A brain dump on SA electoral situation by Phil Robins, Labor candidate for Sturt in 1987

To enhance the experience, you might like to go to pendulum gallery (new window), choose SA from top margin and toggle between there and here. Also, here's the Advertiser piece (only 500 respondents.)

Phil emailed in the following:

Things are getting interesting in South Australia, in a way that has not happened there since 1969 when federal Labor won just about everything in Croweater-land.  For some reason – maybe because the state Libs are so inept - the Rann Government is still flying high and some of that popularity is spilling over to the federal scene.  A poll on federal voting intentions published in The Advertiser last Saturday ( 17/04/04 , Page 2) put Labor’s primary vote in the metropolitan area at 44 percent to the Liberals’ 34 percent.

On the basis of that, not only would Labor hold its marginal seats of Kingston  and Wakefield and win the Liberal marginals of Hindmarsh, Adelaide and Makin but it also would be well in the running for the relatively safe Liberal seats of Boothby and Sturt.  This prospect has escaped general recognition (though the ’Tiser did throw Boothby into the mix).  Of course, it’s still not beyond the Labor Party to miss an historic opportunity through defeatism and timidity (as happened in Hindmarsh in 1998).  

Over half a century I have voted in three electorates – Sturt, Boothby and Adelaide .  I did not live in Sturt when Labor’s Norman Makin became its first member in 1954 or when Norm Foster surprisingly won it back for Labor in 1969 (only to lose it three years later in the It’s Time election).  Ever since then a long list of Labor hopefuls (including myself in 1987) have tried to emulate the feats of the two Normans .  Graham Maguire (48 percent in 1974) and Sergio Ubaldi (46.7 percent in 1983 – despite the slogan ‘U beauty, Ubaldi!’) went close but the hard-headed, tight-fisted party quite rightly has concentrated on more critical seats.

Boothby has not been won by Labor since the 1940s. It is therefore quite natural that, as in Sturt, Labor has not run a decent campaign there for many, many years.  Constituents in Sturt and Boothby are bombarded with Liberal propaganda.  Labor candidates are chosen at the last minute and invariably lack resources.  The sitting Libs run really good postal vote campaigns, but it’s rare for Labor to have any postal vote campaign at all.  The only one I can remember (run from a senator’s office) did not get going until two weeks after the Libs had skimmed off the cream of the vote.  Ordinary Labor voters, not to mention the swingers, struggle to know the name, let alone the policies, of their Labor candidate in these seats.

What this means is that there’s a lot of unfulfilled potential for Labor in Boothby (7.4 percent swing needed) and Sturt (8.6 percent) – and this looks like a good year to realize it.  Those Liberal majorities are fat and flabby, and haven’t really been tested for decades..

Adelaide ’s a different matter.  It was fairly safe Labor when I lived there before.  Now I’ve been redistributed back into it (from Sturt) and it’s the most marginal Liberal seat in the state.  Labor’s candidate Kate Ellis, from the Right, is a staffer of South Australian Treasurer Kevin Foley.  She’s young, attractive and energetic but perhaps lacking gravitas (a number of .potential heavyweight candidates were sounded out but decided it was an offer they could refuse).  On current polls she’ll bolt in.  Nevertheless, Trish Worth is a tough cookie and it’s always sobering to remember that in 2001 Labor did not take a single seat off a Coalition sitting member.

Hindmarsh should be a laydown misere for Labor, especially as Chris Gallus is retiring.  Labor’s candidate, the Left’s Steve Georganas, another state government staffer and a taxi driver before that, is sometimes branded a two-time loser, but it should be remembered he almost pulled off an unlikely win in 1998 and Gallus was ready for him last time.  At least he’s a well-known local.  The Libs have chosen wine executive Simon Birmingham, a pretty boy from the other side of town.  He’ll have Gallus directing his campaign (and Christopher Pyne lending support – unless the heat’s on Pyne in Sturt), but it should be third time lucky for Georganas.

A miracle happened in Makin.  A threat by state MP Frances Bedford to enter the race if popular Salisbury mayor Tony Zappia missed Labor preselection for the third time running forced the factions to give him a go.  A former power-lifting champion with a thriving keep-fit business, he gives Labor its best shot against Minchin protégé Trish Draper and her Bible belt supporters. 

The polls have Labor’s David Cox breathing easier in Kingston , though he’ll still worry about it (and with good reason given the constant threats to the Mitsubishi motor plant which is the key employer in the electorate).  And the only small cloud over his colleague from the Right, Martyn Evans, is that his revamped seat, now Wakefield , includes a fair bit of the hinterland – and The Advertiser poll has the Libs leading Labor by 47 percent to 30 percent in rural areas.

That statistic should put paid to any hopes Labor might have of regaining Grey – even though Barry Wakelin is ripe for the picking according to Ben Browne, a Labor farmer who almost snatched the vast northern seat of Stuart from the Libs in the 1997 state election.  He’d be an ideal Labor candidate but having contributed $10,000 to his Stuart campaign and received minimal help from the party machine – indeed, brickbats from the factions – he’s in no mood to be a fall guy again.

Two safe conservative rate a mention.  Alexander Downer very nearly fell to the Australian Democrats’ John Schumann in Mayo in 1998 and is no longer complacent.  But there’s a chance that Adelaide magistrate Brian Deegan, who lost his son Josh in the Bali bombing, will stand against him, probably as an independent.  Whether the Hills yuppies would flock to Deegan remains to be seen, but he could be a wild card.

And in the super-safe seat of Barker, the Libs’ boring Patrick Secker may be seriously challenged by the only National Party member of the State Parliament, Karlene Maywald.  She’s from the Riverland, a large part of which now comes into Barker, and is considering her options since Secker foolishly supported a further delay in boosting the flow of the River Murray.

One firm prediction – having beaten off the factions, Labor’s Rod Sawford is impregnable in Port Adelaide. 

And here endeth the lesson on electoral prospects in South Australia .

- Phil Robins