It’s a hot day in Adelaide today, after a warm night, but nobody will be feeling the heat as much as Premier Mike Rann and his Labor Party colleagues as they face up to the people this Saturday, seeking their third term.

A year ago, they were cruising in the political equivalent of air-conditioned comfort. From the 2006 election, they held a mighty 28 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly, the Liberal opposition was down to 14 after ham-fistedly letting another one slip away from them in a by-election, and the quarterly Newspoll for South Australian political indicators was boringly affirming.

Now, Rann and Labor hope for nothing more than to hang on. I had no trouble calling the 2007 federal election when I wrote this for The Adelaide Review a few days beforehand, although I did have a surprisingly lonely few days when no-one else in the country was prepared to commit themselves in print. This South Australian election is much more difficult to call. There is a rising mood against Rann and his government, but it is not as trenchant or as long-established as the feelings that swept the Howard government away. We’ll go into more detail about that later.

One prediction I am prepared to make. Even if Labor does hang on, Mike Rann has at most one more Christmas as premier. He will be gone before the end of 2011.

How has it all turned? Isobel Redmond, only installed as Liberal leader in July – and their third since Rob Kerin resigned after leading them to the 2006 shellacking – has done well, but that does not account for it. The government has run into flak over its proposal for a grand new hospital over the railyards at the western end of North Terrace in central Adelaide to replace the Royal Adelaide Hospital at the other end of the terrace, but that does not account for it. The dire state of the River Murray has everyone worried, but that does not account for it. The Liberal campaign has been well-timed, well-directed and sure-footed, but that is more symptom than cause. And Mike Rann has been continually distracted, and somewhat damaged, by conflicting stories about the extent of his involvement a few years ago with a former Parliament House staffer named Michelle Chantelois ever since her estranged husband Richard Phillips whacked him with a rolled-up magazine at a public function last October, but the persistence of that low-grade soap opera is as much symptom as cause.

Most long-term governments enjoy, at some time in their life, a period when, as far as the public is concerned, they can do no wrong. This is often reflected in a run of spectacular approval-ratings, especially for leaders. It doesn’t last, of course, but it is good to have while you’ve got it: for a while, the people love you. But I suspect that Mike Rann’s very high satisfaction ratings in 2006 and 2007 – and more to the point, his very low dissatisfaction ratings – were less an expression of that political love-affair phase than a reflection of the hopeless rabble that was the Liberal Party during that period. As far as its most prominent members are concerned, this has been an unloved, and at times unlovely, government.

Let’s go back to that boringly affirming Newspoll of a year ago. It estimated a two-party preferred split of 56-44 Labor’s way – not far short of the stratospheric 57-43 had been achieved in the 2006 election. Indeed, this was so boring that the The Australian did not even bother to buy the poll and run it when it became available in early April. A little later, the then opposition leader Martin Hamilton-Smith ran into trouble with what proved to be thoroughly dodgy documents falsely seeming to link Labor people with the Scientology movement. Labor made maximum play of that episode, culminating in June in this.

During Hamilton-Smith’s agonies, The Australian decided, on May 20, that the 56-44 poll was becoming more interesting, and published it. It also had Hamilton-Smith’s approval/disapproval split slumping from 43-26 to 39-34. The arithmetic is simple. He was losing fans, and the previously uncommitted were also turning against him. After a sustained parliamentary kicking, and another bad opinion poll commissioned by Adelaide’s Sunday Mail, the Liberals dumped Hamilton-Smith and installed Isobel Redmond as leader and Steven Griffiths as her deputy. The poll, incidentally, was methodologically questionable, but that was no help to Hamilton-Smith. And the Liberals fumbled their way through a messy two-stage process, along the way dealing long-time hopeful and former deputy Vickie Chapman out of the leadership game.

Since then, and with increasing speed during the campaign proper, all is changed, changed utterly. The polls have moved relentlessly against Labor, and most particularly against Rann. And Labor people are fretting about the unfairness of it all, and how this, that or the other distraction is preventing them from getting their message through. But the problem for them goes back further.

Despite Martin Hamilton-Smith’s humiliating departure from the Liberal leadership in the middle of last year, he had only a few months before, in the spring of 2008, had the benefit of a Newspoll in The Aus which put the Liberals level-pegging with Labor. Subsequent trend-lines through that poll suggest that this may have been that perennial hazard of polling, a rogue poll, but it was enough to send some of the Labor camp into what was later dismissed as a night of boozy madness when Rann’s leadership came into question.

But it might not have been as mad as they hoped it was, because I believe it was about then that Mike Rann hit that point which comes to all long-term political leaders eventually: they stop listening to you. It had to come sometime – after all, he has been leader of his party since 1994, and no politician has dominated the media, and the multiple news cycles of each day, so assiduously and thoroughly as Rann.

