Final Results of the 2018 South Australian Election

Final Results of the 2018 South Australian Election

By Antony Green, ABC Election Analyst

Despite doubts beforehand that a winner would be known on the night, it took only a few hours on the 17th of March for the result of the South Australian election to become clear.

Sixteen years of Labor government was brought to an end, Steven Marshall was the new Liberal Premier, and Nick Xenophon's attempt to translate upper house success into House of Assembly seats failed.

Scanning of ballot papers for the complex Legislative Council count continues, but the completion of counting for the House of Assembly allows a more detailed picture of the election result to be unveiled.

The Liberal Party recorded 51.9% of the state-wide two-party preferred vote, winning 25 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly. Two further seats with underlying Liberal two-party majorities, Frome and Mount Gambier, were won by Independents.

The result was in contrast to the last two South Australian elections when the Liberal Party had been unable to translate its state-wide two-party preferred vote majority into a majority of seats. In 2010 the Liberal Party won only 18 seats with 51.6% of the state-wide two-party preferred vote, and 22 seats with 53.0% in 2014.

As outlined in my pre-election summary on the ABC Elections website, a major redistribution took place in 2016. Applying South Australia's unique 'fairness' provision, the boundaries were re-drawn so that a repeat of the 2014 election result should deliver a Liberal majority government. The new boundaries required the Weatherill Labor government gain a 3% swing in its favour to win re-election in 2018.

At the 2014 election there were 24 districts with underlying Liberal majorities, two of them held by Independents. After the redistribution, the new boundaries had a notional 27 Liberal seats, four Labor seats becoming notional Liberal seats, and one abolished Liberal seat replaced by a notional Labor seat. Again, see my pre-election summary for more details on the redistribution and a background on the politics of electoral boundaries in South Australia.

The final results confirm that the redistribution was largely responsible for the election outcome. Pre-selection issues saw one Labor and one Liberal seat gained by Independents, but only two seats changed party based on post-redistribution margins. Those seats were Mawson, where Labor's Leon Bignell overcame the redistribution to retain what had become a notional Liberal seat, and King, an entirely new seat in Adelaide's north-east that sat only a handful of votes on the Labor side of the electoral pendulum. King had not defended by a sitting Labor MP and was notionally gained by the Liberal Party.