South Australia’s 2026 election has delivered its final verdict — a commanding Labor majority and a Liberal opposition under Ashton Hurn. But One Nation’s Cory Bernardi is refusing to accept the democratic arithmetic, wielding primary vote percentages as a weapon to claim a legitimacy that the full count emphatically denies him.
The results are now final for the general election of members of the South Australian House of Assembly. Unfortunately, however, there is still one doubtful seat for the Legislative Council. The website of the SA Electoral Commission explains that in this way: “Counting for the Legislative Council takes longer than the House of Assembly because of the complex nature of the counting system used.”
For the lower house there were 46 clear-cut results. Labor won 34 seats, the Liberal Party five, One Nation three and four independents were elected. Then there was one seat where the counting went down to the wire, the very rural seat of Narungga based on the Yorke Peninsula. Its final result was determined on Saturday 18 April – exactly four weeks after polling day on Saturday 21 March. In Narungga, the final count was 12,073 votes for Chantelle Thomas of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and 12,015 for Tania Stock of the Liberal Party. So, in the end, the ONP scraped up a fourth seat.
Before I proceed, I remind readers of my article for Switzer Daily dated 11 March and titled “South Australia election predictions: Ashton Hurn will still be SA Leader of the Opposition”. I insist that the headline prediction has been proved correct. Even my details of numbers have been correct, though with a few cancelling errors in naming seats.
No sooner had the final result become entirely clear than the local ONP leader, Cory Bernardi, began to squeal. This is how he is quoted in The Weekend Australian, page 6 for 18 April: “One Nation SA leader Cory Bernardi told The Australian this week he believes his party has a moral claim to be the true opposition, saying it vastly outstripped the Liberals’ primary vote.” Here we see the classic case of a politician engaging in dishonest statistic mongering for his own purposes.
Before I give my statement of the true position, I had best give the percentages of the primary vote – and then describe how meaningless they are. For the House of Assembly, Labor secured 37.5% of the total formal vote, the ONP 22.9, the Liberal Party 18.9 and the Greens 10.4. All the rest combined received 10.3%.
Suppose that the SA House of Assembly had chosen to follow its Tasmanian counterpart (which is elected by the Hare-Clark proportional representation system) then the distribution of seats would have been very different from that which occurred in SA on 21 March. However, SA didn’t follow Tasmania. The reason why my commentary has been so harsh on Bernardi, is that he has never been an advocate of the view that any further Australian lower house system should be based on the concept of PR. Therefore, when he quotes the above statistics, he is engaging in dishonest statistic mongering.
As with every Mainland bicameral parliament South Australia’s system is based on single-member electoral divisions with preferential voting. However, SA goes beyond that. It has, in effect, entrenched the two-party system with the way it recounts votes for information purposes. The practice established from the SA elections of 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 was to recount all House of Assembly votes on a scale of Labor versus Liberal. Consequently, I can tell readers that at the March 2022 election 595,663 votes (54.6%) favoured Labor and 495,510 (45.4%) favoured the Liberal Party. I can also tell readers that such percentages meant there was a swing to Labor of 6.5% from the 2018 election.
Whether that practice will continue for 2026 remains to be seen. I think it should continue, but I acknowledge that there are electoral analysts who think it should be abandoned. Their argument is that the system is no longer two-party because One Nation has replaced the Liberal Party as the second biggest party. Such analysts, however, unlike Bernardi, have been long-term advocates of proportional representation systems.
Not being willing to wait for an official verdict on this dispute, I have proceeded to make my own reliable estimates of how the 1,117,714 formal votes would divide if and when such an exercise is performed. I find that 657,136 votes (58.8%) favour Labor and 460,578 (41.2%) favour Liberal.
The above tells us what we already know, namely that the votes of the people rejected the Liberal Party in favour of Labor and that there was a further swing to Labor. So, what about One Nation? My answer is to do the same exercise (in principle) to show what a recount would do if based on a scale of Liberal versus ONP. I find that 628,479 votes (56.2%) favoured Liberal and 489,235 (43.8%) favoured One Nation. In other words, of the three parties the one most rejected by the votes of the people was the ONP. For many voters it is a pariah party which is why the SA Liberal Party performed well when preferences were counted.
All the above explains my attitude. Just as I accept and justify the Tasmanian Hare-Clark system, so I accept and justify the South Australian House of Assembly system. To me it is entirely clear that to distribute nine seats between five Liberals and four for One Nation is fair and reasonable – and reflects the will of the voters. Furthermore, I assert that the electoral boundaries are drawn fairly and are very logical.
The offensive behaviour of Cory Bernardi doesn’t end with what he has said. Worse still is the fact that he has lobbied the independent members for Finniss, Kavel, Mount Gambier and Stuart to abandon the independent basis on which they were elected and join One Nation – so that he can replace Ashton Hurn as Leader of the Opposition!
Now imagine the situation that would arise if Bernardi were to be Leader of the Opposition. South Australia would then have a popular Labor premier, who was directly chosen by the people of Croydon and sits in the House of Assembly. Then the Leader of the Opposition would be this ‘blow in’ who enjoys a cushy eight-year term in the Legislative Council, a man who lacked the guts to stand for the House of Assembly and chose to get into the SA Parliament by being the top candidate on his party’s list.
Finally, one further feature of this election is worth noting. Both Malinauskas and Hurn performed very well in their own seat. In both cases, the One Nation candidate was done like a dinner. In working-class inner metropolitan Croydon, the final vote was 17,067 for Malinauskas and 5,989 for the runner-up Greens candidate. That majority of 11,078 was slightly down on his 2022 majority of 11,462 votes over the then Liberal candidate.
Since 2022, Hurn has represented most of the Barossa wine-growing region in her rural electoral district of Schubert. In 2022, she finished with 15,124 votes compared with 9,327 for the runner-up Labor candidate, so her majority was 5,797 votes. In 2026, she finished with 17,946 votes compared with 8,681 for the runner-up Labor candidate. So, her majority was 9,265 votes. She is very popular. So, on every basis of analysis, she deserves to be the Leader of the Opposition in the new parliamentary term.
Malcolm Mackerras is an Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic University.
Can we have less dribble from left leaning from Mackerras. His views are totally left field. Just give me financial ideas.