In this post, I’m going to look at what a new South Australian pendulum could look like, look also at seats where there was a chance that another party would have made it to the top two, and what margin that could have produced, and use some triangular graphs to show how the contest played out in particular types of races.

For a while now, my pendulums have not strictly obeyed the rules of the traditional two-party-preferred pendulum. I include all seats held by the government on the left sorted by the two-candidate-preferred margin, even when that is not the 2PP margin. It does mean that sometimes you need to be aware that not all seats are alike – you wouldn’t necessarily assume swings in Labor-Greens contests would be similar to Labor-Liberal seats. Effectively the pendulum becomes more about listing seats broadly in line with marginality rather than using it as a predictive tool.

It turns out this method doesn’t actually work too badly in the case of the 2026 South Australian election.

Most seats in South Australia ended up as contests between Labor and one of two right-wing parties: either One Nation or the Liberal Party: 38 out of 47 seats, to be exact.

So I’ve slightly modified my traditional pendulum to list Liberal and One Nation seats mixed together on the right, with independent seats at the bottom right.

This pendulum allows you to get a sense of how much of a swing would be needed from Labor towards these two different right-wing parties to deprive Labor of a majority.

If Labor was to lose eleven seats, it would deprive them of a majority. If One Nation and the Liberal Party gained fifteen seats between them, they would hold a majority. I don’t know what such a majority would look like, but it’s a notable threshold.

This pendulum shows that a uniform swing of 8.5% would leave Labor without a majority, and 10.3% would produce a Liberal-One Nation majority. If we assume that the balance between Liberal and One Nation was to remain steady, One Nation would pick up more of those seats than the Liberal Party and would be the bigger party in such a majority.

While a pendulum can still be interesting, it presumes that there are only two candidates of interest in a seat, and that the two-candidate-preferred pairing is the only possible such pairing. Of course, this is not true.

There has been a number of seats in the past where there was a tight margin on the three-candidate-preferred between two candidates, and the outcome of that contest would then have an impact on the final two-candidate-preferred margin. Sometimes one contender produces a much closer margin than the other contender, and sometimes it actually changes who would win.

In some cases we have hard data on the margin in the alternative scenario, but it’s also possible to take preference flows from other seats and use them to make an estimate.

As of this election, there are now enough of these seats that it’s worth dealing with these systemically, and producing a table of these alternatives.

We are currently missing the three-candidate-preferred from Narungga, so we have this data for 46 of the 47 seats. The gap between second place and third place on the 3CP was 12.3% on average. There were 23 out of 47 seats where the margin was less than 10%, so I’ve focused on those seats. In two cases (Heysen and Croydon) the margin was less than 1%. This really matters in Heysen, and doesn’t matter at all in Croydon, as we’ll see.

The alternative 2CP margin only changes the outcome in two seats. In Hammond, Labor topped the 3CP count, but lose to whoever out of Liberal or One Nation makes the top two. One Nation outpolled Liberal by 4.9% on the 3CP. The 2CP margin over Labor is about the same for either party. In Ngadjuri, One Nation beat Labor. If the Liberal Party closed an 8.5% 3CP margin over Labor, they would have then won on Labor preferences.

In some seats, the alternative margins are fairly similar, but in some cases they produce very different margins.

There’s a bunch of seats where the Liberal Party is substituted for One Nation, or vice versa, and the margin ends up quite similar. There are nine seats that flipped between ALP-ON and ALP-LIB. The Liberal Party would have come closer to winning in Enfield, Torrens and Davenport, while One Nation would have done better in Elder. But none of them are particularly close.

There are four seats where independents have a big impact on the margin. Independents came third in Black, Port Adelaide and Flinders, with One Nation coming second on the 3CP in all three seats. My estimated margin gets much tighter if One Nation is replaced with the independent. It’s worth noting that there isn’t much of a sample size of One Nation preferences splitting between an independent and either Labor or Liberal, and it would undoubtedly vary depending on the specific independent. In this case, I’ve used the Kavel preference count to estimate One Nation preference flows between Labor and Independent, and I’ve used Finniss to estimate ON flows between Liberal and Independent.

And then there’s Heysen, which doesn’t change much, but is the most marginal seat on this list on every measure. Liberal beat Labor by 0.6%. Labor beat the Greens on the 3CP count by just 0.4%. By my estimate of Labor preferences between Liberal and Greens (using examples from Heysen in 2014, federal elections in 2022 and 2025, and Prahran in Victorian elections), the margin is just 0.2%.

The other method for combining two-candidate-preferred and three-candidate-preferred information is through the use of triangular graphs. I have started producing graphs for recent elections showing all seats with a given combination of parties in the 3CP, showing who wins for a given 3CP. My first version of my federal graphs are in this blog post.

These have been inspired by Ben Messenger who first developed triangular 3CP graphs. He has published his own version of these graphs for South Australia here on Bluesky.

Unfortunately South Australia’s election was so fragmented that we can’t show every seat in one chart. I’ve made charts for three 3CP combinations that cover 39 out of 46 seats.

First up, this chart shows Labor-Liberal-One Nation contests – there were 20 in South Australia.

The lighter colours in the background show who would have won for a given 3CP, based on average preference flows (the same numbers used to estimate alternative 2CPs). The brighter dots are actual seat results.

Labor won most of these seats, but Labor needs a relatively higher 3CP to win in such a contest. Labor preferences slightly favour Liberal over One Nation, which explains the blue bulge sticking into the One Nation territory.

There were thirteen Labor-One Nation-Greens contests.

Labor won every single one of these seats, and generally can win with a lower 3CP than when they face two right-wing opponents.

There were six Labor-Liberal-Greens seats. It’s notable that the Labor zone is larger against the Greens than when One Nation is the third party, but One Nation also has a slightly larger zone than the Liberals. I think this reflects that Labor-Greens preference flows are less tight when facing off against One Nation – there are some Labor voters who preference One Nation when they wouldn’t preference Liberal, but that is also true of some Greens voters.

There is one seat that stands out above all others – the blue dot on the corner of the blue, red and green zones is Heysen. This chart makes it very clear that it’s a seat that all three parties could win with a slight nudge in their direction.

None of these methods are a perfect way of showing marginality of seats, but I think they are useful in exploring different angles of the contest. If we have more multi-party elections coming soon, I expect we’ll use these tools more often.

Pretty much all of the analysis I am doing for this blog post is based on the three-candidate-preferred count, which is the second-last round of the preference count. We don’t have this data yet for Narungga. I’ve decided to stop waiting for that seat. I’ll go back and tweak this blog post when Narungga is finished.

This South Australian election was extremely complex, with doubt about who would come in the top two, and with preferences potentially playing a larger role than in the past. So for this post I will be going through what the final preference distributions tell us about the shape of South Australia’s election: how preferences flowed, how close the gap was between second- and third-placed candidates, and how many seats featured a particular combination of candidates.

For my next blog post, I am going to use this data to publish not just the actual margins, but also my estimates of alternative margins, where it was plausible that a different candidate could have made the top two.

Let’s start by looking at how often a particular party made the three-candidate-preferred count.

Until 2026, Labor and Liberal made the top three in almost every seat. Over the previous six elections, Labor missed the top three twice, and the Liberal Party never missed the top three.

This year, Labor missed out in four seats, and the Liberal Party missed out in sixteen! One Nation reached the top three in forty seats. The Greens also had a significant downturn in the number of seats where they made the 3CP.

From 2002-2022 (and likely for much longer) there was always a third spot in the 3CP and that position has varied. The Australian Democrats had that role in most seats in 2002, and SA Best dominated in 2018. Otherwise, the Greens have usually made the count in a majority of seats, while Family First regularly made the 3CP in 2006-2014.

