Horse 3515 - Full Of SA Fury, Signifying Nothing

There is a really curious thing which might happen as a result of the South Australia State Election on March 21st next month:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-20/sa-state-election-polls-put-one-nation-ahead-of-liberals/106370280

The Liberal Party will begin South Australia's election campaign with record low support, according to two opinion polls released today.

A Newspoll published in The Australian found just 14 per cent of voters surveyed intended to vote Liberal at next month's state election.

That puts the Liberals well behind One Nation on 24 per cent and Labor on 44 per cent.

Political analyst Kevin Bonham said if the result played out on election day, the Liberal Party would struggle to win a single seat.

"If the Newspoll were to be correct, they could conceivably win no seats at all, or they'd probably win about one seat,"  Dr Bonham said.

"Fourteen per cent of the vote does not get you many seats in a single-seat system."

- via ABC News, 20th Feb 2026

The Newspoll graphic looks like this: 

The South Australian House of Assembly which is the lower house, has a Preferential Voting System just like the one used at Federal Level. The South Australian House of Assembly uses Instant Runoff Voting to determine who wins the seat, and distributes preferences until a candidate has achieved at least 50% + 1 of the votes.

14% of first preferences of itself isn't disqualifying but it does generally mean that to achieve that 50% + 1 of the votes in practically every seat, that the Liberal Party will have to rely on 2nd and 3rd preferences; and with the way that votes generally fall, it is unlikely. What generally tends to happen is that voters will put who they absolutely hate, last. Thus, 2s and 3s end up coming a war for the centre position of whatever the electorate happens to think, and if you're only polling 14% on first preferences, this indicates that you are probably further away from the centre than you think that you are.

This means that with One Nation polling ahead of the Liberal Party, and they themselves being unlikely to win a seat, that the Liberal Party actually face exact electoral wipeout in winning none of the seats at all.

I would suspect that Peter Malinauskas is returned as Premier; with his Labor Government holding a super-majority in the House of Assembly, and possibly also holding a similar position in the upper house.

So dire is the Liberal Party's first preference poll, that Newspoll hasn't even bothered to do a Two=Party Preferred analysis; because a 2PP basis can't meaningfully be achieved if there isn't actually a logical second party. At 24% One Nation might pick up votes from people who hate the Labor Party but they've chosen One Nation as a protest against all majors, then the Liberal Party is likely to be sharing 6s and 7s with Labor - don't cry for me Argentina, the truth is we never liked you? 

Organisations like News 24 (formerly Sky News Australia) have decided to go full-on dropkick mode; by suggesting that the electorate is brainwashed and is being influenced by the "woke media" despite the fact that they are in fact a media organisation whose former proprietor helped found the Liberal Party in the first place. 5AA is already flying the racist banner and has accused Labor of importing voters; which is as idiotic as it sounds because the kinds of voters who they accuse Labor of "importing" are Indian and Chinese migrants who are more likely to vote for a pro-business party. The rhetoric doesn't even have to make sense, so why bother?

I don't know how you can accuse the electorate of being influenced by the "woke media" when you actually own the only newspaper, are politically amenable with the biggest radio group, as well as the commercial television networks. Unless this is yet another bash at the ABC, who to be honest haven't really said very much at all, then this makes no sense at all other than being a piece of rhetoric against an imagined enemy.

With the Liberal Party at Federal Level being in utter disarray and State Parliaments increasingly looking like bloodbaths with vultures picking off the remnants, I think that we are in one of those strange periods of history where conservatism as led by media telling the people what to think, is over as a model.

The reason for this is that the electorate tends to have very long memories and Generations X, Y and now Z, have never ever seen conservative politics work for them. In fact, they've seen conservative politics actively and repeatedly work against them.

It is worth remembering that the Liberal Party peaked in popularity when newspapers more or less dictated what the prevailing view of the day was. The Liberal Party's peak 1st Preference vote, more or less coincides with the peak of newspaper sales of the Herald-Sun, Courier Mail and Daily Telegraph in 1951. News 24 which is part of News Ltd's suite of media assets, plays to ever decreasing numbers; including in places where it is free-to-air.

Now that newspaper sales, Pay-TV subscriptions, and indeed the reach of traditional media has lost its ability to dictate what the electorate thinks, it follows that the electorate no longer thinks what conservative media wants them to. 

