In Hillcrest in the north east of Adelaide, Christopher Pyne is talking about traffic jams. An hour before, he’d been fretting about white ants in the A-frames of the Liberal party’s election posters.



Outside a suburban house, flanked by the Liberal candidate for the Labor-held marginal state seat of Torrens, Therese Kenny, Pyne says Labor has had 16 years to fix the mess of Fosters Road. He got stuck in traffic there recently, “and I thought, stuff it, I need to turn right, and I’m stuck here”.

We are on Don and Dawn Goldney’s front porch. The retired couple will be voting Liberal when South Australians go to the polls on Saturday, 17 March. Pyne notes that the Goldney front garden, neat as a pin in the late summer heat, is looking “vibrant”.

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“Do you do the hedging yourself Don?” Kenny inquires, deploying the generic kerbside small talk of a politician in election mode. Before Don can answer, Pyne cuts him off: “If Therese gets elected, she’ll come back and do that for you.

“She’ll do anything for a vote.”

With Don and Dawn solidly in the decided column, Pyne and Kenny press on in search of more votes. Keen to harvest impressions, we hang back.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Pyne door-knocking in the South Australian state seat of Torrens with the Liberal candidate Therese Kenny. They are talking to Don and Dawn Goldney. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The contest we’ve landed in is fascinating, and strange. The South Australian election is a genuine three-horse race in a two-horse electoral system – a live experiment on the impact of disaffection with major party politics.

The outcome of a tussle between an ageing Labor government, a Liberal alternative that has struggled to cut through and translate a majority two-party-preferred vote into the requisite number of seats to form government, and Nick Xenophon’s populist and parochial SA-Best party, is impossible to predict.

Don and Dawn are watching with keen interest, but have no idea how the story ends. “It’s time for a change,” Don says – a message we hear frequently as we make our way round, with fed-up voters referencing a shocking elder abuse scandal at Oakden, an Adelaide nursing home, or high power prices, or problems in the health system. “How many mistakes can you allow a government to make?”

But Dawn is worried Xenophon’s insurgency will split the centre-right vote, and that could cost the Liberals, led by Steve Marshall, government.

Don takes up his wife’s theme: “Everyone knows Nick, but who are these other people?” he asks, nonplussed.

“We haven’t seen or heard them, and if Xenophon doesn’t get in and a few of his candidates do – well it’s a bit like cutting the head off a chook, isn’t it?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jay Weatherill, Steve Marshall and Nick Xenophon at the South Australian leaders debate on Monday. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Steven Marshall: from ‘could’ to ‘might’

Closer to the city, in leafy Norwood, the state Liberal leader isn’t fretting. Neat as a pin, nursing a tiny coffee, flanked by a couple of advisers scrolling through their smart phones, Steven Marshall is looking like a politician who thinks he might just get there. He’s humming with the internalised hope of a politician who has shifted himself mentally from “could” to “might”.

The vibe out of the Liberal back room, with a week still to go, is positive. Current internal predictions point to a Marshall victory with a slim majority, although no one really knows, given the outcome in the state hinges on the distribution of preferences from the Xenophon voters – less an inexact science than an absent science.

I mention to Marshall that I’ve dropped in on the last two elections in South Australia – two elections the Liberals were supposed to win – but they lost both of them.

Will you win this one? “Absolutely,” Marshall says brightly, segueing to sound bite. “This is a critical election for the people of South Australia. Labor has been in power for 16 years, and they have comprehensively failed.

“I sense the desire in the electorate for change,” he says. “I’m confident we will do well.”

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In the last state election in 2014, the Liberals secured 53% of the two-party-preferred vote, yet couldn’t claim government. To try to overcome their enough-votes-but-not-enough-seats problem, the party has invested in data mining.

The SA Liberals are using an American software program called i360 to augment fieldwork – door-knocking and voter canvassing – in an effort to tailor communications to the issues of specific interest to voters. The i360 program works with Nation Builder, an electoral database Labor has been using for years.

