The SA Politics Thread

[rev]

Waste of time. If Premiers, or ministers, are up to no good, they're not going to pencil in their play dates in their diaries.

So many more important issues that affect our every day lives.

[Bobski]

At least he's stopped pretending the video was an AI deep fake

Former SA Liberal leader David Speirs started using cocaine "as a form of escapism" about two months before supplying it to two adults on two different occasions, a court has heard.

David James Speirs, 40, appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Friday where his lawyer, William Mickan, told the court his client started using cocaine in June 2024, when it was offered to him by a "third party" to cope with stress.

Last month, Speirs pleaded guilty to two charges of supplying a controlled substance to another person between August 1 and August 10, 2024, at Kingston Park.

Speirs was arrested at Berri, in the state's Riverland region, in September.

This came after a video, published by News Corp, showed the former MP snorting from a plate. The charges do not relate to the video

The former Liberal leader resigned from politics after the charges were laid.

...

"The media didn't destroy this man's reputation … he did," [DPP Martin Hinton KC] said.

"It is very much in the public interest that they report on this, you cannot put yourself up for public office, accept public office, hold public office, and then expect that you will not be held to the standards that go with holding public office.

"He gets to sit in parliament, debate how the rest of us should conduct ourselves, tell us how we should conduct ourselves, contribute to the debate, set the maximum penalty and then expect it to be enforced.

"There's an element of hypocrisy in then coming into this court and saying 'however don't apply that to me'."

Mr Mickan told the court that Speirs has good prospects for rehabilitation and has plans to walk the Kokoda Track.

"The reason for that is two-fold: one is to raise money for men's mental health, but he also wants to do it for his own rehabilitation and restoration," he said.

He also asked for a conviction not to be recorded against his client, so he can travel overseas, but said a fine or a good behaviour bond would be appropriate.

Meanwhile, Mr Hinton asked the court to impose a conviction against Speirs and asked for a "significant" fine to be imposed.

Speirs will be sentenced on April 24

Source

[HiTouch]

Attended the South Australia Industry Climate Change Conference last week at the Convention Centre, which included a Panel on Future Cities. There were 4 panelists: 1 from Singapore spruiking some city architecural award, 1 from Green Adelaide, 1 from SA Planning Commision and the Lord Mayor. People could send in questions using an app. 27 Questions were submitted by people representing industries all over South Australia, most questions focused on public transport, regional infrastructure and smart city planning.

This is what happened:
- Everyone introduced themselves,
- then they went into blindspots (threats) and brightspots (opportunities). The Singapore panellist outlined a lack of cycling infrastructure and rambled about Singapore as if nobody in the room had ever seen the city.
- The SA Planning Commision Director spoke about driverless Ubers in LA as a potential brightspot
- And they went overtime. No questions answered. So it finished.
- The Lord Mayor literally said 2 things in her introduction about pedestrianising the city.

So disappointed. Everyone seems to be chasing theoretical unicorns while ignoring what's on hand. Regarding infrastructure, it's evident that this decade is a lost one with all money going towards N/S Motorway. Nothing wrong with cycling but if you are planning developments in Playford and Seaford for population growth, you cannot expect such people to cycle into the city. Public transit is key.

[SBD]

This week, we had a state budget that paid lip service to drip feeding some money towards a Greater Adelaide Bypass some time n the future.

We also had the announcement that JBS will be mothballing its Seven Point Pork abattoir near Port Wakefield at the end of the year. The root cause eventually identified that Coles will be moving its pork purchase contract from Seven Point Port to Big River Pork. The news so far has focused on the loss of 270 jobs and the largest employer in Wakefield Regional Council.

Let's assume the pigs will still be produced by the farms near Port Wakefield, and the Coles contract is going to require roughly the same amount of pork for the SA market that it does now. Instead of pigs making a short trip to a local abattoir, then truck loads of refrigerated meat coming down Port Wakefield Road to Coles' distribution centre at Edinburgh, we will have truck loads of live pigs going from Port Wakefield to Murray Bridge, then truck loads of pork from Murray Bridge to Edinburgh. How long until someone starts to complain about extra livestock trucks on Portrush Road and extra refrigerated trucks descending the SE Freeway?

The Greater Adelaide Bypass would presumably be ideal for this traffic once it's developed, but is it up to the job yet? Which country towns would pick up this traffic instead of the current highway network? Mallala, Truro, Cambrai, Sedan, Murray Bridge, for a route that Google says is 40 minutes longer by car. Which improvements are critical to make it the preferred route for safety and efficiency of both the truck drivers and everyone else?

