WHAT HAPPENED AT THE SA ELECTION:

* It became clear on Saturday night the Liberals would form a majority government after 16 years in opposition. They are expected to win at least 24 seats in the 47-seat parliament.

* Labor is likely to win 18 seats - a respectable result after their lengthy reign.

* SA-BEST leader Nick Xenophon failed to win his own seat of Hartley, with Liberal Vincent Tarzia retaining it for the Liberals.

* Things didn't go much better for SA-BEST in the 35 other seats it contested, where the party polled well below expectations and failed spectacularly in its bid to seize the balance of power.

* Three seats are tipped to go to independents with two others still in doubt, the Labor seat of Mawson and the Liberal seat of Adelaide.

* The Liberals may have been the most successful but their primary vote was 37.4 per cent - well down on the 45 per cent they won in 2014, with most of what was lost going to SA-BEST candidates and flowing back by preferences.

* Labor's primary vote was 33.9 per cent, while SA-BEST's was 13.7 per cent.

* Mr Xenophon's SA-BEST had more success in the Legislative Council, where it is expected to claim two of the 11 seats up for grabs.

* The Liberals are set to take four upper house seats, Labor at least three with two going to SA-BEST, and one each to possibly The Greens and the Australian Conservatives. </s> Liberal leader Steven Marshall has claimed victory in the South Australian election, declaring it a new dawn for the state after 16 years of a Labor government. Mr Marshall will take over from Labor's Jay Weatherill as premier with the Liberals likely to win at least 24 seats, enough to govern in their own right. 'It's been way too long between drinks for the Liberal Party in South Australia,' a jubilant Mr Marshall, told the cheering crowd.

THE Liberal Party has ended 16 years of Labor rule and also dismissed any challenge from Nick Xenophon and his SA-BEST Party.

It is estimated the Liberals will win at least 24 seats in the 47-seat parliament in South Australia, enough to give the opposition some serious push in parliament and govern in their own right.

Labor will likely take 18 seats and three should go to independents with two seats remaining in doubt.

Counting is expected to continue throughout this morning with those seats still too close to call to come down to postal and absentee votes.

Mr Xenophon failed to win his own seat of Hartley with Vincent Tarzia retaining it for the Liberals.

SA-BEST also polled well below expectations in the 35 other seats the party contested, failing spectacularly in its attempt to seize the balance of power.

Mr Marshall said it had been “way too long between drinks” for the Liberal Party in South Australia.

“Now, we have been given a wonderful opportunity by the people of South Australia,” he told the jubilant party faithful on Saturday night.

Outgoing premier Jay Weatherill thanked South Australians for the “extraordinary privilege of being your premier.”

“It’s been one of the great joys of my life,” he said.

Mr Xenophon said he was beaten by “negativity” and the “big money” spent by the Australian Hotels Association to derail his campaign.

“But it’s not over and I’m not giving up,” he said.

SA-BEST should have at least some representation in the next parliament with the party a chance of claiming two seats in the upper house. </s> For the first time in 16 years, South Australia's Labor Party will spend the day knowing the state won't be under its watch in the coming years.

However, outgoing Premier Jay Weatherill has promised the party faithful this won't be the last time Labor reigns in SA.

"I'll just give you one pledge: we'll be back," he told them after conceding defeat in the state election on Saturday night.

A return in four years may already be on the party's mind but it has plenty of issues to grapple with in the immediate future.

These include whether Mr Weatherill will stay on as leader and if not, who will replace him, a question not dealt with in his concession speech.

Peter Malinauskas, who on Saturday was successful in his bid to move from the upper house to the lower house, is among those considered a potential successor.

It also remains to be seen exactly how many seats in parliament Labor will retain once all the votes are tallied.

The Liberals are likely to win at least 24 seats in the 47-seat parliament, enough to govern in their own right while Labor could finish with 18.

Despite the loss, outgoing treasurer Tom Koutsantonis was keen to stress on Saturday that the party was about more than campaigning.

"We are part of a movement, we're not a brand," he said.