The specific combination of 3CP sets is:

• ALP-LIB-ON – 20
• ALP-ON-GRN – 13
• ALP-LIB-GRN – 6
• LIB-ON-IND – 4 (assuming Labor doesn’t jump over the independent in Narungga)
• ALP-ON-IND – 3
• ALP-LIB-IND – 1

And the specific combination of 2CP sets is:

• ALP-ON – 25
• ALP-LIB – 13
• LIB-ON – 4
• ON-IND – 2
• ALP-GRN – 1
• ALP-IND – 1
• LIB-IND – 1

The next question I was wondering about was whether the gap between second and third has been shrinking. We have noticed this trend in federal politics, where we have more seats where the 3CP count becomes critical. It turns out that the gap has shrunk slightly, but is roughly back to where it was in 2018 when SA Best made a splash.

This actually rings true when considering the actual results. While there was a lot of seats where the top two wasn’t known before election day, there were only a few where it was unclear after election day, and most of those became clear without needing a full 3CP count.

Four seats had a gap of less than 4% between second and third on the 3CP:

• Heysen – ALP 0.4% over GRN
• Croydon – GRN 0.6% over ON
• Schubert – ALP 2.2% over ON
• Enfield – ON 2.9% over LIB

Only in Heysen did this come close to mattering for the result, but I’ll come back to that in the next post.

So did preferences make much of a difference to the result?

There were only two seats where the winner came from behind. In the other 45 seats, the primary vote leader ended up winning. In Finniss, independent Lou Nicholson came from fourth place to win, overtaking the Liberal primary vote leader. In Kavel, independent Matt Schultz overtook Labor.

In the seat of Hammond, One Nation topped the primary vote but actually fell behind on the three-candidate-preferred vote, into second place, and relied on preferences from the Liberal candidate to defeat Labor.

So overall it doesn’t look like preferences had a big impact one way or another, but there were a lot of them. Now that we have 3CP data, we can calculate how preferences flowed on the final round of the count. This is not the same as having preference data based on the candidate’s primary vote (apparently we will get this at the end of the year) but it does have the benefit of isolating other effects.

When comparing primary vote figures to the final preference count, it is difficult to isolate preferences from particular partisan elements – for example, how Liberal preferences flow. But by taking the second-last round of the count, there’s just the votes of one party left to be distributed. This does include votes that were cast for another candidate, but that’s not a bad thing.

So this next chart shows the proportion of preferences that flowed from each party for each two-candidate-preferred pairing. I’ve noted how many seats had this preference flow.

The most common 2CP contest was Labor vs One Nation. About half had the Greens in third, and most of the rest had the Liberals in third. Greens preferences flowed to Labor at about 80%, while Liberal preferences flowed at two thirds to One Nation.

In the Labor-Liberal contests, there is a similar mirror image, but even more polarised – Greens preferences were even stronger to Labor, while One Nation preferences favoured Liberal even more. But again, the parties of the left have tighter preference flows amongst each other than the parties of the right.

When you break down this data by electorate, there are some interesting trends. Greens preferences tend to be a little more pro-Labor in a race against the Liberal Party. In the seat of Elizabeth, almost a third of Greens preferences flowed to One Nation. That was a seat where a donkey vote would go to the Greens then One Nation, and it is a relatively weak area for the Greens.

Liberal preferences favoured One Nation over Labor in every seat, ranging from 53% in Enfield to 73.5% in Hammond. In general, One Nation does not favour Liberal quite so strongly.

Preferences do clearly have a skew, but it seems that multi-party politics means that they often cancel each other out. So I thought I would look at how much preferences helped each party, subtracting the party’s primary vote from their 2CP vote in every seat where they made the 2CP.

The political parties all benefited to similar degrees, but unsurprisingly One Nation does worst out of preferences, with Liberal doing a bit worse than Labor. The Greens didn’t do that well, but this only covers one seat (Croydon) which isn’t exactly Greens heartland.

It is remarkable, however, how well independents who made the final preference count benefited.

This can be seen clearly in my final chart, which shows the preference gain for each candidate in the top two, compared to that candidate’s primary vote.

Labor candidates fairly consistently did better than One Nation and Liberal candidates, but three independent candidates are way off the chart. Independents in Finniss, Kavel and Mount Gambier gained 30-40 percentage points from preferences. No major party candidate gains more than 28%.

That’s it for this post – in the next one, let’s look at some ways to understand the marginality of seats as we lose the simplicity of the pendulum.

This is the nineteenth book in a series that stretches back to 1958, and has covered every election since 1987. It’s been really great to be able to connect to that long legacy and I have been collecting older editions from the series.

I’ve done a quick video going through my collection which you can watch here.

The last six volumes (dating back to Julia 2010) have been published by ANU Press and all of them are available in full online, either as individual PDF chapters or the whole book as HTML, PDF or in ebook formats, and they are all available for purchase as hard copy editions. I think people who read this website will find many parts of these books of interest. Here are the links to the last six volumes:

• Julia 2010: The caretaker election
• Abbott’s Gambit
• Double Disillusion
• Morrison’s Miracle
• Watershed
• Landslide

I have been reading some very old psephological work from the 1970s recently, and a tool used often by analysts like Malcolm Mackerras was a histogram, often showing the distribution of swings. This is a special kind of bar graph where each column lists how many cases fit in that range or bucket.

For this post I am using primary vote totals as of Saturday afternoon, and two-candidate-preferred figures as of Monday morning. Neither is final, but they are close enough to give us a sense of the shape.

Let’s start with the primary vote.

This chart shows the distribution of primary votes for the three largest parties. Seats are coloured based on who won that seat.

The Labor part of the graph is stark – there is not a single seat where Labor polled between 29% and 35% of the primary vote. And every seat over 35% they have won. The only seat below that line where they have come close is Heysen, where a high Greens vote means Labor could win on a lower vote. We will get to the 2CP margins later, but Labor is currently on 49.5% in Heysen and their next best seats are Hammond on 45.2% and Ngaduri and Bragg in the low 40s. There just wasn’t many close losses for Labor.

So part of the story for Labor in terms of their vote efficiency is that when they lost, they lost big. But they also didn’t rack up huge piles of votes where they weren’t needed. Labor’s primary vote only exceeded 50% in six seats.

If you look just at the 34 seats Labor has won, their primary vote averaged at 45.2% and their 2CP vote averaged at 62.2%. They managed a primary vote that generally was enough to win modestly, and also did quite well on preference flows to push a vote in the 40s into the 60s.

Normally you would expect a party winning comfortably to also poll respectably in their losing seats, thus adding to their overall vote total. But Labor is now at a point where they poll very poorly in places where they aren’t winning. And this has a geographic component – most of those Labor wins were in Adelaide, and just one non-Labor win was in Adelaide.

The Liberal and One Nation charts are also somewhat interesting, in particular showing how many seats had very low Liberal primary votes. I think this is something we will have to factor in when we consider how much Liberal preferences flowed to One Nation – in some seats the Liberal vote collapsed so far that they don’t make up a dominant part of the pool of preferences.

This next chart shows the range of primary vote swings for Labor, Liberal and the Greens – there’s not much to show for One Nation, since they only ran in a handful of seats in 2022.

The Greens swings are very tight, with a majority showing a small swing. This isn’t surprising since the Greens vote tends to be a bit lower so doesn’t have as much room to move.

The swings were far from uniform for Labor – they gained a 24.6% swing in Waite and lost almost 20% in Light.

The Liberal swings were huge but there is clearly a focus point – 22 seats had the Liberal candidate suffer a swing of 15-19%. That’s almost half of the state.

Now let’s look at two-candidate-preferred figures. I am using William Bowe’s figures on his website, although I am using the current Labor-Liberal count in Heysen, not an estimated Greens-Liberal count.

At the time of writing, there are 26 Labor-One Nation contests, 13 Labor-Liberal contests, four Liberal-One Nation contests, two independent-One Nation contests, one independent-Labor contest and one independent-Liberal contest.

I will grapple with what a post-election pendulum will look like on another day, likely when we have the final distributions of preferences, but I suspect part of it will be presenting it as Labor vs Liberal/One Nation. If you look at things that way, it covers all but eight seats. Effectively you can see Labor as having two main opponents, with those parties having different strengths in different areas.

