With exactly four months to go until the big day, a post to call attention to the fact that my South Australian election guide has been live for the past week or so. As usual, it features pages on each lower house seat, including tables, charts, interactive maps and write-ups; a further page doing the same for the upper house; and an overview page reviewing the electoral terrain and the general form of state politics over the past four years. There are a fair few gaps remaining to be filled in terms of yet-to-be-selected party candidates, but the whole thing will be updated and revised on a semi-regular basis over the coming months. Come election night itself, this site will feature its acclaimed live reporting of results, which is progressively getting more reliable in its functioning and sophisticated in its methods.
The only thing that matters here is if Labor win the upper house and a supermajority.
The Libs will be destroyed to about 8 members.
Two more terms unless Pyne or Dollie stand for Libs. But they won’t.
William, well done. One correction – in Narungga Profile reference to Narungga (formerly Frome) should be Ngadjuri (formerly Frome).
Thanks Spence, fixed. If I only found one occasion to confuse those two seats, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Thanks William, a fine effort on the pages. In the 20 years we have lived in Sturt / Bragg I have never had a Federal and State LaborMP but I suspect that might soon change. A repeat of Federal results will seeBragg flip as Sturt did. In practice, Malinauskus is more popular than Albo.
For all the blame on individuals and leaders, the fault for the SA Liberal’s miserable status is with Alex Antic IMO. His faction controls Federal and State Liberal exec committees. They have preselected a string of unelectable far right religious candidates for winnable seats. The more they are rejected, the more they repeat the mistake.
Labor would need a first preference vote around 53 -54% to have a chance of 7 Leg Council seats for majority control. 1000 to 1 chance.
Next option would be about 46% first preference vote to win 6 seats and find someone outside Labor to be Leg Council President. Also a pretty long shot.
Fair chance that Labor plus Greens will win 7 seats between them but I would think Greens more likely to win 2 than Labor 6.
Labor have been happy working with mixed cross bench in Leg Council. Expect that will continue.
Spence
Wouldn’t 54% be conservative, even in the upper house?
I think supermajority. Which isnt necessarily a good thing b
Diogenes. 54% and more in 2PP terms will be likely in election. But proportional voting in Leg Council means Labor needs a primary vote of 54% or more. Nothing like that has occurred in recent years. And some people voting for a Labor government will vote for other parties in Leg Council to avoid control of both houses.
It’s doubtful Labor will have a majority in the Legislative Council. They’ll do very well but the primary vote they’d need for the seven seats to add to the five they already have to get a majority is around the 54% mark at least (and that assumes a good amount of preferences coming their way to help them get that seventh quota.
Most likely scenario is Labor either have 11 seats in the chamber or 10 but the Greens will get them over the line on divided legislation (reminder to the interstaters that SA Labor and SA Greens have a much better working relationship than over in the east), or alternatively (and never something I’d put past the SDA/Farrell club), they might be able to get things passed via One Nation/Sarah Game.
Curiously, there is a scenario I calculated based on inference from some polling and historical disparity between voting in each chamber where both Greens and One Nation win two seats each. It’s a long shot and definitely not a prediction of mine, but it’s still plausible. Even more unlikely but not impossible is the Liberals only winning two seats but I doubt it – I think they will win three seats at this rate.
I don’t know what to say about this election that hasn’t already been said.
They’ve put Hurn in to save the furniture but I have barely heard a peep from her. Malinauskas has controlled the news cycle in the wake of recent events, looking like a leader (even if the overreaching powers given to the police make me queasy) and nothing really from her. She’s going to struggle to cut through over the next month and a half, due to holidays and Summer, and then it’s pretty much election time where a young, untested woman gets thrown in front of the SA Labor machine which is ruthless.
And then she gets to rebuild the rubble, while Antic works behind the scenes to stack the party with hard right acolytes and, when the time is right, stabbing her in the back. I hate this.
I suppose one potential silver lining of the rightward shift of the SA Liberals, if ultimately successful, is that it might lure the grouper types away from Labor and force that party to ideologically realign in the long term to survive. But that’s too optimistic – it will just be two different colours of turd competing to control the state (more so than now.)
Isn’t Mali a ‘Grouper’ by any definition. I hope he doesn’t get lured to the right wing parties, he is a real asset to Labor.
I’m not part of the anti-Catholic push when it comes to State Labor leaders. If they keep away from the obvious abortion type stuff they tend to do well, having instincts better than the left (eg Jacinta Allan) around where the Reactionaries will attack, and still tend to have a good instinct around the economic aspects of cost of living etc.
Almost like they do read the Papal encyclicals about stewardship of the Earth, looking after the poor etc, unlike the Liberals whose Catholics and Protestants alike seem to be heading down the American path.
It’s not one or the other. I am not asking the ALP to be a hard left party either. I just don’t want the state branch to be under the thumb of a tight-knit reactionary clique – the kind that keeps good (or at least potentially good) talent at arm’s length and recycles upward failures because of how Don Farrell feels. Malinauskas probably has a few more years before his shine wears off, if he doesn’t retire before then, so no I’m not worried about losing him in a long-term ideological shift.
The Allen Government’s numbers dropping might have more to do with the Government having had been around for well over a decade and its popular leader retiring (who was also a leftie and led his party to landslide wins), pushing voters to reevaluate the state of things under a new leader and suddenly noticing the cracks. Even then, that badly. Not as badly as their NSW counterparts were when they were last in Government and tightly under control of the Right. Factional gatekeeping is stupid.
This has nothing to do with Catholicism. Your beliefs are your own business. We’re a secular society and I expect secular government. You don’t need to be religious to care about the poor or downtrodden. I realise I used the term “grouper” but I wasn’t speaking literally. Believe it or not, I also don’t think the current ALP attitude towards Communism matters either.
