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If self-delusion was votes in the ballot box, the South Australian Liberals would be storming home to victory. Instead, they’re sinking to third-place irrelevance and are now just one seat ahead of upstart One Nation.
One Nation has secured a fourth seat in South Australia’s lower house, winning Narungga on the Yorke Peninsula.
The seat was so close it required a recount, but has now been won by One Nation candidate Chantelle Thomas by a margin of 58 votes over Liberal rival Tania Stock.
The Libs shed a humiliating 11 seats in one election and a staggering 17 per cent of their vote. Yet, there they are, still loudly telling everyone who’s still listening that they’re the real opposition.
Liberal leader Ashton Hurn said her team would remain the “formal opposition”, as she appointed her new shadow cabinet earlier on Thursday.
“South Australians have actually spoken, they’ve delivered us … the second-most seats in the lower house,” she said.
By one seat. Still, Hurn isn’t entirely without a proclivity for understatement.
“We might be a slightly smaller team but we’re not going to be complacent.”
“Slightly,” she says. These people are delusional. She probably still thinks the path to victory is paved by running after Labor and the Greens, shouting, ‘Us, too!’
Somebody stick a fork in these people’s arses: they’re well and truly done.
Meanwhile, One Nation have proved the ‘it’s just a blip’ naysayers entirely wrong, coming from not a single lower house seat outside Queensland in its history, to an historic four lower house seats in the most ‘progressive’ state in Australia.
Ms Thomas will join three other One Nation MPs in SA's House of Assembly […]
Ms Thomas was declared the elected member for Narungga on Thursday afternoon and thanked her supporters and the electoral staff who worked the recount.
On Wednesday, Ms Thomas said she decided to join the party to show “clarity, unity and strength”.
“I think everyone in the country is fed up and they want a strong voice to be heard, and that is what I’ll be for them,” she said.
Narunnga was previously held by Liberal-turned-independent Fraser Ellis, who re-contested the seat but only secured around 17 per cent of the primary vote.
That, to be fair, is hardly much worse than the Liberals did.
In a shock move, the ABC has actually bothered asking working South Australians why they voted for One Nation, instead of just telling them it’s because they’re ‘racists’.
“I was Labor for a long time then sort of switched to Liberal,” [Garry Houlahan] said.
“As you get older, you become a bit more conservative – you have a family and kids and things like that. It changes your outlook.
“Liberal haven’t been that conservative lately and I think One Nation are probably the only true conservative party” […]
For [Julie Hayles], the most pressing issues currently confronting Australia are health, housing and the cost of living, which included the rising cost of fuel.
She said she was opposed to federal net zero policy as well as what she described as “mass immigration”, but denied One Nation’s platform was racist – a perception she described as a “stereotype”.
The ABC just can’t help sneering, can they: “what she described as ‘mass immigration’”. What else would they call 1.5 million migrants in just two years?
Migration was cited by other One Nation supporters at the same election night event in Narungga, including former long-time Liberal voter John Jamieson.
He said One Nation wanted “Australia back as Australia, not so much a multicultural country”.
“One Nation wants people to come here but if they come here, they’ve got to assimilate,” he said.
Assimilate? Cue mass fainting-fits at ABC headquarters.
