Report on the results of the South Australian state election, 18 March 2006

The State election of 2006 was interesting for all sorts of reasons. On election night the Tally Room was galvanized by the level of support shown for Nick Xenophon in the Legislative Council ballot, interested to see that Family First would win a second seat and quiet witness to the decline of the Democrats. As the results for the House of Assembly firmed during the night it became apparent that the ALP would not only be returned to government in its own right but would have a comfortable majority. Then it became clear that the ALP would take not only most of the Liberal marginal seats but also several that commentators had not considered to be vulnerable. It was a Rann-slide, they said. This paper summarises the results of the election. It covers the results in both the Legislative Council and the House of Assembly, for each of the parties. It also looks in some detail at the flow of preferences, and how the parties tried to control this flow through their tickets and How To Vote cards. Parties trade preferences in the Legislative Council election for preferences in that ballot and also in the House of Assembly election, and even when a party is too small to expect to win seats it is useful if it can claim to have delivered the seat to someone else. So this paper looks at who received the preferences, and how much control parties were able to exercise over them. Then the paper looks at what those results can tell us about elections in South Australia. In this second section the paper considers several continuing questions: is it still the case that country seats swing less than city seats? Are the major parties still losing market share? And what should we do about ticket votes in the Assembly? Finally, the paper addresses two very current questions, one State and one Federal. The State question relates to the Premier’s proposal to reduce the size of the Legislative Council and reduce the term of an MLC to 4 years: if we had elected 16 MLCs in 2006, who would have won those seats? The Federal question relates to opinion polls which currently show levels of voter support for the Federal ALP that are comparable with voter support for the State ALP. Which seats would change hands if South Australian electors voted at the coming Federal election in the same way that they did at the State election? Where are the voters who have supported the ALP at State elections but not at recent Federal elections? And what would our Senate vote look like? [Introduction]