Matthew Abraham: Dignity Party’s Kelly Vincent was the accidental MP - it’s a shame she’s no longer in Parliament

KELLY Vincent — a crusader for those with disabilities — is a loss to the South Australian Parliament, writes Matthew Abraham.

• Dignity Party campaign to hold onto seat in Parliament
• Kelly Vincent loses seat in Upper House: “We’ll regroup”

Kelly Vincent is seriously light, but no lightweight.

I know she is light because I once helped lift her in her wheelchair up the steps of a cafe in King William St.

It was quicker than using what was laughingly marked as the disabled entrance, off to one side. Out of sight, out of mind.

She had just been unexpectedly elected to our Legislative Council as almost certainly the first MP in the state’s history to use a wheelchair.

It was 2010, but Parliament House had no proper wheelchair access.

Can you imagine the frantic scurry of staff in grey dustcoats to knock up a ramp in time for the first sitting of the new Parliament? The scratching of heads and licking of HB pencils?

It’s easy to forget Kelly was the most accidental of all accidental politicians.

She was elected under the Dignity 4 Disability banner after its lead candidate, Dr Paul Collier, died from a brain haemorrhage just 11 days before the poll.

In an extraordinary twist, because it was too late to amend the ballot papers before election day, she won from second place on the votes for the deceased Dr Collier.

Somebody up there really wanted Kelly Vincent in Parliament.

She was then, and still is, the youngest woman elected to any Australian Parliament.

“I’m ready because I have to be,” she said at the time.

During the week, the final Legislative Council results were declared and it confirmed what the state’s political machine knew on election night — Kelly Vincent and her rebadged Dignity Party had lost.

The Xenophon push smashed minor players, gobbling up almost 20 per cent of Upper House votes and electing SA Best’s Connie Bonaros and Frank Pangallo to eight-year terms. Their leader, Nick Xenophon, has withdrawn into self-imposed exile, like Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

But more than this, Kelly was a casualty to yet more “reforms” of the Upper House voting system that have seen the bigger parties slowly strangle the minor outfits.

In a double Green jeopardy, ABC election expert Antony Green and the Greens devised a scheme to stop “preference gaming” — where loose coalitions of independents and minor parties swap small parcels of preferences to pull off improbable seat victories.

Ousted politician Kelly Vincent. Photo: AAP/Morgan Sette.

Only Green and three mathematicians can explain the new system, but let’s just say it’s optional preferential above and below the line and favours bigger players. How nice for them all.

Tweeting the final results, Green said they showed “minor parties can no longer leapfrog other parties, system favours parties with votes”.

All very neat, but the scheme also means your vote may not have counted one little bit.

Green tweeted that 1.45 quotas, or around 12 per cent of all votes cast, were “exhausted at end of the count”.

That’s a hefty slab of “exhausted” votes to end up in the dumpster. Yours might have been one of them.

Honestly, the best reform of the Legislative Council would be to scrap it. The joint has been “gamed” by the major parties as an expensive, comfy parking lot for loyal party hacks and backroom fringe-dwellers.

A then 21-year-old Kelly Vincent in South Australia’s Legislative Council.

While it’s laudable to try to prevent vote rorting, it also seems a pity to devise a system that removes serendipity from our Parliament.

South Australia has been well served by some of its accidental politicians and poorly served by some of its deliberate politicians.

The brilliant, late Stella Young coined the phrase “inspiration porn” to describe the use of images of people with a disability — often cute children doing something completely ordinary such as playing, or talking, or drawing a picture — to inspire others to perform. In other words, we’re not here for your inspiration.

Well, cut us some slack.

Kelly was elected in 2010 with just 1.1 per cent of a dead man’s first preferences, or a tiny 0.14 per cent of a quota.

From the get-go, she dispatched her role with maturity and mental toughness.

“It is what it is,” she said of her defeat when we spoke during the week.

Premier Steven Marshall should now find a prominent role for her in public life.

Kelly Vincent was no burden to carry up a few steps and she was no burden to this state.

SA is a better place for her accidental election.