Overview
The Liberal Party's election win under Steven Marshall in 2018 brought to an end 16 years of Labor government, in which time Labor won three elections under the leadership of Mike Rann and one under Jay Weatherill, who succeeded Rann in October 2011. The 2018 result was peculiar in a number of respects, having been achieved in the face of a 1.1% swing to Labor and what at first looked like a game-changing challenge from Nick Xenophon's SA-Best party. With polls suggesting Xenophon could emerge from the election as kingmaker if not king, Marshall made the seemingly courageous decision to rule out entering government if reliant on his support. The move paid off as Xenophon's campaign foundered, its jocular tone seemingly failing to strike a chord with voters. The party scored an average of 18.5% across the 36 seats it contested but failed to win any lower house seats, with Xenophon himself falling short in his bid for the Liberal-held seat of Hartley.
As well as seeing off the challenge of Xenophon, the Liberals were able to win three out of four Labor-held seats that had been left with notional Liberal margins after the redistribution, and further gained a new seat with a tiny notional Labor margin. This left the incoming government with a working majority of 25 seats out of 47, with Labor on 19 and independents on three. Labor was down four on its 2014 result, having further lost its seat of Florey when Frances Bedford retained it as an independent after losing preselection. However, Labor was able to retain the seat it won at a by-election in December 2014 after the death of Liberal-turned-independent Bob Such, which the redistribution had made stronger for Labor and renamed from Fisher to Hurtle Vale. The Liberals were also down a seat after Troy Bell, who had quit the party after being charged with fraud offences, retained Mount Gambier as an independent.
The Liberals lost three seats and their parliamentary majority over the course of 2020 and 2021, with two members leaving the party after becoming embroiled in scandals and a third complaining that the government had failed to address concerns in his electorate, while also likely being aggrieved at having been overlooked for promotion. Conversely, Labor's parliamentary line-up has remained intact since it retained two seats at by-elections held in February 2019 after the retirements of Jay Weatherill and his deputy, John Rau. The redistribution has weakened the Liberals in two key seats, but has not had the effect of moving any seat to the opposite party's column, in contrast to the one before the 2018 election. Consequently, the current numbers in parliament are Liberal 22, Labor 19 and independents six.
Labor thus needs five extra seats to gain a majority, and likely has one in the bag after the redistribution prompted Frances Bedford to abandon her naturally safe Labor seat of Florey for its finely poised Liberal-held neighbour, Newland. The shortest path to victory for Labor would involve a uniform swing of 2.0%, which would net the metropolitan seats of Newland, Adelaide, King and Elder. Beyond that lies a big gap in the electoral pendulum out to the Liberals' next most marginal seat of Colton, where the required swing is 6.2%. Each of the four ex-Liberal members will be seeking re-election as independents, meaning the Liberals have to either unseat at least two of them or win as many from Labor to recover their majority. They also have an opportunity to gain a seat from the other independent, Geoff Brock, who like Frances Bedford has been confronted by a troublesome redistribution. Brock will now run against deputy Liberal leader Dan van Holst Pellekaan in Stuart, which has gained his home base of Port Pirie from his existing seat of Frome.
Redistributions and electoral fairness
The dominant fact of the 2018 result was a redistribution that sought to address the injustice of the Liberals' successive defeats in 2010 and 2014 after comfortably outpolling Labor on two-party preferred. Labor has in fact won the statewide two-party preferred vote only once out of eight elections since 1989, five of which ended up with Labor in government, though only twice did they have majorities in their own right. This was despite an “electoral fairness” clause that Labor magnanimously allowed for after its fortuitous win in 1989, which was ratified at a referendum in 1991 with 76.7% support, but ultimately repealed during the previous Labor government's last months in office in 2017. It required that redistributions be held after every election with an eye to delivering parliamentary majorities to the party with the larger two-party vote, assuming a uniform swing.
The failure of the provision to deliver on its promise in part reflected the fact that only two of the six elections held while it operated produced decisive results: the Liberal landslide of 1993 and the Rann government's first re-election in 2006. Other results were left dependent on the vagaries of hung parliaments, most notably when ex-Liberal independent Peter Lewis went back on a pre-election commitment by shepherding Labor into office after the 2002 election. However, the Liberals' failure to dislodge Labor from majority status after winning the two-party vote in 2010 underscored two further issues: the fallibility of the assumption of uniform swings, with Labor having survived big swings in seats it held comfortably while sandbagging the decisive marginals, and the inefficient distribution of the Liberal vote, too much of which is locked up in unloseable country seats.
With uneven swings having thwarted the designs of electoral fairness in 2010, the boundaries commission oversaw a highly conservative redistribution going into the 2014 election that made little effort to tilt the playing field back to the Liberals, making use of the legislation's injunction that fairness was only to be pursued “as far as practicable”. However, the evident expectation that the Liberals would do better in 2014 in the decisive seats where they had under-performed in 2010 went largely unrealised. The Liberals, who were now under the leadership of Steven Marshall, emerged with one seat fewer than Labor in a hung parliament, despite a clear 53.0-47.0 win on the two-party vote.
The two independents elected in 2014 both served seats that had traditionally leaned conservative, but the Liberals' position was weakened when one of them, former Liberal MP Bob Such, took medical leave immediately after the election due to what proved to be a brain tumour. The other, Geoff Brock, was left with little choice but to back Labor, since the alternative would have delivered only parliamentary deadlock. The Liberals was duly outraged by the evident failure of the boundaries to deliver on electoral fairness, but got what they wanted from the subsequent redistribution, which left four Labor-held marginal seats in Adelaide with notional Liberal margins. Now it was Labor's turn to cry foul, bringing an unsuccessful action before the Supreme Court on the basis that rural conservative seats had been left under-enrolled relative to those in Adelaide.
