2 hours ago
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As the ballots are counted in South Australia, it’s now clear that while the Liberal party isn’t politically dead, it’s currently unalive.
The results so far are both simple and complex. While the headline is that Peter Malinauskas and Labor brought the hammer down on the Liberal party, there are other storylines.
At the time of writing, One Nation’s statewide primary vote has punched through 20% and is several points higher than the Liberal party’s. The Liberals will finish the count with between four and seven seats. One Nation might only pick up one, the electorate of Hammond, although it could also take MacKillop and Ngadjuri.
It’s clear there is a structural realignment under way in Australian politics, with the Liberal party the early and obvious victim.
Because while the bottom fell out of the Liberal vote, which was largely cannibalised by One Nation, at the close of counting on Saturday night the non-major party vote was at a record high of 42%. For context, at the 2006 SA election the non-major party vote was about 19%.
These voting patterns are similar country-wide. In the latest Australian Financial Review/Redbridge/Accent Research federal poll, the non-major party vote was 49%.
Another similar voting behaviour was the almost extinction-level result for the Liberal party in urban seats, with the only win in metropolitan Adelaide on the night being the seat of Bragg, which sits in Christopher Pyne’s former federal electorate of Sturt.
There is an outside chance the party might hold on to the urban seat of Morphett but, with a 20% primary vote swing against the incumbent Liberal, the message is unmistakable – the Liberal party isn’t just uncompetitive in urban centres, it’s not even in the conversation.
After the last federal election the party holds just nine out of 88 urban electorates. And in Queensland, where the Liberal National party won 17 seats in 2024 to clinch government, just two of those seats were in Brisbane.
The problem for the Liberal party is that while about half the Queensland voting population are enrolled in the regions, the rest of the country is highly urbanised.
The SA election is also more evidence that political discontent now organises faster.
In our polling at the RedBridge Group and Accent Research we have found overwhelming evidence of protracted pessimism in the electorate. In surveys for the Australian Financial Review we have found that 55% of Australian voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Just 20% of respondents believe the next generation will have a better life than their parents’ generation, while a clear majority at 55% think the next generation will have a worse life.
Australian voters are frustrated and angry with the state of politics. The big risk for incumbent governments is that voters don’t think they have the change they voted for, so negative sentiment fuels the emergence of more political disruptors, especially populist threats.
That’s why there are also lessons for Labor in the SA count.
Labor heartland seats including Mawson, Cheltenham and Elizabeth have experienced a collapse in the party’s vote, and One Nation appears to be the partial beneficiary.
With nearly 60% of the vote counted in Mawson, Labor has had a double-digit swing against it, with the Liberal vote also down. At this point in the count, it appears that the One Nation candidate with a primary vote of 26% has cannibalised the vote of both major parties. Further north in Elizabeth, with a much smaller count, Labor’s primary vote has absorbed a swing against it of about 15%, with the Liberal party copping a 13% swing against it. One Nation has enjoyed a 23% swing in its favour and is polling a primary vote of 32%.
The other risk of One Nation converting early voting intention support in public polling into actual votes is that it now provides a permission structure for other Pauline Hanson-curious voters across Australia to join the juggernaut and grow One Nation’s vote share.
Will the broader Labor movement see the warning signs?
It was clear in the final week of the campaign that Malinauskas – a generational political talent – recognised the risk and sharpened his attack on One Nation. It could be that with those closing messages he received some political reward in seats where soft Labor voters were Hanson-curious.
Indeed, the premier addressed One Nation’s reductive prescriptions in his acceptance speech late on Saturday. That’s because he knows that One Nation is building a much broader support base, capitalising on the sense of disillusionment that the status quo isn’t working and essentially being defined by what it’s not.
The question is, will the federal Liberal party copy his playbook and take on Hanson and One Nation?
While it’s easy to see the likes of the Coalition shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, and the new Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, tearing down One Nation’s limited policy offerings in the same way John Howard and Peter Costello did, it’s also easy to see the likes of the Liberal senator Alex Antic and the Sky after Dark media ecosystem arguing that the Coalition should align itself with Hanson.
And, like a bad case of haemorrhoids that keeps recurring, the Liberal party will most likely again have the internal (and external) argument about preference deals with One Nation and where it puts it on how-to-vote cards. In a fragmented electoral landscape, these are arguments that will have different consequences for inner suburban, outer suburban and regional voters. The problem for the Liberal party is that it is now fighting on three fronts against Labor, the teal independents and One Nation.
But as we wait to see how many SA seats One Nation eventually lands, the biggest risk at the moment for the Liberal party is Hanson proving that One Nation can win seats. If she can demonstrate that a vote for One Nation is more than just a protest, this might break the last mental block for many Liberal voters who have held back from switching to the insurgent party in the belief it would be a wasted vote.
In politics the greatest sign of weakness is to not recognise your own weakness. The Liberal party is already struggling because it lacks purpose. But if it fails to recognise its biggest weakness and take on One Nation it runs the risk of fading into irrelevance.