The teams door-knocking voters such as Don and Dawn Goldney log the feedback they get on the doorstep to identify the issues people are interested in. Those insights are retained so the subsequent conversations and voter contacts reference those issues.

Some spruik micro-targeting as a major campaign breakthrough that will allow the Liberals to finally catch up with the more advanced ground games from the progressive side of politics, while others are sceptical that it delivers much in the Australian context where voting is compulsory – as opposed to the US, where half the battle is getting out the vote.

Dawn’s doorstop fretting about Xenophon dividing the field isn’t misplaced. The Xenophon insurgency is highly unusual because it comes from the political centre, not from the fringe.

A significant part of Marshall’s objective in the current contest has been to hold the Liberal base, to send a message that a protest vote for SA-Best isn’t a safe bet if centre-right leaning South Australians want to change the government next Saturday.

Anyone who says they know the outcome of this election is either a fool or a liar Nick Xenophon

He says there can be no coalition arrangement with Xenophon. “This concept of a coalition with a guy that doesn’t have policies would be a very dangerous position for the people of South Australia,” Marshall says, insisting he is not bluffing.

While helping to telegraph the campaign’s topline message – vote one Liberal if you want to see the back of Jay Weatherill #stability – Marshall’s tough-sounding declaration is meaningless in practice. It’s unlikely Xenophon would ever seek formal coalition. He’d be more likely to produce a wish list in return for broad undertakings about support.

In any case, Marshall thinks, backed by opinion polls, that South Australians are shifting away from Mr X, their local populist. “I think there has been declining interest in SA-Best holding the balance of power.”

Xenophon began the contest at a clip. A Newspoll late last year had SA-Best on 32% of the vote. A more recent poll has him at 21%.

It’s been a rugged few weeks. The Australian Hotels Association has pounded him on pokies, as have the unions on penalty rates, and he’s struggled in the head-to-head contest, underperforming at one of the early leader’s debates, and stumbling on health funding numbers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jay Weatherill, Steve Marshall and Nick Xenophon at Monday’s leaders debate. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Xenophon is not being judged in this election as a kingmaker with a penchant for cheesy stunts and a heart of gold. In this contest he’s a putative premier.

That’s a tougher standard, and Xenophon knows his performance at that level has been patchy. He concedes he was “flat” in the first leaders debate at the SA press club “and I wasn’t happy about that at all”.

It’s hard to fathom why, given the stakes, but Xenophon clearly didn’t expect his political opponents to come at him as hard as they did, being used to collegiate balance-of-power politics, where you can often slide through with a glib line.

Xenophon likes to be liked. He says the “vehemence” of Weatherill and Marshall in election mode caught him off guard. “They were going for the jugular and I was only tickling their armpits.”

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But while there’s a sense on the ground that Xenophon has hit some headwinds, prompting voters to have second thoughts, both the major parties think SA-Best remains a formidable political threat, and the party could well emerge next Saturday evening with a handful of seats.

Xenophon, who didn’t get where he is by playing his cards too early, won’t say who he will back in the event South Australians put him in the box seat. “I can’t decide until the people decide because you need to know the number of seats and the number of votes,” he says. “It is premature and it is arrogant to determine that position in advance of the vote.”

The SA-Best leader notes the state’s most respected political scientist, Dean Jaensch, who has watched the local elections for decades, isn’t prepared to make a prediction.

“That’s pretty telling,” Xenophon says. “Anyone who says they know the outcome of this election is either a fool or a liar.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest SA-Best leader Nick Xenophon leaves a cafe while campaigning in Whyalla. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Sandbagging in steel town

Tom Antonio is tearing through Whyalla in an SUV, a storyteller with the stamina and singular focus of Scheherazade. Once he warms up, and it doesn’t take long, he barely draws breath.

Antonio doesn’t like to be characterised as a politician, despite the fact he self-evidently is a politician, running in the seat of Giles for SA-Best. “I believe I’m a statesman,” he tells me as we push through the town on the hectic schedule he’s put together. Politicians, he says, are here and now people, not over the horizon people. “I want to advocate for the future.”

