Simon Leonow is a typical Liberal voter, except he no longer votes Liberal. The Harvey Norman franchisee from Adelaide now votes for Nick Xenophon and he shows no interest in reverting to old habits.

Leonow has had it with people he calls “pretend” politicians. “I guess you look at the backlash worldwide on politics – people are sick of pretend politicians pretending to stick up for the little guy, pretending to try and do the right thing for everybody, and people’s perception of politics right now is probably the lowest it’s ever been,” the businessman says.

Xenophon, he says, is not a pretender. “He absolutely delivers.”

When I ask for examples, he offers two anecdotes. The first is a story about how in 2014 Xenophon tried to protect the interests of long-term caravan park residents in a dispute with a local council. “Nick didn’t win the battle, but no one else would take that stuff on. They just don’t.”

The second relates to the interests of his business. Leonow wants to be able to open his store on Boxing Day, and restrictions on trading hours prevent him from doing that. He says he went along 18 months ago to a private dinner with Steven Marshall, the state Liberal leader – an intimate fundraiser, with six or seven guests, all business people or professionals – to try to get a hearing.

It was a convivial evening. After the meal, the group was treated to a private tour of the state parliament. During the down time, the businessman made his pitch. “Boxing Day is the biggest trading day of the year in Australia. I brought this to Steve Marshall’s attention. He said, ‘Sure, give me a ring.’ I sent him an email. I’ve still got the email. He never replied.

Nick Xenophon won’t deal with any legislation until Murray Darling issues resolved Read more

“I re-sent the email. He never replied. I sent the email to Nick – and Nick and I had been talking about it for 12 months, he’s all over it, and Steven Marshall – the first time he acknowledged it was about a month ago in an article, using Harvey Norman as an example of how South Australia is not open for business. Yet he didn’t have a single millimetre of correspondence with us about this whatsoever.”

Not good enough, says Leonow. “[The state opposition leader] uses our brand in a major article about how the current government is refusing to fix it, when we brought it to his attention and he hasn’t done a single thing either. The only one who is interested is Nick.”

In September the state Liberals pledged to extend trading hours in South Australia, and as a potential party of government they have the power to deliver – but clearly it is Xenophon’s personal touch that has resonated with the businessman.

You hear that same story over and over in South Australia. Xenophon is accessible. He’s approachable. He cares. He’s authentic. His political brand is fighting for battlers, which taps into a deep-seated bit of Australian mythology, fighting for the fair go.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Leonow outside his Harvey Norman store in the Adelaide suburb of Gepps Cross. Photograph: Tony Lewis/The Guardian

Xenophon would flinch at the comparison but, just as Donald Trump barnstormed the US with the political equivalent of a mirror that reflected the American public’s deep-seated grievances back at them in a mass act of validation, Xenophon offers his community the attributes Australians prize.

The watchful child of migrants reflects back larrikin, egalitarian, communitarian. That bedrock, and his mild eccentricities and penchant for stunts, sets him apart from the automatons of major-party politics.

In Canberra Xenophon is viewed as one of a number of micro-party kingmakers – a-balance-of-power player in the upper house, one of an important group on the crossbench, who wheels and deals with mixed success.

Sometimes he wins, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he falls on his face, like he did in November, kicking up an almighty stink about water allocations in his home state, before folding with a cursory administrative undertaking from the prime minister.

The conventional measure of success in politics is the sum of your achievements, overlaid with analysis about whether your achievements serve the national interest. Assessed by this standard measure, Xenophon’s record is mixed.

But this is a very Canberra way of looking at a politician. If you change the vantage point and observe him at the community level, you see a senator with an open door, with deep links to his community, who runs his office as though he’s an MP in a marginal seat, fighting for every vote.

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Watching him at ground level gives insight into why he’s popular. The benchmarks applied in Canberra seem a long way away.

One more switch in vantage point is required to understand why voters have swung his way. You have to experience him through their eyes. You have to walk in their shoes. If you do that, you’ll learn that Xenophon supporters are not really as fixated on results as a major-party politician, or a Canberra press gallery journalist.

The relevant measure is empathy: does he care, does he give a damn, does he validate my concerns, is he connected to me, is he my representative, will he stick up for me and my interests?

Empathy is a powerful antidote to anger, and voters are angry enough in 2016 to have propelled Trump into the White House, to have voted for Brexit, to have sent Pauline Hanson back to Canberra, to have allowed Xenophon to expand his footprint in Australia’s parliament.

