The Advertiser today carries a poll of South Australian state voting intention from YouGov (no online report at the time of writing, but the site should have one by morning), crediting Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government with an extraordinary two-party lead of 67-33. This suggests a 12.5% swing which, if uniform, would reduce the Liberals to five seats out of 47. Labor is at 48% on the primary vote, up from 40.0% at the March 2022 election; Liberals are on 21%, down from 35.7%; the Greens are on 14%, up from 9.1%; and One Nation are on 7%, up from 2.6% from 19 seats contested. The poll was conducted May 15 to 28 from a sample of 903. UPDATE: The Advertiser’s report here.
UPDATE 2: Further results in the Sunday Mail show Malinauskas with 70% approval, 18% disapproval and a 72-14 lead over Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia as preferred premier, with Tarzia on 22% approval and 31% disapproval.
Further developments ahead of the state election scheduled for March 21 next year, most involving the cross-bench, the major parties having been diverted over recent months by the federal election:
• Labor last week announced candidates for five seats: James Agness, state government housing policy adviser, in the safe Gawler-based seat of Light, which is being vacated with incumbent Tony Piccolo’s bid to win the neighbouring seat of Ngadjuri from the Liberals; Aria Bulkus, solicitor and daughter of Hawke-Keating government minister Nick Bolkus, in Colton, which Matt Cowdrey holds for the Liberals on a post-redistribution margin of 5.0%; “senior lawyer” Alice Rolls in Unley, which has a Liberal margin of 2.6%, and will be vacated at the election with the retirement of David Pisoni; Marisa Bell, Onkaparinga councillor, intensive care nurse and recent federal candidate for Mayo, in Heysen (held for the Liberals by Josh Teague on a margin of 2.3%); and Toby Priest, St Thomas School teacher and Immanuel College boarding supervisor, in Morphett (held for the Liberals by Stephen Patterson on a margin of 4.6%).
• Greens co-leader Tammy Franks quit the party in mid-May and said she would serve out her term as an independent. Franks did not contest the party’s preselection last year, and now says she made way for parties motivated by “ambition and self-interest” – presumably referring to Adelaide Hills deputy mayor Melanie Selwood, who was chosen to head the party’s upper house ticket. Franks said at the time she would retire at the election, but now says she will consider running. A finding against Franks by the party’s misconduct committee was subsequently leaked to the media.
• A week later, One Nation’s sole member, Sarah Game, quit the party citing issues with “the way the One Nation brand is perceived” and saying she wished to advocate for all “regardless of their heritage or religious beliefs” (this week she applied to register the party name “Sarah Game Fair Go for Australians”). Pauline Hanson and her chief-of-staff, James Ashby, retorted that this came a week after Game’s mother, Jennifer Game, was denied her ambition to lead the party’s upper house ticket. The elder Game had been lined up to lead the ticket at the 2022 election, but instead opted for the first of two unsuccessful runs for the Senate, while her then little-known daughter won the state seat in her stead.
• Former Liberal MLC Jing Lee announced in May she would contest the election under the Jing Lee Better Community banner. Lee quit the party in January ahead of an anticipated preselection defeat, support for her reportedly having tanked after she unexpectedly failed to support changes to abortion laws.
Outsider @ #50 Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 – 4:30 pm
Labor finished 3rd in Indi though.
https://results.aec.gov.au/31496/Website/HouseDivisionPage-31496-218.htm
It was close, but they got 8,824 votes over One Nation’s 7,611 votes.
I think we are talking about results after distribution of preferences – in Indi, Labor was pipped by One Nation at the exclusion point by 10.68% to 10.12%.
Put another way, in Indi the last 3 in the contest were Independent, Liberal and One Nation. Labor was 4th.
Ah, okay, I understand now.
Paul Thomas has taken us down a very nerdy path!
Yeah, One Nation got over Labor on Libertarian and Family First prefs (over 50% from Libertarian, splitting seven ways!). Legalise Cannabis went all over the place, and the Greens slightly favoured Labor over ON but mostly just went straight to Helen Haines.
Taking it back to SA: if it’s 67-33 overall, some safe Labor seats will have a 2pp beyond 80%. There’d have to be a few seats where the Libs crash out of the top two, but who would replace them? SA Best are dead, the state branch of One Nation seems to be imploding, and I don’t think there’s ever been an ALP/Grn 2cp in SA (apart from by-elections where the Libs don’t run).
(That leads onto another Wiki-chore for Kirsdarke, if you’re up for it: the 2018 post-election pendulum. That page only has the pre-election one (which in SA is always affected by redistribution, and tends to be 2pp only), while the 2022 page has the post- but not pre- one. 2018 had about a dozen seats where SA Best came second, so that’d be interesting to see – similar to 1997, the high point of the Democrats.)
Rod
“The Gov’t has made major progress on Health and perhaps you might have another look at those polling numbers.”
No it hasn’t. The ramping figures are the worst ever. Three times when they took over. The waiting list for surgery has increased by 20% as has the overdue number.
And we have wasted $8b doing it. The nWCH is just a car park and we can’t staff out hospitals. We don’t have a proton beam and if you spend any time in hospitals you’d know they are the worst they have ever been.
Almost every metric is going backwards.
Even Mali has given up trying to spin Health. But we don’t have an opposition. That’s covering up a lot of problems. Even the worst diehard Labor supporter knows they are doing badly on health.
Marry me, Paul Thomas and Boston Rob!
Great analysis.
On election day recently, I pointed out to a lot of ‘rusted on Libs’ that there party was doing a direct preference swap with One Nation. At first they didn’t believe me because the Libs just named candidates without party preferences….
