Category: South Australian Politics

YouGov: 67-33 to Labor in South Australia

A rare South Australian state poll finds Labor on course for one of the biggest landslides in Australian electoral history.

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.

DemosAU: 59-41 to Labor in South Australia

A rare South Australian state poll confirms the impression of recent by-elections, plus extensive news on preselections and electoral reform a year out from the next election.

As reported in The Advertiser on Thursday, DemosAU has a poll of state voting intention for South Australia crediting Labor with a lead of 59-41, compared with 55.6-44.4 at the 2022 election, from primary votes of Labor 43% (40.0% in 2022), Liberal 30% (35.6%) and Greens 10% (9.1%). Peter Malinauskas holds a 51-23 lead over Vincent Tarzia as preferred premier. Fifty-three per cent agree the state is headed in the right direction, compared with 33% for disagree. The poll was conducted February 18 to 23 from a sample of 1004, but evidently required substantial weighting, as the methodology statement reports an effective sample of 440 and a margin of error of 4.8%.

The poll presents a rare opportunity for a South Australian politics post, in which to unload information accumulated of late about a state election now little more than a year away.

Continue reading “DemosAU: 59-41 to Labor in South Australia”

Weekend miscellany: duelling pendulums, Tasmanian seat polling and more (open thread)

Summarising federal redistributions ahead of the looming election, polling pointing to a status quo result in Tasmania’s federal seats, and various other electoral news.

Antony Green has published a pendulum display of post-redistribution seat margins for the federal election along with some explanation of what this entails. He did so exactly as I was finalising my own parallel effort, which I present here in the shape of a mock-up of the entry page for the federal election guide I’m hoping to publish around mid-January (a Western Australian election guide will precede it by a couple of weeks).

The margins shown are simply those from the 2022 election where no redistribution has been conducted, but the redistributions for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory require a process of distributing the votes from 2022 across the redrawn electorates. The Northern Territory redistribution is still in the public consultation phase, but I have taken a punt on the proposed boundaries (in this case simply a matter of drawing the line between Solomon and Lingiari) being adopted as they seem impossible to argue with, and it appears Antony Green has reached the same conclusion.

I believe the redistribution calculation methods used by Antony and me are identical with respect to how they handle ordinary votes, (i.e. those cast on election day or at pre-poll voting centres), but we have presumably adopted different methods to deal with the difficult question of “non-static” vote types, such as postals, which are published in aggregate for the whole electorate with no indication of geographic variation. I haven’t crunched the numbers too thoroughly, but the biggest anomaly I can see is that we have landed 0.5% apart in the substantially redrawn seat of Chisholm. We are in agreement that the margin in Deakin is a tiny 0.02%, but where he has it in favour of the Liberals, I make the seat to be notionally Labor.

Where we substantially differ is in seats where an independent is part of the equation. Calculations here are necessarily speculative, as independents will not have been on the ballot paper in newly added areas (where transfers have been conducted between teal seats, this can be dealt with by treating them as a collective). Antony has a method involving comparison of House and Senate vote shares which he says is “imperfect, but so are all alternatives”. The imperfection of my method, which gives independents no primary votes from newly added areas and allocates only the preference flows they might have expected from the other candidates, is that it’s very harsh on the independents, a fact most apparent with respect to Kooyong, where my 0.1% margin for Monique Ryan compares with Antony’s 2.2%.

Complete accountings of my redistribution calculations can be observed through the following links, for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Northern Territory.

Polling and electoral developments of note:

• This week’s Roy Morgan poll had the Coalition leading 52-48, out from 51-49 a week before, from primary votes of Labor 28% (down two, their worst result of the term), Coalition 38% (down half), Greens 13% (up half) and One Nation 6.5% (steady). The previous election two-party measure was a dead heat, unchanged on last week.

• The Australian reported last Saturday that a EMRS poll covering all five seats in Tasmania pointed to a status quo result of two Labor, two Liberal and one independent. In Labor’s precarious seat of Lyons, a generic party-based question has Labor on 34%, Liberal on 31%, the Greens on 11% and Jacqui Lambie Network 4%, while a separate question specifying candidates had 40% for Labor’s Rebecca White, 31% for Liberal candidate Susie Bowers and 9% for the Greens. The Liberals were well ahead in Braddon, leading 44% to 27% on the primary vote with the Greens on 9% and JLN on 7%. In Franklin the results were Labor 36%, Liberal 35% and Greens 11%, suggesting Labor would survive a substantial swing.

