As Mike Rann contemplates next Saturday’s election he would be well aware that history is on his side. All of the other incumbent state Labor governments in Australia were returned to office after their initial term, and in two instances, Queensland and Victoria, the return was triumphant. Our view is that next Saturday this piece of history will be repeated, although not to the degree enjoyed by Premiers Beattie and Bracks. After giving due consideration to the ‘electoral tea leaves’ - digesting the polls and observing the campaign - we believe that Premier Rann will join the second term club with a comfortably net gain of four or five seats. But he may also face a more hostile upper house.

The upper end of this prediction would see Labor with 28 seats, a couple better than Don Dunstan managed when returned to office in 1973 and one better than John Bannon’s 1985 win. A victory of these dimensions would allow Labor to speak in terms of a ‘Rannslide’. But we believe that a devastation of the Opposition similar to that enjoyed by Beattie in 2001 and Bracks in 2002 - or, for that matter, Dean Brown in South Australia in 1993 - is beyond Labor. Our reasoning is that electoral history and recent opinion polls suggest that a Labor victory will be achieved largely through a favourable flow of preferences rather than an overwhelming primary vote. The advent of Family First and the decline of the Democrats, however, have made the preference flow back to Labor less certain. Labor’s problem is that its first preference vote has been in steady decline since the 1970s, hitting a low point of 30 per cent at the State Bank election in 1993. In 1997 Mike Rann helped lift Labor to a still less than impressive 35 per cent. At the following poll in 2002, facing a Liberal government in disarray, Labor’s vote climbed a mere 1.7 per cent.

The most recent statewide poll is the Sunday Mail’s telephone poll of 607 people conducted on 8 March. It reports the Liberal primary vote languishing on 33 per cent, with Labor still on a modest 40 per cent. Interestingly, the poll indicates Family First moving ahead to 5 per cent, the Democrats on 3 per cent and the Greens dropping back to around 2 per cent - results we suspect are around about the mark. Qualifying even further the prospect of a big win for Labor are polls looking at key marginals. Here the Liberals appear set to retain Hartley and, surprisingly, win Norwood. Yet with around 15 per cent of respondents ‘undecided’ we are not about to draw much by way of conclusion.

We believe Rann Labor will enjoy a statewide swing on primary votes of 4 to 5 per cent. Apart from delivering a comfortable win and a majority in its own right in the Assembly, this should see Labor take 5 seats in the Legislative Council, but Labor would remain well short of a majority in that chamber.

Labor’s strident use of negative campaigning against Kerin risks seeming like massive overkill, and if that perception takes hold Labor may not hold as many swinging voters as would otherwise have been the case. Television and direct mail imagery attacking Kerin ventured into new territory this week when they set him up for physical ridicule; interested readers may observe the TV advertisement on the Labor Party website. Undoubtedly, negative advertising is effective in making a simple message stick; recall Labor’s attack on Hewson in 1993 and the Liberals effective dismissal of Latham in 2004. But there is always a risk that it might go too far for after all Kerin, while not widely perceived as ‘better premier’ material, is nonetheless viewed as a decent and honest politician. There is a risk that enough voters may regard him as a man deserving fairer treatment than is being meted out in some of Labor’s advertisements.

The Liberal campaign

Capturing front page headlines with a promise to top up the first home owner’s grant by $3000, Kerin said his policy would “help eliminate stamp duty for most first home buyers”. Treasurer Foley thrashed around trying to say the policy was too costly, but at a modest $77m over three years it appeared that Labor were caught on the hop by an obvious vote winner. Kerin coupled that with a commitment to cut payroll tax, something that he conceded did not impact directly on many voters but was, he argued, “aggressive” and had the potential to create jobs. We can at least say the Liberals threw a few punches at the government during the last week. Alongside the policy to cut public service jobs by 4000, the payroll announcement should shore-up Liberal voters considering a protest vote against their preferred party’s poor showing in opposition over the last four years.

