Nick Xenophon has become the main attraction in the lead-up to the 17 March South Australian election. The latest Morgan poll has his SA Best party on track to receive almost 30 percent of the vote – more than the ALP and just behind the Liberals.

Xenophon is the world’s most boring populist, and there are plenty of reasons to hate him. His vote in the federal Senate has been crucial for the Liberals in cutting the company tax rate, bringing back the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission and pushing through the so-called Gonski 2.0 school funding, which cuts billions from education funding compared to the original plan.

He has also helped the Liberals get through their work for the dole PaTH program and has supported punitive cashless welfare measures.

In recent months, he’s touted support for government whistleblowers, but that didn’t stop him from voting to imprison immigration detention workers who record or reveal information from their work. Like most of the scum in parliament, he supports Australia’s barbaric treatment of refugees.

Xenophon’s politics haven’t strayed far from his time in the Young Liberals in the 1970s. That he is South Australia’s preferred premier is a testament to the crisis facing both the major parties. Their crisis has been sharper in South Australia because of the Labor Party’s record in government and the particular issues here.

Background

While most of the state is a vast desert outback, its population is concentrated and urban. Seventy-seven percent of South Australians live in Adelaide, making it the most centralised state in Australia. Politics is dominated by Adelaide, and rural parties barely get a look in. The National Party has had almost no presence, and support for One Nation is low.

The urban electorate has favoured the Labor Party. Since the end of a rural gerrymander in the 1970 elections, Labor has formed 11 state governments, and the Liberals have formed three.

South Australia has also long been home to a middle class liberalism enamoured with the state’s non-convict history. This has found expression on both the centre left and centre right of parliamentary politics as nostalgia for Labor’s 1970s social reforms and drive to make Adelaide an arts and festival city.

Today, the middle classes cheer on premier Jay Weatherill’s love affair with techno-capitalist Elon Musk. On the right, in the 1970s there was a socially liberal split from the Liberal and Country League (the predecessor of the SA Liberal Party). Some splitters re-merged with the conservative wing of the party and some formed the SA branch of the Australian Democrats.

The local branch of the Greens appeals to this voting base, with its strongest support in the wealthy Adelaide Hills electorate of Heysen. Its lack of left wing credentials, however, meant that the party struggled to differentiate itself from the Democrats and now Xenophon.

It is no surprise that in South Australia an inner-city lawyer like Xenophon, and not an Akubra-wearing agriculturalist, has benefited from dissatisfaction with the major parties.

State politics over the last 16 years has been dominated by Labor. Under Mike Rann, Labor formed government in 2002 after two terms of Liberal government. The Liberals had privatised the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA), which they had promised not to do, and were haunted by scandals involving dodgy contracts with private companies.

In Rann’s first term, Labor was popular, and in the 2006 election the party won in a landslide in the context of a national campaign against PM John Howard’s WorkChoices and a weak and divided state Liberal Party.

They used this win to ram through anti-worker legislation and cuts, including cuts to workers’ compensation in 2008, and big cuts to the public service. These put the unions offside, and they organised protests of thousands in 2010. With his support plummeting, Rann was removed in 2011 by a joint deal between left and right factions, and Jay Weatherill was installed in his place.

A new premier, however, did not mean a new approach to politics. The first Weatherill budget in 2012 brought more cuts and job losses in the public service. In the following years, Labor’s attacks have resulted in scandals involving the breakdown of government services.

The ramping of ambulances outside of hospitals has become a regular concern, a 2016-17 report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare finding the average emergency room waiting time in SA had risen to three hours and eight minutes. TAFE SA was thrown into crisis last December, when the national accreditation body found 16 of its randomly audited courses were defective.

This record in government has opened up an anti-Labor space, but the Liberals are a discredited force and cannot fill it. They are weak and divided locally, having had three MPs resign to the crossbench in the last term of parliament, including former state leader Martin Hamilton-Smith, who joined the Labor cabinet.

Their association with unpopular federal Liberal governments damaged their electoral support in both the 2006 and 2014 elections. And their 16 years out of office have led to rot rather than renewal. They have no disagreements with the Labor government’s general program of cuts, and their occasional proposals of alternative infrastructure projects and opposition to particular taxes or cuts have generated no enthusiasm.

Both major parties at state and federal level have presided over the decline of manufacturing jobs in the state. Unemployment is at 7.4 percent in Adelaide’s western suburbs and 7.9 percent in the northern suburbs. People are desperate for work, but the new jobs have mainly been in industries of death and destruction.

The most prominent proposal has been the construction of 12 submarines for the Australian Defence Force, but there has also been SA Labor’s now shelved proposal to turn the state into an international dumping ground for high-level nuclear waste, which led to thousands protesting back in 2016.

