We all laughed when Nick Xenophon said he’d be resigning from the Senate to run for Parliament in South Australia. How we laughed. Well, we’re not laughing now, are we? A shock Newspoll, released today, confirms that his new party, SA Best, is set to outperform both Labor and the Liberals if he puts up candidates for most seats in the election next March.
He outpolls both South Australian Labor Premier Jay Weatherill and Liberal Opposition Leader Steven Marshall as preferred premier, scoring a pretty massive 46 percent – which is relatively wild in a three-way contest like that.
#Newspoll SA Preferred Premier: Weatherill ALP 22 (-20 since Oct-Dec 2015) Xenophon SAB 46 (+46) Marshall LIB 19 (-8) #saparli #auspol
— GhostWhoVotes (@GhostWhoVotes) December 18, 2017
SA Best has a primary vote of roughly 32 percent, versus Labor’s 27 percent and the Liberals’ 29 percent. Pretty solid for a party which didn’t exist a few months ago.
Other minor parties have tumbled. The Greens have about 6 percent support, with other minor parties only being able to score a further 6 percent as a whole.
There’s one catch, of course – Xenophon has said he only intends to contest about 20 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly. Xenophon told The Australian that he intended on fielding “just under or just over” 20 candidates, including himself in the seat of Hartley. If that’s the case, there’s actually next to zero chance of him becoming Premier, but a very solid chance of him doing what he set out to do: control the state’s balance of power.
He’s only announced six candidates so far, and has missed deadlines to announce the rest. One of them was sacked immediately after comments from his Facebook making light of domestic violence were obtained.
Here’s what Xenophon had to say before the poll was released:
The fact is we’ll be running in about 20 lower house seats and my ambition is to be in the balance of power position and that’s being ambitious enough. We’re not like other parties vying for balance of power positions, like the Greens or One Nation. We’re firmly in the political centre where we want to take a pragmatic approach to change the state for the better. We’ve made headlines for all the wrong reasons. I’m sick of South Australia being a laughing stock in the eastern states and that is an issue we need to change.
Will his tune change now that he realises he’s actually the top dog in this race? Who knows! All we do know is that Labor and the Libs would be sweating right now.
