Nominations were declared yesterday afternoon for South Australia’s 47 House of Assembly seats as well as the Legislative Council contest.
There was a very large increase in candidates compared to the last election, and well in excess of the previous record.
388 candidates have nominated for the House of Assembly. This is a big increase on the 240 who ran in 2022. The previous record was 302 candidates in 2002, so that record has been well and truly beaten. There are 8.3 candidates per seat on average.
South Australia has never had more than nine candidates run for one seat. Indeed there has only been six cases ever of a nine-candidate ballot. This year, there are thirteen seats with nine candidates, and six seats with more. Hammond and Port Adelaide have the most candidates.
The surge in candidate numbers has been driven by a number of parties emerging and running large numbers of candidates after not previously running, and by One Nation running in every seat.
One Nation ran in 19 seats in 2022, but in 47 seats this year. The Labor, Greens and Liberal parties all ran full tickets, as did the Australian Family Party. Family First is running 35 (about the same as last time), while Legalise Cannabis, Animal Justice, Fair Go, Real Change and United Voice are all running 12-22 candidates. Those numbers add up.
Interestingly the upper house ballot paper is slightly smaller, with 17 groups running this time, compared to 19 groups and an ungrouped candidate in 2022.
There has only been a slight increase in parties running for the lower house, from eleven to thirteen. In a trend we have also seen at federal elections, candidate numbers are increasing not because of a surge in parties, but because more of those minor parties are running large numbers of candidates.
Antony Green’s blog post has very helpful historic data for comparison.
I have now updated my candidate lists for my election guide seat profiles, which you can read here. I have made an effort to find candidate profiles for candidates where possible but a lot of these candidates have nominated with little to no news about them beforehand. For example, there appears to be no candidate profiles on the party website for the Family Party, Family First or Legalise Cannabis. In line with my candidate information policy, I will not be updating these guides if profiles appear later.
Looks like classic preference harvesting in full flight. I wonder how many of the minor party candidates are a genuine presence campaigning on the ground in their electorate?