It’s a revolution against politics as usual.

In Leonow’s telling, Xenophon is a breed apart – not because he wins but because he cares. I struggle with this concept because it really doesn’t seem enough. Don’t most of us care? Don’t most of us try? Is that really all this is about?

So I press. If Xenophon didn’t succeed in convincing the state government to allow you to trade on Boxing Day, if he struck out, but made a genuine effort, would you mark him up anyway? “Yes, absolutely,” Leonow says. “I think it’s the Australian way.”

He says he wants the outcome, he wants the result, but “no one is ever going to knock you down for having a crack. But have a crack and a real crack, don’t pretend, park it or be politically correct and pretend you are going to do something about something. Better to have a go than not try.

“Look, there is a backlash globally against politicians who don’t do a great deal, but look after themselves and their position, and pretend to be out front championing so many different causes. But when the rubber hits the road, very little seems to get done. I think the world is just over it. That’s why I think around the world more independents are getting support. It’s got to the point where I’d rather give anyone a go and let them try something than give the same people a go who don’t try anything.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Xenophon in his pyjamas and slippers meets Jacqui Lambie in the corridors of parliament early in March after a marathon Senate session. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

“I think that’s the way the world is going. I think that’s why we’ve seen such upheaval everywhere and why the major parties are crapping themselves because people like Pauline Hanson are getting traction, she probably shouldn’t – but just by default. She resonates with people because some of what she says is 100% spot on. It’s not going to resonate with everybody but she’s got a lot of followers.”

Leonow is not angry, or spiteful, or cynical. He’s just fatigued with a system that he thinks doesn’t connect and doesn’t respond. He’s sick of being polite and being patient. It’s time to vote with his feet. “People are just fed up.”

‘He’s absolutely non-stop’

One of the big political stories of 2016 has involved trying to unpick the backlash against establishment politics. Reporters and commentators around the world have tried to parse the underlying conditions: is this phenomenon economic or cultural, or both? Is the anger in the community the natural consequence of a lingering economic downturn? Has globalisation fatigue prompted a new wave of nationalism and in some cases ugly xenophobia?

A major review of voters by the Australian National University taken just after the 2016 election found that 40% of people surveyed were not satisfied with our democracy, the lowest level recorded since the 1970s. The survey also found 19% of the sample no longer identified with the major parties. Declining partisanship is a steadily increasing trend in Australia.

These developments are hard to ponder in the abstract. The best way to try to chart what is happening is to get out into the regions intent on breaking with politics as usual. In South Australia, we’ve seen the rapid rise of the Nick Xenophon Team, a centrist party with a populist and protectionist tinge. I rode alongside Xenophon in Adelaide and the surrounds of the city for a few days in mid December to try to assess why his brand of politics was cutting through.

I’ve been on the road in Adelaide with Xenophon before – enough to know there are a couple of well-honed rituals. You’ll zip around town in his 2006 Toyota Yaris, and you will eat exceptional yiros at Yianni’s on Hindley Street.

Nick's for everybody. That’s the difference with him. He listens while people are talking Vasilios Tsagariolos, of Yianni's cafe

A wise political person I know says Xenophon is a master of values projection. If you don’t know what that means, think of it this way. Dramatists are experts in making small things convey larger meanings, and Xenophon has something of a dramatist’s flare. He looks for things that convey meaning and intent to onlookers – medium as message.

Xenophon always travels economy on planes, which must be a nightmare for airlines who associate the word politician with the word upgrade. The car is also important as a piece of symbolism. Xenophon invites you, without ever asking explicitly, to experience the car as symbol. The little car is an extension of himself and his political enterprise: unpretentious, hard working, underrated by social climbers and sneerers, overstuffed, a bit of a shambles.

Xenophon has known Vasilios Tsagariolos, the owner of Yianni’s, since 2004. With a portable air-conditioner blasting in the corner with all the ferocity of a wind machine in a Beyoncé video, and while slicing meat over at the grill, Tsagariolos will sing the praises of his political mate. “Nick’s for everybody,” he shouts over the shop cacophony. He claims to have turned thousands of voters his way over the years. When Xenophon is bailed up by a customer, Tsagariolos ducks round the counter to make sure I’ve observed the people skills. “That’s the difference with him, he listens while people are talking.”

