In the end, the results came in much more quickly than expected. Due to COVID and the general trend to postal voting, the results of the South Australian state election were not anticipated until at least the middle of next week.
But about an hour and half after polls had closed, the results indicated a brutal loss for Steven Marshall’s one-term Liberal government.
This was expected to be a very tight election – most likely resulting in a hung parliament, with either side reliant on key independents. This, after all, has been a common pattern in South Australia.
Going into the election, the picture was delicately balanced. Marshall’s Liberals held 20 seats in the 47-seat chamber, while Peter Malinauskas’ Labor Party held 19 seats, with six independents on the cross-bench.
The Marshall minority government was propped up by a number of those independents, including former Liberal and current Speaker of the House Dan Cregan in the seat of Kavel.
However, the final polls and betting odds were indicating that a change of government was possible, perhaps even by a solid margin. By the end of Saturday evening, the extent of the loss was clear: Labor had already secured enough support to win 25 seats, with 24 needed to form a majority government.
According to the ABC, there are still nine seats in doubt. In what would be a truly remarkable outcome, Labor is predicted to finish with 28 seats, the Liberals reduced to 14, with a cross-bench of five.
Two key factors shaped the election result. First, as ABC election analyst Antony Green put it, Nick Xenophon has had “more impact on this election than the last one”. In 2018, a resurgent SA Best, led by Xenophon, had secured strong support in key seats, with 15-20% of the vote in many marginals. What happened in South Australia this year is that a much higher proportion of those voters decided to support the Malinauskas challenge, showing a loss of faith in Marshall’s government.
Steven Marshall’s Liberals have been consigned to a single term in office, following a brutal defeat in the 2022 SA election. Matt Turner/AAP
Second, the Liberals lost ground in those key suburban seats, especially those surrounding Adelaide. The key target marginal seats, including the ultra-marginal Newland, King and Elder, and Adelaide itself, all fell quickly to Labor.
This pattern reflects a familiar structural problem for the Liberals in South Australia, where its support base has disproportionately been in rural and regional areas. However, the swing to Labor was enough this time to see them take Davenport, and potentially Gibson, which had previously been held by Liberals by relatively strong margins.
What went wrong for Marshall?
In his moving poem, The Mistake, the poet James Fenton reflects upon the agonies of hindsight. Given the surprising scale of Labor’s win, we should caution against simplistic judgements about the result. But there are a range of factors that seemingly shaped the removal of Marshall’s government.
In 2018, Marshall had a set of policies around land tax, payroll tax, shopping hours deregulation, and reducing the cost of living through reductions in taxes such as the emergency services levy. It didn’t help that Marshall couldn’t deliver on some of these pledges.
This time around, the Liberals’ spending promises were modest, and its overall macro-economic strategy was less clear.
In contrast, Labor tapped into a public appetite for more significant infrastructure spending, crucially in the realm of health. The issue of hospital ramping has bedevilled South Australia for a long time, and it was an ongoing pressure point for the Liberals. Labor was cannily able to use the issue to build its campaign around new public funding in this area.
Labor used the ongoing issue of hospital ramping to great effect in its election campaign. AAP/Ben MacMahon
The politics of COVID was also a likely factor. This was the first time an incumbent government had been ejected in an election since the pandemic. Yet, what’s clear is voters are comfortable with ambitious spending policy agendas – and new forms of stimulus. COVID has changed electoral dynamics, and Marshall’s government paid a price for a reasonably well-handled approach to the pandemic.
Implications for the federal election
Will the South Australia result impact the imminent federal election? Only indirectly. Australians tend to treat state and federal elections separately, and distinctive local and national factors shape the results of each.
However, indirectly, the failure of the Marshall government is really a story about the fragmentation of the right in Australian politics. The absence of a strong Nationals presence in the state arguably throws out of balance the ideological differences within the Liberal party.
The fraying of the Liberals, and the inability of Marshall to keep factional balances and in-fighting in check, reflects a more general national trend for independents to challenge in “non-Labor” seats.
Given the Marshall government delivered successful and progressive social reforms, not least the decriminalisation of abortion and introducing euthanasia legislation, it ironically reflects the structural failure of moderate liberalism in the country.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a far more conservative-minded leader, and an electoral drag in South Australia, faces a sterner challenge in reconciling this fragmented politics.