We are on the ground in Giles because Antonio has a real chance of snatching this seat from the Labor incumbent, Eddie Hughes.

The steel town of Whyalla has long been an ALP stronghold in South Australia’s iron triangle. But HQ in Adelaide is treating the seat as marginal for this contest.

A recent YouGov/Galaxy poll put Antonio on 31% of the vote, with Hughes on 37%. The two-party preferred result is absolutely line ball. Labor is sandbagging. Extra resources are being deployed for the final week. Hughes is calling around Whyalla, on the hunt for votes.

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Antonio wants Whyalla to emulate his own life path. He came to Whyalla in his youth as an apprentice at the steel works, but then branched out, starting an electrical goods retailing business that flourished and is now an independent regional chain. Just as he has diversified beyond the steel plant, Antonio thinks the town should dream big, and follow suit.

He has served on the local council, including as the acting mayor of Whyalla. He was aligned with the Liberals before hitching his wagon to the SA-Best star. Antonio tells me he approached Xenophon, proposing himself as a candidate.

The SA-Best candidate knows his opponent Hughes very well. They were on the local council together. The rivalries are intense, and relationships are poisonous. Last November, the current mayor of Whyalla, Labor’s 66-year-old Lyn Breuer, is alleged to have assaulted Angela Antonio, wife of Tom, at a Remembrance Day function after an altercation about who was to appear in a photograph. That case went to court this week.

During our visit to Whyalla there was a gritted teeth meeting in the local council chambers when Antonio swept in with his small entourage to brief the mayor about a proposed SA-Best funding commitment to repair the local jetty.

The mayor, unsurprisingly, was nowhere to be seen, and a council bureaucrat glanced with discomfort in our direction, telling Antonio the council was all about a level playing field with candidates in the looming state contest, and the jetty enhancement was delightful, “but if this is going to be an opportunity to politically point-score against Lyn, we can’t do it”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The SA-Best candidate for the seat of Giles, Tom Antonio, with Nick Xenophon talking to the Whyalla council on Tuesday. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Later, at a local shopping centre, an angry woman fronted Xenophon about “defamatory” things Antonio is allegedly saying on Facebook. Xenophon, taken aback, asked Antonio about it. The candidate told his leader the woman worked for Hughes, and categorically denied engaging in anything untoward.

Antonio is hot on the trail of an upset. He tells a community meeting during our visit that he will be “tenacious” if he wins Giles next Saturday. “I would die for this community,” he declares, hands balled, entirely serious. “I will fight, I will work for you – all I need is a chance”.

I don’t agree with my wife on everything, let alone Nick John Noonan, SA-Best candidate

You only need to spend about five minutes in the candidate’s company to glean the fundamentals: he’s self-made, tough, opinionated, polarising, and absolutely implacable. It’s hard to see him toeing any party line.

Given how poisonous his relations are with Labor locally, and his own pro-business views, it’s also hard to see Antonio supporting a minority Labor government in the event South Australians split three ways, and SA-Best ends up playing kingmaker.

When I put this to Antonio, he doesn’t demur. He agrees it would be hard to support Labor “given the mentality they’ve had for the last 30 years”. I point out that the leader, Xenophon, is deliberately leaving their collective options open. What will happen if they both win and they are in the box seat and can’t agree about which team to support?

Antonio is blunt. Whyalla comes first. “I’ve told Nick, I will support you if it is not detrimental to my constituents.” And if they can’t reach a happy consensus? “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Antonio says.

When I relay this conversation back to Xenophon, he absorbs the anecdote briefly, before understanding “Tom’s feelings”. Labor has not played nice in Whyalla, Xenophon notes.

This is a serious problem though, isn’t it, if ultimately you can’t reach agreement on your first major decision? He dead bats. “Well, first, people have to get elected, then we sit down and get a consensus,” Xenophon says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Xenophon has breakfast at a cafe in Whyalla. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Pressed further, Xenophon says he expects people elected under the SA-Best banner to stick together as a group “because that’s where we can get results. As a voting bloc we can negotiate better deals and better outcomes for our communities.”

