Three Advertiser-Galaxy polls show state Liberals will narrowly wrest power from Labor at 2018 state election

A TRIO of Advertiser-Galaxy polls, 12 months before the 2018 state election, show both major parties are bleeding votes to independent Senator Nick Xenophon’s SA Best party, but the Liberals have kept the edge in decisive battlegrounds.

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OPPOSITION Leader Steven Marshall is poised to fall over the line and take government by a narrow margin at next year’s election, according to the first polling of critical marginal seats since the radical redrawing of boundaries.

A trio of Advertiser-Galaxy polls, 12 months to the March 17 election, show both major parties are bleeding votes to independent Senator Nick Xenophon’s SA Best, but the Liberals have kept the edge in decisive battlegrounds.

Labor’s primary vote has collapsed to record lows of around one-in-four, and Tourism Minister Leon Bignell is facing defeat in the new election “tie-breaker” seat of Mawson, trailing 49-51 per cent.

The polls predict a dead heat in the Tea Tree Gully-based seat of Newland, held by former minister Tom Kenyon — and Liberal frontbencher Rachel Sanderson is up four points at 52-48 in Adelaide.

Combined, they suggest the Liberals are on track to win 24 seats in their own right and form the slimmest of majority governments.

The Liberals could boost that figure to 26 by also taking two notionally-conservative seats on their side of the pendulum and defeating the independent ministers in Labor’s Cabinet, Geoff Brock and Martin Hamilton-Smith.

Most recent polls have shown the Liberals with a slender lead on the statewide two-party vote but, as the last two elections have shown, seat battles will finally decide who takes power. And these polls are the first to be published based on the new battlegrounds for 2018.

Under a controversial redraw of electoral boundaries that has flung 400,000 people into new seats, Mawson become the election result tipping point, sitting dead centre of the 47-seat pendulum.

The poll, taken on Tuesday evening after Premier Jay Weatherill’s unveiling of a $550 million plan to fix the state’s power crisis, has the Liberals up two points 51-49 in Mawson.

That indicates a small swing to Labor since the 2014 election, but not enough to keep the seat.

Mr Bignell has held Mawson against the odds at the past two elections, but he has seen it reshaped to having a 3.2 per cent Liberal advantage on paper in the most dramatic of the redraws.

Ms Sanderson had her margin reduced to 2 per cent under the redraw, and is holding firm in Adelaide with a 52-48 advantage on this poll. But Newland is deadlocked at 50-50.

That suggests the Liberals are failing to capitalise on the series of controversies to beset the State Government in the past year, including the power crisis and new Royal Adelaide Hospital delays.

These poll results, if repeated uniformly on election day, would result in Labor losing three seats.

But Labor’s primary vote is languishing at dangerously low levels across the board. While the Liberals are polling in the mid-to-high 30s, Labor is stuck as low as 26 per cent.

A statewide Advertiser-Galaxy poll in February of last year had Labor on 28 per cent primary votes.

Both major parties will also be alarmed at continuing high levels of support for the emerging third force in SA politics, Senator Xenophon’s newly-branded SA Best. Senator Xenophon’s party is pulling a primary vote between 16 per cent in Adelaide and 23 per cent in Newland.

His standout result at last year’s federal election, in which Senator Xenophon’s team took the Adelaide Hills seat of Mayo from the Liberals, has led many to assume he poses a bigger risk to Mr Marshall than Labor at the state election and could pinch semi-rural and regional seats.

But these polls show him within striking distance of edging Labor on primaries in the mortgage belt seat of Newland and, therefore, posing an electoral threat throughout suburban Adelaide.

Senator Xenophon also polled well in Florey, beating Labor in a split race that modelled Deputy Speaker Frances Bedford going independent against Health Minister Jack Snelling.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation records modest support, with a maximum 6 per cent across the three seats polled. That is about equivalent to traditional Family First and Greens support levels.

The major parties combined poll 66 per cent or less in each seat, a historic low that indicates both widespread disillusionment with the Government and low confidence in Liberal alternatives.