[Bobski]

Source

SA state election 2026: YouGov poll tips Malinauskas Labor to annihilate of SA Liberals

Peter Malinauskas is storming towards a historic election landslide that would consign his Liberal rivals to a future-threatening two seats, a bombshell opinion poll reveals.

In extraordinary support for a government nine months from an election, Labor is holding a record 67 per cent to 33 per cent lead in two-party preferred stakes.

The YouGov poll shows Labor’s first-preference support has surged to 48 per cent – an eight-point jump from its landslide 2022 victory – while the Liberals are languishing at 21 per cent, a 15-point slump.

If repeated at the March 21 state election, the Liberals would hold only the electorates of Chaffey and Flinders – in the Riverland and Eyre Peninsula respectively – in the 47-seat lower house.

The annihilation would mirror the Liberals’ Western Australian disaster at the hands of Labor in 2021 – the biggest landslide victory in Australian history, in terms of seats held by a governing party.

Following a metropolitan Adelaide wipe-out at May’s federal election, the Liberal Party would be pushed to the brink of oblivion in the state.

YouGov director of public data Paul Smith said: “An election held today would be the biggest win for the Labor Party in South Australian electoral history.

“A uniform two-party preferred swing of 12.4 per cent to Labor would see Opposition Leader Vincent Tarzia among the 11 of the 13 Liberals in state parliament losing their seats, a catastrophic defeat.

“The Liberals being reduced to only two seats would be the worst result in 168 years for the conservative side of politics, going right back to the first state election in 1857.”

Mr Smith said the only worse result than the SA poll forecast for the conservative side of politics, anywhere in Australia since Labor’s formation, was the 2021 WA election.

In that result, Mark McGowan-led Labor secured 69.7 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, 2.7 per cent more than YouGov is projecting if an SA election was held now.

The poll of 903 people, taken from May 15-28 in the federal election aftermath, shows primary and two-party support for the Liberals has collapsed even since that rout, when they were left without a metropolitan Adelaide seat.

YouGov analysis shows only 66 per cent of SA Coalition voters at the May 3 federal poll now intend to support the state Liberals at next March’s election.

Extraordinarily, Labor’s highest primary support is among the traditional Liberal over 65s base, with 55 per cent backing the ALP and 25 per cent the Liberals.

Labor even nears majority primary support outside Adelaide, with 48 per cent compared to the Liberals 27 per cent.

Primary support for the Liberals is mired below 30 per cent in every age group, region and education level, with the strongest results outside Adelaide (27 per cent) and among the 65-plus age group and tertiary educated (both 25 per cent).

“The Liberal vote collapse is most marked among younger voters where they have only 15 per cent support among 18-34 year olds, placing them third behind Labor and the Greens,” YouGov’s Mr Smith said.

Mr Malinauskas is likely to respond by repeating previous warnings to his troops that unfolding events can change political fortunes rapidly.

Asked by The Advertiser after Labor’s historic Dunstan by-election in March last year if he was concerned about arrogance creeping into his government, Mr Malinauskas bluntly replied: “That is something that won’t be tolerated … The test for us as a team isn’t the size of majority in the parliament or a particular vote outcome. The test is whether or not we’re getting things done, whether or not we’re delivering for the state.”

Source

[rev]

Like we've said on here before, the Liberals are more focused at fighting each other and shit talking the Labor party and their policies.
We can shit talk them our selves for free, we don't need public funded politicians sitting in parliament or in front of cameras doing that on 6 figure salaries with generous pension plans.

What we want and need is an opposition that is going to come up with an alternative to the governments policies.
In forming proper policies and presenting an alternative for voters, they can successfully highlight any flaws in the Labor governments policies without that being the core of what they are about.

The single biggest issues right now, the housing crisis and cost of living crisis.
Come up with some policies to address those issues. At state level obviously they wouldn't be able to do anything to impact the global factors that are contributing to these things, but they can surely come up with a plan that is going to help more South Australian's through this period.

What's Labor come up with recently? Lowering the cost of metro tickets for school kids? That's minor, but such is the lack of opposition they can come up with such minor policies and brazenly tout it as some major cost of living relief.

Hospitals are another issue, that has taken a back seat to housing and cost of living.
But with the nWCH being built next to the 'park' besides the nRAH, and the ED at the nRAH being criticised as too small etc, among other departments there, perhaps there's an opportunity to somehow build a new super sized emergency department between both hospitals (once nWCH is finished) shared by both, and allow the emergency departments in each to be reconfigured for other uses? Effectively making it one large super sized hospital.