• Liberal MP Paul Fletcher announced this week that he will not recontest his seat of Bradfield. Fletcher retained the seat by 4.2% in 2022 in the face of a challenge from teal independent Nicolette Boele, who will run again at the coming election. His announcement comes shortly after teal independent MP Kylea Tink said she would not contest the seat following the abolition of her existing seat of North Sydney, much of whose territory will be transferred to Bradfield. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on two contenders to succeed Fletcher as Liberal candidate: Gisele Kapterian, an international trade lawyer and former staffer to Julie Bishop who shares Fletcher’s moderate factional alignment, and Penny George, director of corporate affairs at AstraZeneca and wife of state upper house member Scott Farlow. Kapterian was endorsed last year as the candidate for North Sydney, but had the rug pulled from under her with the seat’s abolition.

• Liberal MP Ian Goodenough, who lost preselection in his northern Perth suburbs seat of Moore to former Stirling MP Vince Connelly, has surprised nobody by announcing he will seek re-election as an independent. Connelly was the member for Stirling, part of which is now the southern end of Moore, from 2019 until its abolition in 2022. Goodenough claims to have been told that “opportunities might arise that would be of benefit” if he didn’t run.

• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reports former Senator Joanna Lindgren is “poised” to be preselected as the LNP’s candidate for the Ipswich region seat of Blair, held for Labor by Shayne Neumann on a margin of 5.2%. Lindgren served in the Senate for a year after filling a casual vacancy but failed to win re-election at the 2016 double dissolution. Trevor Evans, who lost Brisbane to the Greens in 2022, is expected to again be chosen as the party’s candidate for the seat at a preselection to be held today, though he faces an opponent in Fiona Ward, a past federal and state candidate and regular preselection aspirant. Two contenders are named for the party’s preselection for Lilley, held for Labor by Annika Wells on a 10.5% margin: Kimberley Washington, a former staffer to LNP-turned-independent Senator Gerard Rennick, and Dylan Conway, an army veteran and founder of a mental health charity.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian reports Clive Palmer has launched a High Court bid to overrule a section of the Electoral Act that disallowed him from re-registering his United Australia Party for the next election after his voluntary deregistration of it in September 2022. The report quotes electoral law expert Graeme Orr saying the section exists to prevent newly deregistered parties having their names poached and did not reckon seeking to de-register and re-register, the “obvious reason” for which was to avoid having to make financial disclosures.

• The Victorian state by-election for Prahran will be held on February 8, with the ballot paper draw to be held on January 17. Tony Lupton, who held the seat for Labor from 2002 to 2010, has announced he will run as an independent, calling his former party’s decision to forfeit the contest “cowardly”. The Liberals will choose their candidate in a preselection ballot today.

• South Australia’s state redistribution has been finalised. Ben Raue at The Tally Room has taken a much closer look than I have, and concludes that the already minimal changes from the proposal have become even more conservative in the final determination. One change is that the seat of Frome will become Ngadjuri, owing to concerns raised that the seat’s namesake had been involved in a retribution attack on an Aboriginal encampment.

• Poll Bludger regular Adrian Beaumont offers an overview of results for last month’s US presidential and congressional elections with a more optimistic take for Democrats than most commentators, especially their prospects at the November 2026 midterm elections.

Too much money business

A deep dive into campaign finance reform legislation, federally and in South Australia.

The federal government’s proposed changes to campaign finance laws, to take effect in 2026, passed through the House of Representatives on Wednesday with the support of the Coalition and the opposition of the cross-bench. It will shortly come before the Senate, where the Coalition plans to move amendments to increase proposed spending caps and disclosure thresholds. Katina Curtis of The West Australian reports Labor maintains suspicions that the Coalition “might string talks along but backflip at the last minute for pure politics”, and is duly “keeping its options open” for a late deal with the cross-bench. In the absence of such a deal, Curtis further notes that amendments to the regime will assuredly feature in post-election horse trading in the event of a hung parliament.

