Candidates have been declared for the South Australian election, and are featured in ballot paper order on the seat pages of the Poll Bludger election guide, at least for the lower house. There are a great many of them: 388 for the lower house, an average over eight per seat. Given there are fewer than 30,000 enrolled voters per seat, it would not surprise me if this were an Australian record in per capita terms. Not only Labor, Liberal, One Nation and the Greens but also the Australian Family Party (associated with former Senator Bob Day, who leads its upper house ticket, and not to be confused with Family First, which separately has 35 candidates) are running in all 47 seats, and six further parties have a substantial presence. The table below compares the number of candidates by party at this election compared with 2022.
| 2026 | 2022 | |
| Labor | 47 | 47 |
| Liberal | 47 | 47 |
| Greens | 47 | 43 |
| One Nation | 47 | 19 |
| Australian Family | 47 | 6 |
| Family First | 35 | 34 |
| Independent | 33 | 20 |
| Sarah Game Fair Go | 22 | |
| Legalise Cannabis | 17 | |
| Animal Justice | 16 | 10 |
| United Voice | 14 | |
| Real Change | 12 | 4 |
| Nationals | 3 | 8 |
| SA Best | 1 | 1 |
| Liberal Democrats | 1 | |
| TOTAL | 388 | 240 |
The proliferation of candidates does not extend to the Legislative Council, which has about the same number of groups and candidates as in 2022. Rather remarkably, the ballot paper draw has placed every major or large minor party on the right of the ballot paper, if the Nationals might be thought to count in the South Australian context.
Other news:
• David Penberthy in The Australian reports that a conspicuous meeting at a city hotel between One Nation lead candidate Cory Bernardi and arch-conservative Liberal Senator Alex Antic has been “seen as a broader signal that Liberal conservatives in SA are death-riding the moderate-dominated parliamentary party, willing it to lose and lose badly, as final punishment for taking the party to the left”. One unidentified state Liberal MP is tipped to defect to One Nation “in the event the SA Liberals implode”.
• Former Liberal leader David Speirs is running as an independent in his old seat of Black. This would seem optimistic both politically, given his conviction his 2025 conviction for supplying drugs, and legally, given the state’s Constitution Act prohibits those convicted of indictable offences from serving in parliament.
• Roy Morgan had an SMS poll last week putting Labor at 35%, One Nation at 28%, the Liberals and Nationals at 16.5% and the Greens at 11% – well at the high end for One Nation out of recent state polling. Peter Malinauskas recorded 61% approval and 37% disapproval, compared with 52% and 42% for Ashton Hurn, with Malinauskas leading 60% to 30.5% on preferred premier. The poll was conducted February 19 to 23 from a sample of 2172.
I think this could be a wipeout on the scale of Westerm Australia 2021. The Liberals simply do not seem like an actual party ready to govern. Alex Antic can take great pleasure in presiding over the spoils of defeat.
Wait a minute. SA-BEST still exists as an actual functioning organisation? I thought they would have been almost dead.
Lots and lots of minor right wing groups. They are likely to pick off a few of the less locked in One Nation voters and then their preferences scatter. Also bodes poorly for the Liberals’ chances of retaining many/any seats.
Alex Antic is taking his final revenge.
@B. S. Fairman Well if One Nation are of no chance to take any seats then by that logic the Liberals might be in a much better position than we thought because a lot of they’re current seats are in regional areas where PHON does really well when it comes to having vote magnets.
@Thomas Brian Mutter, Wait a minute. SA-BEST still exists as an actual functioning organisation? I thought they would have been almost dead.
They have 1 member left in the Senate, whose term is expiring. They’re not running any candidates anywhere. So yes I think it’s good night and please turn out the lights when you leave.
William, it matters little, but…..