"We're not Coke or Pepsi, we're about people's lives." </s> The Liberal party is set to form government in South Australia after 16 years of Labor government, with former federal senator Nick Xenophon failing to make a splash in the state with his SA Best party.



And Labor has come out on top in a bitterly-fought by-election against the Greens in the inner Melbourne seat of Batman.



In South Australia, Liberal leader Steven Marshall will be the new premier, with a projected Liberal victory bringing to an end to 16 years of Labor government in the state.

The ABC has projected the Liberals will win at least 25 seats, one more than the 24 needed to secure a majority government.

South Australian Labor leader Jay Weatherill said on Saturday night he had called Marshall to concede and wished him all the best in taking on the role of premier.

"I am sorry I could not bring home another victory," he told supporters. "I do feel like one of those horses who has won four Melbourne Cups and I think the handicap has caught up to us on this occasion."

Weatherill said being premier had been one of the "great joys" of his life and, smiling, promised his family that he'd be a better husband, son, brother and father.

"We’ll just give you one pledge – we’ll be back," he said. </s> With 66% of enrolled voters counted in Saturday’s South Australian election, the ABC is calling 24 of the 47 lower house seats for the Liberals, 18 for Labor and three independents. Two seats – Adelaide and Mawson – are in doubt. Pre-poll, postal and absent votes will not start to be counted until Tuesday.

While the Liberals won the election, the biggest losers were Nick Xenophon and his SA-BEST party. SA-BEST does not appear to have won a single lower house seat, while the Liberals crushed Xenophon in Hartley 58.6-41.4. When preferences are distributed, Labor could eliminate Xenophon from the final two candidates on Greens’ preferences.

Statewide primary votes were 37.4% Liberals (down 7.4% since the 2014 election), 33.9% Labor (down 1.9%), 13.7% SA-BEST, 6.6% Greens (down 2.1%) and 3.1% Australian Conservatives (down 3.0% from Family First’s 2014 vote). When counting is complete, I would expect Labor to fall somewhat, with the Liberals and Greens gaining.

Family First merged into the Conservatives last year, but this was not successful in South Australia. In my opinion, Family First had a catchier name than the Australian Conservatives.

In an October-to-December Newspoll, SA-BEST had 32% of the South Australian primary vote, and it was plausible that Xenophon could be the next premier. In the lead-up to the election, Xenophon was attacked by all sides. I believe the biggest reason for Xenophon’s flop was that he lacked a clear agenda to distinguish his party from the major parties.

Read more: Nick Xenophon could be South Australia's next premier, while Turnbull loses his 25th successive Newspoll

Labor had governed South Australia for 16 years, and the “it’s time” factor appears to have contributed to the result. But this election was not the disaster Labor suffered after 14 to 16 years in power in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania at elections between 2011 and 2014.

According to the Poll Bludger, Labor achieved about a two-point swing in its favour in two-party terms from the 2014 election, but it needed a three-point swing to win after a hostile redistribution. In 2014, Labor clung to power, despite losing the two-party vote 53.0-47.0.

In the upper house, half of the 22 members were up for election using statewide proportional representation. With 11 to be elected, a quota is one-twelfth of the vote, or 8.3%. Currently, the Liberals have 3.78 quotas, Labor 3.56, SA-BEST 2.27, the Greens 0.72 and the Conservatives 0.42.

Read more: Xenophon's SA-BEST slumps in a South Australian Newspoll, while Turnbull's better PM lead narrows

Optional above-the-line preferential voting was used at this election. The Liberals will win four seats, Labor three, SA-BEST two and the Greens one. Labor is currently well ahead of the Conservatives in the race for the last seat, but Labor’s vote will probably drop after election day. However, preferences from Dignity, Animal Justice and SA-BEST should help Labor against the Conservatives, with only Liberal Democrats’ preferences likely to flow the other way.

If Labor wins a fourth upper house seat, SA-BEST’s two seats would come at the expense of Dignity and the Conservatives. The overall upper house would then be eight Liberals, eight Labor, two Greens, two SA-BEST, one Advance SA (formerly SA-BEST) and one Conservative. The Liberals would need all of SA-BEST, Advance SA and Conservative to pass legislation opposed by Labor and the Greens.

