Rita Panahi:
Joining me now is Deputy Executive Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, Daniel Wild. Dan, Cory Bernardi is again an MP and he seems to have even less time for PC BS than the last time around. What’s your assessment of the South Australian state election?
Daniel Wild:
Well, this is a political earthquake that will start in South Australia, but is going to reverberate across the country. You’ll get similar results in Victoria, New South Wales and federally because the Liberal Party has indicated it’s not going to change. So One Nation will continue to rise. The interesting thing in South Australia is if you listen to the mainstream media, Peter Malinauskas is a genius because he held One Nation at bay. No, he didn’t. One Nation took thousands and thousands of votes away from Labour and they are scared. I’ll give you one example of this. You look at the Electorate of Light, which is in sort of the outer northern suburbs centred around Gawler, and the parts of Angle Vale and Munno Para. Labour was a 70/30 party. 70% Labour, 30% Liberal on the 2PP. Guess what it is now? 52/48, Labour, One Nation. Okay.
One Nation took 20% of Labor’s primary vote. Now, it is true that in that electorate, there was a sitting member who left that electorate to go to another one. Funnily enough, he lost that one as well. But nonetheless, it gives you an indication that One Nation is taking many, many votes off Labour. These are white working class, lower middle income South Australians who don’t like woke climate change Labour. They don’t see their values reflected in the Liberal Party. They’re taking votes from both sides of politics and it’s here to stay.
Rita Panahi:
Now, One Nation was expected to do very well in regional areas, but as you’ve described, it’s done well in a number of other areas, including Adelaide’s Northeastern fringe. It’s caught both the Libs and Labour by surprise. I want to ask you about the preferential voting system that we have in this country. It’s fairly unique and it’s delivering some strange results. You’ve got Labour recording around 37% of the primary vote at this stage, and they’ve got over 30 seats. One Nation, over 22%, only two seats. Is there something fundamentally unrepresentative about our democracy, Dan, when you’ve got results that seem to be completely out of whack?
Daniel Wild:
Look, there can be. There’s limitations to every voting system. If you have a UK style first past the post, you can get someone who wins with only 25% of the vote, for example, if you have a lot of candidates. So no matter what system you have, it’s imperfect. Yes, it’s true that the vast majority of seats in Australia are now determined by preferences. So at the end of the day, you’ve got to get your preference game going if you want to win seats. Very few people win seats on primary vote alone anymore. The other quick point I want to make, Rita, is One Nation is now the major non-Labour Party in South Australia. When you look at how many seats that came second compared to the Liberal Party, so all of the outer suburban seats in the South and the North, that’s all One Nation now, and many regional seats.
So if you don’t want Labour, people are voting One Nation. So they’ve now become the major non-Labour Party. And I think that’s going to happen in Victoria and in many cases federally as well. The Liberal Party risks becoming like the Whig Party in the United States where social and demographic changes have superseded it, and they’re just not changing. I mean, there’s no indication that they understand what has just happened, which is that there’s only… I mean, I’ll have to look at the numbers again, but there’s only maybe at the most 10 seats where the Liberal Party came second. So that tells you everything you need to know.
Rita Panahi:
It does tell you everything you need to know. And sadly, the lessons don’t seem to be learned here. Are we going to see, given the importance of the preferences, are we going to see some sort of a formal alliance between One Nation and the coalition? Because we’re still having liberal leaders, including here in Victoria, saying they won’t do preference deals. And if they continue with that sort of strategy, Dan, you’re just going to have Labour in power that they can be getting primary votes of around 30 to 35% and winning in landslides.
Daniel Wild:
Well, I think that’s right, but One Nation is very different to Liberal and it’s very different to Labour, at least the modern incarnations of it. So if I was One Nation, I’m not sure I’d want to be preferencing Liberals either. Really the vote, and I get what Cory said about not being a protest party, and it’s not just a protest party, but it’s basically for people that have had a gut full of the two major parties, that’s who they’re voting for.
So they don’t want to vote for a party that’s going to be seen to be settling up next to another major party. That’s kind of the whole point of why people are voting for One Nation. I think at the moment, the Liberal Party needs One Nation more than the other way around. Now, we’ll wait and see how that plays out over the next few years. But at the end of the day, the only way a political party can succeed is if it gets its primary vote up high enough to be number one in terms of how our people are voting. So that’s what all the major parties need to focus on for their own future.
Rita Panahi:
Now let’s talk about Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke being heckled during prayers at Lakemba Mosque that was on Friday. These scenes have gone viral around the world. [inaudible 00:05:57]. Dan, the scenes outside the mosque were even uglier, the heckling, the hostility. Security was certainly needed federal police to keep the prime minister and the home affairs minister safe. But this amusingly happened a day after the Sydney Morning Herald penned an opinion piece attacking Pauline Hanson, who had said she wouldn’t feel safe or welcome in Lakemba. The reporter wrote, “Lakemba is one of the most welcoming suburbs in this country, evidenced by its wildly successful Ramadan Night Markets that have exploded in popularity. If Hanson feels unwelcome in Lakemba, perhaps that’s on her.” Dan, the PM did seem genuinely concerned. I might even say frightened during some of that heckling, though he has been at pains to say that it was just a very small minority who were there.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Diversity is our strength said Albanese. He’s finally being confronted with the just ridiculousness of what’s happening. I think Pauline Hanson should go to Lakemba and she should do a rally in Lakemba and that would be a good way of finding out one way or another whether this Sydney Morning Herald journalist or opinion piece writer is correct or not. I think it’d be very interesting and maybe she should go there and cover it and see what actually happens.
So look, this is just an insight into how Australia has become Balkanized, how we are increasingly living in enclaves where we don’t talk to one another. The days of Australia having shared values across our country are dead and gone, sadly. Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t come back, but it is going to take a generation to achieve that. And I just found those images so funny of Anthony Albanese sitting there like a soyboy not knowing what to do. And he’s like, “Oh my gosh, what’s happening?” I just find it fascinating. When they actually get out of their bubble and talk to people, they learn that the country they grew up in no longer exists.
Rita Panahi:
Well, as I said on Outsiders yesterday morning, you could praise the Prime Minister for bringing the country together. It seems like everybody hates him right now. The Jewish community’s not happy with him. The Muslim community, Lakemba certainly isn’t happy with him. The left has got all sorts of issues and certainly conservatives don’t like him. So he is uniting the country in one way. Now, before you go, we reported last week on claims that Grace Tame has lost all her speaking gigs for the year. They were saying she’s been cancelled. Well, the former Australian of the year has been announced as a guest of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Grace Tame will be in conversation with former ABC presenter, Antoinette Lattouf, who is promoting her new book about her legal win against the ABC for unfair dismissal. Dan, her conversation with Grace Tame will be about defiance, resilience, and what it truly costs to speak out. Look, I’ve got no issue with these two talking as much as they like in front of audiences, but why are my tax dollars subsidising these sort of lefty loving events?
Daniel Wild:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, people have to earn a crust and if this is how they do it, fair enough. But I totally agree with you. Why do we have to fund this nonsense? And I think Grace Tame has sort of boxed herself into a corner with a lot of her comments. She’s become sort of a political activist, which has distracted away from some of the important charitable work that she was doing. And I just think, again, a lot of people look at this and they just say, “Well, why can’t we have festivals, writers festivals, or other kind of things that will actually bring us together as a community?” But I can’t expect there’ll be that many people tuning in for this, so it’s probably not going to be of much consequence anyway.
Rita Panahi:
Dan Wild, thanks for your time.
This transcript of Daniel Wild on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia from 23 March 2026 has been edited for clarity.