A good half a million people have moved to Australia this year already.
Most are living in detached dwellings, whereas they come from places where they didn't have their own detached home right?
Why not pass legislation that restricts them to apartments for X years or until they have saved a 20% deposit for a house, nto as punishment or a deterrent, but to allow people who already call Australia home, to be able to find a house by relieving some of the pressure on the market, given we aren't able to build enough homes and the forecast is for even less homes to be built..since the federal government has an open border policy in place. Ensure some minimum liveability standards are met for all new apartment buildings, the induced demand will see more being built.

Another idea, why not say to the federal government, you control the nations borders, you're allowing this mass migration to take place that is putting unsustainable burdens of the states, so you fund all the new infrastructure needed to cope, since you collect all the extra revenue through GST etc.

The Liberals need to find their balls again and come up with some strong policies and show South Australian voters they have fight in them still. Because there is nothing at all that Labor is doing that is revolutionary or extraordinary, it is simply things that should have been done a long time ago but weren't because the state was hampered by the state bank collapse and shit policy decisions. They saw the Liberals weren't going to do any of it, so decided it is a vote winner and they were right.

What's stopping the Liberals from coming up with better ideas then my thought bubbles that I can come up with while I'm typing?

[Bobski]

Could we end up with the Greens or a cohort of Independents as opposition? If that poll is accurate, how could the Libs possibly perform the role of opposition with only two seats? And it could even be just ONE seat since Flinders does not look particularly safe - there was a massive swing to the Independent at the last election. (Unless she's not running this time?)

Source

If that's the end result then so be it. The Libs will have brought it upon themselves, and a crossbench opposition might be a model for the future Federal parliament if the LNP don't get their act together. They appear to have learned nothing from their drubbing and seem intent on taking the party further into right wing culture wars, ignoring clear disapproval from voters.

[SRW]

South Australia grew by 1.1 per cent or 21,000 people last year, a rate barely above our 10 year average and consistently below the national. We still have a net loss to interstate migration. House prices increased by nearly 14 per cent.

[rubberman]

If we look back to when SA was competitive with Queensland and Western Australia, we had Sir Thomas Playford, a Liberal, in charge.

He created ETSA on the belief that the private sector was not up to the job...and he was proved to be right.

He also created the SA Housing Trust on the belief that under the housing shortages of the time, and high immigration that the private sector alone was not up to the job. He built Elizabeth, and countless numbers of housing developments.

He welcomed immigration as a means of making South Australia great.

He was right.

Lest you think I am over-worshipping Sir Thomas, I'd also point out that Don Dunstan, in the late 1970s predicted housing shortages and price rises. Like Sir Thomas Playford and Elizabeth, Dunstan made firm plans to build the city of Monarto. He was also a great fan of immigration, and courted migrant communities.

Thus. I point to iconic leaders of both major parties, both of whom saw the need for providing cheap housing and immigration to advance the State. Playford proved that by having electricity in public hands, and building broad scale housing, you could do both.

There's no Playford in the Liberal Party today. If Sir Thomas Playford were alive today, he'd purge the lot of them and start again.

Recreate ETSA, build stacks of housing, and encourage more immigration would be his answer. He would not give one second's notice to the private sector worshippers, religious nuts, nor immigration dog whistlers, and we'd be better off for it.

Because present Liberal Party wants none of the policies of Playford, it's really no longer the Liberal Party as people knew it and voted for.

[NTRabbit]

What's stopping the Liberals from coming up with better ideas then my thought bubbles that I can come up with while I'm typing?

They're run from the background by a proud and advertised Trumpist ideologue called Alex Antic, who took over by stacking the party with Pentecostals, and he and they are more interested in ultra-conservative culture war positions and "owning the (sic) libs" than doing anything that remotely approaches presenting an alternative government. Most of the old moderates are long gone, and what would have been the new moderates have been shut out.

Pretty similar to what has happened to the state Libs in Victoria and the Federal Libs, except it was a lot quieter and less public, until the shit hit the fan with the attempt to wind back Abortion legislation in the middle of the night and everyone caught up real fast.

[Bobski]

The Sat Paper did a story on Antic yesterday. If the Libs allow him to steer them towards his copy-paste-US-conservative agenda, electoral oblivion surely awaits.

June 21, 2025

‘A very dangerous man’: How Alex Antic is shaping the Liberals

Having fought to the top of the South Australian Liberal ticket, Alex Antic is working to reshape the party as a radical outfit more interested in ideology than governing. By Jason Koutsoukis.

