Podcast #165 – Seats to watch on SA election night

Ben was joined by Josh Sunman from Flinders University to run through the seats that could be in play on election night and how preference distributions could become much more complex amidst a One Nation surge.

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Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue.

Polls show enormous upheaval in recent months as One Nation has overtaken the Liberal Party in every poll this year. For today’s podcast we’re going to look at the races that may be in play and what to watch for on election night. My guest today is Josh Sunman. Josh is an Associate Lecturer in Government at Flinders University. Hello Josh.

Josh: Hi Ben, great to be with you.

Ben: So, Labor won 27 seats at the last state election, with the Liberal Party reduced to just 16 seats, along with 4 independents. The Liberal Party has since lost 2 more seats to Labor at by-elections. The Liberal Party now seems to be getting squeezed on two sides, from Labor in the conventional marginal seats, and from One Nation elsewhere. Josh, let’s start with the classic contest between Labor and Liberal. Which seats do think we should be watching on the night?

Josh: Yeah, so it’s pretty clear that the contest this time is going to be in Liberal marginal seats in that traditional Labor-Liberal contest, not the seats that Labor won off the Liberal Party to form government this time. So at the moment, the campaign seems to be centered around in kind of metropolitan Adelaide, Morialta, which is in inner northeast suburbs, Colton, which is beachside suburbs in the west, Morphett, which is the next seat down from Colton, as well as, you know,

inner hills seat of Heysen. So these seats are where we see close two party preferred margins between Labor and Liberal. And this is where we’re seeing Labor try and take more territory. Interestingly, we’re not seeing campaigning really heavily in the classic marginal constituencies of Adelaide, Elder, Newland, where elections are typically won and lost. This doesn’t seem to be a battle for that. This seems to be a battle for how much Labor can expand its margin.

Ben: I don’t think those seats have stopped mattering in terms of being the seats that decide elections. I think it just shows that Labor is not in a position where they’re having to defend the seats that would tip them out of government. Those seats, they’re so comfortable that they’re moving up the pendulum basically, that they’re tackling areas that have been safer for the Liberal Party. So I think this does reflect that before we get into the whole One Nation angle as a Labor-Liberal contest. Labor kind of has a comfortable majority and is like kind of rampaging deeper into Liberal terrain as we’ve seen in some recent Western Australian elections.

Josh: Yeah, I would say that’s absolutely right. This isn’t about reordering the pendulum. It’s more about the pendulum has now expanded for Labor because their fortunes are riding high. You would expect a reversion in the future as the government’s popularity kind of wanes. But at the moment, the government’s trying to set itself up for multiple terms. And they see a real opportunity to do this by delving into what has traditionally been Liberal heartland.

Ben: So when you look at a electoral map of South Australia, you see that Labor is very dominant in Adelaide, and particularly in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and the southern suburbs. And it does make it pretty clear that pretty much every remaining Liberal seat in Adelaide is kind of in a cluster around the centre of Adelaide, not the seat of Adelaide itself, but in that kind of middle band, middle third of the city.

But even there, in those marginal seats, there’s a poll today from Fox and Hedgehog that has a regional breakdown of the vote in South Australia. I don’t think One Nation is going to be in position to win any seats, but it does look like even in that area One Nation is polling about 15%. So you’d expect them to do quite well to chip into that Liberal vote.

Josh: And I think what we’re going to see, which may be decisive in some of these inner city seats, like Unley, Hartley, even perhaps the safe seat of Bragg, we could see preference leakage be a real kind of factor here. Once the Liberals lose those votes to One Nation on primary, they’re not necessarily going to come back.

Ben: There’s also a large independent bench in South Australia. We’ve got a number of independents. It’s a little bit confusing because ⁓ some of them have become independents during this term. Some of them are facing criminal issues that are going to affect their campaign, but then there’s other ones that are just kind of your typical independent. And then there’s also a bunch of new independents running in areas where independents have sometimes done well in the past who, particularly if the Liberal Party is in a weak position, could be the ones to benefit from that.

Josh: Yeah, I think we can kind of break these into two categories. I’ll start off with the incumbents. So in incumbent terms, we have Jeff Brock in the seat of Stuart, which is Port Pirie in the far north. He knocked off the deputy premier last time when they got drawn together in a redistribution. I think there’s no expectation that he’s under any serious threat. Although on paper, it is the kind of seat where One Nation would tend to do well.

