Daniel Wills: Both big parties start to go negative on SA Best Leader Nick Xenophon, accuse him of being in bed with the other

IT WASN’T long ago that everyone in state politics wanted to be SA Best Leader Nick Xenophon’s closest mate, writes Daniel Wills.

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IT WASN’T long ago that everyone in state politics wanted to be SA Best ­leader Nick Xenophon’s closest mate. Now the bosses of both the big parties are running as far away as they can.

Opposition Leader Steven Marshall has been clear in his views from the ­moment it appeared that Mr Xenophon could be a serious Lower House threat at the March state election. He immediately ruled out doing a deal after the election to form power and has since been repeating the line that a vote for SA Best risks returning Labor and giving it a full 20 years in office.

Premier Jay Weatherill had been much more coy, and played a strangely polite game with Mr Xenophon while leaving open the option of doing a deal if the expected outcome of SA Best being the kingmaker plays out.

But his rhetoric took on a harder edge this week, as Labor looks to paint SA Best as a branch of the Liberal Party.

We now have both major party leaders claiming that Mr Xenophon is in bed with the other. It’s one of the few points in this campaign where they might find a little common ground.

With more than a few large leaps of logic, Mr Weatherill said he was rejecting the offer to join a Property Council debate with Mr Marshall and Mr Xenophon and would let them battle it out to decide “the true Liberal Party leader”.

Judging by Mr Weatherill’s past record, one wonders if he’ll approach the pair about their interest in taking up the Labor Cabinet spot that will soon be left vacant by another former Liberal leader in Martin Hamilton-Smith. Mr Weatherill was also more than happy to be Mr Xenophon’s mate after his huge election win last year, and turned a coffee catch-up between the two into a media-call love-in.

Mr Xenophon was once a member of the Liberal Club at the University of Adelaide, something he now attempts to laugh off as a “misspent youth”.

Any fair analysis of his voting record in the Senate suggests very little ideological inclination one way or the other. Most times he can be expected to vote a pure populist position, either adding changes to things one of the major parties proposes, or backing whatever most voters will support.

But he currently does have an over-representation of former Liberals in and around his camp and is mostly running in seats Labor is unlikely to win.

Mr Xenophon says that will soon change, but there is strong speculation that one of his key recruits in Labor territory will be Port Adelaide Enfield Mayor Gary Johanson. He is a former Liberal who would be joining the likes of Port Augusta Mayor Sam Johnson in SA Best. Mr Johnson quit the Liberals amid escalating internal tensions.

This new strategy, from both major parties, is incoherent. They obviously can’t both be right and Mr Xenophon is strident in his offer to work with both as an honest broker in the centre. But truth and consistency are often the first casualties of any hard-fought political campaign.

It threatens to have one significant effect, as Mr Xenophon now faces sustained and ferocious fire from two fronts. A Roy Morgan poll this week found Mr Xenophon’s party on a staggering 29 per cent, ahead of Labor on 24 per cent and trailing the Liberals on 32 per cent. Both big parties have lost about 13 per cent of their primary vote to SA Best. Each has lost bits of their base to SA Best, and have just as much to fear as the other.

With both ganging up to raise concerns about Mr Xenophon’s background, candidate selection and what he would do as the kingmaker, it’s hard to see his primary vote rising. Most likely, it will sag as the big parties dig deep into their pockets with paid advertising campaigns blanketing the media.

While Mr Xenophon clearly has a lot of grassroots support, some of the concerns will have to stick in the back of people’s minds and lead them back to the known quantities of the big parties. He is also hampered by the late selection of candidates, many of whom have close to no public profile.

A pollster calling someone up and asking them to choose between the big party and SA Best brands is a very different question to the one they face in the ballot box. Many people who tell a pollster that they like Mr Xenophon’s party face a real choice on election day between local candidates. Both Labor and Liberal candidates have been active on the ground for months in the battleground seats.

But, to date, the major parties are missing much sustained effort on the other side of the equation for lifting their own primary votes.

While discouraging people about the other guy is one way to get them to support you, the other is just telling about how great your own plan is.

Mr Weatherill forfeited one opportunity to do that by skipping out on the Property Council debate, but we’re beginning to see what the positive Labor campaign will be. Buoyed by better jobs figures this week, and with a bunch of taxpayer-backed announcements to come, it’ll all be about employment.

While the Liberals have plenty of policy out there now, the central theme is still hard to discern, but expect a lot of noise about cost of living as the messages sharpen heading towards the big day.