That the 227-page bill looks set to proceed swiftly to enactment without a parliamentary inquiry has drawn criticism from constitutional law expert Anne Twomey and former NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy, the former concluding that the High Court will likely “end up doing the job instead”. At issue is the doctrine of implied constitutional freedom of political communication, by which the court disallowed the Hawke-Keating government’s attempt to ban political advertising in the electronic media, and more recently caps on third party spending in New South Wales. Twomey perceives two potential difficulties: that the spending caps are “so high that it undoes their aim”, and would make it difficult to establish that the laws serve a legitimate purpose justifying limitations on political communication; and that the bill’s provisions, as noted below, tend to favour parties over independents and incumbents over challengers.

The main provisions of the bill are as follows:

• What Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland describes as “the headline the government wants us to focus on” is that federal electoral donations will be capped at $20,000 per donor per year, increasing to $40,000 in election years, with individual donors allowed to donate no more than $640,000 in total. However, this is calculated at the level of the state or territory branch, such that an enterprising donor could contribute $720,000 to a party over a three-year term, plus extra for by-election campaigns. Joo-Cheong Tham of the University of Melbourne law schools notes loopholes include exemptions for union affiliation fees to Labor (uncapped, unlike similar laws in New South Wales) – and, “most significantly”, a failure to apply to donations made by candidates to their parties, which would seemingly amount to ongoing carte blanche for Clive Palmer.

• Caps on spending set at $90 million for general party spending and $800,000 for individual electorate campaigns. As proof against a legal challenge, this would barely clip Clive Palmer’s wings: his party spent $83 million on its 2019 campaign onslaught, and $70 million in 2022. The latter is an issue for the teals, whose campaign spends in some cases exceeded $2 million, which explains the Coalition’s enthusiasm for the package. Katina Curtis of The West Australian notes that spending caps are fair enough to the extent that “limiting donations without limiting spending heavily advantages people who have their own wealth and don’t have to pass the hat around”. However, the two distinct caps mean that parties trying to see off independents will be able to match their local campaign spend, and trump it by targeting the electorate with further spending that doesn’t mention their candidate, or mentions them alongside Senate candidates. Caps can also encourage third-party spending, which has reached its apotheosis with the “super PACs” that dominate election campaigning in the United States.

• The threshold for public disclosure of donations, which the Howard government hiked from $1500 to an indexed $10,000, will be cut from $16,900 to $1000. The Libeals are continuing to grumble about this, arguing that small businesses will feel too intimidated to donate to them. The bill will also dispense with the notoriously lax requirement that disclosures be made only twice yearly, henceforth to be monthly, then weekly during the campaign period, then daily in the week before and after election day.

• The public funding that currently allocates $3.35 per vote to candidates who exceed 4% will have the rate increased to $5. There will further be administrative funding amounting to $30,000 per lower house member and $15,000 per Senator, advantaging incumbents over challengers.

Meanwhile, the South Australian government last week introduced legislation to ban nearly all political donations and fill the gap with public funding, a move that has attracted the interest of The Economist. It may also yet attract the interest of the High Court, with Peter Malinauskas conceding the “challenging” task of drafting the legislation around the objections that might arise.

Black by-election live

Live results and commentary for the South Australian state by-election for Black.

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8.00pm. All nine booths now in on the primary vote, and we won’t be getting declaration votes counted this evening, so all that remains to come is two outstanding two-candidate preferred results that are already known in outline. Labor has a 13% swing based on election day votes alone, and while it’s been shown that other vote types can behave quite differently, the Liberals would need an entirely implausible swing on both early votes and postals to get back into contention.

7.46pm. Seven out of nine booths now in on the primary vote, the latest both being in Hallett Cove, and both performing well in line with the remainder. They have also boosted the booth-matched turnout calculation that was at 60% in the previous update to 66%.

7.35pm. Antony’s caution seemingly informed by low turnout at the booths: by my reckoning, those that are in have recorded barely more than 60% what they did in 2022.

7.26pm. Antony Green on Twitter not quite willing to call it in the absence of early votes.

7.19pm. Now five booths in on the primary and two on two-party, the new results slightly moderating the projected Labor victory, but leaving the fact of it in doubt following a collapse in the Liberal primary vote.

7.01pm. With the second booth (Sheidow Park) even better for Labor than the first, my system is already calling it for Labor.

6.55pm. A big result for Labor at the first booth in, which is Seacliff South. A note of caution though — I have treated this as being the same as the Marino booth from 2022, which may not exactly be the case. Clearly the same decision has been made at the ABC.