I also expect we will be doing a table showing not just the main margin, but an estimated alternative margin (for example, Labor-One Nation and Labor-Liberal) and the margin on the 3CP to change the top two.

So this chart is similar to the first primary vote chart, but it shows the two-candidate-preferred vote in every seat for each party that made that count (so each seat is shown twice). It is easy to identify whether that party won the seat (is their 2CP over 50%?) so instead I have colour-coded based on who the opposing party is.

Again we see that Labor doesn’t have many super-safe seats on huge margins (one on 79.6%, another on 70.9%.

This also can perform some of the same functions as a pendulum. We can see that if there was a 10% swing from Labor to Liberal/One Nation, Labor would lose eight seats to One Nation and four to the Liberal Party. One Nation dominated the Liberal Party in a lot of places where the combined right-wing vote wasn’t enough to win.

Finally, this chart compares 2CP margins before the election (2022 results redistributed for 2026 boundaries) to the results of this election.

The number of conventional marginal seats has shrunk tremendously. On the old boundaries, there were five Labor seats and seven Liberal seats on margins under 4%, with a further six on margins of 4-8%. Now there are just six seats on margins under 4%, with another ten on margins of 4-8%.

The Liberal Party was particularly reliant on marginal seats prior to this election, so it is not surprising that they would lose so many seats.

Sometimes you would expect to see a party that has gained seats to have simply increased its vote everywhere, and thus see seats move to the right on this chart. But Labor hasn’t really gained super-safe seats. They had three seats with margins of 70% or more, and now there are two. They have particularly gained seats in the 8-16% range. Again, this points to remarkable vote efficiency for Labor. They are gaining election-winning numbers in most seats without getting much more than they need.

So let’s go back to the original question – why did Labor win such a huge number of seats? I don’t think much of the story is explained by preferences. There were just four come-from-behind wins. Labor was overtaken by the independent in Kavel and One Nation in Hammond, Labor overtook the Liberal in Morphett and the independent overtook the Liberal (and possibly Labor) in Finniss.

If this was a first-past-the-post election and there was no change in how people voted, Labor would have won 35 seats, the Liberal Party seven, One Nation three and independent two. It’s not much different to the result we will get.

The story here is that Labor was the biggest party, and were fairly efficient at distributing their votes in seats they won and not in any others. In general, they started the count well out in front of their conservative rival (be that One Nation or Liberal) and then gained enough preferences to maintain that lead.

And how solid was that win? It was fairly solid, with Labor not particularly reliant on close marginal seat wins. If there was a uniform swing of 8.7% on the 2CP from Labor to either of the two big right-wing parties, Labor would lose eleven seats. This would leave them with just 23 seats, one short of a majority.

A 10% 2CP swing would be quite big, but I think such a swing would put the state roughly on a 50-50 balance. Across the 39 seats where Labor is in the top two against Liberal or One Nation, the Labor 2CP averages to 59.7%. Once you factor in the very conservative seats where Labor didn’t make the top two, I suspect a Labor 2PP of about 58-59% would be about right. So if a swing of 8.7% leaves Labor just short of a majority, that sounds to be roughly balanced between the left and right.

With just eleven members elected by proportional representation on a statewide vote, most seats were decided quickly just based on primary votes, leaving 1-2 seats in any doubt. At this point the result is clear for all but one seat, with Labor favourites for that seat.

For this blog post I’m going to examine what could happen with the remaining votes to be counted, and with flows of preferences.

Ten seats have definitively been decided: four Labor, three One Nation, two Liberal and one Greens. Nine of these seats are based on the party polling a full quota. One Nation is on 2.92 quotas so we can be confident they will win a third seat.

Labor has a decent lead for the eleventh seat. The remaining quotas for the leading candidates are as follows:

• Labor – 0.44
• Legalise Cannabis – 0.29
• Family First – 0.25
• Greens – 0.22
• Animal Justice – 0.16
• Liberal – 0.12
• Real Change – 0.12
• Others – 0.46

So what changes between now and the final declaration of the result? Two extra pieces of information will be added. Firstly, there are still some primary votes yet to be tallied. Secondly, preferences will be distributed. I’ll deal with those one at a time.

Unfortunately we are dealing with a severe shortage of data when it comes to which votes have been counted, and which ones haven’t, and it’s hard to compare like-with-like compared to the last election.

It is difficult to know precisely which votes have been counted. The ECSA website reports that nearly all election day and pre-poll booths have been counted, and I suspect the missing booths are those that were not actually used (based on examining lower house data). But there is little data on the other vote categories which are currently being counted in the lower house counts, and presumably are in the process of being added in the upper house. About 1.13 million votes were cast in 2022, and about 980,000 votes have been cast this time.

In theory, we could compare the votes cast in 2022 in categories that have been counted, with those yet to be counted. Unfortunately we lack detailed data on which votes have been counted, and ECSA has changed the voting categories enough to make such a comparison impossible anyway. In the 2022 booth results, there is a single ‘declaration votes’ to cover all votes other than ordinary election-day votes including pre-poll and postal votes. That vote category was slightly worse for Labor, significantly worse for the Greens, about the same for One Nation and significantly better for the Liberal Party. But many of those have been counted already this time. Now that ECSA is publishing results in more detail, this task could be easier in 2030 with greater transparency.

So what about preferences? How would we expect them to flow?

This is just the third election in South Australia since the state abolished group voting tickets prior to the 2018 election. This effectively produced a new electoral system and you can’t really compare results before and after the reforms.

In 2018, 60.4% of voters just voted ‘1’ above the line’, while 33.4% numbered multiple preferences above the line and 6.2% voted below the line. In 2022, 62.6% voted just ‘1’ above, 31.3% numbered preferences above the line, and 6.1% voted below the line.

In comparison, New South Wales uses a similar electoral system, and rates of voters just voting ‘1’ above the line was over 80% in 2011 and 2015, but has since dropped to about 60%, in line with South Australia.

So there’s a lot of voters not doing much with their preferences. In theory, we could see rates of preferencing increasing, but South Australia was already in line with New South Wales in 2022.

This new electoral system is yet to produce a result in South Australia where preferences have mattered – in both 2018 and 2022, the candidates leading on primary votes were all elected. Of course, this doesn’t mean that preferences can’t matter, but they tend to play a smaller role in such a high-magnitude election when so many voters opt out of marking preferences.

I have calculated the position of each candidate during the final rounds of the count in 2018 and 2022. ECSA actually reports thousands of counts, showing every batch of votes that are moved, but I have simplified these counts to just show rounds when the distribution of one candidate’s preferences is finalised. For these graphs I show the numbers for the last seven candidates running for the last two seats. I show the round when there is one candidate left for each group, and the counts when just those seven candidates remain.

In 2018, the Liberal and Greens candidates started well in front of the other candidates – the Greens were 0.256 ahead of Labor when each group was still in the race.

The Greens tended to gain the highest rate of preferences. Between count 31 and count 40, the Greens gained 0.191 quotas, Labor gained 0.115, the Liberal gained 0.117 and the Christians gained 0.066.

The contest was much closer in 2022. At the point where there was one candidate left per group, the gap between One Nation (on track for the tenth seat) and the Liberal Democrats (in twelfth place) was just 0.111 quotas. Notably the Greens were not in the hunt in 2022 -the party had gained a swing which put them just over a quota, so the second Greens candidate had a small number of votes to distribute.

Between counts 26 and 35, Labor again gained the largest share of preferences, of 0.087 quotas, with Family First gaining 0.058 and SA Best gaining 0.062.

By the final count, One Nation had gained 0.127, Labor 0.202 and Family First 0.160.

One thing that is consistent here is Labor does relatively well out of preferences, but not as well as the Greens.

So let’s go back to the parties competing for the last seat in 2026. Labor has a big lead, with Legalise Cannabis their closest rival, followed by Family First and the Greens.

