The Liberals engineered their own demise in SA, and the federal Coalition may do the same

The dominant reason for Labor’s landslide victory in South Australia is that the party led by Peter Malinskasus has been a moderate, progressive party seeking to meet the basic needs of the people.

Yet among all the bewildering, self-defeating decisions of the South Australian division of the Liberal Party in the lead-up to Saturday’s wipeout, preferencing One Nation was at the top.

That was bad enough, but failing to require preferences from One Nation in return probably gives this one-sided preference deal the gold medal for stupidity.

Let’s see if the federal Liberals and Nationals have learned anything from this clanger in the forthcoming Farrer byelection when they will compete against each other, One Nation and a popular independent or two.

The Liberals were smashed in metropolitan Adelaide.

To illustrate, the Liberal Party had held the affluent seat of Unley for more than three decades. It is now in Labor hands after a swing of more than 12 per cent.

How much of this massive swing in a Liberal stronghold was due to disgusted moderate Liberal voters switching to Labor because of the One Nation one-way preference deal is impossible to ascertain, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped.

More generally, across the state, One Nation took primary votes off the Liberals but did not help them win any seats. What was the Liberal Party brains trust thinking?  

The chances of a repetition of the Liberal preference fiasco are greater than you’d think. It depends on who is making the decisions.

If it is the head offices of the Liberals and Nationals, sanity will likely prevail. They will understand that One Nation is a threat to their parties and recommend at least issuing two-sided how-to-vote cards or a message saying voters must fill out all squares and make their own decisions on preferences.

But if the preference decision is made by the dominant right factions of the Coalition parliamentary parties – the moderates having been all but obliterated at the last two federal elections – they might still consider One Nation their fellow travellers and recommend preferences to the One Nation candidate.

This matters not so much from a political insider’s perspective, but because in recent times, among them, representatives of the Coalition parties and One Nation have vilified Australians of Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern descent.

In our system known as an adversarial parliamentary democracy, it is important that robust debate occurs and policy differences exist.

But when political parties resort to racism to win votes, they should be called out. Our proud, multicultural nation is better than that.