We also have the seat of MacKillop where you mentioned criminal issues. Nick McBride, the incumbent MP is facing kind of domestic violence charges. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in that seat. You could foresee a very even race between One Nation, the independent and Liberal on first preferences. And what happens there really depends on finishing order. There’s also the seat of Narungga which takes in the Yorke Peninsula.

Fraser Ellis was previously a Liberal in the last term in government, then went to the crossbench, won again on the crossbench, is likely, I think, to hold on. But One Nation are putting in some serious effort there. There have been Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce visits to the electorate. So there is a sense that they are campaigning quite hard there. The other kind of independent seat we have where independents are a real factor is Mount Gambier.

Troy Bell, of course, has left the seat vacant after being convicted of fraud. One of his staffers, Fatchen, is apparently, according to all the kind of gossip on the ground, in the box seat there. But it’s interesting to see that Mount Gambier, being a regional centre of 20,000 or so population, Labor have been pouring some buckets of money in there throughout the campaign. So it’s been quite interesting to watch and it’ll be interesting to see finishing orders there as well.

Ben: And then there’s also Dan Cregan in Kavel.

Josh: Yes, Kavel my home seat, traditionally kind of rural on Adelaide’s fringes. Not the case anymore. If for those of you listening who may be more familiar with Melbourne than Adelaide, think places like Melton and Bacchus Marsh and that’s Kavel. The main centre of Mount Barker there has undergone massive growth. There’s been massive infrastructure problems, but the Labor government has come in and is building a new hospital, et cetera. That one is going to be an interesting race. I think probably the government win it. And the reason I say that is because Rebekha Sharkie’s votes in kind of the overlapping federal seat of Mayo have been dwindling a bit in Mount Barker. I kind of take the view that if Rebekha Sharkie gets about 30% in Mount Barker, an independent who is running to replace an independent probably isn’t going to do as well.

Ben: There’s a long history of when independents want to hand over to someone new. And sometimes it works, it often only works for one term. I’m thinking of people like Rob Oakeshott in Port Macquarie, for example. But it’s funny because there’s often areas that often they are sympathetic to independents. Mount Gambier is an example of that, you know, and I think there’s clearly something about Mayo. And so, you know, Kavel also obviously has that overlap, but in this moment of a Labor surge, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Josh: I think it’s interesting to have a look at the changing demographics. So if we take Mayo, the two major kind of state electorates which fit into it are Kavel and Finniss. They’re very different. Kavel has kind of rapidly urbanised and now resembles an outer suburb, more than a regional community. Whereas Finniss, where Lou Nicholson is running for the second time as an independent, after almost winning on the two-party preferred last time, I think that’s where we might see an independent candidate get up over David Basham this time.

Ben: I mean these kind of independents that I wouldn’t want to describe them necessarily as Teals, but they often end up taking the role of the progressive alternative to the Liberal Party, and this could be a good election for them as long as the Labor surge doesn’t, overtake them.

Josh: Yes. I think Lou Nicholson in Finniss is a clear case of that. In fact, she’s actually had meetings with Premier Malinauskas and stuff. Labor by all accounts are kind of running dead in that electorate. The other similar independent would be Airlie Keen in the seat of Hammond. She ran last time, put up a respectable third, winning votes in the high teens, is running again. I suspect this time though, as you mentioned, she falls victim to the Labor, but also perhaps the One Nation surge.

I suspect with Labor and One Nation seriously contesting Hammond, which is the next kind of seat further out from Adelaide taking in Murray Bridge and some farming communities, I suspect she’s going to have a really tough time there.

Ben: What about Heysen? That’s also in Mayo.

Josh: Yeah, Heysen’s really interesting. Heysen and Kavel, you would both say are the hills seats. Whereas Kavel is becoming kind of more out of suburban in character, Heysen has always been kind of more affluent, traditional liberal, leafy kind of areas. At the moment, it’s on a really tight two party preferred margin between Liberal and Labor, to the extent that you would expect it to fall over in a wave election like this.

The incumbent is Deputy Liberal Leader Josh Teague. He’s been in the seat now since 2014. You would expect him to have a reasonable local profile, but we’re also seeing a kind of massive campaign from the Greens in Heysen. That’s the seat where they’re pouring in all of their resources. Traditionally, they’ve done quite well there in the past, particularly when Labor was less competitive. We’ve also seen in the past quite strong SA Best votes in Heysen as well.