I think it is very likely that Labor has too much of a lead to be caught up. I think Legalise Cannabis may do relatively well out of preferences, but it’s a big gap to close. I can’t see the Greens or Family First catching up.

11:42 – We already know that 3.95% of voters are to be moved to new seats, but I thought I would drill down to the seat level to see which seats are changing the most.

Seven of the ten seats have retained all of their existing population. The only exceptions are Mayo, Spence and Kingston. They have respectively lost 15.7%, 12.6% and 9.5% of their pre-redistribution enrolment.

Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Sturt are entirely untouched.

10.2% of Makin’s voters are new to the seat, as are 9.5% in Kingston and 9.4% in Mayo. Boothby has 4.6% new voters, while O’Donoghue has 2.7% and Barker 2.6%. Spence has not gained voters, but did lose voters, which reflects it’s fast-growing outer suburban status.

11:37 – And here is my map showing the changes. You can toggle each layer on and off.

11:31 – This video is quite useful in explaining the changes:

11:23 – Here are my estimates of two-candidate-preferred margins. Most changes are very minor or non-existent. Labor has very large margins in six of their seven seats and they are all held intact. Barker gets slightly safer for the Liberal Party while Grey/O’Donoghue becomes more marginal for the Liberal Party.

Mayo was the only complex calculation, since it is the only non-classic seat in the state. I found a reasonably high correlation between Labor 2PP and Labor 2CP, so I have calculated the difference and applied it to the new areas. The areas that Mayo has lost to Boothby and Kingston are relatively weaker for Rebekha Sharkie, but they have also been replaced by areas with a higher Labor 2PP. Overall I think this slightly increases her margin but it is not particularly meaningful.

11:06 – This table shows my estimated primary vote and 2PP for each new seat. I’ve included Rebekah Sharkie in the Independent vote, and I’ve also added in One Nation.

10:56 – 3.95% of voters have been moved to a new seat, which is much less dramatic than the changes in Tasmania, for example.

10:55 – The brief summary of changes based on the report are:

• The proposed electorate of Barker gains part of the Alexandrina Council Local Government Area (LGA) and the localities of Callington and Kanmantoo from the electorate of Mayo.
• The entirety of the City of Mitcham LGA is united in the proposed electorate of Boothby, moving parts of the LGA out of the electorate of Mayo.
• The proposed electorate of Kingston gains the localities of Aldinga, Aldinga Beach, Port Willunga and Sellicks Beach from the electorate of Mayo.
• The proposed electorate of Makin gains part of the City of Salisbury LGA south of the Little Para River from the electorate of Spence.
• The proposed electorate of Mayo gains the localities of Aberfoyle Park, Chandlers Hill and part of Happy Valley from the electorate of Kingston.
• The proposed electorate of O’Donoghue gains part of the City of Playford LGA from the electorate of Spence.

Generally this sounds like rural seats like Barker and Grey/O’Donoghue are expanding closer to Adelaide, with Mayo also moving further into the Adelaide area.

10:53 – The redistribution committee has recommended renaming the large rural seat of Grey to O’Donoghue, after Lowitja O’Donoghue.

10:50 – The Australian Electoral Commission has just published the draft federal redistribution for South Australia.

I had been briefed that this was due out but there hasn’t been much chance to think about it. I understand that the AEC deliberately waited until after the SA election to avoid voter confusion.

I’ll be back shortly with my thoughts on the changes, and I will publish margin estimates soon.

I will be trying to post updates with South Australian time.

I’m going to look at what data we have, and then see what it tells us about the remaining undecided races.

Just as a reminder, we have a bunch of seats where we required a correct 2CP count to know who wins, or if they remain very close. There are also a handful of seats where a full distribution of preferences is necessary to determine the winner.

I had originally written that ECSA wasn’t planning to conduct 3CP counts, but it sounds like they’ve done some exploratory counting to see if independent Lou Nicholson will stay ahead of Labor in Finniss, and that seems to be happening, so I’d expect an Independent vs Liberal preference count there soon.

When analysing preference flows, I prefer to either analyse preferences based on the party of first preference, or by comparing 3CP to 2CP, as these isolate any local seat oddities and ensure you’re comparing like-with-like. Unfortunately none of that data is currently available, so for this post I am looking at the difference between the primary vote and 2CP vote in booths where both have reported, and calculating the percentage of preferences gained for each of the top two candidates.

This first chart looks at the overall flow in all seats with a given 2CP combination. This covers 19 Labor vs One Nation races, 13 Labor vs Liberal races, 3 Liberal vs One Nation races and 1 One Nation vs Independent race. This includes two seats where I have doubts as to whether the current 2CP is correct (Heysen and Finniss) but the data is still of interest. There is no 2CP data for Kavel, Ngadjuri or MacKillop, where there is also doubt about the order of elimination.

Labor is in the 2CP in almost all races, and they do slightly better against One Nation than against the Liberal Party. I suspect that when we eventually have more data we will find that generally One Nation gets a slightly worse preference position for a given primary vote, and in some seats the Labor-Liberal margin is closer than the Labor-One Nation margin.

It’s worth bearing in mind that we don’t know how many of those preferences in Labor-One Nation races come from the Liberal Party. The Liberal vote was severely depleted in some of these seats so many of these votes come from the Greens or other independents or minor parties.

It is a small sample size, but Labor preferences favour Liberal 2:1 when Labor is knocked out. Because of this, the Liberal Party looks solid in Chaffey and Flinders despite strong One Nation challenges, and the Liberal Party looks competitive in Narungga despite One Nation starting with a lead (but more to come on that).

Next up, this chart shows the same data, but broken down by seat. It also shows (in brackets) what proportion of primary votes counted so far have a matching 2CP count.

You can see that Labor-Liberal races have close to complete 2CP counts in most places, which is much less true for Labor-One Nation races.

There is also lots of variety within each category. Preferences strongly favouring Ashton Hurn in her race in Schubert also skew the overall data. If you exclude Schubert, then Labor preferences in Labor-Liberal races improves to 58.3%, much closer to the rate in Labor-One Nation races. Honestly it doesn’t look like Labor’s preference performance differs that much depending on whether they are opposed by Liberal or One Nation.

So what does this mean for the seats where we’ve been waiting for 2CP counts?

Elizabeth and Light

Preference count has caught up in Elizabeth, and 29% of the count is finished in Light. Labor is on 55.7% in Elizabeth and is projected to end up around 56.5% in Light. Both seats called for Labor.

Hammond

No preferences counted here. Labor and One Nation are basically in a primary vote tie, both on 27%. You’d typically expect this to mean Labor is likely to win, but One Nation has received preferences from Airlie Keen and the Liberal Party. Both ABC and Poll Bludger have One Nation in front, so we’ll wait for real preference data here.

Mawson

We have 7% of preferences counted here, which isn’t much. Labor is gaining slightly more preferences than One Nation, and has a big lead, so this is probably a Labor win.

Mount Gambier

31% of preferences have been counted, and independent Travis Fatchen is gaining a very large majority of those preferences. Independent win.

Narungga

Only 13% of preferences have been counted. So far the Liberal is leading on the 2CP count, but those preferences come from Liberal-friendly booths. One Nation is looking to still be the favourite but it is close.

Stuart

Preferences from two tiny booths have reported since I started writing this post. They are slightly favourable to Geoff Brock, who had a large lead. Brock has won.

Current state of play

While the ABC updates more often, here is my seat count:

• Labor – 32 + Mawson likely (awaiting 2CP count)
• Liberal – 4 + leading in Morphett and Heysen (both close, but also possible Greens could overtake Labor on 3CP in Heysen)
• One Nation – leading in Hammond, Narungga (need 2CP count), Ngadjuri and MacKillop (need 3CP count)
• Independents – 2 + leading in Finniss (need 3CP count) and Kavel (need full distribution)

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Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue. The South Australian election was a number of things. It was a landslide victory for the Labor government of Peter Malinauskas despite polling less than 40%, but it also saw an enormous shift on the right of politics, with One Nation out-polling the Liberal Party and becoming the second party in a majority of seats. In today’s podcast we’re going to look at what happened and what might come next.

