Conservatives wresting South Australia out of moderate Liberals’ hands

More than 10 years of moderate domination is coming to an end for the South Australian Liberal Party amid an influx of hundreds of new conservative members fed up with the party’s small-l liberal ways.

Senator Alex Antic has helped recruit more than 1000 new right-wing members to the Liberal Party in South Australia.

More than 10 years of moderate domination is coming to an end for the South Australian Liberal Party amid an influx of hundreds of new conservative members fed up with the party’s small-l liberal ways.

Branch by branch, party conservatives are wresting the SA division out of the hands of the Left in a state long dominated by senior moderates including former defence minister Christopher Pyne, ex-finance minister Simon Birmingham and ousted premier Steven Marshall.

The trigger for the takeover is anger from Liberal conservatives about the dismal performance of Mr Marshall’s Liberal government, obliterated after one term at the March 19 election landslide, and the loss of Boothby and near loss of Sturt by moderate candidates at the federal poll.

The SA Liberals have held power for just four of the past 20 years, during which the party was almost always under moderate control, and its March 19 defeat was so massive that few give the party any hope of ousting the Peter Malinauskas Labor government at the 2026 poll.

The influence of the right faction in SA started to wane when former Howard government minister and conservative powerbroker Nick Minchin left politics in 2011, and weakened further in 2017 when Cory Bernardi quit the party due to Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership and set up Australian Conservatives.

Its resurgence has been driven by four factors – the Marshall government’s ceding of power to the bureaucracy during the pandemic, an over-representation of moderates in its ministry, land tax reforms which alienated key Liberal backers, and religious anger over moderate support for late-term abortion and euthanasia.

Their anger deepened last year when new conservative members were initially blocked from joining the party amid allegations of branch-stacking, the tactic badly backfiring on the party’s Left.

Since then, the surge has intensified, with more than 1000 new right-wing members driving SA party membership to about 5500.

Much of the recruitment has been driven by conservative senator Alex Antic, who vowed to withhold his vote from the Morrison government last year in protest at vaccination mandates. Senator Antic was candid about the surge in membership, rejecting moderate suggestions it was a stack, rather a grassroots push by traditional Liberals who believed the party had lost its way.

“The days of the Liberal Party in South Australia being controlled by 25-year-old ABC-watching, Guardian-reading political staffers are over,” he said.

The scale of the takeover is likely to result in conservatives having full control of the party’s state council, which has about 200 members drawn from state and federal electoral colleges.

This would likely give the conservatives control of state executive and the power to elect their choice of president and four vice-presidents plus other key positions at the party’s AGM this year.

Conservatives now control the SECs in the state seats of Colton, Gibson, Newland, Badcoe and Heysen, and have ousted moderate presidents in Playford, Waite, West Torrens and Wright; and the Kingston and Makin FECs.