5.30pm. Polls close in half an hour for South Australia’s Black by-election, at which the Liberals are defending a southern Adelaide seat on a margin of 2.7% after the spectacular demise of former party leader David Speirs. This will be my first run of an upgrade in my live results system that allows for multiple two-candidate outcomes in its probability estimates, rather than assuming two set candidates as it had done in the past. It can thus provide a three-way probability split where the situation is sufficiently complicated, although that situation is unable to arise here. More background on the by-elect
ion is available through my by-election guide.

Weekend miscellany: Fowler preselection, SECNewgate survey, SA by-election news (open thread)

Labor seeks amends from the voters of Fowler, a poll finds softening enthusiasm for the renewable energy transition, plus the fall and fall of former SA Liberal leader David Speirs.

There may be a Resolve Strategic federal poll through later today, but in case there’s not, a new open thread is order despite there not being much new to relate:

• Labor has chosen Tu Le, whose preselection bid in 2022 was scotched when the national executive imposed Kristina Keneally, as its candidate to recover the western Sydney seat of Fowler from independent Dai Le. Tu Le is a lawyer and daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and the decision to cast her aside to accommodate Keneally’s move from the Senate, where she had failed to secure a competitive position on the party ticket, was evidently received poorly by voters in an electorate that encompasses the Vietnamese community hub of Cabramatta. Dai Le defeated Keneally at the election by 1.6% after preferences, after trailing by 36.1% to 29.5% on the primary vote.

• SECNewgate’s semi-regular Mood of the Nation survey finds positivity towards the transition to renewables at its lowest level since the Albanese government came to power, at 47% positive and 26% negative; Labor favoured by 30% on managing the cost of living, steady from July, with the Coalition up two to 29%; 58% favouring Kamala Harris over 22% for Donald Trump; and a downward trajectory for the perceived performance of the Western Australian state government.

• A South Australian state by-election looms in the highly marginal Liberal-held seat of Black after former party leader resigned from parliament yesterday after being charged on two counts of supplying a controlled substance. Police allege the offence took place “between August 2 and 3 and on August 9”, the latter date being a day after he stepped aside as party leader. On September 9, The Advertiser revealed a video, seemingly filmed in the small hours of June 30, appearing to show Speirs snorting a line of white powder in what appeared to be his home. Speirs claimed the video was a deepfake, but The Advertiser published advice from experts who believed otherwise. The police were seemingly likewise unconvinced, having raided Speirs’ house and arrested him on September 26. The last by-election in the state, on March 23, resulted in Labor gaining former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall of Dunstan, overturning a 0.5% margin with a 1.4% swing.

Polls: Resolve Strategic, RedBridge/Accent MRP poll, Wolf & Smith federal and state (open thread)

One regular and two irregular polls, one projecting a Labor minority government, the other offering a rare read on state voting intention across the land.

A lot going on in the world of polling:

Resolve Strategic

Nine Newspapers has the regular monthly Resolve Strategic poll, which has Labor on 28% (down one), the Coalition on 37% (steady), the Greens on 13% (steady) and One Nation on 6% (steady). My estimate of two-party preferred from these results is 50-50, based on preference flows from the 2022 election. Anthony Albanese holds a 35-34 lead as preferred prime minister, after trailing 36-35 last time. Albanese’s combined very good and good rating is up one to 35%, with poor and very poor at up two 53%, while Peter Dutton is respectively steady at 41% and up four to 42%. The poll was conducted Tuesday to Saturday from a sample of 1614.

Accent Research/RedBridge Group MRP poll

Accent Research and RedBridge Group have published their second multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) poll, in what looks like being a regular quarterly series. This aims for a detailed projected election result by surveying a large national sample, in this case of 5976 surveyed from July 10 to August 27, and using demographic modelling to produce results for each electorate. The full report isn’t in the public domain as far as I can tell but it’s been covered on the ABC’s Insiders and in the Financial Review. UPDATE: Full report here.

The results are not encouraging for Labor: where the previous exercise rated Labor a strong chance of retaining majority government, with a floor of 73 seats and a further nine nine too close to call, they are now down to 64 with 14 too close to call, with the Coalition up from 53 to 59. The median prediction from a range of potential outcomes is that Labor will hold 69 seats, the Coalition 68, the Greens three and others ten. This is based on primary vote projections in line with the recent trend of national polling, with Labor on 32%, the Coalition on 38% and the Greens on 12%.