“Heysen covers an area of the Adelaide Hills beyond the south-eastern edge of the metropolitan area, with most of the population concentrated around Marble Hill, Stirling and Hahndorf at the northern end”
Marble Hill and surrounds are sparsely populated. Upper Sturt – Stirling – Crafers – Aldgate – Bridgewater and through to Hahndorf is the main band (East to West) of denser population with isolated centres like Uraidla and Norton Summit to the north of that band and Macclesfield and Meadows and Echunga to the south.
Those isolated centres seem to split between pro ALP and pro Liberal. The areas around them pro Liberal. Stirling and Hahndorf are fairly heavily pro Liberal – Teague is based in Bridgewater and works Stirling a lot. Crafers booth was also pro Liberal last time but federally it has been turning redder and a concern for Teague. He will also be looking at the more rural areas for losses to PHON and the influx of left leaning hillchangers.
SA Best has been running a shocking number of adverts on YouTube to try to re-elect Connie Bonaros. No idea where they are getting the money from to do that.
If the Greens win Heysen it will be only the second seat they’ve ever won in rural Australia after the state seat of Ballina in New South Wales.
Australian Family Party has six candidates with the surname Day and five with Attard. Family party indeed!
Connie seems quite a character and well meaning.
The Libs aren’t cutting through at all. I don’t know what the strategy is but Ashton Hurn is spending a lot of time in Schubert. She should be going after Mali but it’s every man or woman for themselves now.
Trump’s thumping of Iran isn’t helping. You would hardly know an election is imminent.
Nominations closed yesterday and in a quick flick through The Advertiser I found no mention of that. Am I blind?
@Diogenes You’d have to think the internal polling is showing they’re cooked. Schubert may be the only chance of winning a seat.
@digoenes this is the problem having her as leader, during what could be a very one-sided contest. Hurn has to save face and hold her seat, this means as OP leader she is spending valuable time there and not in the metro seats where their vote could be sliding quicker than a Magic Mountain water slide on a cold day.
The war in the Middle East has put the election to one side and could do for the next week if it continues.
Do we expect more polling over the next week? and William does that Morgan Poll have a breakdown of Country v City?
Anyone checking the social media accounts of the bunch of aspiring MPs OneNotion™ has rounded up? This is their candidate in Schubert. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-29/barossa-councillor-bruce-preece-welcome-to-country-stoush/105350314
If the Greens win Heysen it will be only the second seat they’ve ever won in rural Australia after the state seat of Ballina in New South Wales.
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I would estimate that half of Heysen lives in the Upper Sturt to Bridgewater band of suburbs. Suburbs that are only 15km from the Adelaide CDB and within the greater metro area. Rural, imo, is stretching it. Although some areas certainly feel very remote and you can sense the banjos (and the bikies) in the distance.
It’s a big relief knowing that Labor will win the South Australian election by a landslide. I know that some might point to 2022 as being a landslide for Labor, but really, they were only 4 seats over the threshold. Now they’re looking like they’ll easily win 75% of the House of Assembly with a 2PP vote of roughly 61%.
@SA Voter. The metro/country breakdown for the Roy Morgan poll was;
ALP v Lib
METRO: 65.5-34.5 TPP
REGIONAL: 48.5-51.5 TPP
LIB v ON
METRO: 54-46 TPP
REGIONAL: 48-52 TPP
I didn’t see a city/country breakdown for Labor v ON but overall it was 59-41
I wonder if the 48-52 LIB vs ON 2CP in the regions will have any effect on One Nation winning seats in the House of Assembly?
Eric
The Extended Family party? 😉
As for the Liberal campaign, here in Bragg, one of the Liberals few remaining Adelaide seats, and once one of their safest, I have not sighted the Liberal campaign. We got another Liberal mail-out yesterday. That is all. No sign of local MP Jack Batty.
I find it a little astonishing that the two “Family” parties apparently have enough differences between them to warrant being two seperate entities.
It’s Pentecostal splitting over money, territory and power. Bob Day already let the Logos Foundation cult from Toowoomba steal the name he spent a lot of money and time building. Now he wants that power and money back.