This week, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to secure a meeting with Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada, Liberal senator Alex Antic posted a photo of himself standing alongside the US president. He captioned it: “Bad luck @AlboMP, he doesn’t meet with everyone.”

For Antic, Trump is more than a political idol. He’s a blueprint for how to dominate a party from the inside, humiliate opponents and control the narrative. In his home state of South Australia, at least, it’s a playbook that appears to be working.

Antic is now one of the most influential hard-right populists in Canberra. He is a central figure in the fight over the party’s future.

Last March, Antic claimed top spot on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, pushing former cabinet minister Anne Ruston, a nationally recognised centrist, down to second. The move, widely viewed as a factional power play, was less about tactics than spectacle.

“He’s the most cold-hearted, vindictive person I’ve encountered in politics,” says one South Australian Liberal.

In February, Antic installed South Australian Liberal president Leah Blyth as the replacement for the state’s most prominent moderate, retiring senator Simon Birmingham, boosting his group’s numbers and pushing the party further to the right.

“He’s a very dangerous man,” says another Liberal from South Australia. “He’d make a fascinating case study in psychological analysis because I don’t think the average Liberal has any idea what his endgame is. Is he trying to destroy the party and rebuild it in the image of the Republican Party? Does he actually want to be Australia’s Donald Trump? I don’t know – but it’s very strange.”

Another South Australian Liberal agreed that Antic’s real intentions were not about appealing to the wider electorate but to dismantle the party in its current form.

“I think he wants to burn the place down to rebuild it in his own image,” says a third South Australian Liberal.

When approached for comment, Antic declined to give an interview. Instead, he sent an email that reads as a neatly crafted demonstration of the posture he has built his political career around.

“I am always amused by approaches from journalists looking to write a ‘profile’ piece,” Antic writes, “but I can see why your outlet is so interested in writing about me.”

What follows is a characteristic pivot: the claim that he is, in practical terms, irrelevant. He couples this with the implicit suggestion that the media’s focus on him reveals something more about their bias than his influence.

“After all,” he writes, “I am a backbench Senator, from a political party in minority opposition from a State which has a majority Labor Government. Makes sense.”

It is, however, precisely Antic’s position on the margins that gives him power. Unencumbered by responsibility, he has turned provocation into strategy, building a national profile not through legislative achievement but through cultural grievance and factional muscle.

That profile is built on three recurring themes: small government, individual rights and family values. The troika dominates his appearances on Sky News, where he is a frequent guest on programs hosted by Peta Credlin, chief of staff to then prime minister Tony Abbott; Rita Panahi, a prominent columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun newspaper; and Rowan Dean, editor of The Spectator Australia.

“One wonders how you will take my advocacy for small government, individual rights and family values,” Antic writes in his correspondence with The Saturday Paper. “Surely you wouldn’t just roll out many of the commonly used phrases as adopted by the left-wing media such as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’.”

The irony is that Antic anticipates and pre-empts criticism not to avoid it but to frame it as confirmation that he will say what others won’t.

Jason Koutsoukis Liberal MPs reveal how the former prime minister and his close confidante have been at the centre of a string of disastrous decisions that led to the party’s stunning election loss and the collapse of the Coalition.

He ends his email with a closing line that is both a brush-off and a wink: “If you can forward me a link, I will read it when I find a moment.”

Antic, 50, is the grandson of Yugoslavian émigrés; his father rose to become director of thoracic medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Antic studied law and arts at the University of Adelaide, later working as a senior associate at the law firm Tindall Gask Bentley. He served on the Adelaide City Council from 2014 to 2018.

Widely acknowledged as friendly and courteous in his personal dealings with his parliamentary colleagues, Antic is not exactly popular.

One example of Antic’s behaviour that grates with colleagues is his refusal to contribute the couple of hundred dollars a year that other Liberal senators give to the “whip’s fund”, an informal social club that pays for dinners when the Senate sits late and other social events.

“He won’t pay because he said he doesn’t want to socialise with any of us,” says one of Antic’s Senate colleagues.

His ideological stances also put him offside with former leader Peter Dutton, who lost patience with Antic’s provocative stance. Despite holding the No. 1 position on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, he was overlooked for promotion in Sussan Ley’s new shadow ministry.

Behind the scenes in South Australia, however, Antic has built a formidable power base, aided mainly by an influx of conservative and Pentecostal-aligned members who party insiders say are driving moderates out of local branches and taking control of the state party machinery. This shift in the state branch is giving Antic an outsized influence over candidate selection and internal policy debates.

It’s a pattern Liberal moderates say is repeating across the country – making the party unelectable in the ACT and near-unelectable in Victoria.

