Will the federal election results be replicated at next year's SA contest?

Australia Broadcast Center

09-05-2025

On Saturday night at the Robin Hood Hotel in Adelaide's eastern suburbs, Liberal MP James Stevens took to the stage to concede that he had lost the seat of Sturt.
He apologised for being the man in the seat when it slipped from his party's hands for the first time in more than five decades.
As he descended from the stage, there to comfort the now-former MP were party faithful and elders, chief among them the recently-retired Senator Simon Birmingham.
Speaking to the media later, Mr Birmingham did not sugar-coat the result.
He said it was "diabolical" and he was "gutted" to see "so much good talent, particularly fresher, younger, newer faces" lose their seats.
If this wasn't rock bottom, he posited, it won't be too long before there is not much of a party.
With the loss of Sturt, the Liberals had lost their last metropolitan stronghold in Adelaide.
And with the Electoral Commission currently carrying out a three-candidate-preferred count in the seat of Grey, there are also concerns about one of the party's last two regional strongholds.
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A stark contrast to the Howard heyday where the party held Adelaide, Boothby, Hindmarsh, Kingston, Makin, Sturt, Wakefield (now Spence) and the peri-urban seat of Mayo.
Now, all gone.
A sign that John Howard knew how to tap into the outer-suburban "battler" vote in a way the current Liberal Party simply does not.
That era also saw the SA Liberals with scores of senior voices at the cabinet table — from Alexander Downer to Robert Hill and Nick Minchin — and rising stars like Christopher Pyne and Amanda Vanstone.
The party was in government at a state level too, making it unquestionably the dominant force in South Australian politics of the time.
How times change.
As bad as Saturday's result looks on the face of it, when you dive into the details it starts to look even worse.
In almost every one of the more than 400 polling places across Adelaide's eight electorates, voters favoured Labor on a two-party preferred count.
On polling day just a small handful of booths favoured the Liberals in higher numbers.
A kind way to look at those results would be to consider that pre-polls and postals generally favour the Liberal Party.
But any way you cut it, it's a devastating result — voters in almost every part of the city rejected the Liberals, often in emphatic numbers.
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Both state Labor and Liberal leaders have been quick to distance their contest from the federal one.
At a press conference the day after Labor's victory, Premier Peter Malinauskas said he wasn't "sitting around counting numbers, thinking about seats".
"I think that would be self-serving," Mr Malinauskas said.
"Any sort of analysis for what this means for the state election would be foolhardy from my perspective. We've just got to get on with doing the job."
While Mr Malinauskas doesn't want to seem arrogant or over-confident, Opposition Leader Vincent Tarzia also has strong reasons to distance himself from the result.
"The federal election has been fought on federal issues and I think people can distinguish between federal issues and state issues," he said.
"All I can say is we're just working hard every day now to make sure that we hold the Labor government to account, but also make sure we continue to put our alternative vision forward for the people of South Australia."
Mr Tarzia has enough to contend with, without looking at what's just happened to his federal colleagues.
He's a relatively-new leader, still defining to the public who he is and what his team stands for, up against a very popular, first-term government.
And there's even more he needs to overcome — the local Liberal Party's woes have been oft repeated.
They lost six seats in the 2022 state election, went on to lose two by-elections — one in Dunstan when former Premier Steven Marshall retired, another in Black following the resignation of former opposition leader David Speirs.
They lost MacKillop when Nick McBride turned independent.
The party has also been tarnished by criminal allegations — Mr Speirs has pleaded guilty to drugs charges, and Mr McBride has this week faced court over assault charges after being charged with three counts of assaulting his wife in April.
Before the 2022 election the brand also took a major hit — and lost other seats — when Mount Gambier MP Troy Bell was charged with fraud, and Narrunga MP Fraser Ellis was charged with deception — both have been found guilty but are waiting on appeals.
They both still sit in parliament as independents.
The Liberals also lost Kavel in the Adelaide Hills when Dan Cregan defected, making a deal with Labor to become Speaker.
With all that recent history, Peter Dutton's disastrous campaign is something the local team could have done without.
Party insiders are now questioning not how many seats Vincent Tarzia can win, but how many he might lose.
The good news is, with all the regional seats lost to defections and scandals, there could be a chance to gain some of those back.
But Saturday's result will have done little to energise the local membership — not a good start when you need to be developing an election campaign and pre-selecting candidates.
For Tarzia and his team, their hope will echo Simon Birmingham, that the federal election was rock bottom, and the only way from here is up.