Bewildered is the best word to describe how I feel about the sudden rise of One Nation – not just nationally, but in South Australia of all places. It feels very different from the Xenophon surge in 2018, which famously fizzled out, not least because of the current disarray of the SA Liberal Party. It’s now hard to see the Libs winning more than a couple of seats, and it’s well on the cards they will end up with none. Its just extraordinary. How many ON members are elected to the Lower House is the great unknown, and the key driver will be how many of the moderate Liberals will end up putting Pauline Hanson last. I reckon you’d be putting your money on some of the good independents in regional seats. Most interesting of all will be the final voting numbers which will answer the question of how accurate (or not) the polls have been in gauging ON’s support. A fascinating election night coming up.
Realistically, I think Ashton Hurn will hang on to Schubert and the Libs and ON will go head to head in Chaffey and Flinders. Beyond that, 4 or 5 independents will pick up rural and semi rural seats. Seats like Heysen and Kavel will be of particular interest – if it’s a good night for Labor they could pick up both. It’s also been a revelation about the ruthlessness of Malinauskas – despite a slight wobble here and there, Labor’s campaign has been remorseless.
Key update:
Definitely True 13
Probably True 0
Probably False 1
Definitely False 0
If it was today:
Definitely True 13
Probably True 0
Probably False 1
Probably False 0
Good to see the Greens running in every seat this time. There’s no excuse for them to not have 47 lower house candidates, even in places where their vote is typically very low. In most cases, the candidate’s job is just to be a name on the ballot and nobody really cares if they are a local or not.
Also, with both Greens and One Nation running in every seat, there won’t be any need for an asterisk next to their respective statewide primary vote totals at the end of the election because the total might have been slightly depressed by them not running everywhere. Although, I suspect that One Nation might be slightly depressed by all these other hard right parties running too.
Also, the upper house ballot looks bleak this year. I have managed to find six groups that I can vote for/preference without dipping into the bowl of nuts but it was a little more work than normal. Hopefully having a lot of RW populist parties/groups ends up causing that voting bloc’s influence on the result to weaken via things like exhaustion and preference leakage. Thank the gods GTV isn’t a thing anymore.
Which key is probably false?
Thomas Brian Muttersays:
Tuesday, March 3, 2026 at 10:13 pm
“Which key is probably false?”
Key 4: No third party with 20% or more of the primary votes.
Luke: REGIONAL: LIB v ON 48-52 TPP
When you think about it, that’s about as diabolical as it can get. The vote gets split, each of those parties get 80-90% of what they’d normally get, so they both lose. This cuts the NLP in four parts; ALP, NLP, ONP, independents. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that’s what remains of the coalition after this state election; they hold 13 seats 3/3/3/3 and one to the lucky preference jackpot winner.
Maybe the greens will get lucky winning a seat in the most progressive renewables state in the world.
Gary Johanson is running in Port Adelaide again. He almost won it a while ago in a by-election when he was the local mayor, and has also run for SA Best and the Nats. I wonder how he’ll go now that someone else is the mayor and trying the same thing. Maybe the Libs will come fourth here.
Yeah there seems to be a lot of seats where an independent is going to come in second. Just another sign of a fragile 2 party system being saved by a landslide election result in terms of seats and 2PP.
*from open thread*
2026 South Australian House of Assembly results based on the Wikipedia aggregate:
(note: percentage is based on the percentage of seats in parliament not the percentage of the vote)
ALP: 35 seats (74.8%)
LIB: 3 seats (6.3%)
PHON: 3 seats (6.3%)
IND: 6 seats (12.6%)
I don’t think Johanson’s a threat. Of the many attempts to be elected to parliament, the only time he came close to winning was the Port Adelaide by-election in 2012. And that was when the state Labor Government’s polling was in the toilet and the federal Gillard Labor Government was dragging on the party’s support even further. Also, the Liberals didn’t run a candidate in that election and basically threw their support behind him. Subsequently, he has never come close to winning a seat (including the 2019 Enfield by-election when, again, the Liberals sat it out and supported him) and, additionally, he hasn’t been mayor of PAE for almost a decade.