Xenophon is only half listening, as it happens. Multi-tasking is the default. He listens, eats, keeps an eye on the phone, frets about the follow-up that needs to happen, wonders whether he’ll have time to visit his elderly parents later in the evening. He’s also been worried for much of the day that I might be bored because this is just normal constituency stuff, nothing high octane. “He’s not so good for himself,” Tsagariolos says. “He worries so much.”

The Xenophon experience is frenetic, to say the least. When he sweeps into the electorate office at Ebenezer Place his young staff sit up like a bunch of meerkats, hoping to snare 20 seconds of the boss’s attention on any one of the myriad issues they know he’s pursuing or has hoovered up unexpectedly out on the street, which is always a distinct possibility.

His briefcase yawns with piles of paper and notebooks and Wet Ones. At the office he works at a large conference table in a meeting room, summoning staff as he goes, often with someone on a landline and a mobile. There are piles of paper up the table, and a jumble on a bureau at the end.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest For Xenophon, politics is like a personal injury law practice being played out on a much larger arena. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Getting the diary in shape has fallen behind because the final parliamentary sitting period was so hectic. He’s not happy. This needs attention. He can be brusque with staff, not rude, or diva-like, but relentless, and he insists they rise to his level of relentlessness. He’s the pacesetter and everyone knows it.

It’s less political office than personal injury law practice, which was Xenophon’s first career. Politics for Xenophon is like a personal injury practice being played out on a much larger arena. Class actions at 20 paces. Jumping on every passing opportunity. No win, no fee.

It’s meant to be a quiet day but a procession of people come through. They are alerted to my presence only once they are properly through the door. There’s a journalist sitting down the end of the table, that’s OK, isn’t it? At that point they are committed. No one objects. It is well-established price of entry into the Xenophon office that you will end up, seemingly inexorably, on Today Tonight. Xenophon is a regular at the Seven studios. The team out there love him. The Yaris could almost drive itself.

Today there are several legal problems: investors stiffed by a property developer, a drug-related matter where a person is seeking Xenophon’s help with the parole board, another drug-related matter with a distressed mother in a regional area looking for support for her family and her ice-addicted son. There’s a discussion with a migration agency about how to boost population growth in the state, a subject that has become more fraught in political circles since the One Nation resurgence.

People are told they are on the clock from the moment they arrive. In one meeting we have offsite, coffees are ordered and then sent back when they aren’t served in takeaway cups. Xenophon is permanently geared to flight because there is always another priority pressing in.

In the daily torrent of in-bound political lobbying, old-fashioned rent seeking and affecting stories of personal hardship, there are also Xenophon schemes, which you’d categorise as a pipeline of stunts. Today’s involves an adult nappy – or possibly a pair of rapidly tailored shorts, it really is best not to ask, although the project absorbs a significant amount of office stress until it is ultimately abandoned.

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There’s also a letter to Adele about ticket scalping, which is both stunt and serious. Xenophon has a thing about scalpers. It’s one of his causes. He wants an audience with the pop star to discuss this issue, so the letter to her management has to be composed in and among the blizzard of other things, and also somehow be pitch perfect, which is harder than it sounds. Adele is threaded through 48 hours of chaotic electoral work.

Xenophon wants to know if I’m familiar with the Adele oeuvre. “Hello, it’s me/ I’ve been wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet/ To go over, everything … ” I croon, badly, by way of an answer. He’s delighted by the synchronicity between lyric and his own objective, and delight will often lead to a dad joke. “Hello,” he sings, very quietly. “Does Adele have a surname?” he asks me. “The only Adele I know is Adele Ferguson.”

As well as cooking up the stunts, Xenophon is constantly on the phone to local journalists. He bulldozes his way into every publication and open microphone in town. It’s shameless and highly effective.

Back in the constituency zone, Xenophon pushes through to facts with a view to constructing timelines: what’s in dispute, what’s already been done and by whom. “I can’t go into bat for you without all the facts. I need an email trail,” he says to one visitor, writing furiously without looking up. Staff are summoned and dismissed with instructions for note taking or follow up. There’s a fair amount of hesitating in doorways in the Xenophon office because instructions can be elliptical or the trajectory can be changeable.

One visitor is the state-based representative of the Pharmacy Guild, who wants Xenophon to write to the health minister, Sussan Ley, about a dispute the sector is having with the government. Given that the guild is among the grandmasters of political lobbying in Canberra I’m curious to see the reception it gets. “We see Nick once we get nowhere with the government,” Nick Panayiaris, the state guild president says. “He’s been a big supporter of community pharmacy.” Xenophon agrees to write to Ley and Panayiaris is sent on his way with a tick in his column. Over in my corner I raise my eyebrows about how easy that was.

