The Labor landslide in last weekend’s state election in South Australia is being touted as a harbinger for Scott Morrison, but maybe it’s Jacinda Ardern who should really be worried. Not to mention Dan Andrews.
It’s par for the course for pundits to try and extrapolate state elections as having wider significance. Naturally, Australian pundits are drawing a bow from Adelaide to Canberra.
A landslide victory for Labor in South Australia has stoked Liberal fears that two vulnerable -Adelaide seats could fall to Anthony Albanese at the federal election, as the nation faces the prospect of wall-to-wall ALP governments on the mainland.
The crushing nature of Peter Malinauskas’s victory over first-term premier Steven Marshall – fuelled by an aggressive health campaign – sparked calls from Liberal MPs for Scott Morrison to appeal more to conservative voters and better counter the ALP’s scare campaigns.
If nothing else, this signals to the Morrison government what kind of campaign Labor is preparing: Mediscare 3.0. At the last two federal elections, Labor has run a campaign based almost entirely on claims the Coalition government is set to abolish Medicare. Each time, it was an outright lie — not that the media ever called Labor out on it. But forewarned is fore-armed if nothing else.
South Australian Liberal senator Simon Birmingham warned against any attempted repeat at the federal level of the Labor tactics used in the state election campaign. The Finance Minister blamed the Labor scare campaign and the unlucky timing of the Omicron Covid-19 variant for Mr Marshall’s loss. “We saw the Labor Party run a very targeted, very singularly focused campaign around hospitals and ambulances,” Senator Birmingham told ABC’s Insiders.
“There were many misleading aspects to that campaign; the electoral commission found so in the last day or so. We can’t underscore the potential for Labor to run these types of scare campaigns, just like they did with Mediscare against us back in 2016 …”
But will the South Australian result play out, federally? Well, yes and no. It’s always a long bow to draw from state to Commonwealth: all politics being local, state elections are fought on state issues. In any case, SA is hardly a key battleground state. In 2019, the Coalition only won two (outback) seats out of 10 in the state. While, with minority government a distinct possibility, every seat is crucial, the real battlegrounds will be WA and Queensland.
The result should also serve as a wake-up call to the Liberals’ dripping wet “moderates”.
South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic – who has refused to vote with the government in protest at vaccine mandates – said the Prime Minister should take the lesson of what happened when Coalition leaders moved too far to the left […]
“The SA Liberal Party has spent the last four years trying to dance with Labor and Greens voters while the quiet South Australians were left on the sidelines wondering why they even bothered to turn up.”
Barker MP Tony Pasin, a fellow conservative, warned the federal party against a rerun of the 2016 campaign, when the centrist leader Malcolm Turnbull failed to rouse the base and lost 14 seats.
NSW Transport Minister David Elliott told The Daily Telegraph Labor’s win in SA was a warning to all MPs “interfering” with the government’s centre-right ideals.
Turnbull was “centrist” in the same way Jacinda is “conservative”.
It should also be noted that this also leaves just one non-Labor state on the Mainland. Australians are traditionally averse to one party dominating the states and Canberra.
At the same time, the SA result does send a clear message of another kind.
The Liberals’ defeat marked the first change of government at federal, state or territory level since the previous South Australian election in 2018.
The Australian
Note that: since 2018. In other words, post-covid. Each election since the beginning of the pandemic has been a big winner for the incumbent (NSW was the only state to swing against the government, yet the Coalition held the state by a very comfortable 12 seats). SA may be a signal that the covid party is over for politicians. Notably, One Nation, which has strongly opposed mandates and lockdowns, while not winning a seat, increased its vote by more than any party apart from Labor.
This is why Jacinda and Dan should be just as worried as Morrison. Both will be going to the polls in the next 18 months or so. Both face an electorate whose mood has notably soured, after the giddy panic of the early days of covid.
Of the two, Ardern is in the slightly better position: she can, if she must, string out the day of reckoning till nearly two years hence.
The question is whether she will be able to win back what she has so brutally squandered — New Zealand’s trust. Delaying the day of reckoning may well only end up being seen as sneaky and desperate.