In Mike Rann’s case, the implications of this were delayed, mostly by the misadventures of the SA Liberals. At the end of the year, the former leader (and, briefly, former Premier) Rob Kerin, a genial bloke from the mid-north of the State, decided he had had enough. The February by-election for his safe seat of Frome, mostly rural, centred on Port Pirie, became a fiasco for the Liberals. A local independent, Geoff Brock, got up, and the Liberal ground-work was so shoddy that they even told Martin Hamilton-Smith he could claim victory. (Brock likes the life, it seems: he is running again, and his is one of the seats the Liberals need to regain.) Then Hamilton-Smith’s own saga mopped up most of the time from late April to early July. Then there was a settling-in period for Redmond. Only recently have people been brought up against the fact that Rann, his deputy and treasurer Kevin Foley, and the other main attack-dog, Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, are less able to control public reaction to the events of the day.

Their campaign has been awful. It is clumsy, lumpen, stand-on-the-record stuff, lacking clear messages, too full of boring material, and offering for the future only a plea to let us finish the great job we are doing. It has gone over the top in the wrong places. A bit of tough-on-crime blather about their record in refusing parole recommendations for a clutch of life prisoners – a process mired in historical accident which arguably amounts to arbitrary detention – drew a withering blast from Frances Nelson QC, the long-time chair of the parole board. An over-spun bit of news management by Rann’s people about the hopes for the River Murray from the Queensland floods at the beginning of this last week was quickly exposed for what it was.

Meanwhile, the campaign against Labor is sure-footed and telling in its timing. An attack ad from the single-issue land tax people focussed this week on Treasurer Kevin Foley enjoying the high life. He complains it is unfair, but it touches on his widely- known but little- discussed fondness for late nights in Adelaide’s clubland. And it lobs so close to the big day that it will stick, whatever he does. The Liberal campaign through the letter-boxes has responded neatly to the rising interest in Redmond, and it has also included some funky material reminding everyone how long they have been listening to Rann.

Redmond herself is easy, natural, confident-sounding. She’s saying some riskily nuanced things which will eventually be used against her, but for now she is getting away with it, because the electorate is interested in her; and when they are interested, they listen better; and when they listen better, the politician has the freedom to be nuanced, because the nuances are being digested. Eventually, she will need safer formulas.

And so, the seats. Labor’s Tony Piccolo probably cannot hold Light, on the northern suburban fringe, nominally its most marginal. Next is Mawson, taking in some southern fringe and the McLaren Vale wine district. Leon Bignell won it for Labor: he has done a lot of relationship-building in the wine country, and will need that work to deliver votes. Then there is a clutch of seats up through the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide. Labor swept them last time, but it is a volatile and patchy area historically. At issue are seats named Hartley, Newland, Morialta. Morialta, although nominally well-cushioned by more than 6 per cent, seems most likely to fall to the Liberals.

The Liberals will also win back Mount Gambier, where the independent Rory McEwen, who has been a Rann minister, is retiring. Former Liberal, long-time independent Bob Such will win his southern-suburbs seat of Fisher. He served a term as Speaker of the assembly during the first Rann government, but he has been very disparaging about the way the Labor leadership treats parliament, so his role could be critical if there is a hung parliament.

In the inner east, the totemic seat of Norwood, formerly held by Don Dunstan, is getting a huge effort from the Liberals in the hope of unseating incumbent Vini Ciccarello: she has most of 5 percent up her sleeve, but that puts her on the cusp of what looks like the average swing.

In the near south-western suburbs is the electorate of Mitchell. It was won for the Labor Party in 2002 by Kris Hanna, who then defected temporarily to the Greens before winning it again in 2006 as an independent – running a distant second to Labor, but getting up comfortably on Liberal preferences. Paradoxically – or, rather, incredibly – the Liberal candidate is putting in a huge effort. If the Liberals are successful, the best they can do on first preferences is to outpoll Hanna, and the only result can be to give the seat back to the Labor Party.

South Australians will watch Chaffey closely. It is the riverland seat of the Nationals’ Karlene Maywald, who has sat in the Rann Cabinet as Water Minister. Despite everything, she may well hold it against the Liberals, but she is making no-one any promises about how she would handle her re-election if everything is up for grabs in a close election.

I do not think the sentiment against the government is as heartily dismissive as that which led to the Howard Government being thrown out – but it doesn’t have to be. The best thing going for Mike Rann and Labor is that they hold 21 seats by more than 10 per cent margins. They only need to hang on to three others to be able to govern in their own right. Redmond is acting like a winner, but, in all the circumstances, even getting close would be a win.