Podcast #166 – One Nation surge in South Australia

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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.

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