South Australia 2026: Final Polls Still Have Liberals Third

Average of final week polls ALP 37.1% Liberal 17.6 One Nation 23.3 Greens 11.2 others 10.8

If polls are accurate, Labor wins election easily making several seat gains, with Liberals and One Nation probably winning a few seats each.  Independents could win a few to several seats.

The 2026 SA election has been a weird one for polls.  There's been a very decent amount for a state election, but there were four polls tightly clustered around the start of the formal campaign, Morgan a little later, then nothing til the final days.  Also while the early polls had quite a range of figures, the last-week polls by Fox&Hedgehog, YouGov and DemosAU came out with almost identical primaries.  All have Labor on 37-38%, Liberals 17-19%, and One Nation 21-23%.  Newspoll stood out a bit more with a 40 for Labor and a miserable 16 for the Liberals.  

In my previous article I outlined a way of using the 2022 Legislative Council results to roughly look at where the Liberals and One Nation might make the final two if the polling is accurate, and assuming a swing that is two-thirds proportional and one-third uniform.  I have a few more observations on this model based on the vote share average at the head of this post.  

South Australia 2022: Classic Postcounts and Legislative Council

EXPECTED FINAL RESULT LABOR 27 LIBERAL 16 IND 4

On this page:

Expected Labor gain vs Liberal: Gibson (included in tally above)

Expected Liberal retains: Heysen, Dunstan, Unley, Morialta

On other page: Waite, Finniss, Hammond, Flinders.

This page follows classic (Liberal vs Labor 2PP) seat post-counts and also follows the count for half of the Legislative Council.  The Council count does not currently look all that close, but that might change.

Three seats (Hartley, Morialta and Unley) dropped back into the in doubt category on the ABC site overnight.  These are sites where the Liberals were projecting to win before the projection was switched off and still hold healthy leads; I expect these leads will increase and the Liberals won't be troubled holding these seats.  

(Update Monday: the leads in Unley and Morialta came down with further counting to 50.32-49.68 and 50.50-49.50.  It is most likely the Liberals will pull ahead or at worst break even on prepolls and postals so I am still treating those as expected Liberal holds for now, but may add sections below should this not happen as the count goes up or if there are changes to figures.)

(Update Tuesday: The Liberals have surged to the mid-51s in Unley and Morialta putting those beyond doubt.) 

2018 South Australia Election Wrapup And Postcount

SEATS APPARENTLY WON LIB 25 ALP 19 IND 3
(Mawson was in doubt but retained by Labor) 
Expected Legislative Council result 4 Liberal, 4 Labor, 2 SA-BEST, 1 Green

This thread will provide some general comments on the South Australian election and will also follow the post-counting in the few seats in doubt.  The post-counting comments will not be updated all that regularly as I took three days off work to follow the Tasmanian post-count and should probably get back to earning some money.  I'll try to check every day or so to see if there's anything worth noting.

The Liberal Opposition led by Steven Marshall has won the election, and is more or less certain to have an outright majority.  If it did fall short in a seat somewhere because of some freakish postcount result, Troy Bell could be counted on for support.

This is only the seventh case since 1969 of an Opposition winning an election while the same party is in power federally; for the previous six see here.  On the other hand, it confirms two other historic patterns: that governments no longer seem to go on forever (it is now 32 years since any state or federal government older than 16 years was returned) and that unpopular state premiers don't get re-elected.

SA's Voter Choice Bill Could Be Better

Earlier this year, the Australian federal parliament successfully passed Senate voting reform, which abolished the Group Voting Tickets that had trashed the 2013 election, and returned control over preferences to the voters.  I've had plenty to say already about how successful that was (performance review part 1, part 2, JSCEM sub (PDF) etc).  However, while Group Ticket Voting has been put in the bin at federal level, hopefully to remain there for good, it remains in place in the upper houses of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. (For completeness, NSW fixed its system after the 1999 debacle, Tasmania has a single-member-per-seat Upper House and Queensland has no Upper House at all).

I'm not going to expend a huge amount of energy on trying to get state upper house systems reformed in states other than my own.  But with South Australia the first state where a move away from GVTs is the subject of legislation since the 2016 Senate outcome, I think it's interesting to have a look at what is being proposed.  In attempting to get rid of Group Ticket Voting, the SA Labor government has come up with a near-polar opposite.  The proposed alternative, while still much better than keeping GVTs (as is just about anything really) is so inferior to the Senate and NSW systems that I wondered for a moment if it was built to be voted down.  It appears this isn't the case, so hopefully parties in the SA Upper House (where the Government holds just eight out of 22 seats) will be able to amend the legislation to improve it.  An interview with the Attorney-General in July did suggest he was open to different models provided that preference harvesting got the chop, which is commendable.