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South Australia lurches towards close election

By Graham Young - posted Saturday, 15 March 2014


While respondents acknowledge that Liberal leader Steven Marshall seems to have settled the factional problems down, he has his own problems because he is a first term MP. This means that voters really don't feel like they know him, unlike Labor's Jay Weatherill.

Weatherill's own Labor brand has been corroded, but he is seen as being a clean skin, unlike his predecessor Mike Rann. While some respondents nominate union links as a negative, most seem to feel as though they know Weatherill, and in a close election they will be weighing up the devil they know against the move for change of government.

Apart from their failure to put their policy mark on the election, the biggest risk to the Liberals is the overwhelming belief of electors that they will win.

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The table below shows respondents expectations of who will win the election, weighted according to likely first preference voting intentions in the community at large (our respondents tend to lean heavily to the left, so we need to adjust for this), for the three largest parties.

While this table is not predictive of the actual result, it can predict voter behaviour, particularly in a situation where they have no strong loyalties one way or the other. Voters can reward a good member, even when representing a party they think should lose, because they believe that the other party will win, and so they can safely reward good personal service.

Couple this with the fact that just over 10% of respondents nominated the local member as a reason for giving their preference to Labor (and this was mostly to reward good performance, not to punish an under-performing Liberal member) and if the Liberals do not have a good marginal seats campaign, then they will fail to win seats that they would on a uniform swing.

With Newspoll showing the margin narrowing, and the South Australian electoral system having demonstrated around a 2% bias towards Labor in previous elections, this is going to make for a very close result. Indeed, it may be that Labor's marginal seat campaign is the reason that the boundaries seem biased – the Liberals may be winning big in safe seats, but failing to convert those on low margins.

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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