Five seats are rated as Coalition gains that weren’t last time, Gilmore, Lingiari, Lyons and Aston having moved from too-close-to-call and Paterson going from Labor retain to Coalition gain without passing go. Bruce, Dobell, Hunter, Casey, Tangney, McEwen and Bennelong go from Labor retain to too-close-to-call, while Coalition-held Deakin and Moore are no longer on their endangered list. However, the traffic is not all one way, with Casey in Victoria and Forde in Queensland going from Coalition retain to too-close-to-call. So far as the underlying model is concerned, it is presumably not a coincidence that both seats are on the metropolitan fringes.

The results show a mixed picture for the teals, who are reckoned to have gone backwards in the city, such that Curtin goes from too-close-to-call to Coalition retain and Goldstein goes from teal retain to Liberal gain, but forwards in the country, shifting Wannon from Coalition retain to too-close-to-call while maintaining Cowper as a teal gain. For the Greens, Ryan goes from retained to too-close-to-call while Brisbane does the opposite, with Melbourne and Griffith remaining Greens retains.

Whereas the last assessment was based on 2022 election boundaries, the latest one makes use of the redistribution proposals for New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. Respectively, this takes the teal seat of North Sydney out of contention and moves Hughes from Coalition retain to too-close-to-call; costs Labor Higgins and moves Chisholm from Labor retain to too-close-to-call; and introduces Bullwinkel to the too-close-to-call column.

My routine caveat with MRP is that it handles major parties better than independents and minors, perhaps especially with what by MRP standards is fairly modest sample (a similar exercise before the last election involving some of the same personnel had a sample of 18,923). I am particularly dubious about its projection of a blowout Labor win against the Greens in Wills. There also seems reason to doubt its precision in relation to a demographic wild card like Lingiari.

Wolf & Smith federal and state polling

Also just out is an expansive national poll from a new outfit called Wolf & Smith, a “strategic campaign agency based in Sydney” that appears to involve Jim Reed, principal of Resolve Strategic and alumnus of Liberal Party pollsters Crosby Textor. The poll was conducted from August 6 to 29 through an online panel from a vast sample of 10,239, and includes results federally and for each state government. The federal poll has Labor leading 51-49, from primary votes of Labor 29%, Coalition 36%, Greens 13% and One Nation 6%. At state level:

• The poll joins RedBridge Group and Resolve Strategic in recording weak numbers for the Minns government in New South Wales, showing a 50-50 result on two-party preferred from primary votes of Labor 32%, Coalition 38% and Greens 12%, from a sample of 2047.

• The Coalition leads 52-48 in Victoria from primary votes of Labor 28%, Coalition 40% and Greens 14%, from a sample of 2024, which is likewise broadly in line with recent results from RedBridge Group and Resolve Strategic.

• The Liberal National Party leads 57-43 in Queensland from primary votes of Labor 24%, Coalition 42%, Greens 12%, One Nation 8% and Katter’s Australian Party 3%, from a sample of 1724, which lines up well with the most recent YouGov poll.

• Labor leads 55-45 in Western Australia from primary votes of Labor 37%, Liberal 29%, Nationals 3%, Greens 12% and One Nation 4%, from a sample of 878. Again, this sits well with the most recent other poll from the state, conducted for the Liberal Party by Freshwater Strategy in July from a sample of 1000 and published in The West Australian, which had Labor leading 56-44 from primary votes of Labor 39%, Liberal 33%, Nationals 5% and Greens 12%.

• In the first poll result of any substance from the state since the March 2022 election, Labor leads 60-40 in South Australia from primary votes of Labor 41%, Liberal 28%, Greens 11% and One Nation 5%, from a sample of 856. The Liberal leadership change occurred in the first week of the poll’s three-week survey period.

• A Tasmanian sample of 786 finds both major parties down from the March election result, Liberal from 36.7% to 32% and Labor from 29.0% to 23%, with the Greens steady on 14% (13.9% at the election) and the Jacqui Lambie Network up from 6.7% to 11% – though most of the survey period predated the party’s recent implosion.