My guest today is Rob Manwaring. Rob is an associate professor in government at Flinders University. Hello, Rob.

Rob: Hello Ben.

Ben: So we’re recording this on Monday morning and frankly by the time this podcast comes out we may actually have more data than we have now. But at the moment there is about nine seats that are still in play. The Liberal Party’s won about four, maybe they might get to five. They could theoretically get a little bit more than that but that’s about where they’re at. One Nation has won one seat, they might get up to about four seats.

There’s a bunch of seats where they’re going to have to do a new preference count. That’s going to start today on Monday. So again, by the end of the day, we might have a bit more of a picture of where those seats are going. And then there are a handful of seats that are just, we will need to wait for the full distribution to find out who the top two are. And then there’s just a couple that are just really close. So we’re not going to focus so much on the detail of all those counts today. We’re going to look more at what happened and the story of this election. Rob, do you think this trend of people voting for One Nation is a flash in the pan or do think it’s here to stay?

Rob: I that’s a great question and the one I think there’s a pretty live debate certainly amongst the political science community about. From my kind of perspective, it is here to stay in the sense that I think the plates of Australian politics are shifting. is that increasingly that vote share of first preferences for parties other than the Labor Party or the Coalition is increasing and I think at the election we saw in South Australia

I mean it was a record high vote share for minor parties other than Labor and Liberals. So I think Australian politics is certainly becoming sort of more fragmented, more fluid and there is this sort of bigger rump of voters putting their preference to somewhere else and I think One Nation are a big part of that story.

Is it going to be a linear growth? Probably, possibly not. But I do think they’re going to be increasingly part of the political furniture here in Australia.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, you know if we go back say fifty years or so when most people voted for the major parties and you had one or two minor parties here or there that appealed to a particular community we’re now at a point in Australian politics and this is beyond just One Nation, where no matter where you are in the political spectrum, there’s someone else you could choose, right? Like if you’re on the left, you’ve got the Greens, you’ve got socialist parties. You’ve got other minor left parties if you don’t like the Greens. If you’re in the centre, there’s people like the Teals. There’s a variety of independents. And then you’ve got One Nation on the right and some others, but it seems like One Nation is kind of cornering that market. So I don’t necessarily think that…

It is inevitable that, say, the polls that we’re seeing in the federal election will hang around, but I do think it’s going to be hard for the Liberal Party to totally rebuild what they’ve lost. And I mean, in South Australia, they don’t have a lot to work with, you know. If they’re only winning like five or six seats in the lower house and they’re about the same size as One Nation, they don’t have the same claims of credibility and seriousness that maybe have helped them hold off One Nation in the past.

Rob: Yeah, I agree much of what you’re saying there, because like the story of the South Australian election was this implosion of the Liberal vote. This broader point is interesting to me about, you know, we’re seeing that obviously clearly the growth of kind of minor parties.

And I think in one sense, like the political science community, we’re not believing what we’re seeing in the sense that this is a sort of a kind of a bit of a new reality to really think about how the contest is because a lot of the media debate still is shaped of course rightly by the kind of is it going to be Labor or a Coalition government.

But we’re actually missing a bigger story around this. And it’s interesting too about kind of the options, because my reading too is that there’s greater fragmentation and choice on the right side of politics.

So I think that, you know, it’s quite interesting, like you take South Australia, for example, South Australia is the home of Family First, for example, that was where it was kind of set up and established, which was a kind of conservative right party. And, you know, their fortunes have ebbed and flow, they didn’t have a particularly great night last night. It also had the Australian Family Party, another conservative party, which was actually set up by the Labor Party. And then One Nation, for example, until relatively recently, had almost no presence here whatsoever.

So I think what’s changing Australian politics is that is the fragmentation is certainly happening, certainly much more on the right side. So that’s why it’s, I think, becoming a more pressing problem for the Liberals and the Coalition.

Ben: I think one of the stories of the last year is that One Nation has started to win that argument about who the best right-wing minor party is. You know, before the last election, we had Palmer, we had people like the Libertarian Party trying to get them all to work together and cooperate. And I think One Nation getting Senators elected in three states the last election was like, okay, they’re the party to get on board with.

Which is something you see on the left, right? Like Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice occasionally win a seat here or there. But the main game in town, if you’re on the left and you don’t like the ALP, is the Greens. And so I think that is probably, none of this is permanent ever, but I think that’s more likely to stick around. Now,

The other thing I’ve been wondering about is this trend we’ve been seeing everywhere, all across the country. There’s not a South Australian specific trend. And in fact, really the only reason we’re talking about in the context of South Australia is that their election was first. Do you think there’s any South Australian specific things you can see that are driving this shift, this kind of One Nation surge, this collapse in the Liberal support?

Rob: Yes, I mean, there definitely are contextual factors which probably make this possibly even a better than expected night for One Nation. And I’m just thinking about a number of kind of key seats.

It’s worth just saying something a little bit about the state of the South Australian Liberals. So in general, they have just a generally very poor electoral record here. I think they’ve only won about four times since about, in the last 40 years or something here. Labor tends to win elections here.

The South Australian Liberal Party has had lots of long-standing problems and some of those have really accelerated in the past couple of years. So of course, you know, the obvious thing is the leadership churn that we’ve had. They’ve cycled through a number of leaders.

But what I think is interesting tonight, or I should say, I was going to say tonight, I’m losing track of time on election night, is that some of those critical seats where One Nation are picking up or looking like they’re winning are where there’s been an incumbent, either Liberal or former Liberal, who’s even been tarnished, impacted in a scandal and that has kind of damaged the Liberal brand particularly in those seats. So come the next set of elections, if the Liberal Party for example has some clean skins running in there and without the distraction of some of these kind of former members, then in one sense that kind of might mitigate some of the One Nation rise.

So to give a couple of examples would be the seat of MacKillop. MacKillop is a massive regional seat in the south. The incumbent MP was Nick McBride. Nick McBride on the conservative side of the party, second wealthiest man in the state apparently. And you this is a solid Liberal seat heartland and that’s the way we would think about it.

Nick McBride’s facing court for allegations of domestic violence and battery charges. He was famously campaigning wearing a bracelet. These are charges we should certainly make clear that he’s denying. But the point I want to make is less about his situation. But there you have a what should have been a fairly easy pick up for the Liberal Party, but yet tarnished by the situation. And so similarly, Fraser Ellis in the seat of Narungga, again, another regional seat where this was an MP who fell foul of the MP’s expenses scheme was found to have sort of misused the scheme.

And that has really damaged the Liberal brand and the Liberal Party are then spending resources firefighting in seats which they should sort of in theory comfortably win. So I suppose the point is that there’s probably about somewhere between four to six seats where the Liberal Party are facing particular kind of scandals or problems and they’re having to devote money to fight.

So the other one of course would be the seat of Black where David Speirs, the former Liberal leader is running of course, as is probably well known, David Speirs was convicted of charges of supplying kind of drugs. so again, you have this, his somewhat surprising decision to run again and recontest the seat means that the Liberal Party are kind of fighting both amongst themselves, against their former members and then trying to kind of fend off a One Nation and then a Labor challenge. So my overall story is here is that this One Nation vote I think is kind of fairly solid but it has been in certainly a number of seats, it’s been helped by actually some of the scandals and the disarray of the Liberal Party.

Ben: One thing I noticed when I compared what’s happening in each state is One Nation is doing relatively well everywhere, but it does depend on the context of where the other parties are relatively. So Victoria, where Labor is a lot weaker, it’s an old Labor government. the Liberal Party is getting hit on the right by One Nation but they’re also picking up ground on the centre from Labor. And so they’re in a stronger position. Now, that might change. If I was Labor in Victoria, I’d be saying, to the multicultural voters in eastern Melbourne, if you vote Liberal, they’re going to have to work with One Nation and that might undermine it. But they’re not facing the kind of collapse that the South Australian Liberals are.