The final polls for the South Australian election, from Newspoll and ReachTEL, gave the Liberals 34%, Labor 31% and SA-BEST 16-17%. The major parties, particularly the Liberals, performed better than expected, while SA-BEST performed worse.

Labor defeats the Greens 54.1-45.9 at the Batman byelection

With 74.5% of enrolled voters counted at Saturday’s Batman byelection, Labor’s Ged Kearney defeated the Greens’ Alex Bhathal by a 54.1-45.9 margin, a 3.1% swing to Labor since the 2016 election. Primary votes were 42.7% Kearney (up 7.4%), 40.3% Bhathal (up 4.1%), 6.4% Conservatives and 2.9% Animal Justice. The Liberals won 19.9% at the 2016 election, but did not contest the byelection.

In the Northcote West booth, Labor and the Greens’ two-party results are the wrong way round. The correction of this error will push Labor’s overall margin down to 53.8-46.2, but postals counted so far have strongly favoured Labor.

At byelections, there are no Greens-favouring absent votes, so Labor’s lead is likely to increase as more postals are counted.

Labor received large swings in its favour in the southern part of Batman, the more Greens-favouring part. Kearney was a far better fit for this part of the electorate than the right-aligned David Feeney. It is also possible there was a backlash against the Greens for courting Liberal votes over opposition to Labor’s plan to alter the tax treatment of franking credits.

Read more: With Feeney gone, Greens sniff a chance in Batman, and has Xenophon's bubble burst in South Australia?

For Bill Shorten and federal Labor, the Batman result will be a huge relief. If Labor had lost Batman, the media would have seen it as a backlash against Labor’s tax plan.

While Labor lost the South Australian election, it was not a disaster. Federal parties generally do better in states where the opposite party is in power, so Labor could do very well in South Australia at the next federal election. </s> History, finally, caught up with Labor in South Australia. After 16 years in office, and seeking a record fifth term, Jay Weatherill’s Labor has conceded to the Liberals.

While the results have not been finalised, the current state of play has Steven Marshall’s Liberals securing a majority. In the projected seat tally, the Liberals have won 24, Labor 18, Independents three and two seats remain undecided. This is a remarkable and unexpected result for a range of reasons.

Elections, as Nick Xenophon is discovering, have a cold, hard way of clarifying the minds of the voters.

Only two days before the election, most of the major betting agencies had far more favourable odds for a Labor win. Betting odds are sometimes seen as better predictors of election results than polls.

Read more: Liberals win South Australian election as Xenophon crushed, while Labor stuns the Greens in Batman

So, as we still pick over the results, what seemed to go right for the Liberals and so wrong for Nick Xenophon’s SA-Best team?

For the Liberals, while this was a win, it was not as resounding as, say, Mike Rann’s 2006 “Rann-slide”. Yet, it has been a result a long time coming, having won the popular vote in three of the past four state elections. Marshall’s campaign centred on him being a “safe” change-agent.

Marshall’s success lies in a range of incremental factors. First, he put to bed the historic divisions in the party. In a striking insight, he followed John Howard’s advice not to have votes at shadow cabinet meetings, but decide by consensus. New leadership, coupled with the misery of the long years in the wilderness, helped cement party unity.

Second, Marshall’s policy agenda has remained consistent and undramatic. When he launched his first 100 days in office, this was a smart relaunch of policies already well-known. It might have lacked a “wow” factor, but this has proven to be an asset. South Australians will now see cuts to household bills, a roll-out of a home battery scheme, and a push to deregulate working hours.

Third, the Liberals finally managed to make the most of the ammunition of Labor’s 16 years in office, especially the release of the Oakden report into abuse at the state-run mental health facility. The Liberals capitalised on this with a powerful campaign ad by the son of one of the victims, saying he “had enough” of Labor.

Yet, the story of the night was the deflation of the Xenophon SA-Best threat to the major parties. SA-Best looks set to secure just 13.7% of the vote, much lower than even lowered expectations.

The Xenophon vote fail to carry through – arguably for the following reasons.

