Photo: SA Parliament House with red overlay. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.
South Australians went to the polls on 21 March 2026, and gave us two very interesting stories. Peter Malinauskas’ Labor government has been re-elected in a landslide. But ironically, it is the race for second place that will be more consequential, not just for South Australia, but for the whole nation.
As I write on the first of April, the vote is 88.5% counted and the results are all but decided. Labor is sitting on 37.5% of the statewide primary vote, down slightly from their 2022 result. But the Liberal vote has collapsed by almost half, the party sitting in third place with 19% of the primary vote share. Almost all of this has gone to One Nation, who sit in second place at 23%, the party’s best result since the 1998 Queensland election saw them elect 11 members.
These first preference vote shares are very similar in the Legislative Council (upper house), where the 11 seats up for grabs are likely to fall as 5 Labor, 3 One Nation, 2 Liberal, and 1 Green. Labor’s 5th seat is the only one of these in any doubt. But in the House of Assembly (lower house), individual seat dynamics produce a very different result.
Traditionally, the Liberal party does fairly well in central Adelaide, with a mixture of blue-ribbon and marginal seats. However, this time the fracturing of the conservative vote has allowed Labor to pick up all but one of these, including seats they’ve not held in decades.
The outer Adelaide suburbs to the north and south are Labor heartland. Here, One Nation have become the main opposition party, while the Liberals have been relegated to 4th or even 5th place in some seats. Though One Nation haven’t won any here, some previously safe Labor seats have had their margins cut substantially.
The regional and rural areas are Liberal heartland (note that the Nationals aren’t really a force in SA), but this has given way to various dynamic contests, with each seat being very different to its neighbours. The Liberals, One Nation and independent candidates have each carved themselves a slice and are on track to take four seats apiece (one seat remains in doubt, with One Nation very narrowly leading the Liberals).
The Liberal party will barely hold onto its official opposition status. While they led on first preferences in only four seats compared to One Nation’s seven, the Liberal vote was more concentrated with its senior sitting members, and they also benefited from preferences which tended to direct votes towards the centre. But overwhelmingly, the splitting of the conservative vote has benefited Labor, who now hold 32 of the 33 seats in the Adelaide metropolitan area.
So how did this happen?
In my analysis of the 2025 federal election, I flagged the rise of One Nation as something to watch for in 2028. I had expected them to roughly double their vote at the next election, rivalling the Greens as Australia’s largest minor party. But I did not see anything like this coming.
The surge of One Nation has been developing over the past 6 months. They have enjoyed a positive feedback loop where an increase in polling numbers generated media stories, and this coverage caused more people to tell pollsters they’d vote for the party, continuing the cycle. In this way, opinion polls are a bit like quantum physics – the act of taking a measurement actively changes the thing you’re measuring.
The results in South Australia closely matched the latest state opinion polls. The national story is even worse for the Coalition, with the latest federal polling showing them on a dismal 17%, with One Nation on 29%. If a federal election were held today, we would likely see a similar result replicated across the country. This would see the Liberals completely ejected from our cities, One Nation coming second in the outer suburbs (nearly toppling a few safe Labor seats in the process), while the Coalition and One Nation fight over the few rural and regional electorates. This would constitute the quickest and most significant realignment of Australian politics in almost a century.
Let’s not mince words – this is an existential crisis for the Liberal and National parties. They are at serious risk of being voted into irrelevance. It seems unthinkable that a major party could go the way of the Australian Democrats, but if One Nation can maintain its support and build on this result in other states, then that isn’t out of the question.
Probably the best comparison we have in Australian political history is the Democratic Labour Party, which emerged from an ALP split in 1955 over the issue of communism. The DLP directed its voters to preference the Coalition, which kept Labor out of government for nearly two decades.
The circumstances we see today are eerily similar. An overseas political movement has split one side of politics. Gone is Howard’s broad church of small-l liberals standing alongside conservatives. As the influence of Donald Trump pulls conservative parties across the globe further to the right, inner-city liberals have jumped ship to vote for independents. Not only that, but many find themselves ideologically closer to Labor than to their old party – four of the Liberal-turned-independent seats returned notional 2PP majorities to Labor at the last federal election. And now, conservative voters too seem to have found a new home of greater ideological purity.
Time will tell whether this fracturing of the right-wing vote will be sustained, and deliver decades of continuous government to Labor. One Nation has previously struggled to keep its parliamentarians in the party. If they are to maintain their momentum, they will need to build formal party structures rather than rely on a figurehead who still shares the party’s official name. But at least for now, the severity of this split seems to be just as significant as it was for the ALP last century, if not more so. Despite opposition from the DLP, Labor managed to hold onto a majority of its voting base. The Liberal and National parties may not be so fortunate.
This does not mean we will see Pauline Hanson as PM anytime soon. When the tide eventually turns against Labor, the most likely outcome is one we have seen in countries such as Germany, where currently the largest centre-left and centre-right parties govern in coalition. That would mean Labor governing together with the Teals (whether they reform the Liberal party, create their own, or remain independents). Because even after a result like this, I don’t see One Nation earning enough support in the foreseeable future (either from the crossbench or outright) to govern. Compulsory voting under a preferential system makes winning government very difficult for a populist party.
Closing Thoughts
I want to close this article with some reflections on how we might respond as Christians. Firstly, to those readers who find themselves part of a growing minority of Australians attracted to One Nation. Populist parties gain support by telling a story that creates in-groups and out-groups. In this story, the out-group bears the blame for all the problems of society, as well as the burden of the solutions that the party promises. But history shows that this rarely works in practice, and often does more harm than good. Furthermore, we as Christians are part of the most radically inclusive movement in all of human history. To blame and burden ‘them’ with all our problems is to shirk our missional call.
But perhaps you, like me, had only ever thought of One Nation as ‘the racist party’. If so, what are we to make of a result like this? Are we simply to conclude that a quarter of Australians are racist people? Here I would urge caution, lest we fall into the very same trap by blaming and burdening One Nation supporters for society’s problems. Instead, we ought to ask ourselves if there is anything we may have missed. What is it that resonates with people? Could there be legitimate concerns behind this? What alternative solutions could we implement that do not divide people?
Finally, it is worth remembering that Christians fall across the political spectrum. The people in the pew next to you will have radically different political views to your own. If not, if your church is politically homogenous, then it is not doing a good job reaching out to the wider community. We may have strong disagreements about politics, but we share the same broken humanity. We share the same need for salvation. Regardless of our politics, we eat and drink the same Lord’s supper together. We may seek to solve what problems we can here on Earth, but our true hope is in the life to come.
Chris Shaw is a mathematician and data analyst with an MPhil in statistical research. He is currently writing a book on truth and politics. He attends an Anglican church in Sydney.
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