Daniel Wills: If the SA Liberals can’t win 2018 election, they may as well just quit politics
IF the South Australian Liberal Party can’t win the 2018 election, it may as well just quit politics altogether, writes Daniel Wills.
- Electoral boundaries redraw now favours Libs
- See the new maps for all 47 South Australian seats
- David Penberthy: Surely even the SA Libs couldn’t lose from here
IF the South Australian Liberal Party can’t win the 2018 election, it may as well just quit politics altogether.
The Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission yesterday delivered the kind of redraw that the Liberals had been demanding for years and, on paper, flipped four Labor seats into their column.
It delivered the most radical rewrite of the state’s electoral boundaries in recent memory.
As it stands, if every South Australian cast their votes exactly the same way at the next election as they did at the last, the Liberals would claim government in their own right. If the Liberals went backward from the 53 per cent two-party result secured in 2014 and was only able to break even with the Labor Party, it would still have a chance of forming a minority government.
This is a significant change from the commission’s past practice, where it sought only to create enough marginal seats so that a competent Liberal Party campaign could close the deal.
Yesterday, the commission shifted previous Liberal voters into current Labor seats.
That means the Liberals just need to convince everyone who backed them to bring about change last time, and were let down, to do the same thing one more time, to form government.
In addition to this stronger starting point, the Liberals also have the wind at their backs.
Labor will at the next election be asking for voters to extend its term to 20 years in office.
On a daily basis, the news is dominated by crises across almost the full range of portfolios.
SA has the most expensive and least reliable electricity in the nation, water bills are sky-high and there has been close to no growth in employment over the past five years.
Transforming Health is highly unpopular and a Royal Commission has condemned in the strongest possible terms the Government’s handling of the child protection system.
For a long time, Premier Jay Weatherill was a far more popular figure than the Labor Party as a whole. Now tarnished by child protection scandals, the Gillman fiasco and SA’s general economic malaise, polls show even he is beginning to lose the public’s confidence.
The “it’s time” mood will be strong when voters enter polling stations in March, 2018.
If the Liberals can channel this feeling and grow their two-party vote, from the 53 per cent recorded in 2014 and into the mid to high 50s in 2018, new Premier Steven Marshall could have a very large majority and mandate in Parliament that would likely hold for at least two terms.
The very real current threat to the Liberals, who have a well-documented knack for self-injury and impossible losses, is that this mood for change will continue to scatter in a thousand directions.
The rise of the Nick Xenophon Team has, to date, hurt the Liberals much more than Labor.
New NXT federal MP Rebekha Sharkie took her Adelaide Hills seat from the Liberals, who were also run close by the party of independents in two country electorates. Senator Xenophon says he plans to run a group at the state election. How many, who and where, remain unclear.
If the Liberal Party fails to seize the policy agenda in the new year and convince the state it has compelling plans across every state portfolio, the change vote will continue to bleed.
Senator Xenophon could challenge Liberals in the Hills and country with success, preventing them from forming an outright majority and giving Labor a chance at minority government.
Labor, too, will have to be on the lookout for NXT raids on its heartland as the closure of the car industry and high unemployment hammer working class areas that feel increasingly abandoned.
There are now 15 months until voters cast their judgments at the ballot box. Much can, and will, change in that time. Either political party, with the right message, can win. But not since the State Bank collapsed more than 20 years ago have the Liberals had a stronger hand to play.