But I suspect this time with what we’re seeing in the vote distribution patterns, Heysen is probably, I think, going to fall to the Labor Party, more likely than the Greens, but the Greens still have a shot. This one could be, particularly with One Nation in the race, a very interesting 3CP count as to who comes first, second and third out of Labor, Greens and Josh Teague. I suspect Josh Teague probably finishes in the final two because of One Nation preferences but it’s gonna be a bit messy, I think.

Ben: The Greens in South Australia have never come particularly close to winning a lower house seat. I mean they did hold one for a couple of years when there was a defection from Labor but they’ve never won a seat. But they’re in this funny position now where their vote is high enough to comfortably win one seat in the upper house but they’re still, unless they have a really good election, quite a long way away from winning a second because the quota is quite substantial. And so I would imagine if you were them, you’d look around and go, where do we put our effort? And it does sound like Heysen is the place. But you know, again, I draw the comparison to the last Western Australian state election and the one before that.

When WA Labor was at their peak, it wasn’t a great time for the Greens. And the South Australian Greens are polling pretty respectably right now, but I think in Heysen, for example, the problem might be that the way they win that seat is by getting ahead of Labor. And if both them and Labor are going up, then maybe Labor is the one that ends up winning.

Josh: Yeah, I suspect, you know, it’s quite likely that Labor would benefit from any conservative preferences that are kind of sitting out there. And I think too, there were also two other good targets potentially for the Greens in Dunstan and Unley. In fact, in Unley last time, Greens got 20% of the primary vote, Labor got 30. So you would expect that to be a kind of place where they could do well.

Josh: But they do run into the problem here where all of the inner city seats are really competitive on a two party basis. It’s not like in inner city Melbourne and Sydney where Labor are the dominant party and the Liberals are nowhere to be seen. In inner Adelaide, the Liberals are really competitive and this has been traditionally where government has been won or lost. So it’s really hard for the Greens to break through.

Ben: Although I guess in those kinds of seats, sometimes that can be a little bit easier for the Greens if they can push Labor into third, right? I think that is part of the reason why they did win all those seats in Brisbane in 2022 and they didn’t win seats in Sydney not particularly in Melbourne.

And part of the reason they lost them in 2025 and the reason why there’s a Greens member in Ryan and not Griffith is that their kind of ideal scenario is when the Labor vote is weak enough to fall into third, which again is why this election probably is going to be one that’s not well suited to them because, you know, even if a seat in a more competitive environment could end up as a Liberal versus Greens contest that the Greens would then win, it could end up instead as a Labor vs Greens contest and then the Liberal preferences and presumably the One Nation preferences help Labor out.

Josh: No, I would agree with that. And I think, you know, the Greens should measure their success or otherwise in this election is, do they get their vote up statewide? If they do, I think they should count it as a massive success.

Ben: Okay, let’s talk about One Nation. They’re the big story. I think frankly, it’s part of the reason that people outside South Australia are interested in this election. Otherwise it would be, you know, Labor wins a second term in a landslide big whoop. It is effectively the first proper electoral test of One Nation since they’ve had their surge. What sort of seats do you think are the ones where you’ll be most interested in seeing how One Nation goes?

Josh: Yeah, so there’s kind of three categories here. Number one, there is only one, to my kind of count, pure One Nation-Liberal contest in a deeply rural seat. And that’s the seat of Chaffey out in the Riverland, where you have an incumbent Liberal versus One Nation with no kind of prominent independents in the mix. That’s going to be like your one kind of pure One Nation-Liberal contest. I think it’s also important context for kind of interstate listeners.

South Australia doesn’t have a National Party or rather, it has a National Party that runs a couple of candidates who get somewhere between 2 and 5 % of the vote. It doesn’t have an entrenched national party to represent rural interests. So the Liberal Party in South Australia is more rural than its kind of interstate counterparts and has had to take on that kind of role. So when we talk about competition in deep rural seats, it is a Liberal-One Nation and in a lot of cases, independent contest.

