Boothby and Sturt ’must-wins’ for Peter Dutton’s national success

They’re on opposite sides but Boothby and Sturt candidates Nicolle Flint and Katie McCusker are both campaigning on cost of living.

Liberal Nicolle Flint is back on the trail with the ‘Flintmobile’ in her old seat of Boothby in Adelaide’s south.

The outcome in two key federal seats in South Australia will come down to two female candidates from either side of the ideological divide.

The first is resurgent Liberal candidate Nicolle Flint, making a return after her snap decision to quit politics at the 2022 election amid a private health battle and public hounding by the unions and GetUp over her conservative views.

The second is veteran Greens candidate Katie McCusker, who is running her fourth campaign in Adelaide’s east, her growing support base making the once-safe Liberal bastion vulnerable to the Greens and ALP.

Greens candidate Katie McCusker, with son Richie, 11, is carving out a growing supporter base as she makes her second attempt for the federal seat of Sturt. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dean Martin

For the battered and bruised SA Liberals, McCusker’s candidacy proved lethal when they reached their lowest ebb this year, losing former premier Steven Marshall’s prize seat of Dunstan to Labor in a by-election two years after his government was defeated after just one term.

While Labor suffered a swing against of 3.1 per cent, McCusker’s vote surged 5.5 per cent to 20 per cent, with Greens preferences delivering an easy win for the Malinauskas government – the first time a government had won a seat off an opposition at a by-election in SA for 116 years.

The battleground federal electorates are Flint’s former seat of Boothby, won by Labor’s Louise Miller-Frost in 2022 on Flint’s departure, and Sturt, the former stronghold of moderate powerbroker and senior minister Christopher Pyne, bequeathed by the moderate faction to his ally James Stevens on Pyne’s retirement in 2019.

While SA electorates have barely figured in national analysis of the path to victory at the looming federal poll, the results in Boothby and Sturt will be pivotal on the night, with a Liberal loss in one or both probably making Peter Dutton’s national challenge insurmountable.

South Australia has no teal presence – teal candidate and former Adelaide Writers Week director Jo Dyer had no impact in Boothby at the previous federal poll – but during the 2022 federal election the Liberals lost middle-class female voters in their droves to Labor and the Greens.

The Greens vote reached as high as 30 per cent in some traditional Liberal suburbs such as Burnside.

So determined are the Liberals to regain Boothby and hold Sturt that former prime minister John Howard is heading to Adelaide this month, honouring his “broad church” ethos by hosting a joint fundraiser for the moderate Stevens and conservative Flint at the Arkaba Hotel.

When Flint’s political comeback was confirmed earlier this year, Dutton told The Australian that Boothby had been identified as “an absolute must-win” and the federal Opposition Leader was confident Flint could pull it off.

By her own admission Flint was in a bad way when she announced to this newspaper her snap decision to quit politics back in February 2021. The reason – she’d had a debilitating private battle with endometriosis and was struggling to find effective treatment. In the public domain, her resignation also came after an ugly battle at the 2018 election with left-wing activists staging sustained pickets and even defacing her office with sexist slogans, tactics denounced by former prime minister Scott Morrison as misogynist harassment.

Flint tells Inquirer now that her health is sorted she is ready to resume the political fight, saying Labor’s mismanagement of cost-of-living issues and energy prices have compelled her to make a return.

The former Institute of Public Affairs fellow and adviser to Malcolm Turnbull has spent the past three months campaigning daily through Adelaide’s south in her personally branded “Flintmobile”.

“My life changed in December when I finally found medication to manage my endometriosis,” Flint says. “I am pain free for the first time in my adult life and feel like I have a second chance at life.

“I’m running again for two reasons. My health is back on track but the nation isn’t.

“I couldn’t stand by and watch my local community suffer under the Albanese Labor government and know there was something I could have done about it – try to win back the seat of Boothby – and I believe I am the best-placed person to do this for the Liberal Party.”

The southern suburbs seat of Boothby is classic suburban Australia but the impact of the cost-of-living squeeze has had a peculiar impact in SA. For years the state’s property market lagged behind the rest of Australia and until recently a decent three-bedroom home could be found in suburbs such as Plympton or Glandore for a bit over $500,000. Now those suburbs have reached a median of $1m, and Adelaide is expected to surpass Melbourne in property values, the net effect being higher repayments and a younger generation locked out of the market.

Flint says the impact of interest rate rises and continued inflation is compounded in SA by spiralling power prices, with the state’s renewables sector still failing to deliver on reliability and affordability.

“I have never seen so many people in my local community, both households and businesses, in such a state of financial stress and distress thanks to Labor’s inability to get the national cost-of-living crisis under control,” Flint says.

“The heartbreaking stories I’ve heard is what gets me out of bed and campaigning as hard as I can every single day.”

McCusker is pushing a similar message in Sturt, even though its more affluent eastern suburb residents may baulk at Greens housing policies that target investment properties, holiday rentals and negative gearing.

But McCusker’s past three campaigns show, even without the support of traditional eastern suburbs Liberals, she is carving out a growing supporter base among progressives in suburbs such as Norwood, the spiritual home of ex-premier Don Dunstan, while also capitalising on mainstream disenchantment with the major parties.

To this end, her candidacy risks being comparable to that of the teals in the eastern states, with some SA political observers saying she could win in her own right. The likelier scenario – an equally ominous one for the Liberals – is that she polls big numbers again as per the Dunstan by-election, giving Labor an armchair ride via preferences.

McCusker has a background in public health and has none of the radicalism of eastern states Greens figures, focusing instead on more urban concerns over cost of living and the supermarket duopoly, housing and rental costs, and congestion. She says that even affluent voters in Adelaide’s east are willing to hear the Greens’ views on housing out of worry for their children and grandchildren.

“This is my fourth time as a candidate and my second time around in Sturt,” she says.

“The thing I am hearing the most is cost of living and housing affordability. I’m not getting any backlash. People here really care about each other. Even if they aren’t directly affected, they are worried for their kids. There is a big sense of compassion here.”

In what will be her fourth attempt, with her vote rising at every subsequent election, McCusker says she is mindful that the 2022 vote was fuelled by a strong middle class vote against Morrison.

She says that anti-Liberal vote is now being replicated by other concerns, chiefly with Dutton’s nuclear plan.

But she says the disaffection is directed at both sides of politics.

“I am getting recognised by people, which is fantastic. They are really interested; I’ve been speaking to people for many years now and they really aren’t feeling represented or listened to.

“If one in 10 people changes their vote we will win Sturt. It’s very exciting. It’s very winnable, and we are here to win.”