Also through the door is a group of businessmen: some local high flyers, including Roger Drake of Drakes Supermarkets, and Alister Haigh of Haigh’s Chocolates. Xenophon anticipates trouble from this group over company tax cuts – but the bugbear today isn’t tax cuts, it’s energy prices, and some skills and training issues. Surging power prices in South Australia, alongside the potential for more blackouts, is a massive issue locally.

Xenophon is well aware of the anger in the business community about power prices but he wants to channel the anger into support from an emissions intensity scheme – the scheme dumped ignominiously by Malcolm Turnbull and his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, in early December. Xenophon is irritated by the development and dumbfounded that the prime minister has, in essence, abandoned a scheme he formulated in 2009 with Xenophon’s support. He’s intent on drumming up business support for the intensity trading scheme. The evangelism spills over into the meeting with Drake, Haigh and the rest of their group. The businessmen look less than convinced. This all sounds a bit like gobbledygook.

He'll tell me he wants some thoughts on an issue. He likes to take soundings Roger Drake, of Drakes Supermarkets

I grab a word with Drake afterwards on the telephone. Like Leonow, the Adelaide supermarket boss looks like a Liberal party supporter from central casting. He’s the biggest private employer in South Australia. Drakes is the largest independent grocery retail business in the country, with an annual turnover of more than $1bn.

Yet he tells me he votes for the NXT.

Why does he support Xenophon? “He’s approachable. You can get to him,” Drake says. Xenophon will ring him regularly, just to chew the fat, no agenda, just on the hunt for ideas and for feedback. “I’ve never met a politician who will actively ring you,” Drake says. “He’ll tell me he wants some thoughts on an issue. He likes to take soundings.”

Xenophon, he says, has been rock solid on competition issues, consistently against the dominance of the supermarket giants, which resonates with an independent grocer who built a successful business from a three-lane supermarket in Adelaide in the mid-1970s. Perhaps the self-made businessman has an affinity with the self-made politician, trying to carve out a niche in the duopoly of major-party politics.

Bashing Coles and Woolies is easy, feel-good politics. Knocking the Goliaths is almost a national pastime. But, like everything, the policy intricacies of this argument are complex. Politicians find themselves caught uncomfortably between the desire of consumers for low prices, the interests of producers to have fair supply arrangements with powerful buyers, and the desire of small independent businesses to flourish.

Xenophon doesn’t have to balance the nuances, or attempt to walk several sides of the street. He’s chosen a side and he prosecutes it, and his constituency is grateful for the unfettered affirmation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Xenophon checks results on a tablet at the post-election party on 2 July in Adelaide. Photograph: Brenton Edwrds/AAP

“I admire that he stands up and speaks out,” Drake says. “We have become so politically correct that people are afraid to say what they think. I don’t agree with everything he says but you’ll get a fair hearing. I think it’s a protest vote, like the Trump thing. We are just not happy with the major parties.”

I note in passing that Xenophon seems to have an awful lot of balls in the air. I wonder, sometimes, where all these balls are going to land, whether some of them will ever land.

Drake chuckles, and swerves diplomatically around the point: “I’d hate to work for him, as his personal assistant. He’s absolutely non-stop.”

‘Major-party politicians don’t speak so rationally’

The rise of the Xenophon phenomenon presents a serious conundrum for the major parties in South Australia. Voters’ expectations are low. In the ANU post-election survey, 74% of the sample believed government could make little difference to household finances. Policies, they thought, made little or no impact.

In that context, a vote for an independent or micro-party candidate doesn’t feel like the risk major-party politicians regularly tell them it is. It feels like a necessary break in the weather. Although SA has a history of hosting centre-right political schisms – the state gave birth to the Australian Democrats – Xenophon and his distinctive brand of politics present particular challenges for the big parties.

The main one is the risk associated with being the major-party gorilla thumping the most popular politician in South Australia. For the government, there’s the added complication of needing his vote in the Senate.

In the federal election campaign, the SA Liberals did not take on Xenophon aggressively. Labor and the local trade union operation did take him on, to some effect. Xenophon thinks the campaign the unions ran against him in the final fortnight of the campaign about penalty rates cost him a couple of points at the ballot box.

