differently?

[DL]

Is the upcoming federal election having any impact on this election?
Or are state elections and federal elections viewed differently?

I'm no expert on Australian politics but i have noticed that when Labour is in power for a longtime federally eventually almost all the state governments go Liberal and vice-versa when the Liberals are in power for a longtime federally. I think SA and NSW are the only states that have Coalition gov'ts right now and SA may be the next shoe to drop...

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Is the upcoming federal election having any impact on this election?
Or are state elections and federal elections viewed differently?

I'm no expert on Australian politics but i have noticed that when Labour is in power for a longtime federally eventually almost all the state governments go Liberal and vice-versa when the Liberals are in power for a longtime federally. I think SA and NSW are the only states that have Coalition gov'ts right now and SA may be the next shoe to drop...

Indeed, the phenomenon in question is known as federal drag. Combine it with the age of the governments and it's a pretty good predictor of state elections. The role the federal gov plays in state politics varies, and while politics isn't as nationalised as modern America there is a lot of impacts between both.
And it must be noted that this also works in reverse, unpopular state governments tend to affect their party in federal elections. The clearest example you'll see of this is the 1990 federal election where the entire nationwide swing and Liberal net gains were drawn solely from Victoria thanks to the raging dumpster fire surrounding the Cain government.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Very nasty poll from YouGov/Tiser with Labor leading 56-44. Looks like Labor's campaign has been highly effective as the number one issue for voters polled is Healthcare, and Malinauskas leads Marshall on both popularity and preferred premier.

[DL]

If, as seems likely, Labor wins the SA election that would leave only Tasmania and New South Wales under Coalition control - and while Tasmania reelected its government just last year, NSW has an election next year and it sounds like the Coalition gov't there has turned into a bit of a cluster. Probably the best hope for the coalition in NSW is that Labor wins the federal election this May and then becomes very unpopular a year from now...but as the saying goes "hope is not a strategy"

[DL]

Final election eve poll by Newspoll has Labor leading the Coalition 54-46.

https://www.pollbludger.net/2022/03/18/newspoll-54-46-to-labor-in-south-australia-3/

One thing i love about Australian politics is that with the time change when I wake up in the morning in Canada on a Saturday that is election day in Oz - with the time change the votes are all in - so I get to find out who won as soon as I wake up! its like Xmas morning!

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Polls close in just 6 hours and we expect a very quick count tonight. Thanks to government idiocy in failing to pass an amendment to the electoral act only "ordinary votes" (votes cast in the polling booths on election day) can be counted on the night, meanwhile "declaration votes" (pre-polls, postal votes and absentees) cannot be counted until Monday. Historically this wasn't a problem but after covid people are understandably taking full advantage of pre-polls and postals. It looks like declaration votes will make up at least a third of the total vote, possibly higher, so unless we have a very decisive result we'll need to wait to Monday to see how the close seats fall.

As always there's a lot of rumours about seats to watch. Pretty broad consensus that no Labor seats are in any risk, even Mawson looks pretty secure. All the seats in play are on the Liberal side of the pendulum.

Both parties are said to have written off Adelaide and Newland as certain losses for the Libs. Lucy Hood looks very strong for Labor in Adelaide, meanwhile Newland is a messy 3-way race with Frances Bedford's candidacy, however the christian minor parties are directing preferences against the Liberal incumbent (bc he was a major backer of the abortion reform bill) so it looks to come down to Labor's Savvas vs Bedford.
King has a very strong Liberal member in Paula Luethen, and it's said there's virtually no swing at all on the ground. Could be a Liberal hold against the grain even if Labor wins a majority.
Both parties are confidently claiming Elder and it may come down to the wire, though Labor probably has the edge.

There's been some talk of a larger swing to Labor in more traditionally blue ribbon Liberal seats, Labor quite confident in Davenport in particular. Less info about Colton, Hartley or Waite but Labor looks to have an outside chance in all of them. Steven Marshall is also rumoured to be in trouble in Dunstan.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Votes starting to come in right on an hour after polls closed as is the norm in Aus. Only about 1.5% counted. Nearly every booth so far has a decent swing to Labor which bodes poorly, though it is very early.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

The almost-disgraced Liberal ex-deputy Vickie Chapman is representing the Libs on the ABC panel and is wearing one of the ugliest jackets I've ever seen. It's literally blowing out the colour filters.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Antony Green has called it for Labor, Liberals under siege on all fronts with big swings in the marginals and some very strong Independent challenges in the Country.

[Pulaski]

Glad we have another addition to the "Premiers with long and confusing surnames" club; Palaszczuk must have been getting lonely after the departure of Berejiklian.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Glad we have another addition to the "Premiers with long and confusing surnames" club; Palaszczuk must have been getting lonely after the departure of Berejiklian.

Not to mention new SA Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Another man inside the booth thanked Mr Malinauskas for helping him and then the voter had to pull his shorts back up after they fell around his feet.

Damn, even anonymously why did the ABC have to repeat this anecdote lmao.

> Be me
> Trying to vote
> dilf comes over to help me use a pencil
> It's the leader of the opposition
> Trousers fall down
> Mum's spaghetti

[DL]

Why are South Australians nicknamed “crow eaters “??

[GoTfan]

And here's to our new Premier!

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Why are South Australians nicknamed “crow eaters “??

https://www.lonetester.com/2016/02/crow-eaters-sandgropers-banana-benders-cornstalks-and-more/
Found this.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Another man inside the booth thanked Mr Malinauskas for helping him and then the voter had to pull his shorts back up after they fell around his feet.

Damn, even anonymously why did the ABC have to repeat this anecdote lmao.

> Be me
> Trying to vote
> dilf comes over to help me use a pencil
> It's the leader of the opposition
> Trousers fall down
> Mum's spaghetti

I burst out laughing at this lol.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Why are South Australians nicknamed “crow eaters “??

Could be worse, West Australians are Sand gropers!