Near the end of his poem, Fenton intones the protagonist to “lay claim to this mistake”. Given the outgoing premier’s upbeat assessment of his single term of office, it might take a new generation to learn the lessons from this devastating loss.
The New Democrats have declared a federal byelection victory in their Winnipeg stronghold riding of Elmwood—Transcona.
The NDP candidate Leila Dance told supporters in a tearful speech that even though the final results weren’t in, she expected she would see them in Ottawa.
With several polls still to be counted, Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds conceded defeat and told his volunteers that they should be proud of what the Conservatives accomplished in the campaign.
Political watchers had a keen eye on the results to see if the Tories could sway traditionally NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.
Meanwhile in the byelection race in the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois remained locked in an extremely tight three-way race as the results trickled in slowly.
The Liberal stronghold riding had a record 91 names on the ballot, and the results aren’t expected until the early hours of the morning.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
VANCOUVER – An incumbent BC United legislative member has reversed her decision not to seek re-election and has announced she’ll run as an Independent in the riding of West Vancouver-Capilano in the upcoming British Columbia election.
Karin Kirkpatrick has been a vocal critic of BC United Leader Kevin Falcon’s decision last month to suspend the party’s campaign and throw support behind the B.C. Conservatives under John Rustad.
Kirkpatrick announced her retirement this year, but said Monday that her decision to re-enter the race comes as a direct result of Falcon’s actions, which would force middle-of-the-road voters to “swing to the left” to the NDP or to move further right to the Conservatives.
“I did hear from a lot of constituents and a lot of people who were emailing me from across B.C. … that they didn’t have anybody to vote for,” she said. “And so, I looked even at myself, and I looked at my riding, and I said, ‘Well, I no longer have anybody to vote for in my own riding.’ It was clearly an issue of this missing middle for the more moderate voter.”
She said voters who reached out “don’t want to vote for an NDP government but felt deeply uncomfortable” supporting the provincial Conservatives, citing Rustad’s tolerance of what she calls “extreme views and conspiracy theorists.”
Kirkpatrick joins four other incumbent Opposition MLAs running as Independents, including Peace River South’s Mike Bernier, Peace River North’s Dan Davies, Prince George-Cariboo’s Coralee Oakes and Tom Shypitka in Kootenay-Rockies.
“To be honest, we talk just about every day,” Kirkpatrick said about her fellow BC United incumbents now running as Independents. “We’re all feeling the same way. We all need to kind of hold each other up and make sure we’re doing the right thing.”
She added that a number of first-time candidates formerly on the BC United ticket are contacting the group of incumbents running for election, and the group is working together “as good moderates who respect each other and lift each other up.”
But Kirkpatrick said it’s also too early to talk about the future of BC United or the possibility of forming a new party.
“The first thing we need to do is to get these Independent MLAs elected into the legislature,” she said, noting a strong group could play a power-broker role if a minority government is elected. “Once we’re there then we’re all going to come together and we’re going to figure out, is there something left in BC United, BC Liberals that we can resurrect, or do we need to start a new party that’s in the centre?”
She said there’s a big gap left in the political spectrum in the province.
“So, we just have to do it in a mindful way, to make sure it’s representing the broadest base of people in B.C.”
Among the supporters at Kirkpatrick’s announcement Monday was former longtime MLA Ralph Sultan, who held West Vancouver-Capilano for almost two decades before retiring in 2020.
The Metro Vancouver riding has been a stronghold for the BC Liberals — the former BC United — since its formation in 1991, with more than half of the votes going to the centre-right party in every contest.
However, Kirkpatrick’s winning margin of 53.6 per cent to the NDP’s 30.1 per cent and the Green’s 15.4 per cent in the 2020 election shows a rising trend for left-leaning voters in the district.
Mike McDonald, chief strategy officer with Kirk and Co. Consulting, and a former campaign director for the BC Liberals and chief of staff under former Premier Christy Clark, said Independent candidates historically face an uphill battle and the biggest impact may be splitting votes in areas where the NDP could emerge victorious.
“It really comes down to, if the NDP are in a position to get 33 per cent of the vote, they might have a chance of winning,” McDonald said of the impact of an Independent vote-split with the Conservatives in certain ridings.
He said B.C. history shows it’s very hard for an Independent to win an election and has been done only a handful of times.
“So, the odds do not favour Independents winning the seats unless there is a very unique combination of circumstances, and more likely that they play a role as a spoiler, frankly.”