In the bruised aftermath of the party’s May 3 election rout, Antic has emerged as a symbol of what the Liberals could become if the party follows his right-wing populist instincts: combative, anti-establishment, unbothered by the political centre, and completely irrelevant when it comes to winning elections.

Since becoming a senator on July 1, 2019, Antic has railed against vaccine mandates, described a drag queen appearing on the ABC as “grooming” children, travelled to the US to meet Trump, appeared on the War Room podcast of former Trump strategist and far-right agitator Steve Bannon, and introduced legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors.

“You turn up to a Liberal Party meeting in South Australia these days and you get yelled at about late-term abortions or gender dysphoria or puberty blockers or things that normal Liberals are not really interested in,” one member of the South Australian division tells The Saturday Paper.

“And by normal Liberals, I mean people who are interested in developing economically rational policies around good energy policy, or good housing policy, or good taxation policy, and who hold basic views on things like freedom of the individual, freedom of enterprise, personal responsibility, and reward for effort.

“But instead they find that the party they love is now more interested in hysterically pursuing these ideological crusades, things they don’t want to have anything to do with – and that mainstream voters want nothing to do with – and these members are leaving the party because they will not be dictated to by Alex Antic and his supporters, who are probably more suited to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.”

As the Liberal Party’s first female leader, taking over after one of the party’s greatest losses, Sussan Ley has taken on the task of rebuilding the federal Liberal Party.

This week, she oversaw the appointment of former NSW minister Pru Goward and former Howard government cabinet minister Nick Minchin to conduct a formal review of the party’s disastrous election campaign. She also succeeded in reshaping the committee of management that is overseeing the NSW division. Both are signals Ley is serious about reclaiming the party’s traditional heartland.

Her message since taking over is clear: the Liberal Party must “meet the people where they are”. That means shifting the focus back to economics, aspiration and stability – and reflecting modern Australia rather than raging against it – as well as connecting with women, multicultural communities and younger voters.

Ley’s greatest challenge isn’t external – it’s internal, embodied by figures such as Antic.

While she talks about mainstreaming the party’s message, he talks about the “tyranny of political correctness”. While she pitches to suburban families and centrist swing voters, he rides the algorithmic currents of YouTube and X and perpetual outrage over identity and values.

If one issue distils Alex Antic’s disruptive influence on the Liberal Party, it is climate policy – in particular, the future of Australia’s commitment to net zero.

Nowhere is the divide more visible – or more politically combustible – than in South Australia, where Antic’s faction has turned the Liberal Party’s stance on emissions reduction into a flashpoint of internal warfare.

Earlier this month, at a state council meeting dominated by Antic-aligned conservatives, the South Australian Liberal Party formally voted to reject net zero.

The result left the party straddling three contradictory positions: Sussan Ley’s federal wing has net zero under review; the South Australian parliamentary Liberals support it; the state division formally opposes it.

Following the vote, senior Liberals in South Australia fear their 13 lower house seats in the 47-member Legislative Assembly could shrink even further at March’s state election.

Antic, predictably, celebrated, posting a video of Donald Trump gloating about “winning” with the caption: “President Trump when asked about the SA Liberal Party rejecting Net Zero on the weekend.”

In comments to The Australian, he went further: “Net Zero is a threat to our economy, our security and to our country. Australia’s energy policy has got to be more sophisticated than simply adopting a slogan concocted by globalist bureaucrats more than a decade ago.”

For many moderates, the moment was a breaking point. Senior figures scrambled to do damage control. Some agreed to radio interviews to condemn the motion – only to pull out at the last minute after an intervention from the state opposition leader, Vincent Tarzia, who feared a further outbreak of disunity would make things worse.

Upper house MLC Michelle Lensink, a former minister in the Marshall government, aired her frustration in a message to colleagues, accusing the Right of pushing “virtue-signalling motions” that had already been rejected behind closed doors.

“We have people within the Liberal Party who spend all their time pointlessly trying to win culture wars internally,” Lensink wrote. “That is the reason why I will call out such poor judgment every single time.”

Last year, Antic’s camp helped block motions on transgender sex education and a state-based Voice to Parliament. Soon after the party suffered historic losses at the state level, including to Labor in two byelections – a feat not achieved in South Australia for more than a century.

“There are members of [Premier Peter] Malinauskas’s cabinet who are actually concerned about the size of the victory they are likely to achieve next year, that it will be too big,” quips one South Australian Liberal.

At the May 3 federal election, the South Australian Liberals also went backwards, losing the seat of Sturt for the first time since 1972, and failing to regain the seat of Boothby, which the Liberals lost in 2022 for the first time in 73 years.