The day after Xenophon expressed this view to me in Whyalla one of his other candidates, John Noonan, turned up on the fringes of a Jay Weatherill press conference in suburban Adelaide.

Freelancing in front of the television cameras, Noonan, a 60-year-old engineer running in Weatherill’s seat, suggested he’d like SA-Best to take cabinet positions if they achieved a strong vote – something Xenophon has emphatically ruled out. Asked whether he agreed with Xenophon on everything, Noonan said: “I don’t agree with my wife on everything, let alone Nick.”

Having to herd independently minded candidates, absent any clear and comprehensive party platform and philosophy to bind them together, is a considerable challenge, but it’s not the party leader’s only problem.

If there’s a divided balance of power then I think the Liberals will form government Antony Green

It’s not clear that Xenophon will win the seat he’s chosen to run in, Hartley in Adelaide’s east.

The ABC’s election analyst Antony Green plays down the “Nick’s in trouble in Hartley” feedback I’ve been given across the board – from Labor sources, Liberal sources, and the SA-Best operation.

To believe this, Green says, you’ve got to believe that Xenophon doesn’t come first or second next Saturday night, which seems a stretch. “I reckon he’s going to come first or second,” Green says. “Both the major parties have done open tickets, I think the majority of voters from both parties will give him preferences.”

While it’s manifestly in Xenophon’s interests to portray himself as the underdog assailed by the major parties and nasty rent-seekers such as the pokies lobby – and he’s working round the clock to do that, with help from the combatants who have picked up the cudgels – his usual cartwheeling frenzy is also laced heavily with fatalism, which is unusual for him.

As we drive through Wyalla with Xenophon in the back seat, battling motion sickness, I ask him whether they have war-gamed a scenario where candidates get elected and he doesn’t. Would he insist on being a leader outside the parliament? “Like Aung San Suu Kyi?” Xenophon offers.

I persist, what’s the plan? He says in that situation there would be a parliamentary leader and he would remain an activist and a “mentor” outside the parliament. He’d really like me to dial down the hypotheticals. “We are getting ahead of ourselves. These are dilemmas that would be good to have.”

While it’s all pretty free range in public, behind the scenes at SA-Best, the party is preparing a big final push. Private polling is underway in several seats to determine where to direct their final week efforts. The election ads are on high rotation on television. It’s crash through, or crash.

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I ask whether Xenophon, still hemmed in in the back seat, whether he misses Canberra, whether that life seems in retrospect, somehow simpler. “I did have one dream, once about an estimates committee where I was on a roll with a line of questioning: the public servants were squirming, and the minister – I’m not sure who it was – and I thought damn, why didn’t I ask those questions when I was in the Senate? I thought that’s a brilliant line of questioning.”.

So you do miss it? “No,” he says. “That dream only happened once, and it doesn’t require any counselling or treatment or strong medication.”

Xenophon pauses. “I don’t look back.

“You can’t look back.”

Weatherill says he’s just getting started

Back in Adelaide’s central business district, Jay Weatherill is insisting he’s nowhere near his use-by date.

We are in Weatherill’s city office, many floors up, gathered around a board table, late in the day. The room is chilly from the air conditioning, and pin drop quiet. The Labor leader has a stillness in his manner, an assertive kind of physical containment, that lends him the quality of a coiled spring. He also speaks quietly, which prompts you to lean in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jay Weatherill insists he is nowhere near his use-by date. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The dialled down public personae belies Weatherill’s toughness, and the toughness of his political operation, which shouldn’t be underestimated, either in the looming election contest, or in any other backs-to-the-wall political skirmish.

But this campaign is all uphill. There’s the weight of 16 years in office – a seeming lifetime in Australia’s punishing, biodegradable politics. An electoral redistribution in the state has also made life harder. Because of boundary changes that have transformed a handful of Labor seats to notional Liberal seats, Weatherill needs a positive swing of 3% to stay on his feet.

