Daniel Wills: SA Best started the campaign with a bolt, but there’s emerging signs Nick Xenophon might be starting to struggle

SA BEST Leader Nick Xenophon has had a tough fortnight as he learns what it’s like to bet all the chips, and there are emerging signs that the shooting star could be starting to fade, writes Daniel Wills.

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SA BEST Leader Nick Xenophon has had a tough fortnight as he learns what it’s like to bet for all the chips, and there’s emerging signs that the shooting star could be starting to fade.

The election campaign proper starts this weekend as the State Government goes into caretaker mode, signs go up and letterboxes are stuffed to the brim.

A lot can change. Gaffes, blackouts, the dynamics of a federal by-election on the same day as the state and anything else yet unimagined could derail or boost candidates across the board.

Mr Xenophon started the year on the ascendant. With a blockbuster Newspoll at his back that showed SA Best beating both Labor and Liberal on primary votes, candidates flocked to him. There were grounds to think he could exit the chaos as Premier, and SA Best could claim a dozen seats or more.

Less than a month ago, Galaxy polling in three key city seats showed SA Best streets ahead and raised the very real prospect of a major party wipe-out.

Since then, he’s been caught in a pincer movement as both Premier Jay Weatherill and Opposition Leader Steven Marshall, as well as the experienced campaign machines behind them, treat SA Best with the disrespect it deserves as a clear and present threat to their own candidates and MPs.

At the same time, as Mr Xenophon is forced to move from legislative deal maker and critic to a possible political powerbroker or even state leader, he’s committed rare unforced errors.

SA Best is in a confused space where it’s unclear on what it wants to be. Mr Xenophon says he’s aiming to keep the bastards honest but isn’t ruling out replacing them completely. His policy platform is a mixture of watchdog ideas and hard cash promises of the kind that only a party of government which expects to deliver a Budget can deliver.

He’s playing down expectations of influence while also preparing for the possibility of a blockbuster result.

Major party operatives who have been frustrated for years at Mr Xenophon’s Teflon qualities say there has been a noticeable shift on the ground in the past fortnight, after the SA Best boss slipped up on a health policy announcement and shifted on a pokies position he’s held for two decades.

Mr Xenophon’s incorrect estimate of the state’s annual health budget, by a hard-to-ignore $2.3 billion, is said to be resonating on the doorstep as people attracted to his character think twice about his competency. A shift from demanding no pokies to saying he has a plan to just have fewer is also likely to come back as part of paid advertising campaigns in the next month. The Greens, who have pledged a pokies wipe-out and are at serious risk of losing an Upper House MP at this election, would be mad not to use it as their dominant campaign point of difference.

But it’s also possible that Mr Xenophon continues to play by different rules to other politicians, and his supporters are so furious with the old parties that they’ll stick fat no matter what.

In the final month of this campaign, The Advertiser will be polling heavily in key seats and shed light on how well SA Best is tracking, as well which seats the major parties could gain from each other. Twin polls taken in the South-East and commissioned by the Australian Forest Products Association were released this week. They showed the SA best vote languishing in the teens. That compares to 32 per cent statewide recorded by Newspoll in December.

This week brought some evidence to suggest SA Best is struggling in an area many thought would be a stronghold.

Major party analysis has found that, if Mr Xenophon’s 2016 federal election results were repeated in state seats, he should pull 33 per cent in Mt Gambier and 26 in neighbouring MacKillop. Instead, he’s at about half that.

It’s possible these or just local anomalies, or indicative of a bigger trend.

Mt Gambier can be something of a wacky seat. The fact that the early favourite is a former-Liberal-turned-independent MP who’s fighting a court battle stemming from an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry is enough to tell you that. It has a history of electing independents and sending a middle finger to the cosy two-party club in Adelaide, in part driven by a frustration with the Liberal Party for being so long out of government.

Mr Xenophon’s numbers could well be damaged there by the fact that incumbent Troy Bell is an unusually well-connected and likeable local MP who‘s also probably picking up independent-minded voters who’d otherwise go to SA Best. But Mr Xenophon’s result in MacKillop, which covers Naracoorte and Keith and has no strong non-Labor candidate to cannibalise his support, is unarguably poor. Time and more polling will tell if that’s just a local problem for SA Best, or a much bigger deal.

A Climate Council poll two weeks ago had SA Best down to 18 per cent statewide. Major party strategists are tight-lipped on their internal work, but suggest it also sees the SA Best vote slipping. But while both major parties are united in their desire to push back against SA Best and drag its vote down, there’s mixed views about what that would mean. Some Liberals have the perverse hope that Labor gets ahead of SA Best in many races, believing the preference lottery in that event would play out far better for them. Labor believes it can mount a surgical strike that still leaves a weakened SA Best claiming a swag of natural Liberal seats.

Four weeks is a very long time to campaign. If a normal one is like chess, 2018 looks like solving a Rubik’s cube while juggling chainsaws.

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