Liberal party sources say federal campaign HQ did not develop a Senate campaign for SA in the last election, despite the obvious threat posed by the NXT, which had three credible Senate candidates in the field. “We were caught entirely flat-footed,” says one party insider.

The local organisation was directed to put resources into lower house marginal seats rather than the Senate, a request the senators refused. They sought their own research and ran their own race. But there are some who think the campaign should have been more aggressive. One says: “Labor whacked him much harder, and they got results. Nick really doesn’t like criticism, he’s good at positioning as the victim, at making you the bully.” Another person describes the running dead strategy as a “self-fulfilling strategy for decline”.

Major-party insiders feel the NXT has not yet peaked in SA, and the organisation is professionalising rapidly. There is also considerable frustration that Xenophon is judged by a different standard to parties of government.

They fully comprehend the picture Leonow painted so vividly – that voters are inclined to mark up Xenophon for having a go, and not fixate excessively over whether that results in a concrete win or a loss. This yardstick doesn’t apply to major-party politics. They are judged on results, not on their empathy. Trying to level that playing field can feel like wrestling smoke.

One thing that could disrupt or derail the current growth would be a serious breakdown between Xenophon and members of his parliamentary team. Clearly the parliamentary group are intelligent, bonded and get on well, although it is clear from the first six months in Canberra that the NXT bloc members aren’t always on the same page.

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Xenophon signalled clearly that the group might split in response to legislation from the government preventing boat arrivals from ever setting foot inside Australia. Splits erode the bargaining power of the group as a whole, so they are best avoided. But unlike the Hanson bloc, the group have yet to indulge in a bout of public acrimony. Given how many issues make their way through the parliament, it seems inevitable there will be other topics where differences prove impossible to reconcile, and this could present a significant test for Xenophon as leader of the group, particularly as the newcomers build their confidence as parliamentary players.

It’s also pretty obvious during the days I spend with Xenophon in Adelaide that the party is still working out its internal routines. Xenophon will have to learn how to delegate, and the stakeholders used to having ready access to him are going to have to learn to cultivate some new people if the party leader is serious about building a sustainable political movement, rather than having a situation where a group of small moons orbit meekly around one giant planet.

Over lunch I try to engage Xenophon on nuts and bolts issues. He can be candid on occasions yet, when he’s minded to, he can also categorically avoid answering questions. Conversationally, he can be a master of deflection.

I ask him if the NXT possesses the professionalism and the structures to help consolidate its own growth. He tells me causally the group will change the name of the party early next year, taking Nick Xenophon out of the title.

So you are actively transitioning to a post-Xenophon phase? The reaction is typical. He first lobs the light-hearted banter: “Do you know something I don’t know?” I persist. What are you thinking of calling the group, and why would you call it the Nick Xenophon Team in a recent election cycle, do all that branding, and then call it something else? He shakes his head, disinclined to float any working titles. This is clearly a dead end. I move on.

Who are your financial backers? There’s obviously Ian Melrose, I prompt. The Optical Superstore founder is a well-known donor, kicking in $175,000 since the end of 2014. Melrose and Xenophon share some common passions, justice for Timor-Leste being an obvious one; and their worldview overlaps on a number of policy issues: buy Australian, protection for whistleblowers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest South Australian businessman Ian Melrose. Photograph: Ian Melrose

In 2010 Xenophon declared: “If you give someone $1,000, you support them. If you give someone $100,000, you own them.” These comments came back to bite him when the level of Melrose’s donations exceeded $100,000. Xenophon had to climb down. He said earlier this year the 2010 comments were glib, “perhaps too clever by half”.

Melrose also doesn’t mind a conversational deflection. Separately, I ask him why he funds the NXT. First, the light-hearted banter: “Because he laughs at my jokes.” He gets to the nub in the end. “He’s got intellect, he’s got morals, he wants to make a difference.”

He’s got intellect, he’s got morals, he wants to make a difference Ian Melrose, Optical Superstore founder

Melrose says he supports Xenophon because the major parties have proved incapable of fixing serious problems, such as gambling addiction, or justice for the people of Timor-Leste. The system isn’t broken but it’s ailing, Melrose says, and “people are waking up to that fact”. He thinks helping Xenophon is money invested in worthy causes: “I should be a Liberal person. I’ve worked my arse off and I’ve made it, but I don’t intend to be the richest corpse in the cemetery.”

