Christopher Pyne: It is impossible to predict the winner of the state election
Only weeks out from the state election on March 19, it is a very close race and any attempt to pick the winner is pure guesswork, writes Christopher Pyne.
Opinion
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In four weeks we should know who is going to form government in the great state of South Australia.
The truth is, no one knows who is going to win. It’s all speculation. But in a two-horse race you’ve got a one in two chance of being right, which are pretty good odds.
In the 2018 state election, Steven Marshall led the Liberals to victory after 16 years of uninterrupted Labor government led by two premiers, Mike Rann and Jay Weatherill.
In that election, the Liberals won 25 seats, Labor 19 and three independents were elected – Troy Bell, Frances Bedford and Geoff Brock. Now there are three more independents – Sam Duluk, Dan Cregan and Fraser Ellis.
There are 20 seats on the Labor side of politics (because Bedford has vacated her seat of Florey to contest Newland, and Florey will return to the Labor fold barring an upset) and 27 on the non-Labor side.
Labor needs four to win a majority in its own right.
Labor will be targeting the Liberal-held seats of King, Newland, Elder and Adelaide. If they fall short in any of those, they will try to convince any independents elected to support them to form a minority government.
The Liberals will seek to hold what they have. They will also doubtless target Badcoe, in Adelaide’s inner-southwest, and they will work with any independents elected to form a minority government if necessary.
With a month to go until election day, it’s hard to predict the outcome and there’s time to analyse the issues and the mechanics of an election held during a pandemic. Instead, let’s look at the independents.
Minority governments in South Australia are not uncommon. Weatherill, Rann and Liberal premiers John Olsen, Sir Thomas Playford and Steele Hall all led minority governments.
The current government relied on independent MPs to remain in power these past 12 months. In the event of independents holding the balance of power, I would back Marshall to form another government.
It’s unlikely that Brock will be elected in the seat of Stuart.
That seat is held by the Deputy Premier and Minister for Resources and Energy, Dan van Holst Pellekaan. Brock’s home town of Port Pirie was moved into Stuart in the redistribution of boundaries.
His previous seat of Frome will be won by the Liberals’ crackerjack candidate, Penny Pratt.
In court, a barrister can ask one too many questions and cause their client’s case to unravel. In politics, you can stay one too many elections and run out of luck.
In Brock’s case, I think he is in the latter category.
Similarly, Bedford will struggle in Newland. The local Liberal MP, Richard Harvey, is hard-working and well liked. His vote is not about to collapse.
Labor will work hard to win the marginal seat. Their vote won’t collapse either.
Bedford will come in third or even fourth, behind the Greens. She can’t win from there.
Again, Bedford has been in state parliament since 1997. You’ve got to know when to hang your gloves up!
That leaves a clutch of former Liberals, turned independent, seeking to be re-elected.
Duluk is the Member for Waite. His seat has moved southeast, and in doing so has taken in areas that have voted independent before.
The fly in the ointment for Duluk will be that it is hard for the Greens to preference him over Liberal and Labor because they led the attacks on him in the Legislative Council.
The Greens poll well in Blackwood and its surrounding districts. Labor will be hoping for an upset win, as they had in the neighbouring seat of Fisher in the 2014 by-election.
If Labor wins Waite, they will probably form government.
Even if Duluk beats the Liberal candidate in Waite, ironically, his longstanding friend Alexander Hyde, he would be hard pressed to support anything other than a Marshall Liberal government.
Bell is the Member for Mount Gambier.
He has been fighting legal cases brought against him for some years and keeps winning.
The Mount seems to like voting counterintuitively to the rest of the state and he will be hard for the Liberal candidate, Ben Hood, to dislodge.
While Bell can be tendentious at times, he is a thorough conservative Liberal. I can’t imagine him supporting a Labor government.
In Narungga, which covers the Yorke Peninsula, the Liberals have chosen local farmer Tom Michael.
First-termer Ellis was elected as a Liberal in 2018 and his legal matters have not been resolved, meaning that he could not rejoin the Liberal Party before the election.
Like Duluk and Bell, Ellis is as blue as blue.
He has been a mostly reliable supporter of the Liberals on the floor of the House of Assembly and it’s hard to see that changing.
Finally, there’s Cregan. He is the MP for Kavel in the Adelaide Hills.
I still can’t fathom why Cregan moved to the crossbench.
His Liberal opponent, Rowan Mumford, is working hard.
And despite the leaked polling showing Cregan a runaway winner, a lot of Adelaide Hills voters must wonder why the Liberal candidate they elected for the first time in 2018 left the Liberal government in 2021 to oust the other Adelaide Hills MP, Josh Teague, and become Speaker.
I am still to hear a convincing explanation. However, if he wins, Cregan will probably support the re-election of the Marshall government. But, of the four, he is the most enigmatic.
While it seems complicated, it isn’t really. It’s just politics in the modern era – messy.
By my analysis, if the parliament is in minority, there will be no Labor-leaning independents and only former Liberal MPs who are now independent.
If that is the case, the Marshall government will be re-elected.
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