South Australia 2022: Messy Postcounts (Waite, Finniss, Hammond)

Expected final result LABOR 27 LIBERAL 16 IND 4

On this page: Waite (assumed Labor win vs Holmes-Ross (IND), exclusion order issues.)

On this page: Finniss (Liberal expected to defeat IND, either by exclusion order or on 2CP. )

On this page: Hammond (assumed Liberal win)

On this page: Flinders (assumed Liberal win)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

General update 30/3: All seats have been determined now with the result at 27-16-4.  As Hammond is now showing as a 2PP I am assuming it as well as Waite finished as 2PP contests while Finniss and Flinders did not, but I am awaiting confirmation of that.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to my SA 2022 post-counting coverage.  The result of the election was a win to Labor with about as many seats as polling-based seat models predicted, but the downside for the Liberals in terms of losses to independents appears to be on the high side.  As well as the expected wins by Dan Cregan in Kavel (a massive win) and Fraser Ellis in Narungga, they have lost to Geoff Brock in Stuart.  That leaves two seats that are the subject of this thread - Finniss (where they may lose to a new independent) and Waite, where the ex-Liberal independent Sam Duluk seems to be doomed but it's not at all clear that the Liberals will get the seat back.  This is the thread for messy, interesting post-counts, and I also have one up for the vanilla postcounts and the Legislative Council (which currently seems to be tracking towards 5 Labor, 4 Liberal, 1 Green and a battle between One Nation and the reborn Family First for the final seat (or maybe LDP but they have form for dying on preferences.))

South Australia 2022: Can Even COVID Save The Marshall Government?

We're just three weeks away from the 2022 South Australian election and the first Newspoll of the campaign has just given a reminder of how challenging the Marshall Liberal Government's task is.  The poll has the Coalition trailing 47-53 off primaries of Coalition 37 Labor 39 Greens 10 Others 14.  Strikingly, Marshall trails Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas 39-46 as Better Premier (an indicator on which opposition leaders rarely lead unless governments are in big trouble).  Marshall's own rating is a shadow of its former COVID-boosted self at a still reasonable net +1 (48-47) but Peter Malinauskas is doing much better at +20 (51-31).

Perhaps the latter offers some hope for the Liberals since they may be able to dent the Opposition Leader's image, but that the Marshall Government appears struggling to avoid a first-term defeat at this stage is not historically surprising.  Firstly, the government was elected with a small majority and is federally dragged, so it would be expected to more likely than not lose some seats.  Secondly federal drag also predicts how state governments will go compared to their leadup polling, which for the SA Liberals wasn't crash hot anyway.  Thirdly the government has lost a majority it started with, and this is often associated with defeat (though I am a little more cautious about this at present given that voter contempt for hung-parliament games has seemed in recent years to be rising, both in Australia and the UK.)  At some time analysts were wary of predicting state governments would lose after a single term, but first-term losses in Victoria 2014 and, far more spectacularly, Queensland 2015, reminded us that it does happen.