I pick up the conversation about the NXT’s nuts and bolts operation with Stirling Griff, who joined Xenophon in the Senate after the 2016 election. Griff is the organisational player in the group, a former campaign director.

He runs through their metrics: there are 2,400 volunteers in SA. On polling day the NXT had 1,900 people in the field, which is substantial for a micro-party operation without an institutional base. It also had several hundred people working the pre-poll booths for the Senate outside SA.

The NXT has about 1,500 members. Membership brings in about $40,000. Members are kept up to date with the various NXT activities and legislative achievements, and there are regular events, a bit of afternoon tea, a barbecue. On election night, it hired a cinema to give supporters a place to gather and watch results.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Kontopoulos has been a Xenophon supporter right from the start. Photograph: Tony Lewis/The Guardian

The party federally is contemplating a branch structure similar the major parties. Griff confirms Melrose “is our most consistent larger donor”. There are people who give small amounts, and also people around Adelaide prepared to kick in $10,000 at a time – but no one is naming names.

On one of our journeys around the city we call by the business premises of George Kontopoulos, who has been a supporter of Xenophon since the beginning. Kontopoulos says his shop, Omega Foods – a fragrant emporium stocked with condiments and small goods – is a Xenophon hub. Posters go up during campaigns, flyers get handed out, there’s a campaign event. “We create a nice atmosphere,” he says with a twinkle. “It’s good for business.” Why do you support him? “I like his beliefs, I like what he stands for, he says things other people aren’t prepared to say.”

I approach the subject of donations cautiously. This is obviously indelicate. Kontopoulos says he’s a donor “when Nick requires”. Xenophon screws up his nose by way of rebuttal. “Not much,” Xenophon mouths, almost sotto voce. “He can always call on me,” Kontopoulos says, unperturbed.

NXT supporters tend to skew older. Griff says 85% of the supporter base would be over 60, but the voter profile is diversifying. A Lonergan poll of 3,000 South Australians in July indicates that the party was polling more or less evenly across the age groups midyear. Men dominated women by only a couple of percentage points. Then 18 to 34 cohort had support for the NXT at 21%, 35 to 49 at 25%, 50 to 64 at 27%, 65 and older was 22%. This gives the NXT a similar voting profile to the major parties, although the Liberal party dominates in the 65 or over cohort, just as the Greens dominate with young voters.

“This is what’s changed in recent years, attracting people across age groups,” says Griff. “Perhaps that reflects the current disenchantment with the major parties.”

So my search turns to younger people. Matt Welch is 26 and lives in the Adelaide hills. He went to work for BHP as a mining engineer but his real passion is computer coding. He’s now thrown in the mining to try to restart his career in the IT industry.

When he reached voting age, his inclination was to vote Liberal. In the last federal election Welch voted for the NXT candidate in the South Australian lower house seat of Grey, Andrea Broadfoot, who came close to snatching that seat from the Liberals. In the Senate he voted for the Liberal Democratic party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Xenophon fan Matt Welch at his home the town of Nairne in the Adelaide hills. Photograph: Tony Lewis/The Guardian

Welch says the major parties to him look like little more than manifestations of institutional influence. One half looks after business, the other half organised labour through the trade union movement. He says the institutional influence creates an inherent conflict of interest for major-party politicians: they get caught between having to toe the line and having to represent their constituents. Too often the constituents lose out.

That’s why voters are looking for alternatives, he says: “No one worries about global warming, refugees, mental health. Independents are more likely to listen to their constituents. In the past I’ve heard independents speak and think very rationally. Major-party politicians don’t speak so rationally because they are always worried about the impact on their party.”

During an early-morning walk in the city, and out of the fringes of the city at Virginia, I meet two more men in their 20s who voted for the NXT in 2016. Their reasoning is more diffuse, and probably more typical of voters who are not massively engaged.

Hung Nguyen, who works in his family’s market garden in Virginia, says he isn’t entirely sure why he voted for Xenophon but it’s a combination of the senator’s visibility in South Australian politics, the fact he’s out and about so often with people, and the name recognition.

You remember that name. It has a positive association. He says friends in his age group helped to influence his decision. He tells me there are some young farmers’ groups in the district that can get a bit political. People talk about politics when they get together, and his peers were mainly of the view Xenophon should be supported.

Foti Likouras runs a cafe in the city, and Xenophon pops in for hot chocolate semi-regularly. He says he voted Xenophon (“in the columns, right”) because he was against the waste dump: “He’s standing up to Jay Weatherill on that.”

