Liberals Crushed by One Nation Surge

The old political duopoly in South Australia is teetering on the edge.

For years, voters have been told the only choice is Labor or Liberal. Red or blue. Pick your manager of decline and hope for the best. That illusion is now collapsing under the weight of its own failure.

Confidential Daily founder Cory Bernardi, now leading One Nation in South Australia, has stepped into that vacuum and, to the horror of the political class, voters are responding.

The polling is no longer a curiosity. It is a trend.

The latest YouGov poll has Labor on 38 percent, One Nation on 22 percent and the Liberals on 19 percent. Newspoll in February was even more brutal, with Labor on 44 percent, One Nation on 24 percent and the Liberals reduced to 14 percent. Roy Morgan went further still, showing One Nation at 28 percent compared to the Liberals on just 16.5 percent.

This is a political realignment in motion.

The so-called party of opposition has been overtaken because it has forgotten how to oppose. Voters can see it. Bernardi has simply said it out loud.

“There’s no effective opposition to government; they’re effectively one party — a uni-party — and that’s a bad thing for South Australians because they’re being left behind.”

He sharpened the point even further.

“The only competition we have between the two major parties is who’s going to manage the social, economic and cultural decline slightly less badly than the alternative.”

That diagnosis resonates because it matches lived experience. Cost of living pressures are rising, services are strained, and the political class continues to talk in slogans while delivering very little.

Bernardi is not pretending this is an overnight revolution. His expectations are measured but confident.

“Whether we have one seat, we have five seats or 22 seats, we will be the strongest voice of opposition that this government has ever faced.”

That is how insurgencies build. Not through hype, but through persistence and clarity.

What is most revealing is not what One Nation says about itself, but how the Premier has started talking about them.

Peter Malinauskas has shifted his fire. He is no longer treating this as a simple contest between Labor and the Liberals. He is targeting One Nation directly and putting the Liberals on the defensive over preferences.

“Which begs the question here and that is, is the Liberal Party going to try and do a preference deal with One Nation?”

He reached back to John Howard to reinforce the point.

“John Howard had the principle and the conviction to put One Nation last. Was he wrong?”

And then came the line that cuts through the spin.

“If you look for One Nation’s health policy, you’ll find nothing … just a lot of videos complaining about culture war issues.”

That is not the language of a government dismissing a minor irritant. That is the language of a government trying to contain a rising threat.

Politicians do not waste time attacking parties they consider irrelevant. They attack the ones that are taking votes from where it hurts.

At the same time, Malinauskas has tried to play down the broader instability on the conservative side, saying he would not comment on the “chaos and turmoil” there and insisting his focus is policy. That is standard political insulation. It does not change the reality that his campaign is now shaped in part by One Nation’s rise.

There is, however, a hard truth that needs to be acknowledged.

Votes do not automatically translate into seats.

South Australia’s electoral system, like elsewhere in Australia, is built on single member electorates. You do not win representation by piling up votes across the state. You win by finishing first or second in specific contests and then surviving the preference flows. That is where the difficulty lies.

Regional seats are crowded with entrenched independents. Local dynamics matter. Incumbency still carries weight. A strong statewide vote can easily be spread too thin to convert into victories where it counts.

It is entirely possible for One Nation to poll in the twenties and still come away with only a handful of seats, or fewer than its supporters expect.

That does not invalidate what is happening. It simply defines the battlefield.

Bernardi understands this, which is why his benchmark is representation and influence, not empty predictions.

“A good result is representation in the parliament — that’s my benchmark.”

The deeper shift is cultural and political, not just numerical.

If One Nation supplants the Liberals as the primary alternative in the minds of voters, the entire structure of South Australian politics changes. The Liberal Party becomes an afterthought. Labor faces a different kind of opposition. The policy debate moves, whether the establishment likes it or not.

That process is already underway.

The Liberals are stuck between trying to imitate Labor and trying not to offend anyone. It is a strategy that satisfies no one. One Nation, by contrast, is offering a clear critique and a defined position.

That is why the polling is moving. That is why the Premier is engaging. That is why the South Australian election is no longer as predictable as it once seemed.

The system will resist. It always does. Electoral mechanics, preference deals and local dynamics will all work against a clean breakthrough.

But systems only hold while voters believe in them.

Right now, a growing number of South Australians clearly do not.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
– Mark Twain