And the rest

• The University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre has results of polling conducted by YouGov in June concerning the US alliance and related matters of regional strategy, conducted in conjunction with polling in the US and Japan. Together with an Essential Research poll in July, it points to a softening in attitudes towards Donald Trump, with 26% now rating that Australia should withdraw from the alliance if he wins, down from 37% last year. However, 46% would be “very concerned about the state of US democracy. Twenty per cent of Australian respondents felt US handling of China was too aggressive, compared with only 9% in Japan and 10% in the US, and 40% agreed Australia should send military forces “to help the United States defend Taiwan … if China attacks”, down six from last year, with 32% disagreeing, up ten. Respondents in all three countries were asked if it were “a good idea for Australia to have nuclear-powered submarines”: 51% of Australians agreed while 19% disagreed, compared with 35% and 16% of Americans daring to venture an opinion one way or the other. The survey was conducted from June 17 to 25, from sample of a little over 1000 in each country.

• JWS Research has the results of its latest quarterly True Issues survey on issue salience. Cost of living remains by far the issue most frequently invoked as being among the “most important issues the Australian government should focus on”, despite a six-point drop since May. The survey also finds a net minus 22 rating for direction of the national economy, down two on May and the equal worst result going back to the series’ inception in 2013.

South Australian Liberal leadership change and state redistribution

South Australia has a new Opposition Leader as of Monday, and now a proposed new seat of electoral boundaries.

Two developments in state politics from South Australian, which continues to go unserviced by opinion polls. The first is a change in management in the Liberal Party, with Vincent Tarzia winner Monday’s leadership ballot by eighteen votes to four over Shadow Attorney-General Josh Teague. This followed the resignation last Thursday of David Speirs, who said he lacked the motivation for what he appeared to acknowledge would be a “fight” for the leadership, while also faulting “the papers and the Twitter-sphere” for reporting “speculation based on speculation based on nothing”.

Vincent Tarzia served as Speaker and later Police Minister during the Liberals’ term in office from 2018 to 2022 and has racked up an impressive electoral record in his eastern suburbs seat of Hartley: he gained it from Labor in 2014, saw off the highest-profile of challengers in Nick Xenophon in 2018, and retained it in the face of the government’s defeat in 2022. Both he and Josh Teague are factional moderates, but Tarzia reportedly won the favour of the conservatives, who constituted a “disciplined” block of nine votes. Remaining as deputy is another moderate, John Gardner, who chose not to contest after canvassing support over the weekend, after some initial reports rated him the front-runner. Also not a contender was Shadow Health Minister Ashton Hurn, who has been touted as the parliamentary party’s most promising prospect, but is presently on maternity leave and focused on other priorities.

Speirs did not not attend the party room meeting to choose his successor, and told FIVEaa radio he would “find it difficult to remain in the Liberal Party” if the “two or three people” who undermined him were elected to leadership positions. Labor enforcer Tom Koutsantonis said it was “pretty clear” that Tarzia was among those he had in mind, and Paul Starick of The Advertiser rated it “more than a fair bet” that he was right. The latter further cited a view among “many Liberals” that Speirs would soon quit the party.

Moving right along, the Electoral Boundaries Commission of South Australia today published the draft report for the redistribution that is conducted roughly in the middle of each term. A feature of South Australia’s redistributions is that the commission goes to the trouble of calculating revised two-party margins, a hangover from the days when it was legally obliged to take into account the elusive notion of “electoral fairness”.

The biggest proposed change is to place Port Augusta, which is divided between Giles in the west and Stuart in the east, entirely within Giles. Stuart is to be compensated through a gain of interior territory from Giles and, closer to the orbit of Adelaide, the northern end of Frome, which in turn is to gain the northern edge of Gawler from Light. This turns Stuart from having a Labor margin of 1.8% in two-party terms to a Liberal one of 1.5%, though it is in fact held by independent Geoff Brock. Brock says he will contest the next election despite the fact that he will then be 75, and resigned his cabinet position in April citing health reasons. Frome’s gains at Gawler make it less safe for the Liberals, reducing their margin from 8.2% to 3.3%, while Giles and Light remain safe for Labor.

Electorally consequential changes are proposed for two marginal seats in Adelaide, both favourable to Labor. One is David Speirs’ southern coastal seat of Black, which is to lose territory in the north to Gibson and gain it in the south from Reynell, cutting his margin from 2.8% to 1.0%. The other is in the northern suburbs seat of King, which Rhiannon Pearce gained for Labor in 2022 with a margin of 2.9%. That now becomes 5.7% with the proposed gain of Craigmore from the Labor stronghold of Elizabeth, balanced by the loss of Salisbury East to Wright in the south.

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