Senator Cory Bernardi, surrounded by his friends and well-wishers Credit:Alex Ellinghausen And also Andrew P Street. What is is about the Paris of the South that creates such strong political personalities? Well, I have a few ideas: 1. You grow up surrounded by concrete evidence of the sort of legacy government service can leave Literally, reminders made of concrete; most notably in the form of the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Nick Xenophon now has an entire NXT bloc in the upper house. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Few other states rhapsodise over their former premiers the way that South Australia does about Don Dunstan, but it's not mere parochialism. The things he created during his tenure (1967-68, 1970-79), most notably in the arts, are constant reminders of the great things that can be done when a politician gets truly passionate about their job and doesn't treat being premier of the state as being a nice little something for the CV en route to finally getting a top lobbying gig for the racing industry. 2. Government policies have immediate, tangible effects Look, everyone likes to pretend that size isn't important, but Adelaide is a small city and the public service is one of the biggest employers - which is true of Australia generally, to be fair.

However, when there is talk of governments showing responsible fiscal rectitude by trimming expenditure - ie: sacking a bunch of people - it's felt acutely in SA, not least because no one ever announces that they're shutting down their Sydney and Melbourne offices to consolidate their new mega-department in Klemzig. Furthermore, the biggest industries have historically been heavily subsidised - the Whyalla steelworks, for example, and the car manufacturers in the southern and northern suburbs - and as those benefits were removed, the industries collapsed along with the districts surrounding them. And, of course, there's the fact that if the government's management of the Murray River failed, Adelaide would basically dry up in a week. Which does genuinely appear to be Barnaby Joyce's plan. 3. You grow up drinking surprisingly excellent wine, which prepares you for a life of political meetings in restaurants That the wine is excellent isn't the surprising bit - South Australia has the Barossa Valley, the Clare Valley and McLaren Vale wine districts, which basically makes it the planet's tipsy El Dorado - but there's a spinoff that doesn't seem obvious until you're a student whose booze budget consists of whatever change is in the sock drawer.

Every season the state's premier winemakers flog off their excess production cheaply in cleanskins which are then sold for next to nothing on the lower shelves of the less scrupulous bottleshops. The upshot is that even South Australia's most budget-conscious student politicians develop an early taste for excellent wine - and, being students, for arguing endlessly while drinking it. That's basically the entire process of preselection, right there. 4. Getting a senate seat is far, far easier than the other states There's a reason why most of the people referenced in articles that begin "independent maverick senator" come from South Australia or Tasmania: they're the places one needs the lowest number of actual votes to get elected.

As you know, every state gets 12 senators. Six are elected for a six-year term at each normal election. The idea is that this provides some consistency across parliaments, and that all the states can have a voice without just being railroaded by the superior population size of NSW and Victoria. On a practical level it means that the number of supporters needed for a senate seat is a hell of a lot smaller. To win a quota outright in NSW in a normal election you'd typically need the support of about 700,000 votes of the five million-odd voters spread all over the state; to win in South Australia you'd need a bit over 160,000, and almost all of them are in Adelaide. There's the added benefit of local media: South Australia contains 11 of Australia's 150 electorates (and might be shrinking to 10 before too long), and only four could be reasonably considered marginal. The chances of South Australia ever deciding an election is effectively nil. By contrast NSW has 47 seats, 18 of which are marginal. That's enough to decide an election on its own.

Thus east coast media, very reasonably, tends to focus on the race for the lower house seats that will determine which party wins government and the senate candidates struggle to get prime time coverage. South Australia's media, however, has less to work with and therefore have more airtime available for senate candidates - and they tend to be pretty colourful because… 5. Only the most passionate-slash-crazy stay there I used to make the joke that South Australia's two largest exports were cars and ambitious people, until the collapse of the motor industry made it too cruel to bear. However, the fact remains that rising to the top in Adelaide is influenced to some extent by simply waiting for your competitors to get impatient and move to Melbourne. That's not to suggest that everyone in South Australian politics is merely the dregs of the local party machine - whatever your political affiliation, no one could accuse the likes of Christopher Pyne or Penny Wong of being ineffectual representatives of their parties - but it does mean that politicians which would be considered cranks if they were attempting to challenge in the east can still find themselves in the red seats in Canberra purely by virtue of their own self-belief and lack of viable alternatives.