Honestly, I can’t see anyone but Labor winning Port Adelaide this time. While it’s possible that a low Liberal primary vote and a large list of independent/third party candidates on the ballot might cause an independent to end up above the Liberals in the end, the Labor primary (and the preferences it will still get) is likely to be strong enough to overcome any such challenge.
I should attach the caveat to the above that this isn’t accounting for the potential wild card that One Nation might present but, even then, I don’t see that radically changing the outcome of the seat that much (just maybe who gets the honour of losing to Labor in the 2PP/2CP count.
Outsider
I heard Mali told his team his pass mark for them is Libs holding zero seats. He is very ruthless. And I gather quite a few working with him don’t appreciate it. He is very aware he is responsible for about 90% of their popularity.
Grinding the opposition into the dirt isn’t the best thing for any state. It leads to unaccountable , arrogant government.
You heard, did you Diogenes? Thanks for the laughs tho!
Probably a silly question, but how often do we see both major* party leaders with positive net satisfaction?
* the Liberals still count for the moment
It’s a weird situation facing Labor. I think on balance they would prefer an outcome where the Liberals hold 5 or 6 seats and One Nation misses out, or only has 1 or 2. A scenario where ON ended up as the official opposition (no matter how small their number of seats) would afford ON legitimacy which in the longer term does nobody any good (apart from ON of course). Since I posted earlier in the week I have had a sense that the Libs will claw back a bit of support – precisely for the reason Diogenes has identified – that there is a need for an effective Opposition to ensure Government accountability. On the other hand, experience also says that the polls are more reliable than hunches!
Another hit to Liberal hopes of a miracle win in SA with One Nation refusing to recommend preferences, telling their voters to vote 1 One Nation and then preference whoever they want.
Not a great result for the Libs after the coverage of Ashton Hurn refusing to rule out preference deals earlier this week. Perfect way to annoy teals and moderates and get absolutely no pay off.
I see some of the Greens ads are urging us to vote Greens in order to keep an eye on the politicians, the Greens presumably not being politicians themselves.
But I do worry that a “Keep an eye on ’em” attitude might produce bizarre voting in the upper house.
@William Bowe Will there be a live results map for South Australia to go along with the ones that were created for the Western Australian and Australian elections from last year?
BSA Bob @ #40 Friday, March 6th, 2026 – 1:44 pm
It won’t any more so than if they didn’t say that. “Keep the bastards honest” is not a new pitch, nor is it unusual for voters to vote differently for the upper house to keep legislation in check.
While, I think the Greens’ ads are a bit weak and preaching to the already converted, they’re not the problem here.
Watched a 6 News interview with Melanie Selwood from the Greens last night, it was from a few days ago, interesting to see they are campaigning on a train to the Adelaide Hills using an existing goods line
What did the Liberals end up doing re preferences and One Nation seeing they didn’t get any love from Cory?
Wat & H B Green
I quite agree that the notion of keeping the bastards honest is far from new & is in fact one of those ideas that sounds pretty good in theory. And the Greens aren’t the problem. I was thinking more of the potential for truly weird results coming from the preferences of the abundant crop of small time candidates. I don’t know how many of these are standing for the upper house & it’d be no good to have a herd of cats in there.
As for a passenger rail service to the Adelaide Hills, I presume the Greens are talking about Mt Barker?
I’m happy to talk all day about trains & there should be more of them. But the work & expenditure required to make the existing line into the hills suitable for commuter service would be prohibitive.
Yep she mentioned Mt Barker
Liberals to preference One Nation ahead of Labor. Shame!
This after Cory Bernardi doubled down on his comments linking gay marriage to bestiality. The Liberals are desperate enough to chase the bigot vote.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-07/sa-liberals-to-preference-one-nation/106428070