Nick Xenophon is poised to play kingmaker in South Australia
Nick Xenophon has sniffed a golden opportunity in South Australia ... and he may well determine who will rule the state.
Nick Xenophon came to a simple conclusion six months ago.
After a decade as a South Australian senator and less than a year out from a state election, it was time to leave Canberra and sort out troubles at home.
The constant barbs about his home state had suddenly taken on a different edge. In his mind, the usual snide remarks about South Australia had turned to a discernible, contemptible sneer.
The attacks had, he believed, become too personal. They had to stop. Are the lights on? Why are all your young people leaving? So electricity is more expensive than gold? South Australia: the mendicant state that never stops asking for more ...
Xenophon also is a shrewd and canny politician.
There’s little doubt he sniffed a golden political opportunity. After all, he had carefully built his populist brand in his home state for more than 20 years. Perhaps he sensed now was the time to truly capitalise.
Xenophon launched his shock return to state politics in October, announcing he would lead his new SA Best party from the front and stand in the marginal lower house Liberal-held seat of Hartley at the March 17 state election. No longer would he sit in the nation’s capital as South Australians faced a “contest of low expectations” caused by the “lazy and unaccountable” major parties, he said.
“We’ve made headlines for all the wrong reasons,” Xenophon tells The Australian. “I’m sick of South Australia being a laughing stock in the eastern states and that’s an issue that has to change.
“I could have just stayed in the Senate (the High Court has cleared him of breaching dual-citizenship rules). I was well established there. But I want South Australia to prosper and I think I can make more of a positive difference from the frontline.
“Our population has shrunk relative to the country as a whole, our economic growth is diminishing, our young people are leaving, our power prices are too high. No matter what spin you put on it, you can’t say things are doing well.”
Jay Weatherill is as shrewd a politician as Xenophon. Taking over as Labor Premier in 2011 from Mike Rann, known as “Media Mike”, Weatherill has maintained the army of spin doctors and deployed them on any number of scandals that have embroiled his government, from child protection to aged-care crises.
After the devastating statewide blackout in September 2016, which Xenophon had initially attributed to Labor’s embrace of renewable energy, Weatherill argued the federal Coalition government’s neglect of the National Electricity Market was representative of its general indifference to South Australia. Last March, six months after the state went black, Weatherill stood alongside federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg at a routine news conference about an AGL “virtual power plant”. The softly spoken Weatherill up-ended proceedings, berating Frydenberg and his federal colleagues for “bagging South Australia at every step of the way” and for being “the most anti-South Australian government we have seen from a commonwealth government in living memory”.
The battlelines had been drawn. If Labor was to win a historic fifth term, it would be off the back of South Australian pride, according to the Premier.
Only he could defend a state reeling from power blackouts, soaring unemployment and an overall dented sense of pride. Embarrassment, even?
Weatherill, at every opportunity since, has portrayed South Australia as an oppressed state, one that is treated with disdain by powerbrokers to the east. “I think South Australians want strong independent representation,” Weatherill tells The Australian. “They want someone who is prepared to stand up for them. I think I’ve demonstrated I’m prepared to do that, whether it’s on Holden, Future Submarines, the River Murray, the energy crisis — any one of these issues I’ve stood up and advocated for the state’s interests in a powerful way, and in a way I think people understand.”
Many South Australians may well be able to relate, but the latest SA Newspoll, published exclusively in The Australian last month, indicates they are no longer impressed.
Just 22 per cent of voters preferred Weatherill as premier, while Liberal Opposition Leader Steven Marshall garnered just 19 per cent support.
Xenophon, who says becoming premier is “fanciful” (while not entirely ruling it out), polled a stunning 46 per cent. But everyone in South Australia knows Xenophon is popular.
The big shock from the Newspoll was that his new SA Best party, which at the time had just six candidates, outpolled the major parties on the primary vote. SA Best’s primary vote of 32 per cent was three points ahead of that of the Liberals and five points in front of Labor. The poll was a particularly bad one for Marshall and his partyroom, which has been uncharacteristically loyal to its leader since he was prematurely elevated in 2013, just three years into his first term as an MP. The hapless Liberals have languished in opposition since 2002.
Given the calamities overseen by Labor in its fourth term — mishandling child protection; a hasty uptake of renewable energy without safeguarding the state’s power supply, resulting in soaring power bills; ignoring repeated warnings at a state-run aged-care centre; health backflips, infrastructure blowouts; and most recently a TAFE SA training scandal — it is Marshall, and not Xenophon, who should be in the box seat come election day.
Marshall rejects any suggestion he is failing to cut through and connect with the key swinging voters who will decide the next election. Indeed, he even gives himself a “seven or eight” out of 10 performance rating for the past 12 months. Marshall has unequivocally ruled out forming any coalition government with SA Best if the Liberals do not win a majority of the 47 lower house seats needed to govern in March.
Weatherill, on the other hand, says Labor is open to the idea because “Xenophon doesn’t fit into the Pauline Hanson category”. Some Liberal insiders have privately questioned Marshall’s position, but he shows no signs of budging. Political necessity will likely see that change, should SA Best hold the balance of power.
“A vote for Nick Xenophon is a vote for 20 years of dysfunctional Labor government in SA,” Marshall tells The Australian.