First, there was overreach by Xenophon, perhaps mistakenly buoyed by the December Newspoll that not only suggested his party could hoover up a third of the vote, but also dangling the prospect of Xenophon as future premier.

Running 36 SA-Best candidates proved a stretch too far for South Australian voters.

Second, the SA-Best machine seemed ill-equipped and under-prepared for the campaign. Policy announcements came late in the campaign, giving the veneer of “policy on the run”.

In other key seats, some untested SA-Best candidates met difficult challenges. In Colton, Matt Cowdrey, the Liberal candidate and former paralympian, easily saw off the SA-Best candidate. In Mawson – a key SA-Best target, Leon Bignell the Labor (now former) minister ran a strong campaign to damage Xenophon hopes.

The thinness of the SA-Best “machine” might prove a factor, as candidates were recruited late in the piece, and some did not seem quite ready for the media scrutiny, nor have enough time to embed themselves as the SA-Best candidate in their seats.

Voters also seem to have pulled back from the unclear positioning of SA-Best. After the initial honeymoon, SA-Best shifted from its traditional “watchdog” role – previously held by the Democrats - to presenting as a “kingmaker”. This brought additional scrutiny and expectation, pushing Xenophon onto the back foot.

Read more: As South Australia heads to the polls, the state is at a crossroads

In the final weeks of the campaign, Xenophon was playing to his familiar strength, gambling reform, but voters expected a more embracing policy agenda.

Finally, the Australian political system is undergoing change, but the institutional factors continue to suppress minor party challengers. The lower house, with its majoritarian electoral system, requires a strong performance by the next best-placed challenger. Three-into-two does not easily go.

It is notable too, that the election did not go as planned for other parties. The Australian Conservatives clearly failed to capitalise on their merger with Family First, with a drop in its vote share to 3.1%.

For Labor, the result is far from a disaster, and offers them the chance to rebuild, perhaps with a new leader in Peter Malinauskas.

Critically, Australian democracy seems more accelerated, with Liberal governments in Victoria and Queensland ejected after just one term. Marshall will need to move quickly to ensure his new government does not follow this new trend. </s> The Liberals will claim victory at the South Australian election, an exit poll has predicted, less than an hour before polls close.

The Channel 9 Galaxy poll says the Liberals are ahead on a two-party preferred basis with 50.5 per cent of the vote, compared to Labor's 49.5 per cent, giving them 24 or 25 seats in the 47-seat parliament.

Nick Xenophon's SA-BEST has slipped to just 15 per cent of the primary vote, the poll says, compared to 36 per cent for the Liberals, 31 per cent for Labor and eight per cent for the Greens. </s> The Experts

SA Election: Will Xenophon be king-maker?

Malcolm Mackerras

Friday, March 09, 2018

Having made near-perfectly-correct predictions for Tasmania’s recent election “Island politics: Spotlight on Tasmania’s election” I am emboldened now to chance my arm on South Australia whose general election will occur on Saint Patrick’s Day, Saturday March 17. I begin by noting that I have already predicted this election result – more than a year ago. In my article “Leadership Shakeup for WA and SA?” (published on Thursday February 9, 2017) I correctly predicted the Labor win in Western Australia and went on to write: “By way of contrast, the opposite will happen in South Australia in March 2018. The Labor government there will be defeated and replaced by a government composed of one party only, the Liberal Party. Labor’s Jay Weatherill will lose the office of Premier to Steven Marshall”.

That, of course, was written long before Nick Xenophon decided to resign from the Senate in order to contest the state seat of Hartley in the SA House of Assembly. So, do I stick to that prediction? Or do I change it, asking to be excused my change of mind by using Xenophon’s decision as my excuse? As explained in detail below I have decided to stick to the prediction that Marshall will be Premier in a majority Liberal government.

In the outgoing lower house, Labor held 24 seats: Ashford, Cheltenham, Colton, Croydon, Elder, Enfield, Fisher, Florey, Giles, Kaurna, Lee, Light, Little Para, Mawson, Napier, Newland, Playford, Port Adelaide, Ramsay, Reynell, Taylor, Torrens, West Torrens and Wright. The Liberal Party held 21 seats: Adelaide, Bragg, Bright, Chaffey, Davenport, Dunstan, Finniss, Flinders, Goyder, Hammond, Hartley, Heysen, Kavel, MacKillop, Mitchell, Morialta, Morphett, Mount Gambier, Schubert, Stuart and Unley.