In this context, Xenophon has presented himself as a credible alternative.

Xenophon

Xenophon entered South Australian politics when he scraped into the state upper house in the 1997 election on a No Pokies ticket. In his first decade, Xenophon found a political niche as a supposedly community-minded independent who would, as the old Australian Democrats slogan had it, “keep the bastards honest”.

1997 was the peak year of Democrat support in South Australian elections. As the party’s vote collapsed, Xenophon absorbed its base. The 2006 state election was the first time the Democrats failed to win a seat and Xenophon’s first breakout performance. He polled 20.5 percent and won two of the 11 seats in the upper house election, laying the basis for his successful 2007 run for the federal Senate.

At state and federal levels, Xenophon’s crossbench vote put him at the centre of several political controversies, beginning with the privatisation of ETSA by the Liberal government in the late 1990s. He voted both for and against the privatisation bill on separate occasions, which eventually passed without his support thanks to Labor defectors.

This flipping on major issues has continued to today: “No Pokies” Nick recently announced that he no longer supports banning poker machines in pubs. In his decade in Canberra, this slipperiness has been at the heart of Xenophon’s pragmatism. By being willing but not committed to vote for key government legislation, he has traded his vote for small concessions.

In 2008, he was praised by the Canberra press gallery for striking a deal to bring forward $900 million in spending for the Murray-Darling Basin out of Kevin Rudd’s $42 billion stimulus package.

He has since regularly been applauded for voting for reactionary legislation in exchange for minor compromises and Senate inquiries. These give an opportunity for Xenophon and a supportive media to tout his success as a negotiator and help him secure the support of business groups happy to see media “reform”, tax cuts or anti-union legislation pass.

These “wins” also fuel his support among wider sections of South Australia, including a significant voting base in rural areas of the state, where he’s viewed as standing up for their interests in Canberra.

The results of the 2016 federal election consolidated his position as a powerful third force in South Australian politics, his team winning a lower house seat and three Senate positions. The lower house result was significant, showing he could expand his support beyond a personal vote. The approaching state election will be a further test of this support.

With one poll putting its primary vote as high as 32 percent, his SA Best is well positioned to win a significant number of the 47 lower house seats, probably holding the balance of power, possibly gaining enough to form a minority government and with an outside chance of governing in its own right.

The success has attracted a range of local political and business figures. Many are former members of the Liberal Party, including Port Augusta mayor Sam Johnson and Port Adelaide mayor Gary Johanson, but there is also former Labor member and independent mayor of Marion, Kris Hanna.

The election campaign has focused less on Xenophon’s parliamentary negotiations and more on relating to a growing anti-establishment sentiment. Xenophon has adopted a range of talking points, particularly targeting the Labor government’s record.

He held a public meeting with students affected by the TAFE SA crisis and has demanded financial rewards for government corruption whistleblowers, a royal commission into state government health scandals, an end to parliamentary entitlements and a shortening of legislative council terms.

He has also supported protectionist policies to save local manufacturing and steel industries and vowed to oppose further privatisations. While his best performing seats continue to be in traditional Liberal Party areas, his campaigns have been able to win support from former Labor voters, and he is running candidates in traditional Labor seats.

The potential for Xenophon to cohere this support and the assortment of figures he has running with him into an organised political force is one of the worst possibilities to come from his rise.

The last thing Australian politics needs is another pro-business party, especially not one with the enthusiasms and momentum that Xenophon has thus far generated. He has capitalised on the failings of the state Liberal Party and pushes a right wing Labor Party further to the right.

That’s why he has gained the support of key business figures and the Murdoch press, and it’s why we should oppose him. It was positive last year when hundreds of CFMEU members protested outside of his Adelaide office in response to his support for the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and this year when the state branch of the nurses and midwives’ union, the ANMF, gave him an F on their health scorecard because of his failure to answer questions on health policy.

Labor’s opposition, however, has been more muted. Despite describing SA Best as just another Liberal Party, Jay Weatherill has refused to rule out dealing with Xenophon to form government. Depending on the parliamentary arithmetic, his rise could present the ALP with an opportunity for a fifth term of government.

Xenophon has refused to rule out working with either party, saying he will let the voters decide before entering negotiations.

There needs to be an alternative to the Labor government, but Xenophon isn’t it. Nor are the parties running in this election.

We should vote for Labor or the Greens – but with no illusions. Workers and students must be prepared to fight against several horrific parliamentary possibilities that the election could throw up. Some sort of minority government involving SA Best is the most likely outcome.

The union protests against Rann’s cuts in 2010 and the nuclear waste dump proposal in 2016 show that there is another alternative. Thousands came out to fight for progressive demands against right wing attacks from Labor. That’s the alternative we’ll need whatever government forms in March.