If we assume that the Liberal Party suffers absolute electoral wipe-out in the election and then a subsequent existence failure in the new parliaments, the question then arises as to what happens if there is no formal opposition. As Western Australia proves, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Questions are still put to Cabinet Ministers. People still voice complaints. The actual machinery of parliaments, which existed before the existence and invention of political parties, not only copes, it copes well. 

As for the action of the colour of the political football teams that will inhabit the next parliament, that's also pretty well completely known in South Australia. South Australia which is more than 90% urban by population, tends to have a stronger affinity for local community candidates. In that respect, South Australia acts more like Blacktown City Council which also has no formal Liberal Party representation. Instead, people are appointed because they are able to garner local support. South Australia actually has a long history of local independent candidates; who sometimes break through to Federal politics, as in the case of Nick Xenophon.

With only 14% of the vote, the Liberal Party preferences are likely to flow to Labor because rusted on voters tend to hate One Nation. With less than 30% of the vote, preferences are likely to flow to Labor because rusted on voters tend to hate the Liberal Party. Together, these two trends tend to break open the path for local independent candidates; these people are likely to populate the remaining seats.

With only 47 seats in the South Australian House of Assembly and what appears to be a 16% swing away from the Liberal Party, my Swing Calculator predicts:

Lab 43

IND 4

Lib 0

ONE 0

The Legislative Council reads:

Lab 12

Lib 5

Gre 1

SA-BEST 1

IND 3

That means that Labor would gain a majority in both houses with the asterisk of having to install a President in the Legislative Council but even then, it would require every single non-Labor Councillor to oppose legislation. I honestly have no idea what happens in the above scenario when you have 4 independent members - do you actually even need to choose a formal Opposition Leader? How does that work when there is no formal Opposition?

I just don't know.

Horse 2513 - My Electricity Problem, The Bigger Electricity Problem, And Why Privatisation Is Stupid

The Problem:
At about 8am yesterday morning, Mrs Rollo was disturbed not by the usual onslaught of feline hostilities which rage from time to time but by a white car and a man with a BA in Clipboardology. He came to the house, shut the power off at the power box, put a tape over the switches which are a criminal offence to remove and drove away.
I had recently arrived at work and had made a cup of coffee (of everyone’s favourite zero star coffee International Roast) and was about to settle in for the morning to do a spot of grunt work when I was told that there was no electricity.

The poles and wires in our part of the world are owned by Endeavour Energy. It was they who sent around their man in the car to switch off the power. However, I wasn’t to know that as in the first instance, I had to ring our retail electricity provider, which was Origin Energy.
Except it wasn’t.

The last bill that we had from Origin Energy was back in November last year. The account was showing $0.00 outstanding and so it was nonsensical to the person who I rang at Origin, why the elecrity was cut off.
I was sent to Endeavour Energy.

Endeavour Energy asked me if I’d run my retail electricity provider. I told them I had. They told me that I needed to track down an order for  cut off, so that it could be reversed.
So back to Origin Energy I went.

Origin Energy told me that they had sent no such order to Endeavour Energy and that I should ring Endeavour Energy to see where the order for cut off had come from.
So back to Endeavour Energy I went.

After speaking to someone at Endeavour Energy and having to reexplain the situation, I was then sent on a series of numbers until I found someone who could tell me where they order had come from. It had not come from Origin Energy as I had thought, and who I had been paying our electricity bills with but from AGL.
So I rang AGL.

AGL were incredibly confused. Not only could AGL not identify me as a customer at this address but they had details of me living at a house that I had moved out of more than five years ago. They sent me back to Endeavour Energy to see which National Meter Identifier (NMI) had been cut off.
So I went back to Endeavour Energy.

Endeavour Energy were able to tell me what the NMI for this property was, sort of. There is also a granny flat out the back, and they couldn’t determine which one it was and as they do no have accounts linked to NMIs because they are not the retail electricity provider, they sent me back to Origin Energy to get the NMI.
Which I did.

I then took that NMI to AGL, wherein I had to set up a new account because apparently (and this is the kicker) our property was an AGL owned account but unattached to any customer. This means that AGL have been supplying electricity to us, without us even knowing about it and because the account was unattached to any customer and nobody paid the bill, this is what triggered the cut off order.