A couple were shocked. One Woman just said to me, that’s the way I’ve always voted, My Dad would kill me if I didn’t vote Liberal……
A crusty old bloke, A liberal, I was handing out next to me told me how he hated Dutton, Trump and Pauline. I told him it was OK. You haven’t left your party, your party has left you. I asked him why he was handing out for Dutton, Trump and Pauline….
NO sympathy!
AS you have pointed out, many traditional lib voters have finally worked it out. Many have not. It will be painful for them.
I cannot wait for the SA election! I cannot wait for the Tassie election. (WTF Tassie!?!?!)
Ah, right, I’ll have a go at making a pendulum for the SA 2018 election wiki page in the next few days then.
47 seats isn’t too much of a task compared to 148 seats after all.
Kirs
You should use the sporting team metrics for the size of the Libs MPs.
Aussie Rules
Rugby
Cricket
Baseball
Volleyball
Basketball
Polo
Re: Indi, that one really puzzled me. You’d have thought that it would behave fairly similar to Mayo (rural-ish seat, well held by a popular indie and thus not really hotly contested by either major, etc.) but instead the two went in completely opposite directions, with Labor actually making the final two and decisively winning the 2PP in Mayo, but actually losing ground on 2PP in Indi and getting beat out by One Nation.
The difference may be partly explained by the identity of the Coalition party contesting the seat. The Victorian Nats did very well; the SA Libs require resort to words like “dire,” “catastrophic” and “diabolical.”
@Diogenes: For seven there’s netball (actually alluded to by Queensland Labor in reference to all of the new seats their candidates picked up this election). Eight is tough; Google’s AI offers only korfball (?!) although there are some sports with varying numbers of players that have an eight-man variation, e.g. rowing and artistic swimming.
If you’re talking WA Libs after 2021, there’s tennis…
Paul Thomas – Indi is still very much a rural /regional seat – it reaches up to the NSW border and into the mountain areas. Mayo is quite different – it stretches from the urban fringes of Adelaide into the Adelaide Hills, and down to the retirement areas on the south coast. Most of its population areas could be considered semi-suburban, with major population growth in recent years in the Mt Barker area. Its only 10 minutes to get up the hill from Glen Osmond to Crafers/Stirling and another 20 minutes to Mt Barker. There are still some very rural and conservative areas, but it’s now much more like an extension of suburban Adelaide. It’s really quite difficult to draw comparisons with electorates adjacent to other State capitals, but for sure demographic changes have made it more Labor friendly over time.
Paul
I think it might be netball level.
They shouldn’t burn Ashton Hurn. So many parties burn a woman when the men have stuffed it up. Between Spiers and Antic, they have no hope. Antic will stay around and ensure they are never electable.
Diogenes @ #63 Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 – 8:08 am
I agree. While I have been skeptical of some of her praise and the assertion she’s their secret weapon, I am tired of women being thrown into no-win/uphill battle situations, expected to perform miracles and then be scapegoated as the main cause of their defeat (and what an electoral disaster it would be if they ever gave her another chance.) Although, being the centre-right party, they’ll probably forgo the “She just ran on a woke ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman’ platform” gaslighting.
While, obviously you should take classical 2PP results in a non-classical seat with some salt, I do agree with the assessment about Mayo, in particular on the back of the growth of Mount Barker. It would not surprise me, depending on the over all election, to see a Labor member for the seat (in its current shape at least) after Sharkie has moved on.
I think with future distributions, Mayo will be become increasingly “urban” – presumably some of the more rural areas further away from Adelaide will be moved into Barker in future redistributions as South Coast and Mt Barker area populations increase. Mayo would increasingly lean Labor as a result and become a likely gain post-Sharkie, subject of course to the impact of a future Liberal rebound in popularity (whenever that may be).
Alrighty, set task is complete, just finished the SA 2018 post election pendulum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_South_Australian_state_election#Post-election_pendulum
The page is a little bit more cluttered than I like, but I suppose other editors can fix it up, just as long as they don’t revert or delete it I’m happy.
It looks like SA-BEST’s closest seat was Heysen, coming within 48.2-51.8% of the Liberals.
Another interesting federal seat to analyze is Longman. Each major party did somewhat worse on preferences from their minors than you’d expect– the Libs did worse on ON, Trumpet and Family First prefs and Labor did worse on Greens. If Labor had hit its national average on Greens preferences they’d have won the seat– quite a surprising result given that the two majors candidates were virtually tied on first preferences and the overall preference pool had almost twice as many right-wing minors as Greens.
While the Libs nearly fumbled that seat on preferences, one where they unambiguously did so is Bullwinkel, where 20 percent of Nats voters preferenced Labor over the Libs– way more than enough to make up the final victory margin. Very possible that Mia Davies was the Condorcet winner there, but she was dragged down by the WA Libs, the sick man of Australasia. Labor had absolutely no business stealing that seat; at the 3CP stage the Coalition’s combined vote share was over 55 percent!
Matt Cowdrey to resign at the next election. Joining John Gardner on the route to the exit. Another great Liberal hope gone.
And probably the best chance of the Libs holding at metro seat at the election next year, gone.
Yeah, as I said in the main thread, any hope of the Liberals sandbagging that seat is gone, if it is a historic landslide as a lot of the signs are pointing to. Cowdrey has a strong personal vote in that seat.
Assuming things stay the same/get better for SA Labor and polling for this election stays around 67-33, I’m getting concerned about the next SA election…
Oh no, not for the Libs. I’m concerned that Maulinauskas could beat McGowan for having the most decisive election win in Australian history. McGowan must always remain on top.
Oh, that’s too bad. Unless they’re an actual Nazi (sorry, Klete Keller), I pretty much always root for Olympic and Paralympic athletes.