Liberals need to get as creative as Labor to rein in surging NXT party vote

LABOR has played this game before. For a few years now, backroom operators have studied the X-factor of SA politics and searched for a way to shut him down. Finally, they found Nick Xenophon’s Achilles heel.

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LABOR has played this game before. For a few years now, backroom operators have studied the X-factor of South Australian politics and searched for a way to shut him down.

Finally, they found Senator Nick Xenophon’s Achilles heel. And it hides in the hip pocket.

The Nick Xenophon Team scored the most stunning results of election night in SA. The one-man band is likely to be expanded into a quartet and can maintain hope of adding a fifth member.

His huge one-in-five statewide Lower House vote is without precedent for a third party in SA.

But the bulk of the pain was felt by the long-suffering SA branch of the Liberal Party.

It lost a huge 9.5 per cent of primary votes in the orange dawn, as Labor incurred a 3.6 per cent dent.

Worse still, the Liberals are on Monday morning confronted by a worst-case scenario in which they lose three Lower House seats. Labor can remain optimistic of adding one seat to its SA tally.

Senior strategists on both sides of the political divide say the Labor campaign machine has again outfoxed the Liberals, as it did in the 2014 Fisher state by-election and for a decade before that.

The decisive move was combining an attack on Senator Xenophon’s team of mysterious and unheralded candidates with a policy attack that spoke directly to core Labor brand values.

This two-step move capped the Xenophon vote, and pushed waverers to the Labor column.

Penalty rates are critical for a large number of relatively disengaged voters who are prepared to swing their support away from candidates that threaten them and toward those protecting them.

The power of penalty rates became clear to Labor strategists in the final days of the 2014 state election campaign, and they returned to that fertile ground with success in the past month.

As Labor was locked in hand-to-hand Lower House combat in 2014 over who would form the next State Government, another front opened up against NXT in the Upper House.

Employment Minister Kyam Maher was at serious risk of losing his Legislative Council seat to a second NXT candidate, and the Labor machine swung into action.

Close analysis of key issues for voters showed that comments from Senator Xenophon and allies about the merits of cutting back penalty rates for very small businesses was enough to make many think twice.

That campaign was enough to deny Xenophon and return Labor. At this federal campaign, added to a base-rallying scare campaign on Medicare, Labor again stemmed its losses.

One senior Labor figure said on Sunday: “It’s one thing to tell people that they shouldn’t vote for Nick but it’s another, and much more important thing, to get them to vote for you”.

Senator Xenophon’s response made clear that he was hurting as the campaign rolled to a close.

Precious time and money went towards countering the penalty rates scare as “Labor lies”.

In the end, it sent his Senate vote backwards compared to the result scored in 2013.

“There was a very misleading, deceitful scare campaign from the ALP in relation to penalty rates. It was a lie,” Senator Xenophon said on Sunday.

“That saturation advertising campaign did bite. I understand that the gambling lobby pumped a lot of money into the major parties.”

And the SA Liberals are again plunged into soul-searching and introspection. Again, when presented with the same challenge, they’ve been less creative than Labor in finding a solution.