The grouper types is exactly what you meant. Catholic, SDA, Joe De Pope and their ilk. Religion should be a private matter but isn’t and has to be a selection criteria inside Labor and out.
But plenty of good right faction people have kept Labor in power and that counts for something. Left is better but if they have poor political instincts or tactics I’d rather have a Mali than the Lib.
Noted.
Stand-by for a repeat of the WA 2021 result. Liberals on track to lose every seat they presently hold in the Adelaide metro area and approximately half of their remaining seats are in danger of being lost to independents.
Liberal problems continue:
Long-term Liberal Party executive leader Lachlan Haynes has quit his federal and state executive roles after what is believed to be a surprise lack of support in his bid for the southeast seat of MacKillop.
It is understood Haynes, who has previously worked in federal Barker member Tony Pasin’s electorate office in both 2018 and 2023 was disillusioned after failing to win support for the key state seat.
Haynes resigned on December 15 from his roles as federal and state Rural and Regional chair – jobs that had him sitting on the Liberal party’s federal and state executive councils.
This morning, Haynes also quit the Liberal Party.
An email sent to InDaily by one party member said: “there is significant concern among some party members regarding the circumstances surrounding his departure, particularly given his long-standing service and loyalty to senior figures within the Party, especially Tony Pasin, for whom he has previously worked in his electorate office”.
https://www.indailysa.com.au/news/just-in/2025/12/22/shock-resignation-of-long-term-sa-liberal
William: there’s a weird little glitch in some of the seat maps. In the booth results, the party that came last has a percentage vote way too high compared to their number of votes. There’s this one in Adelaide:
Or this one in Kavel:
Or this rather glaring one in Giles:
It doesn’t happen in all seats – seems to be in any seat that had at least six candidates. Possibly a dropped bracket / errant comma / code gremlin hiding in a spreadsheet somewhere?
Wild guess, but I think the Government will be returned. Drive past any Hospital, open ground even, where cranes hover over new build, reconstruction. And Dan Andrews style mobility infrastructure. And talent, ability, gender balance even, in the young people progressing , umm, progressive Government. We are a little bit like Albo, underestimated and a little bit overlooked, that’s O.K. If the Opposition can’t govern itself, etc. etc.
Thanks for picking that up, Bird. The issue was that the percentage for the third candidate was showing up for the sixth. Should be fixed now.
Do How-to-votes Matter? Evidence from the 2022 SA Election:
https://antonygreen.com.au/do-how-to-votes-matter-evidence-from-the-2022-sa-election/
Great instincts by the Bludgers here to be focusing on the only genuinely competitive contest at this election: the LegCo.
With a Labor majority in the lower house all but assured, I just spent the last little while modelling three different Legislative Council scenarios for March 2026:
A. the Liberals recover enough under Ashton Hurn to hold their fourth seat.
B. One Nation takes it and wins two seats at a single election.
Or C. the Greens take it and win two seats at one election for a total of three in the chamber.
And the thing that actually surprised me is this: in every serious scenario, it is essentially impossible for Labor and the Greens not to end up with a governing majority in the Council.
As discussed, Labor winning a sixth seat looks quite difficult. The upper house simply does not give them the ceiling for it. As a side note, it seems all but certain that Clare Scriven will secure Labor’s fifth seat, which I personally find dispiriting given she was one of only two Labor MLCs to support the recent anti abortion bill which feels completely at odds with the values of a party that presents itself as progressive, but I digress.
I started this exercise from a place of distress that One Nation might manage to win two seats at a single election. But the more I have worked through the numbers, the clearer something else has become. Even if One Nation does break through, they cannot become kingmakers.
The real story in the upper house is that no matter whether the Liberals hang on, One Nation breaks through, or the Greens gain, the numbers resolve the same way: a Labor/Greens majority in the LegCo.
This potential change from the outgoing parliament is significant considering in the 2022 to 2026 term, Labor has needed both the Greens (including former Greens and now independent Tammy Franks who defected in May 2025) and the centrist SA-Best to pass legislation. After this election, Labor should be able to govern in the Council with Greens support alone.
If this comes to pass, then according to BludgerTrack’s tally of Legislative Council results since 1989, it will mark the first time in history that Labor and the Greens have held a progressive majority together in South Australia.
While it is preemptive to say this before a single vote has been cast, unless something truly extraordinary happens, the 2026 election looks set to deliver a LegCo where progressive forces control the agenda which may well end up being the most interesting outcome of this whole upcoming contest.
SA Liberal leader Ashton Hurn has been accused of attempting to erase her own history after deleting a social media post enthusiastically backing her party’s now-abandoned plan to abolish stamp duty.
Emergency tax reform plans were announced shortly after Ms Hurn took over the leadership in December, with the party committing to establish a Tax Reform Commission that would review all state taxes, effectively walking away from the pledge to phase out stamp duty by 2041.
However, when former leader Vincent Tarzia announced the stamp duty policy, Ms Hurn praised it as a “really ambitious plan” calling it the “single biggest tax cut in our state’s history”.
That post has since been removed from Ms Hurn’s social media pages.
Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis said the deleted post showed Ms Hurn was among the loudest supporters of the policy, which the Liberals dumped just weeks after it was unveiled under former leader Mr Tarzia. Mr Koutsantonis said deleting the post highlighted the deep division within the Liberal Party, noting Shadow Treasurer Ben Hood had left his own social media endorsement of the policy online.
“Their own leader is trying to cover her tracks after backing a plan that would have blown a $2 billion-plus hole in the state budget every year,” Mr Koutsantonis said.
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/ashton-hurn-under-fire-for-deleting-social-media-post-on-abandoned-stamp-duty-tax-policy/news-story/db2ac8d8390e25afbaf56a72fd492776?amp