Why the SA election result should spook the Morrison government

Labor’s stunning victory in the South Australian state election on Saturday, wiping Steven Marshall’s Liberals from power after just one term, will send alarm bells ringing through a federal government struggling to regain ground in the polls just two months out from an election.

Labor is set to win 26 of a possible 47 seats, reducing the Liberals to just 15, on the back of a thumping 7% primary vote swing against the government.

All weekend, the Morrison government — particularly Finance Minister Simon Birmingham, its most senior South Australian — has been working hard to push a “no federal implications” narrative, arguing the state election was won and lost on local issues.

Voters, Birmingham said, had been “tricked” by what he called a Labor scare campaign on healthcare, and an ambulance ramping crisis in SA hospitals. Liberals worked hard to stress the differences between Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and SA Premier-elect Peter Malinauskas. 

But putting aside the spin, and the differences between a state and federal poll, there are plenty of takeaways from the SA result, none of which are good news for Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

The end of incumbency

Throughout the pandemic, incumbency has been politically potent. Every state premier that went to the polls since 2020 recorded a handsome victory. Marshall bucks that trend. 

What’s more worrying for the federal Coalition is that the Marshall government largely handled the pandemic well, keeping SA almost entirely COVID-free, until last December when the outgoing premier made the ill-fated decision to open the state’s borders just as the Omicron wave was picking up. While inevitable, the move proved politically disastrous, and gave greater ammunition to a Labor campaign almost singularly focused on failures in the state’s health system. 

Here, the federal parallels are clear. While when compared to much of the world Australia’s pandemic response has had many successes, the Morrison government’s determination to remain totally absent over summer, right when Omicron was causing havoc in the community, clearly angered voters, hardened perceptions about the Coalition’s incompetence, and accelerated its slump in the opinion polls.

The marginals question

One silver lining for the government is that SA has just one crucial marginal: Boothby, which Labor hasn’t won since the 1940s, is held by the government on a 1.4% margin. MP Nicolle Flint is retiring. 

Saturday’s result gives Labor a real psychological boost there. The state seats in the area all went against the government, with Labor picking up Elder on an 8.4% swing. Adjoining state seats all shifted to Labor between 6.7 and 14%. 

The size of the Labor rout starts to put question marks over two other federal seats. The Liberals hold Sturt on a 6.9% margin, but in overlapping Dunstan, Marshall suffered an 8% swing and is struggling to retain his seat. Vickie Chapman, his deputy, is set to retain the adjoining seat of Bragg but copped a 10% swing.

In the vast rural seat of Grey, held on a safe 13% margin, there’s chatter about independent Liz Habermann having a run, who is falling narrowly short in the state seat of Flinders despite a big swing. 

The vibe shift

For some time now, Morrison’s message to his MPs has been to stay focused, ignore the polls and the headlines, and have faith in him to deliver a 2019-like miracle on the campaign trail.

This result makes it a little harder for Liberals to keep the faith, and gives Labor a spring in its step. It shows the polls, which throughout the past week were predicting a Labor victory, were correct. That makes it tough to totally discount polling that has consistently pointed to a federal Labor victory.

There’s also more signs that after over three years in the Lodge, voters are starting to turn against Morrison, who now trails Albanese as preferred PM. Morrison barely made an appearance in SA, while Albanese did. It was John Howard, not Morrison, who Marshall campaigned with during the closing stages.

The government fervently believe campaign-mode Morrison is their best political asset. If that lustre has worn off, and voters are sick of the prime minister, the coming campaign could get very difficult.