The ABC’s Green thinks a Labor victory is unlikely on current indications. Green reasons if Xenophon emerges with one or two seats next Saturday night, the balance of power in the South Australian parliament will be divided between SA-Best and another small group of independents, which gives Marshall viable options other than Xenophon to pull together a working majority if the Liberals can translate votes to seats. “If the Liberals end up with more seats than Labor, if there’s a divided balance of power then I think the Liberals will form government,” the election analyst says.

Weatherill is having none of it. When I mention there seems to be an observable “it’s time” factor afoot, the premier says he’s detecting something different. He says there’s a “mood” or a disposition to let him finish what he’s started.

Back-room types and Labor volunteers working on pre-poll report the feedback out on the hustings is friendlier than it was four years ago, but when I ask one well-placed operative whether this means anything, whether it is possible Labor could emerge from the three-way alive, the candid response is: “Who bloody knows?”

Weatherill says it’s been a tough few years at the helm. The Labor government has absorbed the shelving of the Olympic Dam mine project and the closure of Holden, but the state’s economic indicators are solid, and the unemployment rate stands at 6%. “This is an extraordinary achievement. There is a foundation of which to grow,” the premier says. “We were governing right up until we went into caretaker mode, and there is plenty more to come.”

Given Labor has spliced together minority governments before, including after the last election in 2014, when Weatherill sprinted ahead of Marshall to lock in the Port Pirie-based independent Geoff Brock – the premier rates his prospects of being able to do that again if he can get close enough.

If we fall short, we will try and pull together a majority Jay Weatherill

While the Liberals sense they have their nose in front, Labor thinks the contest is line ball, with a hung parliament the most likely outcome, with a crossbench of up to five.

Weatherill says he hasn’t reached out to any of the potential cross benchers just yet, but he’s making zero Marshall-style declarations about who he will or won’t work with. “If we fall short, we will try and pull together a majority,” he says.

“We’ve been successful in negotiating a complicated parliament. If that happens again, we are pretty relaxed, we know how to manage that. It’s not our preference obviously. We’d like a majority government, it’s much more comfortable, but the people might have a different view about how comfortable they would like us to be.”

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Given the South Australian election will be something of a political referendum on major party disaffection, I ask him whether he thinks “a pox on all your houses” is a significant issue in the state. Disillusionment with politics, Weatherill acknowledges, “is a factor everywhere”.

“The current cynicism about politics and politicians is corrosive,” he says.

The Labor leader has trialled some exercises in deliberative democracy during his period in government to try to find a pathway through divisive issues.

He says the only antidote to the loss of faith in politics as an institution is to bring the people back in. It’s hard to do, because it exposes governments to political risk, and it creates the potential for policy formation to be captured by activists, but he says being more consultative of the citizenry is “the only way forward”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Federal Senate Labor leader Penny Wong and Labor candidate for Adelaide Jo Chapley at a pre-polling station in Adelaide on Thursday. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Weatherill has styled himself as the fighter for South Australia, and the glass-half-full guy. While Marshall talks about Labor dysfunction, and Xenophon about the failings of the major party duopoly, the Labor leader is presenting himself as the leader with the cut-through to make an impact on the national scene and get things done.

With Adelaide in the grip of what the locals call “mad March” – the packed festival and events season – with residents out on the street, enjoying themselves, and feeling good about their city, the premier hopes South Australians might just see a glass half full when they cast their ballots. “I think both my political opponents set their political strategies 18 months ago in the context of 8% unemployment that they thought was going to 10%, and the state-wide power blackout,” he says.

“Basically their political strategy is to forge an assessment of the state as being in crisis, when the objective circumstances, 18 months later, don’t measure up. So they are stuck with a rhetorical position they are unable to update.

“It’s incongruent, I don’t think it resonates.”

But will his offering resonate? Will the voters buy it? Can Labor climb the mountain? “Well,” Weatherill says with a smile, “we’ll see”.