So I had to create a new account with AGL, who then sent an immediate order to resupply electricity and the same man in the white car who had been around at 8am, came around at 2:25pm to turn the power back on.

Between three companies, nobody had a clue as to why we’d been transferred from Origin to AGL without our knowledge, or even how it had happened.

The Bigger Problem:
Electricity supply as far as the customer is concerned, something of a natural monopoly. The customer shouldn’t have to care about comparing a godzillion number of plans and rates, in a giant confuseopoly because in the end, electricity is  exactly fungible. 240 volts at 10 amps should be exactly the same if it comes from Kalgoorlie to Karratha or from Katoomba to Kiama. I give zero hoots about where it comes from. Broadly speaking, I’d like it to come from less fossil fuel burning, but that should be government policy and not incumbent on the poor consumer who is stuck in the middle of a retail price maelstrom to decide.

Because Electricity supply is both a natural monopoly, and a piece of national infrastructure, then history consistently proves that privatisation is rubbish. I’m not trying to make some grand statement about socialism here but if it takes the best part of six and a half hours and three companies to resolve an issue which could have been solved in less than four minutes, then you can stick whatever comments you have to make about free markets into the sun.

Private companies who have multiple administrations, which are basically duplicates of each other, who are all being funded at the lowest possible rates in the name of spinning a profit, are terrible for the consumer. Had it been back in the days of Prospect County Council which was a state-owned corporation owned by the Government of New South Wales, you would have had a guy called Geoff walk down the corridor to another guy called Steve and ask “Why’d you cut the power off at 33 Banana St?” and there would have been an answer immediately.

Privatisation has not brought prices down for consumers and to be perfectly blunt, it more than anything else was probably the root cause of the 2016 South Australian blackout, when almost the entire state losing its electricity supply due to busted interconnecters and physical destruction of wires due to storms.

The then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that state governments had paid "little or no attention to energy security", and prize knave Queensland One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, blamed the incident on relying on renwable energy sources.
The truth is that without wires, electrity doesnn't flow and the real culprit for not doing proper maintenace was ElectraNet who are 46% owned by the State Grid Corporation of China, 33% owned by a Malaysian company called YTL, and something called Australian Utilities Pty Ltd.

The fact that the electricity isn't owned by the South Australian state government is stupid and all who sold off need to be put into a room with no electricity so they can think about what they've done.
The same goes for the state governments of New South Wales. Whoever thought that this was a good idea and everyone who voted for it, is criminally stupid.

More recently Mike Baird campaigned to lease 49% of NSW's state-owned electricity distribution network and as soon as he got a better job with the NAB, he jumped ship citing "family reasons" (I think that we know exactly what those "family reasons" were). It is decisions like this that stretch back to the 1980s, which explain why it takes three companies to shut off my electricity for no good reason at all.

Conclusion:
More than six hours after the power went off and after I’d been on the phone almost continuously, doing the equivalent of their administration  for them, the power came back on again.

I had a phone call later that afternoon from AGL, asking me if I’d enjoyed the customer experience and if I would recommend them in the future.
Seriously?

Horse 2386 - SA Votes, Batman Votes, Russia Votes... Everyone Votes

Over the weekend Australia went election crazy in the 2018 Festival Of The Democracy Sausage as we had both the South Australian state election and a by-election for the federal seat of Batman on the same day; and do you know what we learnt from all of this? Nothing!
It is completely normal that after sixteen years of one party being in power that the electorate will change; which is what happened in South Australia. It is also completely normal that when you have two roughly left to centre parties running for the same seat, that one of them would win; which is what happened in Batman. The clouds didn't split, the sea didn't divide, and there was no earth shattering kaboom.
The two contests which were in theory supposed to be wildly different, with the phrase "a referendum on" for just about every political topic that you can possibly think of, turned out to be so mind numbingly alike and boring that neither of them even so much as registered a peep on the national newspapers on Monday. Maybe there was some residual celebration in the Adelaide Advertiser but as far as the rest of the country was concerned, it was yawn and crick time.

This bears further discussion and so, in a post election analysis special, I'm going to look at the two most boring Festivals Of Democracy Sausage in living memory.