For Sussan Ley, the chaos in South Australia is existential. Antic is no longer merely an agitator from the fringe. On the issue that defines the Liberal Party’s most bitter divide, he is writing the playbook.

What happens next will depend not just on the findings of Minchin and Goward, but on whether the party has the will or the numbers to confront the forces that dominate it in places like South Australia.

For now, Antic shows no sign of slowing. He is campaigning, consolidating and elevating allies. The old Liberal model of internal compromise and electoral pragmatism is being steadily replaced by something far more combative and far less predictable.

Antic’s rise reveals the extent to which the machinery of the Liberal Party can be captured and redirected by ideological actors who are less interested in governing than in fighting. What he offers is not a path to power but a project of permanent opposition, where provocation is proof of conviction and policy is just another front in the culture war.

There are those in the party who still believe it can be pulled back – towards consensus, towards the centre, towards relevance. Their influence is waning.

If Antic’s playbook continues to succeed, not just in South Australia but nationally, the future of the Liberal Party may look less like Robert Menzies or John Howard and more like the politics of talkback radio: louder, angrier and further from government than ever before.

That, as Antic might say, is what winning looks like.

Source

[rubberman]

The Sat Paper did a story on Antic yesterday. If the Libs allow him to steer them towards his copy-paste-US-conservative agenda, electoral oblivion surely awaits.

June 21, 2025

‘A very dangerous man’: How Alex Antic is shaping the Liberals

Having fought to the top of the South Australian Liberal ticket, Alex Antic is working to reshape the party as a radical outfit more interested in ideology than governing. By Jason Koutsoukis.

This week, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to secure a meeting with Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada, Liberal senator Alex Antic posted a photo of himself standing alongside the US president. He captioned it: “Bad luck @AlboMP, he doesn’t meet with everyone.”

For Antic, Trump is more than a political idol. He’s a blueprint for how to dominate a party from the inside, humiliate opponents and control the narrative. In his home state of South Australia, at least, it’s a playbook that appears to be working.

Antic is now one of the most influential hard-right populists in Canberra. He is a central figure in the fight over the party’s future.

Last March, Antic claimed top spot on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, pushing former cabinet minister Anne Ruston, a nationally recognised centrist, down to second. The move, widely viewed as a factional power play, was less about tactics than spectacle.

“He’s the most cold-hearted, vindictive person I’ve encountered in politics,” says one South Australian Liberal.

In February, Antic installed South Australian Liberal president Leah Blyth as the replacement for the state’s most prominent moderate, retiring senator Simon Birmingham, boosting his group’s numbers and pushing the party further to the right.

“He’s a very dangerous man,” says another Liberal from South Australia. “He’d make a fascinating case study in psychological analysis because I don’t think the average Liberal has any idea what his endgame is. Is he trying to destroy the party and rebuild it in the image of the Republican Party? Does he actually want to be Australia’s Donald Trump? I don’t know – but it’s very strange.”

Another South Australian Liberal agreed that Antic’s real intentions were not about appealing to the wider electorate but to dismantle the party in its current form.

“I think he wants to burn the place down to rebuild it in his own image,” says a third South Australian Liberal.

When approached for comment, Antic declined to give an interview. Instead, he sent an email that reads as a neatly crafted demonstration of the posture he has built his political career around.

“I am always amused by approaches from journalists looking to write a ‘profile’ piece,” Antic writes, “but I can see why your outlet is so interested in writing about me.”

What follows is a characteristic pivot: the claim that he is, in practical terms, irrelevant. He couples this with the implicit suggestion that the media’s focus on him reveals something more about their bias than his influence.

“After all,” he writes, “I am a backbench Senator, from a political party in minority opposition from a State which has a majority Labor Government. Makes sense.”

It is, however, precisely Antic’s position on the margins that gives him power. Unencumbered by responsibility, he has turned provocation into strategy, building a national profile not through legislative achievement but through cultural grievance and factional muscle.

That profile is built on three recurring themes: small government, individual rights and family values. The troika dominates his appearances on Sky News, where he is a frequent guest on programs hosted by Peta Credlin, chief of staff to then prime minister Tony Abbott; Rita Panahi, a prominent columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun newspaper; and Rowan Dean, editor of The Spectator Australia.

“One wonders how you will take my advocacy for small government, individual rights and family values,” Antic writes in his correspondence with The Saturday Paper. “Surely you wouldn’t just roll out many of the commonly used phrases as adopted by the left-wing media such as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’.”