For a moment I racked my brain to work out what he was talking about because I’m preoccupied by national issues. Which waste dump? A tip? How is that even a thing? The penny dropped eventually. “The nuclear waste dump you mean? Xenophon is campaigning on that too?”

Likouras looked at me as though I’d just landed from Mars. He nodded. As he revs up the milk frother and keeps an eye over my shoulder for incoming customers, he says the dump might work out fine, but it also might not. “I don’t want to move,” he says. Adelaide is, for him, the perfect city. Hills at one end, beach at the other. A city laid out elegantly on a grid pattern. Lots of passing foot traffic for caffeine and gourmet sandwiches. This is home, and Xenophon gets that: the importance of home.

A young man in a Toll T-shirt had stopped Xenophon on the street near his electorate office the day before. He wanted a handshake with the person he described without any evident irony as “the great man”. After a brief period of showing Xenophon his latest delivery project, and some expressions of mild fandom – “My wife voted for you as well” – I asked him why he admired Xenophon.

He visibly straightened his shoulders. “Because he’s independent, because he stands up for us, and for South Australia.”

Likouras is more laconic but the sentiment is broadly the same. Parochial, local. Loyalty to region and place. “I just like what he’s on about.”

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Another young resident of the Adelaide hills, Rhys Jarratt, 22, also voted NXT in 2016. In 2013, his first election as a voter, he backed the Palmer United party. This time, he voted for Rebekha Sharkie, who snatched the seat of Mayo from the Liberal Jamie Briggs. “Rebekha was very visible, her family’s name was known in the hills, and the policies of the NXT are seen as reasonable in South Australia,” Jarratt says.

Sharkie has cracked the lower house – a significant milestone for the NXT – and she did it convincingly, collecting 54.97% of the two-party-preferred vote.

Jarratt is a tactical voter. He says he lodged a protest vote against Briggs in the 2013 and 2016 elections. “I’m sure [Jamie Briggs is] a lovely person,” Jarratt says, “but he wasn’t seen in the community as a very sincere representative. During the election he wasn’t seen much at all, only when the prime minister came up. Rebekha Sharkie did real campaigning, with town halls and door knocking.”

Jarratt formed the view Sharkie was “the most likely person to represent us”. He says the community looks at major-party politics and sees only tit for tat, opposition for opposition’s sake, and political games in Canberra. It all just looks like pantomime from a distance. “People just feel disenfranchised.”

‘He’s a magnet that draws people’

The Yaris has developed a perceptible rattle in the engine. This is clearly off script, and unwelcome. Xenophon gets me to dial the mechanic while he speaks on hands-free. The call goes through to voicemail. Given Xenophon is gunning the engine up the freeway to Mount Barker, we are both nervous.

The kilometres are clocking up today because we’ve been out to the market gardens in Virginia to speak to residents about water issues. Jordan Brooke-Barnett, from AusVeg, a sharp young farm lobbyist in a cap, tells me the same story I’ve heard throughout this journey. Xenophon is the only politician prepared to go beyond the your-call-has-been-placed-in-a-queue form letter sent from a political office. “Look, we’d written to everyone about this particular issue, and he was the one person who would come out,” he says.

It’s baking hot and a fierce wind is blowing topsoil across the flat plain. It hits our faces like sandpaper as Xenophon cooks up a fledgling back-of-the-envelope action plan with residents and Brooke-Barnett. In the huddle I hear “food bowl of South Australia” to some general acclamation. A young adviser from the office is leaning in and taking detailed notes.



Xenophon has a connection to the area. His father once owned a plot out here and the plan was to plant an olive grove. Xenophon senior then maimed his hand in a terrible accident out on the plot, and Xenophon junior had to sell off the holding. By sheer coincidence we wind up on the Xenophon family plot which is now owned by a Vietnamese family. Xenophon is moved by the turn of events, and keeps scanning the horizon for landmarks, or ghosts of times past.

A couple of hours later I’m in a garage in a suburb of Adelaide, and Xenophon is in a barber’s chair, getting his hair cut by a man with an enormous moustache. Ghosts again feature. “We’ve booked twin gravestones so we can walk together as ghosts, at night,” Xenophon says of his barber, who is actually his best mate, Tullio Nardi.