So I’m really watching the seat of Chaffey for that kind of pure contest. There are going to be a lot of messy contests in places such as Flinders, which takes in the entirety of the Eyre Peninsula almost, Narungga, which is the Yorke Peninsula and surrounds, MacKillop, which is all of the southeast part of South Australia that’s not Mount Gambier. It’s going to be really interesting to see what finishing orders and preference distributions are. I would say there’s a pretty even chance in each of those seats between the independents and One Nation, with a slightly less of a chance for the Liberals coming through. The other kind of seat we might be able look to is where Labor might be challenged. So, you know, Labor is dominant, as you said, in the northern and southern metropolitan areas. I would expect One Nation to outpoll the Liberals in most of those seats. That’s something we saw in 2018 with SA Best. The Liberals and SA Best were neck and neck in most of those seats.

And if SA Best polled 14%, One Nation, the polls are suggesting is somewhere around 20%, you would expect them to outpoll the liberals in those seats. Particularly since the liberals were very late in announcing candidates in the Northern suburbs in particular, they really struggled with candidate recruitment. So they’ve not been on the ground long at all. So I think on a primary vote of about 40, Labor will be okay in those kind of fortress seats. But if that vote were to slip into the mid-30s, you would really see One Nation start to apply pressure in places like Light, which takes in Gawler and Munno Para and Taylor, which takes in Parafield Gardens and Angle Vale, et cetera.

Ben: Now, let’s talk a bit more about the complications, the three candidate preferred. The whole thing is it’s very hard to predict. But I do think we’re going to see a lot of this dynamic we’ve been seeing in federal elections recently. But this is a perfect storm for this that, you know, when there are two clear lead candidates, things are simple. Even if votes are cast for other people, we have a good system to deal with that. You know, we have two candidate preferred counts.

We do the primary vote and then we move straight on to the two candidate preferred. First of all, there’s going to be a lot of seats where the Electoral Commission will basically be guessing about who makes that two candidate preferred. And in some of those guesses, they’ll be right and some they’ll be wrong. You know, I’ve seen examples in the recent past where commissions have traditionally been very conservative. They’ve tended to go, we’re just going to stick with who ran last time. We can’t be criticised for that.

But then again, y’know, 2022 with the Teals, the federal Electoral Commission was quite willing to put them in the 2CP and that turned out to be the right choice. if the first two are clear on election night, even if it’s wrong, again, it’s relatively simple then for the next day, or Monday or something, to then do the correct 2CP and then we’re all good.

You know, and for all those kinds of seats, once that’s done, the only thing that matters is if it’s super duper close, then you’ve got a count, but it’s not that bad. But I think we will see an increasing number of seats where even on the end of election night, we don’t know who the correct top two should be. You know, I don’t think the Electoral Commission of South Australia has ever done a 3CP count.

When the full distribution of preferences is counted in every seat, they calculate the three candidate preferred and the four candidate preferred and the five candidate preferred for every single seat. But they don’t usually do it until all the votes have come in. But we’ve started to see the Australian Electoral Commission in 2022 and then even more so in 2025, when there are three leading candidates picking the top three.

and doing a count between them, which often clarifies who makes the top two and then clarifies who wins. And they don’t have to wait for the full count to do that. I’ve never heard of South Australia doing that as state election. ⁓ Maybe they will. But it is hard as an electoral commission to develop these new procedures on the go. But I think we will definitely see seats where we will have wished they’ve done that.

And you know what, like, we had the seat of Calwell in 2025 where we didn’t even know who the top three were and thus we had to wait for the full distribution later on in the count. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a seat like that, right? Because we’ve got Liberals and One Nation competitive with each other. But like you said, there’s some of these seats with rural independents where you could see four candidates all kind of quite even.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. I say something like Mount Gambier. You could quite easily see an independent, One Nation, Liberal and Labor claiming 20 % each. And what happens from there is kind of who knows, right? I think to the last election in 2022 had one of these really complicated counts. And that would have been the seat of Waite in Adelaide, which ended up now is like a Labor held traditionally Liberal seat on a margin of about 3%.

But that count had Labor, Liberal, an incumbent conservative independent who had been kicked out of the Liberal Party, a local mayor who was running as a more progressive Independent. And no one really knew what was going to happen there until kind of the final distribution of preferences occurred and then Labor ended up winning. So now the Commission’s faced with not just one seat like that, but I suspect probably seven or eight, foreseeably where we could see these things. The rural seats are going to get quite messy, I think.

