Labor landslide threatens to wipe out South Australian Liberals with a bit of help from One Nation

The Prime Minister has flown into South Australia for his first appearance in the state election campaign, only hours before voters cast their ballots in a contest where One Nation is poised to overtake the Liberals as the second most popular party.

Labor’s Premier Peter Malinauskas is on the cusp of securing an historic landslide win for a second term in office, and here in Adelaide you could be forgiven for thinking Pauline Hanson’s party was already the formal opposition.

One Nation’s soaring popularity has been gathering considerable attention in the final days of the campaign, and on Saturday night the party’s results will be closely scrutinised well beyond South Australia.

According to YouGov’s final poll ahead of Saturday’s election, Labor is on track to secure its highest-ever two-party preferred vote in the state, while the Liberals face their worst result to date, finishing third on just 19 per cent.

Meanwhile, One Nation’s support has surged to 22 per cent, placing the minor party second in the state for the first time, with particularly strong support in regional areas.

Similarly, a Newspoll published on Friday shows despite the Liberals making some gains over the past month, support for One Nation is holding up ­strongly, with its primary vote in SA on 22 per cent and the Liberal Party on 16 per cent.

Pessimism is setting in among Liberals both in South Australia and across the country as they brace for their party to lose seats in a Parliament where they already only have 13 lower house members.

Some are predicting the Liberals could be left with as few as four seats in the South Australian parliament after Saturday, although one senior party figure tells The Nightly “seven is probably the floor – we may get to nine”.

“There are so many three and four-way contests that the flow of preferences will determine many seats. I doubt One Nation will win any in the Lower House because they will not attract a lot of preferences,” the Liberal veteran says.

Liberal party figures also believe Labor’s vote will be down in some heartland seats because of the surge in One Nation’s popularity, a scenario that the Premier again acknowledged during interviews on the eve of the election.

Since defeating Premier Steven Marshall in 2022, Mr Malinauskas has dominated opinion polls and seen off his first two Liberal opponents David Spiers and Vincent Tarzia.

Now he’s facing first-term MP Ashton Hurn — sister of former West Coast Eagles captain Shannon — who at age 35 has had fewer than 100 days as leader to restore the Opposition’s fortunes, and in doing so has impressed many of her colleagues.

“Ashton has proven herself to be a total star. If the election had been in December, we would have won two seats rather than losing them,” one Liberal colleague claims.

However political scientist and Flinders University associate professor Rob Manwaring predicts the State Opposition Leader could be facing a party-wide wipe-out.

“One Nation has been steadily tracking between 22 to 28 per cent on the primary votes for quite some time and I think the key thing with the polls is the trend data rather than just necessarily one-off polls,” he says.

Appearing in the steel town of Whyalla on Friday, Anthony Albanese was also asked whether the increasing popularity of Pauline Hanson’s party was causing him concern.

While the PM sidestepped the direct question, he pointedly declared that “independents and fringe parties” can’t make a difference in parliament.

On Saturday night as the Adelaide Fringe Festival is underway for another year, South Australians and voters across the country will start to see whether Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party lives up to the polling hype, or indeed remains a fringe act.