That left two others, both seats which would normally be won by the Liberal Party. They were Frome, based on Port Pirie, and Waite, in Adelaide’s salubrious southern suburbs. Port Pirie is a Labor town but the surrounding countryside (which is almost entirely to its south) votes solidly Liberal. It would be a Liberal seat except that it has a popular Independent member who won the seat as an Independent but supported the Labor government. Waite is blue-ribbon Liberal but its member, Martin Hamilton-Smith, decided to be a minister in the Labor government. My predictions begin by asserting that both Frome and Waite will be won by the Liberal Party.

The big problem lies with SA Best, Xenophon’s party. However, I chance my arm on saying there will be two such members in the House of Assembly. They will be Xenophon himself in Hartley, taken from the Liberal Party, and one other member in Giles, a gain from Labor. Giles takes in the steel-making city of Whyalla plus a third of South Australia’s area to Whyalla’s west. It is Labor’s only regional seat.

At the general election held on Saturday March 15, 2014, the two-party preferred vote was distributed 53-47 in favour of the Liberal Party, which party lost the election! Due to the obvious unfairness of such a result there has been a redistribution of seats which creates a notional result (on the new boundaries) of 27 Liberals to 20 seats for Labor.

Having studied all the seats and much opinion poll information I now predict these 24 seat will be won by the Liberal Party: Adelaide, Bragg, Chaffey, Colton, Davenport, Dunstan, Elder, Finniss, Flinders, Frome, Gibson, Hammond, Heysen, Kavel, MacKillop, Mawson, Morialta, Morphett, Mount Gambier, Narungga, Schubert, Stuart, Unley and Waite.

The 21 seats I predict will be won by Labor are Badcoe, Black, Cheltenham, Croydon, Elizabeth, Enfield, Florey, Hurtle Vale, Kaurna, King, Lee, Light, Newland, Playford, Port Adelaide, Ramsay, Reynell, Taylor, Torrens, West Torrens and Wright.

If all the above is correct, then Xenophon will be very disappointed – but not devastated. I say that because there are plenty of pundits who think he will not win Hartley. For that seat to be won by the Liberal sitting member or the Labor former member would be devastating for Xenophon. So I do not think it will happen. On the other hand I am not predicting he will be king-maker. Since that is the aim of his quixotic decision to leave the Senate my predicted result, if proven as correct as my Western Australian, Queensland and Tasmanian predicted results, would leave Xenophon very disappointed indeed.

Two by-elections will be held on the SA general election day, March 17. One is very easy to predict. The Liberal Party will retain blue-ribbon Liberal Cottesloe (WA), the seat resigned by the former premier, Colin Barnett, who has retired from politics.

By contrast, Batman (Victoria) is interesting. Once again my prediction is on the record. In my article here (show “Who’s to blame for the citizenship scandal?” in blue) I wrote that “Labor will lose Batman to The Greens at the next election whenever that election is held”. Do I stick to that? I give an affirmative answer. The Greens candidate, Alex Bhathal, will be elected for Batman.

(Malcolm Mackerras is Honorary Fellow of Australian Catholic University. malcolm.mackerras@acu.edu.au)

Published: Friday, March 09, 2018

Disqus </s> After 16 long years in the political wilderness, the Liberal party has claimed victory in South Australia after one of the most unusual election campaigns in living memory.

At a packed Hackney hotel on the edge of his seat of Dunstan – which he won handsomely – the incoming Liberal premier, Steven Marshall, entered the room to squeals of delight and speakers blasting out The Man by the Killers.

“A massive thank you to the people of South Australia who have put their trust, their faith in me and the Liberal team for a new dawn, a new dawn for South Australia!” he said.

Marshall won on a platform strongly grounded in business-friendly plans including deregulating shop trading hours and cuts to payroll tax, land tax and the emergency services levy.