South Australia.
As at the time of writing, the Liberal Party has got 24 seats to Labor's 18 (2 are still in doubt) and even though there was a really strange narrative that the Adelaide Advertiser was trying to spin, the Nick Xenophon Team made virtually no strange noises at all. When South Australians hollered for a Marshall, they got Steven Marshall as the new Premier instead of Elon Musk's massive battery. As far as the Liberal Party is concerned, this is the election which a drover's dog could have won and the fact that they made good on that is no surprise at all. Also not surprising is that former Premier Jay Weatherill will stand down as leader of the Labor party in the state.

The Nick Xenophon Team has gone the way of most third parties which ride on the back of someone's name. Just like Clive Palmer's or Jackie Lambie's parties before it, when faced against the problem of winning seats en masse, the order of magnitude of difficulty is simply too much. Historically the way to break into a two party system is to do it over many election cycles and then hope that the movement outlives its founders and is able to stand on its own. Nick Xenophon is a nice enough chap but that of itself doesn't win tens of seats.
Absolutely before the next election, the Nick Xenophon Team should be rebranded as NEXT if it is going to ever achieve anything interesting. I think that it should absolutely take confidence from winning 13.7% of the vote, to be best of rest and even beating the Greens.
Conspicious by their absence is the National Party, who after just receiving a paltry 1,328 primary votes in the 2014 election, quite rightly didn't bother to contest the 2018 election. Once again, Duverger's Law which says that single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system, continues to hold true.
The South Australian election tells us nothing because a change election was expected and we got a change election. To win 5 elections in a row is rare and as far as I know, only the Nationals in Queensland under Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen with seven and the Coalition federally under Menzies, Holt, McEwen, Gorton and Mcmahon have gone further with nine.
Apart from the two majors there are three independents, and although there is the vaguest of possibilities that they might end up holding the balance of power, I think that that chance is slim to non-existant.

Batman By-Election.
We learned even less about the state of politics from the Batman by-election than we did from the SA State election.
After the Section 44 citzenship "crisis" claimed David Feeney (who couldn't be bothered to read a form properly), his resignation triggered the by-election and former President of the ACTU Ged Kearney, was put forward as the candidate.
After what seemed like weeks of News Corp trying to run a scare campaign against both Ged Kearney from Labor and Alex Bhathal from the Greens, Ged was returned as MP; after the Labor party strengthened on both first preferences and on a two-party preferred basis.
The really weird thing was watching Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop trying to paint this as a win for the Liberal Party on ABC1's Insiders, despite them not actually fielding a candidate in the election.
The Batman by-election tells us nothing because those people who would have usually voted for the Liberal Party, had to put their votes somewhere and it seems that they hate the Greens more than they hate Labour but we already knew that in the 2016 election when on first preferences, Alex Bhathal led with 36.2% of the vote to David Feeney's 35.3%. In 2016 the 19.9% of people who voted for the Liberal Party had to put their number preferences somewhere and here, they just distributed them straight up.

How do I think that this fits into the wider game of Australian politics? Perfectly. These two elections are the respective electorates acting completely within expectations. Neither of these results was out of the ordinary at all. If there is anything to be drawn from these results it's that the Australian electorate as a whole is far more stable than the rest of the Anglosphere.
The next major shockwave to come through Australia's parliament will probably be at the next federal election which by my reckoning will occur on Saturday 11th May 2019, which is after the 2019 Budget gets handed down and is the only Saturday after that date which is possible because of the rules surrounding when the writs for the next election must be delivered.

Mostly by-elections swing against the government that's in power but seeing as the Liberal Party didn't bother to field a candidate, then that was more or less a fait accompli. State elections mostly follow the same kind of logic except that the timing of those changes things a bit. In theory, the 2010 SA State election should have installed a Liberal Government but it didn't; so that has been delayed until the point where the existing Labor Government wore out its welcome. I would expect that following the 2019 Federal Election when Bill Shorten is likely to be the next Prime Minister, then the subsequent state elections should begin to start returning Liberal Governments to State Parliaments; those results in the foreseeable future should also be kind of mind numbingly boring.

Addenda:
Russian Presidential Election
Vladimir Putin got 76.69% of the vote running as "Vladimir Putin" on the ballot. His re-election also tells us nothing because that had all the inevitability... of Putin winning the Russian Presidential Election.