State Election 2018: Nick Xenophon reveals SA Best candidates for Kavel and Elder
SA BEST leader Nick Xenophon has announced more candidates in Liberal seats but he promises the hate will be spread evenly within weeks.
- Habib and Digance fight for Elder.
- Xenophon’s bid for a political revolution.
- Five new candidates for SA Best.
SA BEST leader Nick Xenophon says he will soon be “hated equally” by both major parties as he revealed two more candidates for the March election on Saturday.
Mr Xenophon will run a long-time councillor and a previously insolvent businessman who is now a business development manager in the seats of Kavel and Elder — both electorates the Liberals had been banking on winning.
Adelaide Hills councillor Andrew Stratford will try to win Kavel. It has been a Liberal stronghold since 1970 when the seat was established, but the unpredictability of SA Best preferences and strong polling make the seat vulnerable.
Kavel is also in the centre of the federal seat of Mayo, where Mr Xenophon’s candidate, Rebekha Sharkie, unseated minister Jamie Briggs in 2016.
Michael Slattery, who unsuccessfully took on Labor MP Mark Butler in Port Adelaide during the 2016 federal election, will run against Labor MP Annabel Digance and Liberal candidate Carolyn Habib in the southern suburbs seat of Elder, which is now seen as nominally Liberal after a change to electoral boundaries.
To date, 10 of the 13 candidates Mr Xenophon has announced are running in seats held by the Liberals or classed as nominally Liberal after boundary changes.
“I expect that within the next 10 days, if the Labor Party don’t hate me as much as the Liberals yet, they will,” he said.
Mr Stratford, who is a sales manager for a pool company, has vowed to campaign on increased health services and better road infrastructure for the growing Hills region.
“A lot of people are sick of the bickering between the two major parties and to have a third alternative is a great outcome,” he said. “I’ve been in local government for 12½ years in the Hills.”
Mr Slattery came under fire during the federal campaign for failing to tell voters his firm wound up in 2015, owing 117 creditors more than $402,000.
The business development manager for a manufacturing company said that after his own business failed “for reasons beyond my control”, he wants to ensure the same doesn’t happen to others. “I want to protect small and medium enterprises and have proper legislation that reflects the hardships that mum-and-dad enterprises go through,” Mr Slattery said.