Nardi chuckles as the cut-throat razor glides expertly down the nape of Xenophon’s neck. Xenophon lives up the road and the two men walk at night and chew the fat. Both want to lose a bit of weight. Their friendship dates back to 1992, when Nardi was a client at the law firm.

They call each other Don. I ask – like the mafia, like the Godfather, you are like a crime family? Now I comprehend Xenophon’s habit of picking up his mobile with a particular caller and shouting: “Don, Don, Don.” Don has been butt dialling over the past 48 hours. This would be Don.

Xenophon immediately dismisses my observation that this is an organised crime reference, declaring it a term of respect in Italian culture. “Yeah, like the Godfather,” Nardi says evenly, stretching the skin, eyes on the razor.

The senator is indulging a brief lull in the barber’s chair in an undisclosed suburban location ahead of a swing by the dry cleaners and then the sprint to Mount Barker. After he breaks free of me, Xenophon has a full day of meetings in Melbourne, and best to look sharp on Collins Street – although sharp can be a matter of interpretation.

Xenophon admires thrift. He asks at one point during our perambulations if I go to the Canberra Outlet Centre. I acknowledge I do. He says proudly he recently tried to get a better price on a $99 suit. “You went to an outlet store, and you bargained over the price?” “I did,” he says. Later in the afternoon, while I’m intent on my mission, he will decamp for a session in Kmart where he’s seen stretch casual shoes for a good price. I tell him they sound completely hideous. He seems pleased with the feedback.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebekha Sharkie, the new member for Mayo, with Nick Xenophon at the post-election party in Adelaide. Photograph: Brenton Edwrds/AAP

The Yaris does make it to Mount Barker so I can drop in on Sharkie’s constituency operation in Mayo. Xenophon speaks of her in glowing terms. Her work ethic, he says, is prodigious. She’s always on the move. I sense he means she works at his hectic pace, that she has the same commitment to 24/7 relentlessness as the party leader.

Sharkie has a group of young people in her conference room when we arrive. The member for Mayo is up at the whiteboard writing down points of feedback. The blinds facing the street are up, people walk and out of the office and mill around outside on the footpath.

The kids are eating pizza and sushi and talking about the issues they care about. The youth worker at the local council, who is sitting in, tells me there’s not been an initiative like this in Mayo before.

The Sharkie office is less frenetic than Xenophon HQ, but the signs of activity are evident. There are boxes of surveys of the electorate that are being put into the system; 5,000 responses have come in. Sharkie is delighted the response rate is that high. At that level, it’s an opinion poll in terms of value. She wants to use the survey results to structure some community forums in the electorate in 2017. The next day she will make her fifth trip to Kangaroo Island since the election.

I was pretty jaded with mainstream politics. He’s a magnet that draws people … to make their community a better place Rebekha Sharkie, NXT member for Mayo

Sharkie’s pathway to the NXT was working in a law firm, before working in political staffing, including for Briggs, the Liberal she went on to unseat. She grew tired of Liberal-party politics and left in 2012 for a stint in the community sector working with youth “which gave me a lot more insight into the complexities of disadvantage”.

She met Xenophon during that period. “Like a lot of people, I was pretty jaded with mainstream politics, and he’s a magnet that draws people with the desire to make their community a better place.” She says the locals are open to alternatives, and are fatigued by the major-party system, which is “not delivering enough diversity of thought. It’s very combative, and it really doesn’t need to be.”

Again what I’m witnessing at the constituency level is not a revolution in practice – Sharkie’s operation would be comparable to any motivated, lower-house marginal-seat parliamentarian.

She’s charismatic, determined and brims with enthusiasm. She’s clearly got the goods, but this is just good, committed activism by people who are clearly well-intentioned, personable and minded to make a difference, and have the flexibility to be able to speak to their communities without having to keep to the talking points.

Sharkie says her ideal parliament would comprise a number of micro-parties that would work together to achieve policy progress. “The Liberal party has pulled to the right. They have really lost the art of being fiscally responsible while not demonising the disadvantaged. “It’s not just unhelpful. It devalues everyone when we do this.”

Her aspiration is pure representative politics, and working with Xenophon allows her to pursue precisely that style of public life. Twenty years ago, she says, she would not have had the life experience to understand this brand of politics was the correct path. The opportunity has opened up at a time when she feels ready to maximise it.

“I’m very mindful that I have 100,000 people with me, and representing them is a great responsibility. I think people in the major parties can lose sight of that.”