The irony is that Antic anticipates and pre-empts criticism not to avoid it but to frame it as confirmation that he will say what others won’t.

Jason Koutsoukis Liberal MPs reveal how the former prime minister and his close confidante have been at the centre of a string of disastrous decisions that led to the party’s stunning election loss and the collapse of the Coalition.

He ends his email with a closing line that is both a brush-off and a wink: “If you can forward me a link, I will read it when I find a moment.”

Antic, 50, is the grandson of Yugoslavian émigrés; his father rose to become director of thoracic medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Antic studied law and arts at the University of Adelaide, later working as a senior associate at the law firm Tindall Gask Bentley. He served on the Adelaide City Council from 2014 to 2018.

Widely acknowledged as friendly and courteous in his personal dealings with his parliamentary colleagues, Antic is not exactly popular.

One example of Antic’s behaviour that grates with colleagues is his refusal to contribute the couple of hundred dollars a year that other Liberal senators give to the “whip’s fund”, an informal social club that pays for dinners when the Senate sits late and other social events.

“He won’t pay because he said he doesn’t want to socialise with any of us,” says one of Antic’s Senate colleagues.

His ideological stances also put him offside with former leader Peter Dutton, who lost patience with Antic’s provocative stance. Despite holding the No. 1 position on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, he was overlooked for promotion in Sussan Ley’s new shadow ministry.

Behind the scenes in South Australia, however, Antic has built a formidable power base, aided mainly by an influx of conservative and Pentecostal-aligned members who party insiders say are driving moderates out of local branches and taking control of the state party machinery. This shift in the state branch is giving Antic an outsized influence over candidate selection and internal policy debates.

It’s a pattern Liberal moderates say is repeating across the country – making the party unelectable in the ACT and near-unelectable in Victoria.

In the bruised aftermath of the party’s May 3 election rout, Antic has emerged as a symbol of what the Liberals could become if the party follows his right-wing populist instincts: combative, anti-establishment, unbothered by the political centre, and completely irrelevant when it comes to winning elections.

Since becoming a senator on July 1, 2019, Antic has railed against vaccine mandates, described a drag queen appearing on the ABC as “grooming” children, travelled to the US to meet Trump, appeared on the War Room podcast of former Trump strategist and far-right agitator Steve Bannon, and introduced legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors.

“You turn up to a Liberal Party meeting in South Australia these days and you get yelled at about late-term abortions or gender dysphoria or puberty blockers or things that normal Liberals are not really interested in,” one member of the South Australian division tells The Saturday Paper.

“And by normal Liberals, I mean people who are interested in developing economically rational policies around good energy policy, or good housing policy, or good taxation policy, and who hold basic views on things like freedom of the individual, freedom of enterprise, personal responsibility, and reward for effort.

“But instead they find that the party they love is now more interested in hysterically pursuing these ideological crusades, things they don’t want to have anything to do with – and that mainstream voters want nothing to do with – and these members are leaving the party because they will not be dictated to by Alex Antic and his supporters, who are probably more suited to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.”

As the Liberal Party’s first female leader, taking over after one of the party’s greatest losses, Sussan Ley has taken on the task of rebuilding the federal Liberal Party.

This week, she oversaw the appointment of former NSW minister Pru Goward and former Howard government cabinet minister Nick Minchin to conduct a formal review of the party’s disastrous election campaign. She also succeeded in reshaping the committee of management that is overseeing the NSW division. Both are signals Ley is serious about reclaiming the party’s traditional heartland.

Her message since taking over is clear: the Liberal Party must “meet the people where they are”. That means shifting the focus back to economics, aspiration and stability – and reflecting modern Australia rather than raging against it – as well as connecting with women, multicultural communities and younger voters.

Ley’s greatest challenge isn’t external – it’s internal, embodied by figures such as Antic.

While she talks about mainstreaming the party’s message, he talks about the “tyranny of political correctness”. While she pitches to suburban families and centrist swing voters, he rides the algorithmic currents of YouTube and X and perpetual outrage over identity and values.

If one issue distils Alex Antic’s disruptive influence on the Liberal Party, it is climate policy – in particular, the future of Australia’s commitment to net zero.

Nowhere is the divide more visible – or more politically combustible – than in South Australia, where Antic’s faction has turned the Liberal Party’s stance on emissions reduction into a flashpoint of internal warfare.

Earlier this month, at a state council meeting dominated by Antic-aligned conservatives, the South Australian Liberal Party formally voted to reject net zero.

The result left the party straddling three contradictory positions: Sussan Ley’s federal wing has net zero under review; the South Australian parliamentary Liberals support it; the state division formally opposes it.

