Nick Xenophon’s self-described big gamble to quit the Senate last year and lead SA-Best to a balance-of-power position in South Australia is at risk of imploding, with his new party’s primary vote in free fall and his personal popularity crashing.
Mr Xenophon’s federal influence has already been diminished with the loss of former senator Skye Kakoschke-Moore. Her replacement, Tim Storer, is likely to serve as an independent, reducing Mr Xenophon’s federal bloc of three senators to two, and increasing the influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
In South Australia, Mr Xenophon’s SA Best has seen its primary vote drop from 32 per cent in December to 21 per cent just a fortnight before the state election, according to a Newspoll taken exclusively for The Weekend Australian.
Of greater concern to Mr Xenophon will be his standing among voters, as his preferred premier rating has plummeted from 46 per cent in December to 29 per cent in the latest survey, just one point above South Australian Labor Premier Jay Weatherill, and only five points clear of Liberal Opposition Leader Steven Marshall.
I am all for flushing the major parties but it would have been a great shame to see Australia’s best premier dislodged by Xenoponzi whose only economic idea for SA is to join the crush-loading of Sydney and Melbourne to the benefit of his investment properties.
Honestly, if I were Labor I’d just book a whole lot of advertising space in the weeks ahead and play this trash instead of their own ads:
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