The states where the Liberals seem to be most vulnerable are federal, again, where there’s a reasonably strong Labor government in New South Wales, where there is quite a strong young Labor government. Not polling anywhere near Malinauskas country, but there’s often been a lot of comparisons between Chris Minns and Peter Malinauskas, who I believe are the only remaining Labor right premiers in the country. And then Queensland, for example, which has always been One Nation’s best state, you’ve got a LNP government that’s in a reasonably strong position.

And so One Nation is still causing a threat, but you know, if anything, Labor’s a bit more worried. So I do think part of the story here, the reason why it’s hit the Liberals so hard is that they didn’t have anywhere to retreat to. You could imagine if they were doing five points better against Labor, you know, maybe Labor would have lost seats like Light and Elizabeth, and maybe the Liberal vote would have been high enough to withstand the One Nation challenge in some of their safer areas.

Now, something else I’ve also been wondering is, okay, so it looks like they’re going to get probably three seats in the upper house. It looks like they could get four seats in the lower house. I think that picture will get clearer as the week goes on. Say they have seven MPs in parliament. What do we think about how they’re going to behave and how they’re going to perform? Looking at the history of One Nation before.

Rob: Yeah, it’s a really good question. in one sense, we’ve got limited data to work off around that. I generally, in previous cases, it’s not gone well. One Nation famously, of course, many of the candidates have either then defected or left the party, sometimes out of personality differences or because of their own factional warfare. So it’s harder to get a sense about how cohesive they’re going to be as a kind of voting block.

I think on the one hand they will particularly find it relatively easy to rally around and try and block major pieces of Labor legislation that might come through because that’s where they’re going to be able to see. I mean, there’s also an argument, though, that perhaps they’re getting a little bit more savvy. mean, in one sense, someone like Cory Bernardi, for example, I even though he was something, I would say, of a lone wolf within the Liberal Party when he was the lead Senate candidate here in South Australia, he has some savvy. So he knows a little bit more about parliamentary process and about trying to keep a group together.

I think they have a history of dysfunction and disorganisational ill-discipline. But there’s also a sense that there are savvier heads here to say, can we get on a couple of key committees and then use this to elevate some of the culture politics that they might want to fight here in South Australia.

Ben: Yeah.

Rob: Overall I don’t think they seem quite coherent. I think a better analogy in one sense has been the case of Reform in the UK.

Reform has done very well, certainly in local government, but what’s actually happened in many Reform-led councils is that some Reform councillors have either left the party or even resigned from local council because they were elected on a sort of protest or grievance kind of politics against even the British Labour Party and the Conservative Party. But then the reality of governing kicks in and actually they seemed ill-equipped or have quite unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen. So for One Nation to have this sort of presence of perhaps you know six or seven MPs across both houses, ⁓ In South Australia this is uncharted territory. We don’t know.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And in one sense, this is a story that might be relevant to a bunch of states and South Australia will be the first test. So how they perform, I think, could be relevant to those polls that we’re seeing everywhere else. One example is New South Wales, because again, Mark Latham, who was elected at the head of the ticket, in 2019.

They didn’t get anyone elected to the lower house. It wasn’t like anything like what they have now, but they got two people elected to the New South Wales upper house and he was the head of that ticket. And then four years later, he recruited a sitting Labor MP whose seat had been abolished, Tania Mihailuk, to join the party as well. And he actually resigned from his seat in the upper house halfway into his term to run again. And then he got himself elected and then Mihailuk filled his vacancy as well.

So there were three members in the upper house, two of them are former Labor MPs. And I think often Latham was quite clever at recruiting candidates who weren’t white in Western Sydney seats, for example. I live in Parramatta and there’d be, a large Indian community here and One Nation was running Indian candidates. And I thought they were being quite clever at adjusting their message to appeal in the suburbs, which has always been Latham’s traditional stomping ground.

But they still weren’t able to work together and they weren’t able to work with Pauline Hanson. It kind of blew up a little bit over Latham. Y’know, Latham has always been a savvy political operator, but he’s also often been someone with a short fuse. And he said some horrible things about Alex Greenwich and Hanson didn’t back him up. But I think it was still interesting that Hanson and Latham weren’t really able to get on the same page.

She’s always found it very hard to allow other people to get the spotlight and to do things their way. And so I think my question now is like, as she’s getting a bit older, is she on the way out the door? Is she letting that new generation take over? And, you know, will Cory Bernardi also be able to like do things his way and lead that group? Or is like Hanson going to kind of get in the way and meddle a little bit in which case we could end up with something a bit similar to New South Wales where a bunch of these people get elected and then they’re like, well no, we didn’t get elected because of you, we’re gonna do our own thing.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, that’s the really good question, isn’t it? And I think, again, mean, I could see a bit of both really is that there is definitely sort of like a new generation or a new type of kind of One Nation presence coming through. Taking Sarah Game, for example, former One Nation, you know, she’s very young, young woman, very kind of particular conservative outlook on the world. And in one sense, sought to disassociate from some of perhaps the more ardent, perhaps some of the xenophobia and racism of that aspect of One Nation politics of Pauline Hanson.

There’s definitely a, if you indicate in the Victorian case, there’s going to be sort of this jostling and sort of realignment. But I do see this point where as well is that my reading particularly about One Nation in South Australia is actually, I mean Pauline Hanson does resonate with certain types of One Nation voters, but my reading is that this is a bigger phenomenon than Pauline Hanson. And it’s interesting how generally we describe it as One Nation rather than Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, not just because it’s easier to use the sort of two word moniker, because actually I think it’s a grouping there that encompasses a composite of different kind of voters and groupings.

And I think Pauline Hanson had traditionally appealed, I think, to a particular type of radical politics there, especially around the politics of race. There is a sort of socially conservative branch, and then there’s also a grievance branch as well. So the One Nation support base, you know, that in some seats is like 32, 35 percent.

is that there’s a composite and I think those tensions within that kind of grouping will kind of also play out I think within some of their elected members as well. But again I mean I I’d emphasise the point this is like in the South Australian context this is uncharted we’ve just never seen a Liberal Party that’s so weakened and we’ve never seen such a presence of another type of party both in the lower house and upper house. So even when, for example, the Democrats were very strong, they had a particular role as like a watchdog party. And this is quite a different phenomenon. we don’t quite know how it’s going to end. And think the general point is they’re probably going to be ill-disciplined and subject to some of that factional problems.

Ben: Well, maybe, but I mean, we talked about the quality of their candidates. I know in Ngadjuri, for example, which looks likely to be their first win, you know, the candidate there is a deputy mayor of a local council. I think some of the people they’re recruiting, and I think we’ll see this in other states too, are the types that could be in a different world, be prominent local conservative independents. And they wouldn’t have jumped on the One Nation train when they were polling 4% and they were kind of full of crackpots a bit.

Which is not to say they haven’t had candidate problems, of course, particularly the candidate for Adelaide. But again, Adelaide isn’t the kind of seat where they were ever going to have a chance of winning. But I think in those regional seats, they have been able to bring in like a higher caliber and maybe some people who will be able to do their job a bit more effectively.

Rob: Yes.

And I think some of those candidates actually look like Nationals style candidates, to be honest. And of course, South Australia, we’ve never really had a significant Nationals presence. Although of course, the last time we did during the Rann government, there was a Nationals MP, Karlene Maywald, who was a minister within the Labor government.

The Nationals, in one sense, I just reinforce that’s a really good point, Ben, is that I think many of those candidates, certainly in the regional rural areas, were kind of types of candidates you might expect to join a Nationals party or a very conservative part of the Liberal Party, but they’ve come through to One Nation and I think then have a sort of local kind of cache and legitimacy that perhaps, rather than just a young person who wants to spark off about particular issues, wants to reach out to the electorate. So I think that’s probably in one sense why they’re probably reaching a little deeper there.

