He’s the high-profile South Australian politician challenging the big parties with his own upstart political movement – and no, we’re not talking about Nick Xenophon.



It is a sign of the deeply unusual manner in which the SA state election campaign is panning out that senator Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives party has hardly rated a mention, despite the 17 March contest shaping up as both the first big test and first major opportunity for the ex-Liberal’s new political force.

The Australian Conservatives are running 33 lower house candidates – three short of the number Nick Xenophon’s SA Best have announced to date – but the real opportunities lie in SA’s legislative council, where Bernardi already has two well-established members out of a merger with Family First.

Dennis Hood, the leader of the South Australian branch of the party, is not up for re-election, but his collegue Robert Brokenshire will be fighting for his spot, and Riverland businesswoman Nicolle Jachmann rounds out the upper house ticket.

If Bernardi can retain enough of Family First’s significant SA support base and bring on board some of his own fans, the Australian Conservatives could prove highly influential in what is likely to be a fractured 22-member legislative council.

What’s more, One Nation failed to register in time for the election, meaning the Australian Conservatives will have a clear run at voters who inhabit the space to the right of the Liberal party.

That space is larger than usual given that the campaign of Liberal leader Steven Marshall, himself a moderate, has responded to the Xenophon threat and Labor’s popular renewables strategy by edging to the political centre on a number of issues.

SA Liberal leader Steven Marshall (left) with Nick Xenophon. Photograph: David Mariuz/AAP

In an election where the centre-right party is offering $100m in means-tested grants to help people buy home battery storage systems and a 10-year moratorium on fracking in a farming region, Bernardi has a lot of conservative touchstones to himself.

His proposals include repealing $3bn in state taxes, completely ending renewable energy state subsidies, and undertaking a cost-benefit analysis to either bring coal-fired power back to SA or build a nuclear power plant.

The nuclear ambitions don’t stop there, with the Australian Conservatives proposing to follow through on Labor’s abandoned push to establish a $445bn state wealth fund seeded from importing and storing high-level radioactive waste that could remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

A lower house seat is a long shot, but the Australian Conservatives could play a deciding role in many electorates, firstly by making it more difficult for the Liberal party to win seats outright in an election where going down to preferences promises to be a chaotic affair, with Liberal, Labor and SA Best evenly divided in many areas.

Australian Conservatives preferences are, however, expected to flow back to the Liberals and could prove decisive in the many marginal seats up for grabs.

Their conservative values and policies appeal to some, but the key question is whether anyone is actually listening, with all the attention on Xenophon.

Of course, it is not so easy to start afresh without the formidable Liberal party machine backing Bernardi as it once did. Like Xenophon and SA Best, Bernardi’s personal brand is well known, but his new party’s name is not, and Australian political history is littered with the floating corpses of startup political parties drowned out by more established voices.

Voters had a decade-and-a-half to become familiar with Family First, but the Australian Conservatives are in a sense starting afresh, and will also be distracted by the federal byelection in Batman that concludes on the same day as the SA election.

Unlike Xenophon, Bernardi is not himself running as a candidate as he continues with his federal Senate commitments, and besides is a great deal more divisive a figure than the SA Best leader is. Xenophon might have questionable taste in advertising jingles, but he has never linked bestiality to same-sex relationships as Bernardi has.

After spending three months in the US during the 2016 election campaign, Bernardi might be confident that divisiveness can be a vote winner. His election slogan is a familiar one: “Make South Australia great again.”

The original version worked for US president Donald Trump, but how will it go down in SA?