Following the vote, senior Liberals in South Australia fear their 13 lower house seats in the 47-member Legislative Assembly could shrink even further at March’s state election.

Antic, predictably, celebrated, posting a video of Donald Trump gloating about “winning” with the caption: “President Trump when asked about the SA Liberal Party rejecting Net Zero on the weekend.”

In comments to The Australian, he went further: “Net Zero is a threat to our economy, our security and to our country. Australia’s energy policy has got to be more sophisticated than simply adopting a slogan concocted by globalist bureaucrats more than a decade ago.”

For many moderates, the moment was a breaking point. Senior figures scrambled to do damage control. Some agreed to radio interviews to condemn the motion – only to pull out at the last minute after an intervention from the state opposition leader, Vincent Tarzia, who feared a further outbreak of disunity would make things worse.

Upper house MLC Michelle Lensink, a former minister in the Marshall government, aired her frustration in a message to colleagues, accusing the Right of pushing “virtue-signalling motions” that had already been rejected behind closed doors.

“We have people within the Liberal Party who spend all their time pointlessly trying to win culture wars internally,” Lensink wrote. “That is the reason why I will call out such poor judgment every single time.”

Last year, Antic’s camp helped block motions on transgender sex education and a state-based Voice to Parliament. Soon after the party suffered historic losses at the state level, including to Labor in two byelections – a feat not achieved in South Australia for more than a century.

“There are members of [Premier Peter] Malinauskas’s cabinet who are actually concerned about the size of the victory they are likely to achieve next year, that it will be too big,” quips one South Australian Liberal.

At the May 3 federal election, the South Australian Liberals also went backwards, losing the seat of Sturt for the first time since 1972, and failing to regain the seat of Boothby, which the Liberals lost in 2022 for the first time in 73 years.

For Sussan Ley, the chaos in South Australia is existential. Antic is no longer merely an agitator from the fringe. On the issue that defines the Liberal Party’s most bitter divide, he is writing the playbook.

What happens next will depend not just on the findings of Minchin and Goward, but on whether the party has the will or the numbers to confront the forces that dominate it in places like South Australia.

For now, Antic shows no sign of slowing. He is campaigning, consolidating and elevating allies. The old Liberal model of internal compromise and electoral pragmatism is being steadily replaced by something far more combative and far less predictable.

Antic’s rise reveals the extent to which the machinery of the Liberal Party can be captured and redirected by ideological actors who are less interested in governing than in fighting. What he offers is not a path to power but a project of permanent opposition, where provocation is proof of conviction and policy is just another front in the culture war.

There are those in the party who still believe it can be pulled back – towards consensus, towards the centre, towards relevance. Their influence is waning.

If Antic’s playbook continues to succeed, not just in South Australia but nationally, the future of the Liberal Party may look less like Robert Menzies or John Howard and more like the politics of talkback radio: louder, angrier and further from government than ever before.

That, as Antic might say, is what winning looks like.

Source

This shows that the Liberal Party is dead. Beyond saving.

The question then is: what are the large numbers of people who are generally centre right going to do?

With the Liberals having abandoned them, who is to represent their interests? Antic certainly doesn't.

We've had a parade of small parties trying to capture that centre right, but none have succeeded. Don Chipp, Xenophon, the Centre Alliance have all had a go, but gained no traction. Are there so few people on the centre right that there's nobody with enough numbers to form a viable opposition to hold Mali to account?

[rev]

The open border policy aka mass migration is part of the reason we are in the housing crisis mess at an accelerated rate. But yeh sure, lets bring more people in when we cant sustain the people already here.
Australia, and South Australia in particular, have de-industrialised. We don't need mass migration to grow our industrial base, because our industrial base is long gone.

[Bobski]

This shows that the Liberal Party is dead. Beyond saving.

The question then is: what are the large numbers of people who are generally centre right going to do?

With the Liberals having abandoned them, who is to represent their interests? Antic certainly doesn't.

We've had a parade of small parties trying to capture that centre right, but none have succeeded. Don Chipp, Xenophon, the Centre Alliance have all had a go, but gained no traction. Are there so few people on the centre right that there's nobody with enough numbers to form a viable opposition to hold Mali to account?

It seems likely to me that challengers/oppositions of the future – both Federal and State – will come from the left. The voting patterns for under 35s tell the story.

[rev]

It seems likely to me that challengers/oppositions of the future – both Federal and State – will come from the left. The voting patterns for under 35s tell the story.

I wouldn't write off the Liberal party just yet at either state or federal level.