Ben: The position of One Nation compared to the Liberal Party or the Coalition has shifted since their first surge of support in the late 90s and early 2000s. Back then, you know, there wasn’t a very large minor party vote. They were pretty much it in terms of right wing minor parties, but also the, you know, okay, so they did get some preferences at the 1998 Queensland election and the Coalition kind of went, oh, that didn’t go well for us. And in the 1998 federal election, famously, John Howard decided to put them last on their how to vote cards. They didn’t get preferences from the Coalition. They only got one senator elected. They probably would have gotten a bunch of senators elected if they got Coalition preferences, but they didn’t.

\Whereas in the last few years, as One Nation has come back,

They were crucial Senate votes for the Morrison government in the late 2010s, which they never really were that important for the Howard government. They only got one senator elected and he didn’t stick around in the party very long. They did a preference deal in 2025. So I think we’re both seeing the parties showing a little bit more willingness to each other, but also their voters seeing themselves as being kind of part of a right-wing bloc in the same way that I think Labor and the Greens are part of a left-wing bloc, as much as sometimes the politicians don’t want them to be.

And so, you know, I think some people imagined before this election, the Liberal Party won’t preference One Nation. And I was like, no, they absolutely will. And then when it became a controversy during the campaign, it was the Liberal Party being concerned that people would be misled into thinking they weren’t preferencing One Nation. That was their message was no, no, no, no, no, we are preferencing One Nation over Labor. And in a few seats, that may well end up helping One Nation win the seat. And so, you know, I do wonder if as our party system fragments, do we end up a little bit more with two blocs? And so sometimes we’re talking about how we can’t really draw a real pendulum based on these results.

But in one sense, almost every seat is Labor versus someone right wing. And you might end up with a pendulum that’s like, in some places, the local right wing party is the Liberal Party. In some places, the local right wing party is One Nation. They both exist, but they don’t both get to a winning position. And in the same way that on the left, sometimes in some areas, the teal has become the main progressive alternative. And then the Greens and Labor are competing over who gets to be in that role in other places. I could see something like that happening. You know, if say the Labor vote was five percent lower and that vote split between One Nation and Liberals, I think we could see a bunch of.

Well, One Nation would be coming into Labor’s presence in, know, Whyalla and the northern suburbs of Adelaide and the southern suburbs of Adelaide, while the Liberal Party would be doing better in the middle of Adelaide. And I think we could see this being a little bit of an evolution in that direction.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things I’d pick up on there. One, in one sense, a lot of the attention is where One Nation have been picking up seats at the expense of the Liberal Party. But I mean, it’s interesting, like the seat of Elizabeth, you know, just north of Adelaide, you know, traditionally solid Labor heartland. The One Nation vote there is very high and they’re making inroads there, picking off maybe what we see is like the economically excluded from, mainstream kind of Adelaide metropolitan areas.

So they’re interesting. The point about preferencing and where the major parties position themselves around One Nation and a populist radical right party is really interesting and is changing. So in Europe, of course, for quite a long time, there was the notion of a cordon sanitaire where there was just a fundamental refusal to countenance going into coalition with or accepting an alliance agreement with the radical right populist party. And that, over time, has softened in many countries like Austria. And there’s been debates in places like Sweden and also Germany. So that also seems to be playing out here a little bit, is that there seems to be a realignment.

I thought from my perspective, the most interesting exchange that took place on our election night on the ABC coverage was this was the kind of exchange between Nick McBride in MacKillop for a conservative MP and Anne Ruston, the moderate Liberal senator. And McBride made the point pointedly, he said the Liberals have far more in common with One Nation than they do with Labor. And Anne Ruston fundamentally disagreed with that and said we have to reassert our liberal values to win back an office.

And I think there’s a sort of strategic dilemma for the Liberal Party here about what they do. Now this election they did preference One Nation and in one sense I think that could backfire for them in a couple of the seats because Liberal preferences perhaps help that One Nation surge. But the question is I’m not sure there’s a fixed view within the centre-right side of politics in particular about what to do and again there’s this sort of.

The other aspect of that is how do you criticise One Nation for not having policies, for not having costings, but not demonise One Nation voters because that’s the sort of the double edged sword, it’s similar to the Democrats and the Trump voters. How do you critique one but sort of try and find angles to get in there? And again, what strikes me, particularly on the Liberal side of politics, it’s certainly not clear how coherent their response is to dealing with that kind of populist kind of threat.

And that exchange on election night to me was fascinating because this has sort of played out for some time now, certainly since John Howard left office in the Liberal Party, is what do you do with the moderate and the conservative wings? How do you make this so-called broad church work well? And in South Australia, over the last 10, 15 years, that really has been highly dysfunctional, which is one of the reasons why it had such a dreadful result on election night.

Ben: To compare to those European countries, particularly places that use proportional representation, where I think there’s a case that under a certain kind of model, the moderates and the conservatives and the liberal party would be in separate parties, not always, but, you know, possible. And the nature of our system has pushed them to be in the same party.

One Nation, you know, a party like that might have been more successful earlier under a PR system, but they’re now starting to get to the point where they can be successful without it. And, you know, if their vote was a little bit higher, you would imagine they would start to win a lot of seats, possibly more than their share. But I do wonder if the nature of the preferential system kind of forces these parties to build these alliances when they might be more comfortable going it alone and then coming to whatever arrangement they need to after the election.

Rob: Yeah, that’s really good point. Like, one sense, how much of this is about electoral responses? I suppose the way I kind of think it’s less around that is around the leadership of One Nation. Because much more successful radical rights and populist leaders, I think in one sense have managed to mainstream and detoxify their kind of brand in particular.

The classic step away from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Marine Le Pen was really trying to really shift away, you know, from in that sense, the party had kind of clear Nazi roots. And so they’ve really come on a long, long journey and Le Pen has a reasonable chance of picking up the French presidency. So that journey of kind of normalisation, astute leadership, picks this up. And I think what has hamstrung actually One Nation in terms of being the electoral threat is actually a rather narrow and at times dysfunctional leadership under Pauline Hanson.

So I remember reading a very good submission to one of the JSCEM reports by a couple of colleagues, making this point that actually we should probably take the populist or radical right kind of threat more seriously because under better leadership then maybe they would be able to strategically kind of make a bigger imprint. But I think the point is right is, does the electoral system, has it kind of working against it? mean, the other bigger picture here is that Australia, the question is why is Australia somewhat lagged behind if lagging is the right word between countries where this kind of a hard right group has really taken hold?

And there’d been a sense that compulsory voting combined with preferential voting has somehow muted the kind of One Nation effect. But that seems to be unwinding slightly now, is that we seem to be kind of shifting. And I just can’t say anything more or less than that it’s now looking much more fluid and much more fragmented.

Ben: Just before we go, just going through the upper house, Labor has four seats so far. One Nation almost certainly has three. Liberals have two and there’s one Green that leaves one seat undecided. Right now there’s nine Labor and two Greens when you include the members elected the last election because they serve two terms. That’s half the chamber. In the race for the final seat, Labor is in the lead. The other parties that could be a factor are Legalise Cannabis and Family First.

So we’ll be keeping an eye on that, maybe do some analysis around preference flows. If Labor wins that, that will give Labor and the Greens a clear majority. They don’t have a lot of other options in terms of upper house members. I’m sure Labor would like alternatives they could work with. They’ve got Sarah Game, the former One Nation member, and then they have the Liberals and One Nation. So probably it’ll be a situation where the Labor government, will have a choice of Liberal, One Nation or Greens to pass legislation in the upper house.

Rob: I think the Labor Party were probably hoping for a slightly clearer or easier kind of run than they’ve got. At the last election of course they were somewhat gifted in Terry Stephens who was the Liberal who decided to take the Speaker role which actually in one sense gifted them a vote but for this election I think they’ve just about got that smooth majority in the upper house sort of progressive majority but it’s probably got a lot tighter than they probably envisage.