The new boundaries were drawn in such a way as to tilt the advantage to the Liberals in Labor-held Newland, Mawson, Colton and Elder. However, it also produced a notional Labor seat in Hurtle Vale, the successor to Bob Such's old seat of Fisher, where Nat Cook achieved an unexpected nine-vote win for Labor at the by-election held after Such's death. The change was particularly dramatic in the case of Mawson, which was formerly dominated by suburbs on the southern fringe of Adelaide but now took in Kangaroo Island and much of Fleurieu Peninsula. Labor member Leon Bignell was nonetheless able to retain the seat, overcoming a notional Liberal margin of 3.2% with a swing of 4.5%. However, the other three seats were duly won by the Liberals, together with the new seat of King in Adelaide's north-east, where a 0.7% Liberal swing accounted for a notional Labor margin of 0.1%.
With the 2018 election having delivered a broadly fair result, the latest redistribution has been able to take a less dramatic approach. However, the Liberals have emerged weakened in two of the decisive seats from 2018. In the eastern Adelaide seat of Newland, conservative territory in the Adelaide Hills has been exchanged for suburban Modbury, reducing Liberal member Richard Harvey's margin from 2.0% to 0.2% and encouraging independent Frances Bedford, who has devoted much energy to campaigning on behalf of Modbury Hospital, to abandon her existing seat of Florey. In the inner southern Adelaide seat of Elder, an exchange of Liberal-leaning territory at the eastern end for Labor-leaning territory in the west has pared Carolyn Power's margin from 4.4% to 2.0%.
The Liberals in government
The Liberals' term in government has been marked by many of the factors that contributed to electoral success for governments in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania, most notably the successful avoidance of a significant COVID-19 outbreak until the emergence of the Omicron strain in December. Public health measures introduced at that time further appeared to be successful in limiting its extent relative to other states. However, the government's management of its internal affairs has not been nearly so smooth. It was plunged deep into minority government in 2021 as a result of both an accommodation expenses scandal that primarily involved members of country electorates, and the alienation of the party's conservative wing over its exclusion from senior roles in government and a socially liberal policy agenda.
The first chink in the government's armour resulted from the drunken misbehaviour of Waite MP Sam Duluk at a parliamentary Christmas party in 2019, culminating in his acquittal on an assault charge after SA-Best MLC Connie Bonaros accused him of groping her. His suspension from the party was soon followed by an ICAC investigation into misuse of a country members' travel and accommodation allowance that led to the resignation of three ministers and sent Narungga MP Fraser Ellis to the cross-bench in February 2021, tipping the government into minority. The situation worsened the following October when Kavel MP Dan Cregan resigned from the party and embarrassed the government by securing the position of Speaker after Labor and cross-benchers supported a measure to ensure it went to an independent. The parliament also passed a no-confidence motion in Deputy Premier and Attorney-General Vickie Chapman over a conflict of interest claim concerning her veto of a proposed timber port on Kangaroo Island, prompting her to stand down pending in November pending an Ombudsman's report.
The collective impact of the ministerial and party resignations was to weaken the position of factional conservatives (the moderate Chapman being a distinct exception), which Marshall's cabinet reshuffles pointedly failed to ameliorate. Moderates remained in a majority on the state executive despite a conservative membership drive targeting evangelical churches, spearheaded by firebrand Senator Alex Antic, which told against efforts by the cross-benchers to return to the party fold. As a result, Sam Duluk and Fraser Ellis as well as Dan Cregan will defend their naturally conservative seats as independents, together with Mount Gambier MP Troy Bell, who has been similarly placed since 2017. Conservative sentiment was further inflamed by the passage on conscience votes of abortion and euthanasia bills, which have given the government a more liberal record on social policy than its Labor predecessor.
Labor in opposition
With the resignation of Jay Weatherill in the wake of the March 2018 election defeat, the Labor leadership passed from the Left to the Right with the ascension of Peter Malinauskas, former state secretary of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Malinauskas first came to public attention in 2011 when he delivered a factionally ordained ultimatum to Mike Rann to go quietly or face a leadership challenge, a measure of the union's power within the Right. He was immediately elevated to cabinet after filling a Legislative Council vacancy in 2015, serving as Health Minister during the government's last six months in office. Still only 37, his move to the House of Assembly in Croydon at the 2018 election was widely seen to portend leadership ambitions. These were realised in short order after the election, when the factions agreed that Malinauskas should succeed Jay Weatherill with the deputy position going to Susan Close of the Left.
The party has presented a picture of stability in opposition, exhibiting notable sangfroid after a respectable election defeat that was long seen coming. It was initially thought that Tom Koutsantonis, another alumnus of the SDA who had been Treasurer in the Weatherill government, might contest for the leadership, but he declined to nominate after the faction's support coalesced behind Malinauskas. There have been no signs since of dissent from the view that the more amiable Malinauskas presented a better bet electorally than his notably combative rival. As local publication InDaily noted immediately after the election, the leadership was “predicated on a sober assessment of whether Labor is facing eight years in Opposition, or whether they are well-placed to return to Government after just one term. If the latter, the leadership is Malinauskas’s to refuse.”
Malinauskas has pursued a small-target strategy in opposition, particularly in relation to management of COVID-19, having evidently learned from the cautionary tale of the Liberals in Western Australia. When a snap lockdown was imposed in November 2020, Malinauskas took to social media to announce that the opposition was “here to support the government” and call on South Australians to “fight for each other, not against each other”. Conversely, Labor has opposed the government's plans to address the state's energy challenges with a connector to New South Wales, instead proposing construction of a new hydrogen-fired power station, and to build a new sports and entertainment arena in central Adelaide at a cost of $662 million, promising to instead divert the money to the health system.