South Australia voted on Saturday, and the headlines will tell you Labor romped home. Peter Malinauskas secured a second term, expanded his majority, and on the current count the Liberals were reduced to just four seats in a 47-seat chamber. On the surface, it looks like a landslide.
Look at the primary votes and a very different story emerges.
Labor’s primary vote actually fell, dropping around two percentage points from 2022. The Liberals collapsed from roughly 36% to under 19% and One Nation, which polled just 2.6% at the last SA election, surged to over 21%. The conservative primary vote didn’t go to Labor. It shattered, and the preference flows handed Malinauskas his expanded majority almost by accident. He won more seats with less support. That’s not a mandate. That’s a structural windfall.
The more uncomfortable question for both major parties isn’t who won. It’s what drove more than one in five South Australian voters to a party with no sitting MPs, no state-level policy platform, and no local personalities worth speaking of.
The answer is that voters weren’t endorsing One Nation. They were rejecting everyone else.
The NSW connection is direct and urgent
Last week Resolve Strategic released a poll that should be sending alarm bells through Macquarie Street. It said in New South Wales, Labor sits at 29% on the primary vote, the Coalition on 25% and One Nation on 23%.
The change from 2011 is remarkable when Barry O’Farrell swept the Liberals to power he garnered 51.2% of the primary vote and Labor got just 25.5%.
In 2023 NSW returned a Labor Government where Chris Minns secured 37% of the vote and the Liberals got 35.4%.
The South Australian earthquake now shows we have a genuine three-way primary vote race.
Forty-six per cent of NSW voters say they would vote for someone other than Labor or the Coalition. That is nearly half the state signalling they have checked out of the system that has governed them their entire lives.
Resolve director Jim Reed put it plainly: One Nation started by taking votes from the Coalition but is now cannibalising Labor’s vote too. The voters shifting aren’t committed ideologues. They’re people who, as Reed describes it, “simply want a change to the two-party system because it’s not working for them.” This is not a left-right story. It’s an insider-outsider story. And that is a fundamentally harder problem to solve.
The Liberal dilemma is now existential
The SA result crystallises a trap the Liberal Party faces in NSW and nationally. With One Nation outpolling them on the primary vote in SA, conservatives will push Angus Taylor federally, and Kellie Sloane in NSW, to adopt One Nation-lite positions to win back regional and outer-suburban voters. But does a party that moves right accelerate losses in richer, inner city moderate areas where the party is already under threat from the Teals?
The SA Liberals were caught in exactly that bind and were destroyed by it. In NSW, with Sloane polling just 17% as preferred premier and the Coalition primary at its lowest since the last state election, the same forces are already pulling the party in opposite directions.
Labor’s problem is the one nobody is talking about
While Labor celebrates in Adelaide, Chris Minns faces a quietly deteriorating position in NSW. His personal popularity carried the party through the post-Bondi period, but he has now publicly signalled he won’t be premier in 2032, effectively placing a retirement horizon in the public mind. Resolve’s Jim Reed was blunt: “He is Labor for most people.” With Minns’ departure now in view, and 75% of voters undecided on who should replace him, Labor’s 29% primary looks more exposed than ever. Car, Park, and Scully are each known to roughly half of voters, but none breaks 10% on preferred successor.
What comes next
The Farrer by-election in southern NSW is scheduled for May 9. One Nation is polling at nearly 29% in that electorate, ahead of an independent on 23% and the Liberal candidate on 19%.
Pauline Hanson said on SA election night she was leaving Malinauskas “some landmines” in the SA parliament, and that the rest of Australia would be watching Farrer. If One Nation wins the seat, coming off the back of SA, it would be the next step in a structural realignment.
The SA election wasn’t a story about Labor’s strength. It was a story about what happens when voters lose faith in both major parties simultaneously and find somewhere else to put their frustration. NSW is showing every sign of heading the same direction. The 2027 state election is just one year away. That is not a lot of time for the majors to reverse a 46% rejection of the two-party system.
Chris Hall is CEO, Primary Comms Group, and Chair at Sport NSW
