Matthew Abraham: Xenophon’s popularity is poised to create a seismic shift at March state election

NICK Xenophon’s popularity will poleaxe Labor and Liberals alike at the March election. Who wins is anyone’s guess, writes Matthew Abraham.

• Xenophon reveals candidates in five seats
• Former partner’s extraordinary claims about Mr X

ONE Messiah should be more than enough at Christmas time but Adelaide will be unwrapping three.

First and, most importantly, we await with joy the celebration tomorrow that marks the birth of baby Jesus.

It may slip our minds but that’s the only reason the planet has a Christmas Day. For those who struggle with that concept, you’ll just have to suck it up.

Messiah means the anointed or chosen one and, in the secular world, we chuck the title around a little loosely.

So, in the New Year, our state awaits the return of a sporting Messiah — Malcolm Blight.

The man who took the Crows to back-to-back premierships, who kicked an 80m torpedo punt through the big sticks on June 5, 1976, to give North Melbourne victory against Carlton after the siren, who has won a Magarey Medal and Brownlow Medal etc, ad infinitum, is coming back to the city that launched his footy ship.

Welcome home, Blighty. What took you so long?

Finally, ahead of election day on March 17, South Australians are rolling out the red carpet for Nick Xenophon.

To borrow from Monty Python, Xenophon is not really the Messiah, he’s just a naughty boy.

Even so, Australia has never seen anything like Tuesday’s stunning Newspoll, published in The Australian.

The snapshot of SA voting intentions revealed Xenophon’s fledgling party, SA Best, is poised to outpoll Labor and Liberal if it runs candidates in most seats next March.

His party is pulling a primary vote of 32 per cent — ahead of the Liberals on 29 per cent and Labor on 27 per cent.

Newspoll could not give a two-party figure because the prestigious polling outfit does not know how SA Best will allocate preferences. Nobody does, not even Xenophon.

Here is the important thing. With a primary vote outstripping both Labor and Liberal, Xenophon’s party is not the underdog, it is the frontrunner. How it distributes preferences is not the issue.

If the poll flows through to election day, the “minor” parties will be Labor and Liberal, and how their voters number the boxes down the ballot paper should be the killer.

Will lifetime ALP voters in Lee swallow their pride and give their second votes to the Liberal candidate or to SA Best? Similarly, will rusted-on Liberals in Heysen choke on giving their second vote to the ALP and, instead, favour a Xenophon clone?

With their primary votes so low, in some seats it won’t matter much what they do with their preferences.

This is weird gear. One veteran political operator said that reading the Newspoll felt like “fear and loathing on the campaign trail”, a reference to the drug-infused, hallucinatory campaign scribblings of the late journalist Hunter S. Thomson.

“Theoretically, on these figures, neither the Labor Party nor the Liberal Party will have a seat left in Parliament,” he said.

“They will, though, won’t they,” I insisted.

“You tell me which seat!” he replied.

Cue sounds of crickets chirping.

You have to go back to the Great Depression and the 1933 SA election to find an example of one of the major parties running as a minor, when a fractured ALP ran as the ALP, Lang Labor and the Parliamentary Labor Party. It was nearly wiped out.

The only saving grace for the allegedly major parties is that Xenophon will not have a candidate in every seat. So far he has scrambled to assemble a cricket team of largely unknown candidates.

That will be cold comfort to both Premier Jay Weatherill and Opposition Leader Steven Marshall who, potentially, could even lose their seats of Cheltenham and Dunstan.

Marshall is particularly vulnerable in Dunstan. It’s not hard to see him losing it.

Besides, it’s not like voters are in love with either man.

Xenophon now consistently bolts it in as preferred Premier while Weatherill and Marshall compete for dismal disapproval ratings.

People who complain that Xenophon has no policies and runs dud candidates might as well bay at the moon.

The Xenophon vote is consistent with a worldwide crack in voting behaviour. A common theme of saviours is that they offer hope and deliverance.

Uber grew out of lousy service from the taxi industry. Aldi grew out of major supermarkets treating customers with contempt. And so we have Saint Nick.

Why is anyone surprised?