The B.C. Conservatives list West Vancouver School District Trustee Lynne Block as its candidate in West Vancouver-Capilano, while the BC NDP is represented by health care professional Sara Eftekhar.
Kirkpatrick said she is confident that her re-entry to the race will not result in a vote split that allows the NDP to win the seat because the party has always had a poor showing in the riding.
“So, even if there is competition between myself and the Conservative candidate, it is highly unlikely that anything would swing over to the NDP here. And I believe that I have the ability to actually attract those NDP voters to me, as well as the Conservatives and Liberals who are feeling just lost right now.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Egypt on Tuesday for his 10th trip to the Middle East since the war in Gaza began nearly a year ago, this one aimed partly at refining a proposal to present to Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire deal and release of hostages.
Unlike in recent mediating missions, America’s top diplomat this time is traveling without optimistic projections from the Biden administration of an expected breakthrough in the troubled negotiations.
Also unlike the earlier missions, Blinken has no public plans to go to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this trip. The Israeli leader’s fiery public statements — like his declaration that Israel would accept only “total victory” when Blinken was in the region in June — and some other unbudgeable demands have complicated earlier diplomacy.
Blinken is going to Egypt for talks Wednesday with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and others, in a trip billed as focused both on American-Egyptian relations and Gaza consultations with Egypt.
The tamped-down public approach follows months in which President Joe Biden and his officials publicly talked up an agreement to end the war in Gaza as being just within reach, hoping to build pressure on Netanyahu’s far-right government and Hamas to seal a deal.
The Biden administration now says it is working with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar to come up with a revised final proposal to try to at least get Israel and Hamas into a six-week cease-fire that would free some of the hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Americans believe public attention on details of the talks now would only hurt that effort.
American, Qatari and Egyptian officials still are consulting “about what that proposal will contain, and …. we’re trying to see that it’s a proposal that can get the parties to an ultimate agreement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday.
The State Department pointed to Egypt’s important role in Gaza peace efforts in announcing last week that the Biden administration planned to give the country its full $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding congressional requirements that the U.S. hold back some of the funding if Egypt fails to show adequate progress on human rights. Blinken told Congress that Egypt has made progress on human rights, including in freeing political prisoners.
Blinken’s trip comes amid the risk of a full-on new front in the Middle East, with Israel threatening increasing military action against the Hezbollah militant organization in Lebanon. Biden envoy Amos Hochstein was in Israel on Monday to try to calm tensions after a stop in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has one of the strongest militaries in the Middle East, and like Hamas and smaller groups in Syria and Iraq it is allied with Iran.
Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged strikes across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas started the war in Gaza. Hezbollah says it will ease those strikes — which have uprooted tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border — only when there’s a cease-fire in Gaza.
Hochstein told Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that intensifying the conflict with Hezbollah would not help get Israelis back in their homes, according to a U.S. official. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, said Hochstein stressed to Netanyahu that he risked sparking a broad and protracted regional conflict if he moved forward with a full-scale war in Lebanon.
Hochstein also underscored to Israeli officials that the Biden administration remained committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the tensions on Israel’s northern border in conjunction with a Gaza deal or on its own, the official said.
Netanyahu told Hochstein that it would “not be possible to return our residents without a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.” The prime minister said Israel “appreciates and respects” U.S. support but “will do what is necessary to maintain its security and return the residents of the north to their homes safely.”
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, meanwhile, warned in his meeting with Hochstein that “the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action,” his office said.
In Gaza, the U.S. says Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal in principle and that the biggest obstacles now include a disagreement on details of the hostage and prisoner swap and control over a buffer zone on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Netanyahu has demanded in recent weeks that the Israeli military be allowed to keep a presence in the Philadelphi corridor. Egypt and Hamas have rejected that demand.
The Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 people. Militants also abducted 250 people and are still holding around 100 hostages. About a third of the remaining hostages are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, said Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count. The war has caused widespread destruction, displaced a majority of Gaza’s people and created a humanitarian crisis.
Netanyahu says he is working to bring home the hostages. His critics accuse him of slow-rolling a deal because it could bring down his hardline coalition government, which includes members opposed to a truce with the Palestinians.
Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu was doing enough for a cease-fire deal, Biden said, simply, “no.” But he added that he still believed a deal was close.
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Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