Ben: You sometimes get people in the comments on my blog who will be like, well, they should know which seats these are and they should do the 3CP count to start with. But the thing is, we often don’t know which seats this is going to be. You know, we only have so much information. We don’t have a lot of history about where the One Nation vote is surging the most to base it on. We have a rough guide.

We don’t know which of these independents will be so popular that they will get all the votes that would have otherwise gone to One Nation and which of them will prove to not be able to withstand that wave. And so I think the system they have is still a good start. I think doing a two candidate preferred count on election night is the best option. I just think they probably do need to have a 3CP option ready to go for a handful of seats if they need to on the Monday or the Tuesday. you know, I’m sure ECSA is doing a fine job, but I would say like,

The Australian Electoral Commission before the last federal election did a really good job both before the election and after the election of doing media briefings for the election analysts. And so some of us were independent analysts and people from the large media companies and all of that where they would go through the results counting process. And then we were able to help them by communicating that to the public.

So I would say, you know, if anyone from ECSA is listening to this podcast, you know, like bring us in, let us know what you’re doing so that we can then communicate that to our readers and people can then understand what’s gonna be happening.

Josh: Something also that’s a bit weird in the South Australian context moving forward, not so much for election night, is the redistributions we conduct every four years. ECSA and the Boundaries Commission incorporate the pendulum into how they distribute seats. And it’ll be interesting to see how they handle that now in a situation where we suspect that two candidate preferred is not going to give us a meaningful measure at all.

Ben: And so the history of that is that this was actually written into the South Australian Constitution, what we called the Fairness Clause that was designed to ensure that whichever party won a majority of the two-party preferred would win a majority of seats. But it was always backward-looking, right? Because it looked back at the last election and it designed a pendulum that would have produced that result at the last election.

And it never really worked great. It relied on arbitrary classifications of independents and minor parties to either be Labor or Liberal, which they’re not. And eventually that clause has been repealed. But what has been interesting is the Boundaries Commission since then has still taken it into account. They’ve still done the calculations which no other commission tries to calculate partisan impact, at least at that point in the process.

The AEC usually does it later, but no other commission does that work for you as an analyst, otherwise you usually have to do it yourself and they do it themselves because they are interested in it and they report on it. But I would have to say if this result looks anything like what we think it will, they’re gonna have to give up. it’s not sustainable.

Josh: I would agree with that. Look, I’m someone who kind of my first ever piece of academic work was actually saying why I hate the fairness clause and how it’s arbitrary. This doesn’t work in the system we have. So I’ll be more than happy to see it go on kind of a personal level. But yeah, it presents the commission with real kind of problems. I guess the other kind of commission side thing to note as well is new legislation was passed last year, which now allows the commission, thank God, to count pre-polls on the night.

Because until this election, South Australia had previously had to wait until the next day to start counting pre-polls. And I’m assuming there’ll be a massive amount of pre-polls cast. We were already seeing people cast votes. 70,000, I think, were cast in the first day of pre-poll. So we’re absolutely going to see a massive pre-poll be determinative to the result, particularly in a lot of these tricky seats.

Ben: Mm-hmm, good point. One more thing on redistribution as well, worth noting.

There is a federal redistribution of South Australia due to be reported. My understanding is the AEC has basically finished the work and they’re basically waiting until after the South Australian election to avoid confusion that if you were to publish new federal electoral boundaries the week before a South Australian state election, it would potentially confuse a lot of people. So look out for that. Although if the parliament is expanded, those new boundaries would have to be discarded and they would have to start over again.

Josh: Yes, and we might get a seat back.

Ben: Okay, so this Saturday night I’m going to be doing something new, a Tally Room election night livestream. I know that there’s plenty of people looking for something different on election nights, focusing entirely on the results without all of the other stuff that goes on on a TV election night coverage. This will be a bit of an experiment. I’m going to keep it simple for the first time, but if people like it, hopefully we can do it again in the future. For this first livestream, I’m going to have a bunch of guests on through the night and try to have coverage for as much of the night as possible.

So please tune in on Saturday night. It’s gonna be starting at 6.30 PM South Australian time and hopefully going through to 10 o’clock and let me know what you think.

So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thanks to Josh for joining me, who’s just had to get off the call. You can find this podcast on your podcast app of choice. If you like the show, please consider rating or reviewing 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

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Thanks to Chris Dubrow for writing the music here in this episode. Once again, thanks for listening.