“He’s already refused to rule out putting Labor back into power, his only policy announcements so far have been to back Labor positions regarding the deregulation of shop trading hours and also the refusal to cap council rates.”
Marshall stops short of calling Xenophon untrustworthy, despite a conversation he says they had “three or four months ago” in which Xenophon told him SA Best would stand in only four to six seats, split evenly between Liberal and Labor.
Xenophon confirmed the conversation took place but said the “equation changed” after he committed to standing in Hartley. (Marshall and Xenophon no longer speak.) Xenophon has so far unveiled 13 candidates, the majority in Liberal-held seats, with a further seven, at a minimum, expected to be rolled out soon.
“We’re still working on quite a few (candidates), there’ll be lots of announcements, we’re just working frantically to do all the stuff we need to do,” Xenophon said this week. In ruling out a possible coalition government with SA Best, Xenophon says Marshall is being petty and misleading.
“When Steven says he won’t work with me if SA Best holds the balance of power, and that’s an ‘if’, I think he’s lying to himself and unwittingly lying to the electorate,” Xenophon says.
“I think he’s being badly advised because I’ve heard other people within the Liberal Party who were dismayed by such an inflexible approach. I think he’s made a strategic blunder, but I’m still willing to work with him in good faith and with goodwill.
“The same goes for Labor. But it all depends on so many factors: number of seats, number of votes, policy positions and, particularly, transparency measures. These are the big issues.”
Weatherill says his ability to make minority government work is second-to-none. It’s a fair point, given he managed to negotiate another four-year term for Labor from a hung parliament in 2014. Yet Weatherill has been silent on Xenophon’s decision to return to state politics because of South Australia’s “broken and politically bankrupt system” after 16 years of Labor rule.
Rather than enter into a personal stoush, Weatherill says he wants to debate policy, which is where he thinks Xenophon’s weakness can be exploited.
“So you’ve got Nick just hoping that there’ll be a general sort of evaluation, plenty of critique but not a lot of policy substance, and the Liberal Party selling, really, a pretty outdated political ideology, that is the free market ideology in a world where people are reconsidering the role of government in protecting citizens,” he said.
“I think it’s going to be a very interesting political contest.”
Pundits are predicting a genuine three-cornered election contest; others forecast one of the most chaotic elections in memory. An unpredictable election is something all three leaders can agree on. In the electorate, there is clearly a mood for change. But the unknown voting preferences will play such a crucial role that those who think they can predict the outcome in any number of key seats are fooling themselves.
“It will be an election like no other,” Xenophon says. “I expect this to be the nastiest of all election campaigns, not from us, but I think South Australians see through that and I think they actually understand the state has been going backwards for too long.”
Nasty is how Xenophon wants the campaign. Dirty tricks from the major parties will play into his narrative that a “major party duopoly” is out to get him. Which it is, of course.
Both major parties will not rule out preference deals against SA Best in Hartley, a northeastern suburban seat where Xenophon is running against sitting Liberal Vincent Tarzia and former Labor minister Grace Portolesi, who held the seat until the last election.
“Generally speaking, Xenophon doesn’t fit into the Pauline Hanson category, so it’s not a matter of vetoing him,” Weatherill says.
“Obviously, we’ll try and consider what’s in our interests in the lead up to the election, but it is very difficult for me to consider preferencing the Liberal Party (in Hartley), our principal political opponent.”
Marshall says it is “implausible” that Xenophon would go to the election without declaring beforehand which party he would support, should he be kingmaker.
Xenophon says to do so would go against his independent centrist ideals. “Our plan is to run open tickets; being from the political centre that makes sense. I’m as neutral as Switzerland,” he says.
In less than 70 days he may have to pick a side.
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State of rivalry
NICK XENOPHON
AGE 58
FAMILY Divorced from Sandra Kazubiernis; one son, Aleksis.
BEFORE POLITICS A personal injury lawyer with his own suburban law firm.
IDEOLOGY Flirted briefly with the Liberal Party as a law student. Describes SA Best as a “centrist” political party.
WINS Newspoll has SA Best outpolling major parties on the primary vote, while he is more than twice as popular as the premier and opposition leader.
FAILS Displayed poor political judgment in accepting a part-time staffer’s job to his replacement in the Senate, Rex Patrick.
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JAY WEATHERILL
AGE 53
FAMILY Married to Melissa; two daughters, Lucinda and Alice.
BEFORE POLITICS A lawyer with an economics degree who established his own industrial law firm in 1995.
IDEOLOGY At the University of Adelaide he and Penny Wong, a former girlfriend, were members of the “Bolkus Left”, proteges of senator Nick Bolkus. Now heads South Australian Labor Left faction.
WINS On his analysis, he says he has delivered 383 of 432 promises made at the 2014 election.
FAILS Unstable and unreliable power system, Oakden aged-care scandal, TAFE SA training bungle, failure to get state-based bank tax through parliament.
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STEVEN MARSHALL
AGE 49
FAMILY Divorced from Sue; two children, Charlie and Georgie.
BEFORE POLITICS A businessman who worked in his family’s furniture company; chairman of Jeffries compost and mulch company; manager with Michell wool company.
IDEOLOGY Aligned with the SA Liberal Moderate faction, backed by Christopher Pyne. An economic rationalist.
WINS Defeated Labor’s proposed state-based bank tax.
FAILS Poor personal ratings in opinion polls.
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