One Nation eyes more seats as premier ‘gets on with it’
Prime Minister Peter Malinauskas says voters want the government to “carry on” after Labor’s massive victory in the South Australian election, as the final outcome for a handful of seats remains uncertain.
It is stated that in an environment where 40 seats have been determined and seven seats are still in doubt, the Labor Party has obtained 33, the Liberals four, the independents two and One Nation the first lower house seat in the state.
Speaking at a Labor Party meeting on Tuesday, the prime minister said: “We were not celebrating, we are going about our business, we are not building landmines.”
This was a reference to One Nation federal leader Pauline Hanson’s election night declaration: “I’m leaving you with some landmines, they’re called One Nation members of parliament. Don’t step on them because they’ll explode.”
Current census figures show One Nation has at least one lower house MP in Ngadjuri’s seat, David Paton, and two upper house MPs – state leader Cory Bernardi and state leader Carlos Quaremba.
He is also in the race to win the previously Liberal-controlled seat of Hammond in Adelaide’s east, previously held by independent Nick McBride, the Yorke Peninsula seat of Narungga and the rural south-east seat of MacKillop.
Postal votes and preference distributions will be important factors in the final results.
“I think voters said, ‘just go ahead, call the shots… even if it results in some backpedaling,'” Mr. Malinauskas said. he said.
“They don’t want chaos, they don’t want division; they want the government to call on people to work together to get results.”
Late on Tuesday Labor announced that Nadia Clancy, Michael Brown and newly elected MP Alice Rolls had been promoted to the front row by the caucus.
The promotions, seen as a move towards generational change, fill vacancies left by former senior ministers Nat Cook, Zoe Bettison and retired MP Andrea Michaels.
Experts say the result shows a significant shift in the Australian political landscape, which could spill over to other states and at the federal level.
Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics at Monash University, said the move towards One Nation was almost entirely due to voters turning away from the opposition.
“If we look for only one explanation here, it is that the coalition is experiencing a serious identity crisis,” he said.
Dr Moffitt said this shift could be recreated later this year in the Victorian state election, where One Nation received around 20 per cent of the primary vote in recent polls.
”This was a test and I think we will see something similar in Victoria,” he said.
Retired ABC election analyst Antony Green said the Liberal Party’s disastrous result (third with 19 per cent behind One Nation’s 22 per cent) was “hard to comprehend for anyone with a background in Australian political history”.