An understated Liberal launch way back in mid February was followed up by a more public launch, with candidates present, last Sunday, six days out from polling. This unusual approach to ‘the campaign launch’ probably did no particular harm and perhaps helped underscore the Liberal’s underdog status, something that may garner some support from swinging voters worried about Labor winning by too much. It was certainly an old-fashioned affair, with lots of banner waving candidates and, in stark contrast to Labor’s launch, little else by way of props, physical or electronic. The foreign minister, Alexander Downer, warmed the party faithful with an address delivered with a touch of the ‘mongrel’ that Rob Kerin struggles to muster. Downer claimed for the Howard government the state’s improved economy and trumpeted that “Mike Rann is sometimes known as Media Mike. I think a better name for him would be expedient Mike. He stands for nothing and he achieves nothing.” Downer also took a swing at Rann for taking the credit for the economic benefits that are flowing from Howard government defence projects, suggesting that “the only federal project Mike Rann has not claimed is the Baxter detention centre”.

Alas, Premier Rann is not confronting an opponent with Downer’s rhetorical flourish. But Kerin managed a little wit with his statement, “I’ve always believed that people would eventually see through this shallow government and realise that it’s a kilometre wide but only a centimetre deep.” The able and knockabout Kerin hammered out his themes that the state’s economy should be doing better, the health system remains a mess and honesty in government would be one of his priorities. But his statement that he truly believes “we are in with a real chance”, is not sufficiently reassuring to prompt us to advise readers to lay a wager with Centrebet, even if the odds on a Liberal win are 12 to 1!

Labor’s campaign

With the formal launch of Labor’s campaign presidential politics in South Australia reached new heights. With a backdrop of four-metre high photos of the premier and a video presentation that made hagiography look respectable, the setting would not have been out of place at a US political convention. It also demonstrated the huge gulf between the two campaigns - in terms of money, organisation, focus on key messages, and style.

Of course campaign launches are no longer the occasion when the election platform is laid out in its entirety. They are about key messages, about creating impetus in the final week when the less rusted on voters are starting to focus and come to a decision. In short, they are about presentation, which in this instance was highly professional and the message tightly focused.

For Labor the centerpiece was the health system and a plan to rebuild the Flinders Medical Centre, which sits at the edge of Adelaide’s southern suburbs and a clutch of marginal seats. This was balanced by a pledge to return the privatised Modbury Hospital in the city’s northeast to public sector management. This provided an opportunity to once again raise the privatisation bogey, which fell a bit flat on this occasion when Healthscope, the company that operates the hospital, cheerfully announced that they would be only be too pleased to get out of the contract, and in fact had asked to do so two years ago but were refused. Labor also had to admit that public sector management would be 5 per cent more expensive.

Labor would also not have been happy to have to endure the factional brawling of their federal colleagues, which pushed state news down the list in the evening news bulletins. In fact the deputy premier made his feelings quite clear when he told the Sunday Mail that both he and the Premier were “pissed off” at brawling factions.

The other ‘problem’ for Labor was the question of how they were going to fund their promises. At the time of writing Labor had not yet released any detailed costings and it appears that this will be held back until after the commencement of the electronic blackout. The Liberals suffered early from their announcement that they would cut public service jobs to create financial headroom. But to some extent it has given them some protection against the cry of “where’s the money coming from?” On the other hand, media questions to Mike Rann about costings produced one of the few images of a ‘testy’ premier.

However, the biggest talking point of Labor’s campaign remains their use of negative attack advertisements, which - as we noted earlier - have increased in number and become far more personal. The jury is still out on their effectiveness, although discussions with party professionals suggests that there are few doubts within Labor’s campaign team. What is more interesting is the frequency with which they are still being used, despite the clear lead Labor has over its opponents and the stratospheric advantage which Rann holds over Kerin. One explanation is that a large lead can also induce complacency and that the ads are part of a strategy to keep the pressure on voters to remember why they have switched to Labor and to keep them there. The results on Saturday will provide a few answers and perhaps create a template for future campaigns.

In fact we believe that it’s quite likely that when commentators look back on Labor’s campaign in this election they will see it as marking a turning point in the way politics is conducted in South Australia. Certainly it’s been a basic rule of campaigning for decades that the leader needs to be up front. Politicians also learnt some years ago that people get their information from television and so that’s where the advertising effort has to be focused. Even negative advertising is not new. But the intensity of that negative campaigning, the frequency and hard-edged content of the television advertising and the promotion of the leader to the point of adulation all suggest that we are seeing something different.