He paid special tribute to Vincent Tarzia, earlier introduced to the room as the “lion of Hartley”, for defeating the SA Best leader, Nick Xenophon, in the eastern suburbs seat. Marshall might have been speaking about himself when describing how Tarzia would have reacted to the news Xenophon would be returning to state politics.

“Most people at that point of time would have thought this is not going to happen, I’m going to throw in the towel,” he said.

Marshall had banked it all on victory, pledging to quit if he lost and ruling out a deal with Nick Xenophon’s SA Best to form government. The result was also a profound relief for the party at large – after winning the popular vote in three of the past four elections, only to lose them all.

It was a result that the Liberals felt they they’d been robbed of three times over. Their election-night traumas combined with the uncertainty of Xenophon’s return to state politics with SA Best, who had a relatively disappointing showing, left even the most confident party faithful holding their breath until the result was beyond all doubt.

Labor’s leader Jay Weatherill, as he promised earlier in the day, was philosophical about the result, acknowledging the challenge of winning another election after so long in power.

“I’m so sorry we couldn’t bring home another one to you,” he said. “I feel like a horse that’s won four Melbourne Cups and the handicap has just been put up.”

Weatherill expressed pride in the achievements of Labor’s long stint in power, which began with the election of the Rann government in 2002, before Weatherill took power in 2011.

He highlighted in particular the rollout of one of some of the most ambitious renewable energy infrastructure in the world, with projects constructed or under way including the biggest solar thermal tower in the world, and the two biggest battery storage systems globally. Aside from the “time for change” imperative, Labor was up against it in newspaper coverage, with the Adelaide Advertiser and the Australian both endorsing Marshall.

As it stood at 10.30pm on Saturday night, the Liberals were in front in 25 seats despite a swing against them of 6.9% and a primary vote of 37.8%, an oddity explained by the arrival of SA Best and a redrawing of electoral boundaries in 2016 that actually meant Labor had to win seats to retain government.

Labor looked set to win 18 on a primary vote of 33%, and is still a chance in Adelaide, King and Newland. Three independents were on the verge of victory, and SA Best was not in front in any seats although remained a chance in Heysen. The party secured a vote of 13.7%, well short of the 32% Newspoll projected at its height last December.

Xenophon made a unusually early concession speech of sorts at 8pm at the SA Best function at Palace Nova cinemas in the heart of Adelaide.

On a night when SA Best were expected to get anywhere between one and four seats, he framed the result as a victory against the duopoly of Liberal and Labor because of a number of second-place finishes, and a platform to build from in the future. “This is not the beginning of the end, it’s actually the end of the beginning,” he said.

“We’ll have a presence in the state parliament and we’ll build on that presence and build on it, so that every day, for the next four years, we’ll hold the government, the next government of South Australia, to account. We’ll hold the opposition to account, we’ll make the parliament a workhorse, not the rocking horse it is now.”

The seat of Hartley was a microcosm of the challenges facing the SA Best campaign, with Labor, Liberal, Greens and Australian Conservatives candidates all preferencing against Xenophon, the pokies lobby running a concerted campaign on the ground against him, and the SA Best party leader too busy elsewhere to spend much time meeting voters.

The Liberals poured resources into beating Xenophon personally, hoping that defeating the SA Best leader would leave any candidates who did get elected rudderless.

In the Legislative Council, it looked on election night that four Liberals, four Labor and two SA Best candidates would be elected. Of the one seat remaining, it appeared that the Greens MLC Tammy Franks would retain her seat ahead of the Australian Conservatives’ Robert Brokenshire.

In an election calling on a record 1.2 million South Australian registered voters, sausages sizzled outside polling booths housed in schools, town halls and churches across the state.

The final tally will be further delayed by the record 215,000 early votes cast, which the Electoral Commission will only begin counting on Monday in a process that could take weeks.

Marshall will be hoping for further good news from those ballots, having himself voted early in an attempt to encourage the public to do the same while the report on the Oakden aged-care home abuse scandal was still in the news cycle.
The SA Liberals win a majority of seats in South Australia's lower house, ending 16 years of Labor Party government in the state.