David Penberthy: Nick Xenophon has up-ended SA State Election by announcing he will run for Hartley

NICK Xenophon has up-ended the South Australia state election by announcing he will run for the Liberal-held seat of Hartley, writes David Penberthy.

Xenophon has up-ended the South Australia state election by announcing he will run for the Liberal-held seat of Hartley, writes David Penberthy.

IN his many battles with KAOS, the international organisation of evil, the most fiendish foe encountered by secret agent Maxwell Smart was a spy by the name of Simon the Likeable. As his name suggests, Simon’s deadliest quality was that people couldn’t help but warm to him.

Described by The Chief as “a man so unassuming, so modest, so sweet and warm that you take one look at him, and you like him,” Simon the Likeable famously pleaded guilty to espionage, larceny, extortion and assault with a deadly weapon, but was freed by the starry-eyed judge anyway, amid wild cheering from a courtroom of supporters.

The 2018 state election isn’t a case of Get Smart but Get Nick. Senator Xenophon’s announcement that he will exit federal politics to run for the State seat of Hartley has up-ended the entire election. The manner in which the campaign and result pan out will depend on questions of personality as much as policy.

This is now a three-way contest between an exceedingly long-serving incumbent that has spent much of this term lurching from one crisis to the next, their traditional opponents who have yet again failed to inspire voters in unassailable numbers, and a feel-good third party that offers the polling day satisfaction of a stuff-the-lot-of-them protest vote and a genuine cult of personality courtesy of Nick the Likeable.

I suspect that if you asked voters not who they would like to run the state, but who they would like to sit down and have a feed with, Nick would poll more votes than Jay or Steven. The polls suggest he would go all right in the running the state stakes, too. “One thing you will hardly ever hear is any individual politician bagging Xenophon,” one state MP told me this week. “Just about any politician you hear prefaces whatever he says by stating that he has a good relationship with Nick.”

By the length of the straight, Xenophon also gets the cushiest media treatment of any politician in South Australia. Some of that is due to the fact that, unlike actual governments (and the alternative governments that are oppositions), he has avoided the baggage that comes with decades of difficult decision-making.

You can’t blame him for the ETSA sale or the EDS deal or the State Bank collapse or the RAH budget blowout. But beyond that, Xenophon has an almost irritating habit (to journalists at least) of trying to “cute” his way, to coin a verb, out of everything.

Nick Xenophon has up-ended the South Australia state election by announcing he will run for the Liberal-held seat of Hartley, writes David Penberthy. n

Indeed, when Will Goodings and I interviewed him on Monday, we set about to do four things: suggest that he had betrayed his contract with those thousands of voters who only recently installed him as a Senator for South Australia, accuse him of acting as a Trojan Horse for Labor by only fielding candidates in seven Liberal seats, having shoddy mechanisms for screening those candidates, and lacking the whole-of-government agenda required to run a state.

Nick breezed through with his usual combination of self-deprecation, earnest SA boosterism and cheesy gags, ending the interview by explaining that he was in California fighting to save the Aussie ugg boot and had to go tend to a flock of sheep. The sheep subsequently escaped and he uploaded a video as he scrambled to catch them, in a trademark silly stunt.

The question for the major parties is this. How do you destroy someone whom so many people like?

Talking to tacticians on both sides this week, it appears that Labor has got a head start courtesy of the aggressive penalty rates campaign it ran against Xenophon at the state election almost four years ago.

For Labor, that tactic had the happy effect of energising its own base by painting Xenophon as the enemy of the working man, while also pushing some traditional Liberal voters Xenophon’s way on the basis that he was pro-small business.

As befits their more genteel approach, the Libs have not yet got their head around the Xenophon threat, in part because as the government of the day in Canberra they had to keep open the lines of communication to court his balance-of-power vote.

Having robbed them of the seat of Mayo at the last federal poll, given Chris Pyne a fright in Sturt, and with Xenophon’s (direct) Senate presence a thing of the past, the Libs seem to have decided that it is now time to muscle up and go for the jugular.

The risk in this is that they offend those voters who dislike personal attacks and are predisposed towards liking Nick. However, the Libs hope that the fear of 20 years of Labor rule, aiding by Xenophon splitting the vote, will erase any backlash over their perceived aggression.

The dream scenario for both parties is that whatever happens elsewhere in terms of gains by the SA Best Party, Xenophon himself fails to win Hartley.

This is not as fanciful as it sounds, as Vincent Tarzia is a very good grassroots MP, who hails from solid Italian stock in SA’s most Italian seat, someone who goes to all the community events and religious festivals, does all the doorknocking — all the things that Nick Xenophon as a creature of our indolent upper houses has never had to bother with.

Of course, the Libs have the most to lose from all this, as Xenophon’s support is at its strongest in Liberal areas.

Expect them to muscle up accordingly as this has truly become a fight to the death, and a weird fight it will be, against a foe so likeable that you don’t want to be seen to be fighting with him.

DAVID PENBERTHY HOSTS BREAKFASTS ON RADIO FIVEAA WITH WILL GOODINGS