Ben: Yeah.

Okay, so that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you, Rob, for joining me.

Rob: Absolute pleasure. Thanks Ben.

Ben: I’ll be tracking the results of the South Australian election over the next few weeks. We’ll be getting preference counts in. We’ll be getting some of these close seats will be getting resolved over coming days. And there’ll be a lot to analyse about how preferences are flowing and what implications that has just for not just for South Australian politics, but also for politics around Australia. So please keep an eye out. The podcast will be taking a bit of a break now, but there’ll be a lot happening on the Tally Room. After the South Australian election. I’ll be covering the Newcastle Lord Mayoral by-election in April.

There’ll be a Nepean by-election in Victoria in May and the Tasmanian Upper House elections also in May on the same night. And then we’ll be back with another election night live stream for the Farrer by-election on May 9. So keep an eye out for that. The live stream we did on election night was excellent. Lots of people tuned in. Rob, you were there too. Hope you had a good time. And people liked it. So we’re going to do it again for Farrer on May 9.

You can find this podcast on your podcast app of choice. If you like the show, please consider rating or viewing us on iTunes. You can follow me on bluesky at www.benraue.com. You can now also follow The Tally Room on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at @thetallyroom. This podcast is made possible thanks to the generous support of our donors on Patreon. Sign up at patreon.com/tallyroom. Ad free versions of this podcast are now available for Patreon subscribers. And if you sign up for $8.80 or more per month, you can join our Discord, where we’re having great conversations about elections.

If you are a Tally Room member, can also access election guides for Victoria, NSW and the next Federal Election. Information about this podcast is available at tallyroom.com.au and you can email questions or feedback to podcast@tallyroom.com.au. Thanks to Chris Dubrow for writing the music here in this episode. Once again, thanks for listening.

By this morning, we have a fairly good sense of what is going on, but there is still quite a bit that is unclear. Some pre-polls have reported, but others are yet to report, which could shift some seats. This post is based on early on Sunday morning – some of these statistics will change as the pre-poll and postal votes are added.

In this post I’m going to run through some summary statistics about what happened last night, along with some maps, and then run through the seats where is serious uncertainty about who has won.

This result was truly disastrous for the Liberal Party. By my count, the Liberal Party has won four seats and is leading in a fifth. That would be less than a third of the seats they won in 2022.

The party failed to crack 10% of the vote in 15 seats (almost a third of the state).

There were two seats where the Liberal candidate came fifth, and seventeen others where they came fourth. The party only reached the top two in seventeen seats.

Labor topped the primary vote in 35 seats, and I also have them currently likely to win 35 seats. One Nation was first in seven seats, but right now it looks like they are more likely to end up on about 3-4 seats. So I suspect preferential voting will be shown to have a slightly negative effect on the party.

This first map shows the primary vote for the four biggest parties across the state.

The Labor vote was unsurprisingly highest across Adelaide, while the Liberal vote in northern and southern Adelaide hit extreme lows. As expected, the One Nation vote was highest across regional South Australia, and then encroached into the outer suburbs of Adelaide. Central Adelaide still looks a bit more like a conventional Labor-Liberal contest.

This next map shows the primary vote swings for Labor, Liberal and Greens. I haven’t bothered with One Nation since there were many seats they didn’t run in last time – safe to say they got big swings everywhere that is calculable.

Labor had slight backwards swings across most seats, but did slightly increase their vote in most seats in the central third of Adelaide.

The Liberal Party suffered swings in every single seat. The biggest swings are shown in pale colours – they were in regional South Australia and on the eastern side of Adelaide.

We didn’t get much useful preference data last night, but there is still a lot of interesting information in who is in the top two in each seat. By my reckoning, these are the number of seats with a given 2CP pairing:

• ALP vs ON – 18
• ALP vs LIB – 9
• LIB vs ON – 4
• ON vs IND – 2
• Unknown – 14

That is 14 seats where we can’t say who is in the 2CP for now. Some of those may well end up being classic Labor-Liberal contests, but it’s still remarkable that just nine seats fit that conventional classic seat mould.

Of those unknown seats, it includes nine seats where Labor has won but we don’t know who will come second. In those seats, it is mostly of academic interest who comes in the top two. But in the other five, it will matter a lot. I will get to that further down.

This map shows which of these 2CP pairings applies in each seat. You can also toggle to see the (likely) winner in each seat. Where the result isn’t called, the likely winner is in a lighter shade.

The classic Labor-Liberal contest is now solely present in the central third of Adelaide, although even here there is a number of seats that may not fit that category. In West Torrens, for example, the Liberals have come fourth and the Greens and One Nation are in a close race for second, with Labor way out in front.

Labor-One Nation contests dominate northern and southern Adelaide, plus Hammond and Giles. The Liberal vote is so depleted in many of these seats that there is no prospect of them making the final count.

The Liberal-One Nation and One Nation-Independent contests are all in deep regional South Australia.

And then the seats where we don’t know the 2CP – the nine where Labor has won are all in central Adelaide. These are seats where Labor has a clear lead, but the Liberal Party may fall behind the Greens, One Nation or both. The five where the result is unclear all lie in a band in regional South Australia immediately to the east of Adelaide.

So what seats are still in play?

By my reckoning, these are the seat counts by party:

• Labor – 30 + 5 leading
• Liberal – 4 + 1 leading
• One Nation – 3 leading
• Independent – 4 leading

This is not precisely the same as the ABC or Poll Bludger but not far off.

That leaves 13 seats that are uncalled. They fall into three types. There is just one seat where we have a clear 2CP count that is simply too close. There are another seven seats where we need the ECSA to conduct a different 2CP count, but it’s clear who the top two are. There are then five seats where we would need a 3CP or even a 4CP to clear things up, and probably will need to wait for a full distribution.

In Morphett, Labor is on 55% of the 2PP, but we don’t yet have the pre-poll vote, so it’s possible the Liberal Party could catch up.

There are four seats where Labor and One Nation are in the top two and we have no 2CP count:

• Elizabeth
• Hammond
• Light
• Mawson

The ABC and Poll Bludger have called Elizabeth and Mawson for Labor and they are probably right. On my system I have them as “likely” rather than “leading”. One Nation are favourites in Hammond and Labor in Light, but we really could do with real preference data.

We need an Independent vs One Nation preference count in Stuart and Mount Gambier. The independent is the favourite in both. Geoff Brock is a strong favourite in Stuart. But I’d like to see a preference count.

And we need a Liberal vs One Nation preference count in Narungga. Poll Bludger has called this seat for One Nation, and ABC has Liberal ahead. I just don’t think we have enough data to call it either way.

Then we get to the five most complex seats.

In Finniss and MacKillop, we need a 3CP between Liberal, Independent and One Nation. In MacKillop, One Nation is well out in front and are the favourite, but Labor and the independent could feasibly overtake the Liberal. In Finniss, there is a close race for first between Liberal and One Nation, but independent Lou Nicholson isn’t far behind and should benefit from Labor preferences.

In Heysen, we need a 3CP between Labor, Liberal and Green. This seat resembles seats like Ryan, Macnamara and Prahran. If the Greens can get into the top two they will likely win narrowly, but right now they’re behind Labor, who are winning narrowly.

In Ngadjuri, we need a One Nation, Labor and Liberal preference count. The primary vote has a close three-way split with One Nation leading. If Labor falls into third, the Liberal could win. I would expect One Nation to win if the Liberal falls into third.

And finally Kavel is still the hardest to pick. I don’t think a 3CP would solve this seat. We are still waiting for the pre-poll, but right now Labor is leading, an independent is second with One Nation and Liberal not far behind. The independent is the favourite if he can stay in the top two.

That is enough for now – I will probably put up some new posts early next week when we have more complete numbers and hopefully some fresh preference counts. And when we have the final preference counts, there will be a lot of fresh data to analyse which should hopefully help in future elections.

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